Oh that was exciting! This was a cool problem. Sammy almost bounces on her feet. “Wow, no fooling? That must take some seriously intense concentration, like damn. I can see why you’d want to work this out.”

She peers at the tentacle and its little stars, baps at one as it floats past her, feeling the force of the…wind more or less. 

“So, this feels like it could be a few different problems, depending on what you’re trying to do. Option one, you find an accurate and most importantly, really damn fast intake that’s available to your teammates and isn’t to most others. For our group, that’s probably smell. Pick some faint scents that I could identify but that most other folks in the match won’t even be able to detect without walking right into the face of one of your tentacles. Then I’ll follow the scent of the right flowers to wherever you’re flinging me. Fast and easy, plays into reaction time, piece of cake. Also a huge problem if it turns out that somebody else shows up with their own wildcard that can tell the difference. Don’t suppose you know if Astra has something stupid like a particulate scanner?”

“Option two. Artisteia! matches don’t last forever, so just up the complexity. Color code or have them form in a specific shape and pattern that clearly shows which one is which. And then have three different variations. Or five. Or more, however many you need. Plan in advance to change them up every minute or so. I mean, if you can, like you could pre-program them to have a shifting hue or just put in the effort to quickly shift all the colors on your summons every so often. By the time anybody figures it out that didn’t already know the plan, the arrangement has shifted. By the time you’d need to repeat, the match is over. You’ll have to tell me in person though and make sure I’ve got it memorized, no point if it’s easy to leak and Taowu is even remotely closse to the match. Also maybe it’s too hard if you just have to leave them stuck one way and you can’t change them all that fast.”

“Option three, intentionally limit yourself to make decision-making easier. Like, make a field that’s only fling away tentacles and then save the fling forward tentacles for new summons only. I’ll trust that if I’m on your team and a tentacle appears in front of my face that I don’t need to swerve aside at the last second while knowing exactly how the terrain works. Everyone on the team can trust that the field will limit how the other team moves, and you can explain it in way less time just a few seconds before the match. It’s less powerful in the abstract, but sometimes you win a match by just doing something that’s easier to execute instead of too complex and then actually executing on it.”

As she’s talking, Sammy is bouncing. You can tell by looking at her that she’s itching to move. She doesn’t try to wreck the tentacle or take off running, but she’s excited and it’s expressing itself in nervous motions and tension. She wants to fling herself into the closest tentacle and see how she flies (or see if she got unlucky and how long it would take her to break out. She’s no maxima, but also doesn’t know exactly where the borderline sits on an A vs. B rating). 

But she wants to hear which idea makes the most sense to Kraken first, so she’s holding herself still just a little longer.