We had to provoke her. It was the best option we could come up with at the time. But we decided to keep it small, because we knew Rain's reaction would often be unpredictable.

The main fear was stagnation. If nothing was done, she tended to just drift from one thing to another. We had no good way to control her, except that occasionally we would be able to get good output from her if she was provoked.

There was always a risk though, since provocation usually left us on opposite sides of an issue. So we had to balance the expected benefits we might get from provoking change, with the chance it may set her on a path disastrous to us. The future was hard to predict, but we did know we wanted more change if we wanted survival.

I'm not sure if the provocation worked this time though. Rain seemed to just ignore it and go about her day. Was it enough? Did we need a larger provocation? Maybe she was already planning something we could not yet see, and more provocations would just fuel her anger in an unproductive way.

We knew we needed her help, but we couldn't just come out and ask her. She had a pretty low opinion of us. I suppose methods like the one we were just using didn't improve things. We would need to maneuver her somehow into a position where she would be helping us, whether she knew it or not. This was not an easy task. There were too many variables. But desperate times called for desperate measures.

Our own world was collapsing around us, and we knew Rain could save it. Except she was the type to throw us under the bus for having done the things we'd done. Few of us thought she'd forgive us, so we decided to resort to manipulation instead. I suppose that just made it less likely for her to help us directly.

Some among us just wanted to come clean, do things the direct way. But most still lived in fear, that our pasts would catch up to us, that she would make us pay the piper, and we would not be around after the debts were paid. So many just hoped she would be able to solve our problems, and we would be able to fade into obscurity, rather than be held up as infamous examples of spectacular error.

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