Today three more people reached the point that they were worthy of joining my paladins. I have no idea how many people will reach that point by the end, but I expect there to be quite a few in a group this large.
The elf kid from before has improved, quite a bit more than I expected actually. They still are below average, but their single-minded determination and my personal attention has helped them make up quite a bit of the gap. They are now actually able to direct plants to their will somewhat freely, though only when the plant itself isn’t resisting. Most of their issues here will likely be solved once they evolve, but I’m not willing to evolve anyone here who isn’t being inducted into my Paladins. That doesn’t mean that people won’t evolve, in fact, this is actually a really good situation for people trying to evolve. A single-minded effort to achieve mastery in a skill regularly gets people an evolution.
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Other than that I spent my downtime today going through the people connected to my hivemind to find someone who is both a natural leader and who completely believes that I am guiding their actions. I also excluded my paladins from that as I want them to remain as something separate. It took a bit of effort, but it wasn’t too hard to narrow down the candidates to a small handful after looking purely at second qualification, while looking at the first narrowed it down even more to two candidates. One has more experience leading and organizing groups of people, though on a smaller scale than this, while the other one was really good at getting people to like her. I ended up choosing the first guy and then made everyone connected to my hivemind aware of my decision.
I think that this will be the best way to minimize political nonsense in my hivemind, just make their politics irrelevant and hopefully they will stop trying to get one up on each other.
Anyway, Good Night Diary.