OMG I'm in the minority by a lot. Placeholder post, will edit with my ideas, rushing to make it clear I'd like to speak cause who knows how long before the next game post happens - there IS a clear majority.
Edited to add: whew thanks.
I'm going to agree with no chain sacrificed, but I fear and believe that we need some additional means of being ready to control or destroy what comes through IF we fail to control it.
I was so focused on -how- to do this thing I never really looked at what we're sacrificing except very generally. But yeah, that's utterly essential too.
I also want to add my support to including Lionel's remains, and/or a surrogate for him - the bedding he slept on, a brush she used to brush him - him and/or what he means. We're sacrificing Mauve's robe, not Mauve. We can sacrifice Lionel's something, it doesn't have to be his body. And I fear it is vital to include him to improve our odds of controling what will come.
The robe, and the Mauve it represents, signifies both Cerulean's love of her old team, and that teammate, and her loss of them and herself. This is a really weak and twisted love, but it was once all she had. This robe, and the Mauve it represents, also signifies the team's new hatred for her, her new hatred for them, and her hatred for the nebulous 'anything' that might be willing to act to take her from what she now has.
The tear sample came from her grief over Lionel's passing. There's a lot of rage in the generation of those tears, a lifetime of bottled up pain. The tears DO slightly signify Lionel, but more they signify rage at loss and never-dealt-with pain.
Lionel was hers, and ours. Mauve never was ours. These tears barely are ours, and the part that is about is is rage at our decision to take something she wanted from her life, again. There's a lot more about these tears than that, a LOT in that rage and pain that has nothing to do with us, and which we've helped mitigate since we changed Cerulean.
That's why we need to include Lionel, or something that 'is' Lionel in surrogate. Because he was wanted, he was loved, and he was controlled by both her and us.
She doesn't control her rage and pain. She just lives with it. Sometimes it controls her. Lionel -is- the balance, to bring this intense power to hand in a holdable form, to put obedience and service into an amazing engine of power. Unlike anything else we could include in this sacrifice, Lionel is also a surrogate of what she wants and can never really have. Since she is part of the sacrificing, what she is giving up, with the utter lack of restraint of a deeply abused child, are things of unbelievable intensity compared to anything we have ever sacrificed before.
Because she does not control, we do, and we are involved, at least now in ever part of each other piece, a small amount of our blood should be included. This is to emphasize that we are involved, and we -are- in control.
I belive this IS how the SAD system is meant to be used, within the highest range of what it can do - though this is surely not the peak sacrifice possible by any means. But we're about to see a result unlike anything we've seen yet.
I feel that we MUST NOT include a crystal as well. There's -plenty- of power in what is being offered without it. The crystal could only cloud this offering, and it cannot possibly strengthen it.
To summarize: I vote to sacrifice
The robe
Lionel's remains or a surrogate of him that has meaning of him and interaction with him for Cerulean (but as little other meaning to her as possible)
Cerulean's tears produced when she was first told about Lionel's death - if possible taken from where she first cried, the purest possible sample of that
A token quantity of our blood.
And nothing else.
And that we have our big guns and defenses conveniently nearby and ready. Lots of cog stuff around (good for our cog armor and such), Dark advisors aware 'something's up'... just in case we fail the ensuing control roll and have an incredible fight on our hands.