Let's play it safe with the donors. You have far more control over how it goes.

Going with the donors doesn't feel like it has a huge chance of success... But importantly, it's the safest option, and this is the first day. She could find the camera, the FBI could notice you looking at terrorist websites, and rallying the students was basically open revolt, but... This? You could choose exactly who you were writing, and what you were saying.

It does, uncomfortably, occur to you that there would probably be several days of turnaround on this before any action could be expected, but... Well, even if it was slow enough that you ended up a blissed-out demon ****, at least you'd still have your ****, right? Whether or not you could still understand it.

But negativity was an enemy here; your chances of anything succeeding were so bad that focusing on all of the whys of why something wouldn't work would leave you paralyzed and hopeless. Better to just get started, and focus on the glimmers of hope.

Ten hours later, you lean back in your chair, defeated without ever having written a single letter. It wasn't super-clear who gave money to the school, but you were a decent enough researcher to find the bigger declared individual donors and heads of associated foundations... And a cursory check of their backgrounds so that you'd have some idea of how to appeal to them made it pretty clear that, at best, they'd just ignore your letter.

It wasn't just that all of them were Satanists, many of them were confirmed demon worshippers, and most had press statements vehemently arguing for the role of demons in modern society. No, it was that checking them out on social media, finding grainy clips of them on youtube, and reading news articles in which they were mentioned... Made it really, really clear that their own personal lives were pretty similar to Ms. Devlin's. Worse, maybe.

Well, perhaps you were just being overly pessimistic. The guy publicly rating his interns "hawtness", the woman being sued for secretly filming her employees, the woman at the heart of a ten-way relationship web that ended with six dead and a city block aflame... Maybe they all really, seriously cared about maintaining clear relationship boundaries in a university setting. Or at least, cared when it wasn't their own behavior in question.

But something told you that you were better off chasing another lead instead. This hadn't been a complete waste of time, at least; now you had a good idea why Ms. Devlin believed she was so untouchable. Her fanclub (or at least, wealthy individuals adjacent to her fanclub) had bought the school far more thoroughly than a single contract would suggest. Maybe they just cared about demons in the abstract and wouldn't care if she in particular was fired... But you'd need a far stronger case than you'd have been able to deliver to the Dean even if your scheme had succeeded.

...Seeing how many people you were up against, you actually started to wonder if the Dean had been setting you up to begin with. If not, the number and quality videos that Ms. Devlin promised you might be enough, especially if you ensured the press got a copy too. If so... ...No, you didn't want to finish that thought. If the Dean was on Devlin's side as well, then all of you were thoroughly doomed from the start.

You could still go to the state with this approach, maybe. The school received significant funding, and you could trust your elected representatives where private donors had failed you. But... It was an election year, and this was too easy to spin. You'd probably just be burning the careers of good people, and it would be months before any action could be taken regardless.

You glance at the clock, bleary-eyed. You were usually up in a couple of hours, but you could sleep in a bit. The only thing you had to do in the morning was Ms. Devlin, and you doubted she was an early riser.