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And then it wouldn't be next to her shield anymore, so she would be unable to rapidly shield it.
And when it comes to preventing surprise attacks, it seems like decoys would work just as well.
Meguca Micro Empire Quest (PMMM)
- Thread starter inverted_helix
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I think the only thing we got, other than your omakes, is the bitter, sarcastic laugh when we tried to tell them about our experience with Class 3s; probably implies a lot more first-hand experience with them than we have.
Yes, mostly running and hiding/dying than winning though. Veterans in small numbers really don't stand much of a chance. Occasionally roped into a fight with others against one on more even terms.
Why not mount it on the back of the shield?
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
Because that's where she draws her guns from.
Right; the Type 1 is mostly an anti-sniper or anti-PvP defense, to prevent someone with good PvP experience from instantly putting you in a gem-coma by sniping/swiping your gem in a single maneuver. Neither type helps much with regular demons.
Oh yes, absolutely; the Type 2 would have to be strapped down via a web belt or vest or something. Like I said, it's a specialized tool to aid in fighting Class 3s by aiding the rapid cleansing you need to even fight inside a Class 3 aura; seriously 0.2 GCU per minute is what that toxic aura would have been costing our vets without Kaoru's song; that means you're stuck feeding your gem a cube every 2.35 seconds just to keep up, which IMO would rather severely impact your ability to actually fight. It's not a normal, every day walking-around thing.
Ultimately I'm going for limited bonuses for these, consummate with the rather low costs:
- The Type 1 gives a bonus to PvP fighting, maybe +2-4% depending on the number of decoys.
- The Type 2 gives a bonus to Class 3 fighting, again, maybe +4-6%, but of course you have to keep the thing loaded, so having a second pre-loaded shell would be good for prolonged fights, and that has a high GCU cost.
The Type 1 is a bunch of decoys: it's basically a dozen metal balls, one of which has your actual soul gem inside, so you are playing a shell game with your gem.
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Godwinson
"Well, I've got nothing."
It's entirely possible that Homura didn't think about armouring her soul gem because her main opponents were Kyubey and Walpurgisnacht, not other magical girls, who rarely knew the significance of the soul gem anyways.
Or that she thought about it, and discarded the idea, because it would make lichbombing Mami happen much more often, and an unstable Mami is a serious threat.
Or maybe it's for the same reason that she didn't change up her costume to be armour in general, whether because it would take extra time (and thus extra grief generated in time-stop) for her to armour up every time she was about to fight, or perhaps because she trusted in her time-stop a bit too much.
Or that she thought about it, and discarded the idea, because it would make lichbombing Mami happen much more often, and an unstable Mami is a serious threat.
Or maybe it's for the same reason that she didn't change up her costume to be armour in general, whether because it would take extra time (and thus extra grief generated in time-stop) for her to armour up every time she was about to fight, or perhaps because she trusted in her time-stop a bit too much.
Protecting the soul gem is all well and good, but do keep in mind that soul gems are already designed to be resilient. The whole reason the incubators made them in the first place was so that magical girls would be more likely to survive the rigours of hunting. Although resilient, it is true that a soul gem can't handle a direct hit from magical musket shot, so there is some room for improvement, but the case would have to be thick and/or magically enchanted because a standard thin metal case isn't really going to help much. A titanium brick would probably help, but that would be an expensive and time consuming custom order and Homura probably just never got around to it.
Witchbombed Mami can be a serious threat (depending on the circumstances). But I find it a bit odd to think that Mami would have gone 2 years in frequent contact with other magical girls without realizing that there was something odd about soul gems (i.e. that a soul gem contains a soul, or at least that destroyed gems are bad news). It's quite possible that she simply never quite got around to telling Madoka and Sayaka about it in canon before she died.
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Kyubey said she never found out in episode 7.
Godwinson
"Well, I've got nothing."
It's an indication of just how rare it is for the true nature of the soul gem to actually matter for magical girls. It's only when someone has found out about it, and then exploits that information, that it becomes important. Most of the magical girls that Mami interacted with were newly contracted girls, rather than those who had been part of an organization with institutional memory. In fact, magical girl organizations almost certainly didn't exist in the original universe, thanks to the cannibalistic nature of magical girls.
It's part of why Madoka set it up so that wraiths drop numerous cubes, so that even for the simplest hunt, for the most untrusting group, it's simple to divide the spoils. Madoka wanted magical girls to be able to trust one another, to work together, to support each other. In the new universe, because magical girls will work together, and tell one another about the true nature of soul gems, it becomes better for the Incubators to be upfront about the matter with magical girls, so as to retain a greater level of trust in them, so that magical girls do not warn their friends off from making contracts quite so easily.
Which is why neither of my ideas is actually protective; I figure to get actual protection relative to what the gems are already made of your minimum requirement is going to be something like enchanted sapphire crystal, the sort of thing you see on $1,000+ watches that will be prohibitively expensive for our group for awhile. The costs/benefits I'm proposing are:
- Type 1 (PvP concealment case): cost $50-100. Benefit: a half dozen identical opaque cases, one of which contains the soul gem, provides +2% to PvP. $100 gives you a dozen cases and provides a +3%
- Type 2 (Class 3 cube injector case): cost $100-150, must have 0.5-1 GCU allocated per meguca. Benefit: a case with 0.5 GCU worth of grief cubes arrayed around the soul gem, provides automatic cleansing so the meguca doesn't need to constantly feed cubes to it to counteract a Class 3's aura. +3% to combat against a Class 3 for the first three minutes of combat. The higher-cost version has a "reload" of another 0.5 GCU, allowing the bonus to extend to six minutes.
Oh, less specifics, and more... universal survival tips.
E.g.: If you see the sun or moon start to flicker, run like fuck two level 3s are in the area. Demons are drawn to tourists, stay out of the ritzier area; or demons are drawn to despair, stay out of the ghetto; you say that your girl Kaoru can make music that can slow the despair process? BRING EM' AND POP EM' LIKE ADVIL (you don't drink her magic-) idgaf AD.VIL.
That sort of thing.
I want to showcase how 'weak' magic can turn out to be super useful once there's more of a tech base or if people get creative with it. You don't need to be an elite to contribute. For example, super hearing? Maybe it doesn't trigger a clairvoyant headache when used from an anchor (but it has the usual super hearing drawbacks - i.e. you have super hearing and OW THAT WAS A BIG BOOM). At higher levels of specialization you start to be able to do other stuff with it - daredevil-like echolocation, the magical equivalent of perfect pitch, an instinctive understanding of what kind of magic is being used just by the sound it's making. Turn that spell into magitech and you've got a fairly sophisticated ability to 'measure' magic.
(does Keiko have magic yet. I kind of want this to be Keiko's magic now - she was always embarrassed by how weak it was and never mentioned it, but whoops turns out it can be useful TIME TO SCIENCE THIS)
As for the astral projection - the advantage that comes to mind is an ability to remotely trigger spell anchors, something clairvoyants should not be able to do. She's the one that can act as a backup, that can hit the healing anchor on an unconscious puella, or the barrier anchor for one that's being distracted by something else. The no heal-clause is admittedly a bit gratuitous, but I hope it'd be an interesting character arc. She starts off as being her group's eyes and ears, but when she joins the Serene group she realizes others can do it better than she can - it's like her legs all over again, she's being held back again, she's useless (she doesn't want to be useless, she was abandoned once before, if she's abandoned again...) - until she discovers no, wait, she can do something no one else can do.
And so on and so forth, hoho.
Not really sure what you mean. Do you mean characters from the canon spinoffs? I must admit I haven't seen most of the spinoffs.
What you give here would likely be reasonable type of stuff. They'll usually be drawn to concentrations of meguca, but alternatively to large concentrations of normal people: sports venues and such.
They'll likely have stories about a couple specific 3s that they encountered, though there's a lot of variance between them.
Unless they can teleport they can't outrun you, but they can move fast enough to make it hard to find someplace to sleep safely since they don't.
Keiko does not yet have an assigned magic type. So something like that might be reasonable.
Well my bigger concern is how I'd have to not only track the unique magic type and its interactions, but having to track what you're doing with a cripple to make sure they aren't allowed anything they shouldn't be able to do.
- Location
- South Africa
Yes. And locations and stuff.
Well now, that's useful information. I had been worried that Class 3s might be so physically superior that there was no hope of outpacing them without teleportation. But this gives options. We can draw away individual Class 3s into traps and ambushes and away from other Class 3s. We can snipe them from a distance, run when they get close, then snipe them again (which is probably one of Nagoya's tactics).
Speed means that we control the battlefield. Speed means we can win.
That is dependent on all Class 3s being idiots, though, isn't it?
That's speaking of strategic level movement. On the tactical level they're just as fast.
The difference is because they can't leave their miasma. And they can't move their miasma zone as fast as a meguca can run away. If you're entering the miasma to fight them, it pretty much removes the difference in speed.
Since I haven't seen them I'm not intending to use them pretty much.
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Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
@inverted_helix
Have you come to a decision on my proposed diplomacy action?
Have you come to a decision on my proposed diplomacy action?
I think I will, but I need to come up with sufficiently diabolical problems with dealing with each of the legendaries the Incubators will refer you to.
You may yet regret asking.
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Mini Omake: Current list of questionable Tokyo Nomad advice:
Current list of questionable Tokyo Nomad advice:
Oh! I see. That is a conundrum that I as mere omake-writer did not think of at all. What if she were mobile when she's a meguca? Ah, but wait, that invites further complexity because not all meguca are doing purely meguca things.
Easiest would be to give her something 'automatic' but that kind of goes against the grain, hm. Oh well, just a thought.
- Demons don't sleep. If you see one, it's alive and it's awake - kill it or run.
- Demons are cunning. They can learn how to hide, and how to sneak, and how to camouflage themselves. One puppeted a dead meguca to act as its mouthpiece. It wasn't very good at it, couldn't actually talk, but it used the body like an anglerfish used light. We called it Lightning Maria on account of the fact its base power was electricity - the body puppet thing it just learned how to do, somehow.
- Please don't call out your attack names. It'll mark you as either new or an outsider in Tokyo, and some girls can get very, very hostile when it comes to newcomers and outsiders. Also, it's embarrassing. Please stop.
- Demons that are in the process of dividing look weak. Now, we've never seen one but rumors have gone both ways: either it is the weakest it will ever be, or it's going to rip everyone's face off. If you can figure it out, tell us.
- Someone's been sending aid packages. A cube here and there, money, food. No one knows who's responsible, or why they're doing it.
- At least one category 3 demon is psychic - it can broadcast emotions, read thoughts, the whole deal. You feel like your thoughts are not your own? Turn back and run, you can't deal with that thing, it can induce spirals frighteningly quick.
- Corollary: psychic resistance hella important, do continue training that up
- Healing category 3 demons are annoying as shit and erratic, even for demons. For example... eh, you'll understand what I'm talking about if you meet one.
- You can run away, a demon's limited to their zone of miasma and miasma is not very mobile.
- If you enter a demon's miasma and it's flickering, run. It could be the demon's natural miasma, but it could also be a rare overlap between two category 3 demons. Or so I've heard, anyway.
- You say that your girl Kaoru can make music that can slow the despair process? Anchor that shit to the ground.
- You make us go to Tokyo and we are gone, good-bye
- Don't go to Tokyo
Oh! I see. That is a conundrum that I as mere omake-writer did not think of at all. What if she were mobile when she's a meguca? Ah, but wait, that invites further complexity because not all meguca are doing purely meguca things.
Easiest would be to give her something 'automatic' but that kind of goes against the grain, hm. Oh well, just a thought.
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
Well, in my omake that I'm stuck on, it involves diplomacy with Hortence. She eventually agrees to help after Kyuubey confirms our ludicrous survival rate, but on the condition that we pay for her cube upkeep and monetary expenses while she's in Japan, and that we will owe her 50 cubes (in installments) and a Favor (nothing criminal).
So I'm expecting the price to be steep.
My current thought on her is that she was (a daughter of) minor nobility before the revolution and her personality never changed.
It just seemed to me like the sort of person that would make for very interesting interactions. And very twisty sorts of negotiations. If you're going to do a super old character I think it's better to play upon the changed society more.