Turn 33
Turn 33
Training
General training
Even with much of your forces deployed to Tokyo this month you continue the basic training you need to get your new recruits up to snuff, and by the end of the month they at least understand your organization enough to not drag the standards down.
Learning Japanese
Learning Japanese is no easy task, or at least so you've heard. All the languages they have between them are from the same linguistic family, while Japanese is not. None of your girls have actually taught anything beyond magical girl skills before either. They start picking up basic phrases, but this is going to be a fairly long term activity, though you likely could leave it to their free time and they'd eventually learn.
Review and Training
This month was the first time that Serena's really faced demons that didn't just fall over from proximity. While her friends had some prior experience before being caught in her orbit that still is somewhat distant and rusty. Some discussion of what they encountered and ways they could have done better is certainly helpful.
Diplomacy
Trade Deal (Coalition): (1.5 Vet): Attempt to trade for their Tandem Casting research. Explain that we need to improve our Tandem Casting to help with the clean up of Tokyo. Be willing to offer more in addition to our own Tandem Casting research if necessary.
Your efforts to persuade the coalition to exchange their research notes with you surprisingly bear fruit. You've gone a long way at bringing relations with them to a more neutral level.
Their notes on tandem research give you some perspective, but at the basic level it's largely matches with what you already knew. Synchronizing magic between casters is hard and requires some form of mnemonic timing mechanism. They use ritual dances to do so, but fundamentally it is all about more precisely matching timing, and it is possible to do so in other ways.
There may be more value in their notes in what it tells you about the way they think though than in terms of the research itself. They're very focused on concealment. All of their attempts on fusion are in relation to stealth. It's no wonder that the girls in area 1 never had trouble eluding you. (Insight: The girls in Area 1 which formed the core of the coalition were sharply skewed towards stealth, and doubled down on it. They gain bonuses to stealth, surprise attacks, and stealth research, and penalties in other fields.)
You suspect their research on fusion has had the results redacted, as they give you enough information to rapidly piece together your own success but do not include their own variants. They have only had luck with individuals with very strong connections to each other and suggest that to some degree it is a trust exercise. While two girls with the same magic type can externally synchronize their magic and project it cohesively this method doesn't seem to work when the magic types differ. With truly different abilities there must be some degree of magical give and take, passing magic between the two to blend its flavor.
Open Formal Relations (Heaven's Chosen):
You personally handle making the initial contact with the Heaven's Chosen. Their name itself is rather ominous to you and you haven't particularly heard good things about them, but you don't let that cloud your perspective. Your initial contact goes pretty well. The contact information you have essentially connects you to Taura's counterpart, the leader's personal assistant. She speaks in a sort of overly formal and archaic manner most of the time but occasionally slips up in minor ways.
As you work to arrange a formal meeting directly with Hiko you try to feel out the basis of the organization through three of her assistants. You get the feeling that she's not very often in her nominal office. You slowly wheedle some details out of the various girls you end up talking to. There's a sort of layer of imposed tradition upon them, but that's not exactly something they chafe against, following the leader is something that's heavily ingrained in Japanese society from birth.
To their perspective the NM is too corporate. Hiko runs a sort of feudal responsibility system where people are responsible for fulfilling their duties to those above them, but those above them are also responsible for the wellbeing of those beneath them. The NM only serves the people at the top. But at the very least that makes the NM somewhat predictable once you have a grasp for what the top level goals are.
The Junta and Republic are far less simple to work around. The Junta is always pressing for weaknesses, a society built purely on martial lines, and they're dangerously aggressive. The Republic has the failings of any democratic system and is unpredictable and unreliable with goals and directives changing too fast.
Their probing on you is more subtle you would have expected from how open they are in answering your questions. They try to determine your goals, the treatment of your subordinates, and angle for the number of members of your group though they seem to have an estimate already. You can't be sure how well you prevented them getting information, though they took your deflections with good grace. They also open the possibility of long term trade deals.
You're questions about their quality of life are poorly answered. They say they're fine, but you don't trust the answer. They're vague and comparative. They live less dangerous lives than the Junta, they aren't subject to contrary directives like the Republic, and they aren't sent to fight distant wars like the NM.
They can't really answer why the name is what it is for you. It's not something they've really questioned. Tokyo doesn't seem to matter as much to them as you'd expect. They don't seem very concerned, though you try to keep your own worries about it out of your voice.
At the end of the month you get a short audience with Yashiro Hiko. You are allowed to bring whatever honor guard you like. They don't even give you a limit to how many, though they warn you that the location will not be safe for teleportation. You take a small entourage on the bullet train to get there. It travels fast enough that from your knowledge magical girls don't care about you passing through unless you get off in their territory.
You're escorted by a pair of very modestly dressed girls from the Kyoto station to what appears to be an old but very well maintained Shinto shrine. You're glad you wore a formal kimono for this. You're hardly use to measuring demon strength by feel given your group's usual methods, but you're thinking it's definitely not negative, you'd feel that for sure, you suspect from the appearance of the human population that it's probably well above baseline.
Your guides take you through an illusion barrier into a larger building than the shrine building. Entering the building feels strange. The closest comparison would be entering a miasma but that's not really close. There's a sort of heavy weight to the building, spiritual pressure almost, you can tell magic runs through the bones of the building. You find yourself suddenly remembering the myth that old items can gain a life of their own, but it's probably nothing.
There weren't all that many people in the building. Certainly no obvious guards as your guides directed you to a sliding door and waited. Yashiro Hiko was waiting in a traditional largely empty room. She would have looked young, ten or twelve maybe in a cute priestess outfit, but even a human would surely have felt the weight of years behind her eyes, and her sheer presence filled the room. It wasn't something magic or you would have noticed, but you could feel her eyes scything through you, silently judging. Then her demeanor changes and she cheerfully greets you with a voice and expression befitting her appearance. That sets the tone for the rest of the meeting as she seems to stick to an upbeat personality with odd bits of young and old.
You're treated to a rather strange mix of cut down traditional customs. She apologizes that she doesn't have time to do things the long way as she abbreviates many things with casual magic use and unnerving grace.
The conversations that follow are an array of careful probes, oblique deflections, implications, and metaphors that leave you confused at times if you're even talking about the same things. You really aren't sure what to make of her.
You think she'd like Kyoto to be the capital again, but that seems like it's more a means to her than an end. The Emperor would endure either way she's sure.
She's certainly not as concerned about Tokyo's fate as you are, but restraining your own anxieties about it limits your approaches on the matter. She claims that over the years many entire towns have died out from the folly of their magical girls, and Japan has nonetheless endured. She can hardly be expected to clean up the mistakes of every foolish girl in the country, nor can she ask her subordinates to risk their lives to do so. She has a hard enough time just keeping them safe as it is.
Her responses about tradition and culture are interesting. The way she speaks of it proves more than anything else that she's had a great many years to ponder it. Her tradition and culture have diverged from what she grew up with; many ideas have been cast aside as useless or completely wrong. She's oddly more pragmatic than you'd expect for someone so traditional. Anything about the weakness of females or females taking a subordinate role has essentially been discarded as absurd. And she's perfectly capable of adapting to the times where it's clearly useful, she even has a computer and a cell phone. But why should things change that work fine? Why has cuisine shifted so radically, or architecture, or clothing? She spends at least an hour on the subject and she's much less guarded about it than other things.
She encourages you that you're used to thinking in the short term, but you should also think about the long term, and you have a feeling she has a different perspective on what those mean.
You get less out of her in the end than you wanted, but more than you perhaps expected. She's interesting, and you definitely don't think she's crazy, but you could see why some might think that.
Daily Progress Updates (0 vets):
Nagoya Teams - Give them the locations we feel are likely to provide the best screening for demons heading west if they flee from our actions (though they may of course adjust as they see fit). Let them know that our progress is likely to be slow and steady, so they might not see any action for the first few days, but we'd appreciate if they let us know about any unusual behavior in the areas that are outside of our scan range.
Tokyo Contacts - Maintain contact with the elites, and inform them of our progress through the month. We will let them know if we have a situation that is ready for their direct assistance, but otherwise expect that mostly they should play defensively, particularly when the demons start getting more agitated and disturbed.
You maintain contact with the groups, but there's nothing unusually significant outside of what was already reported.
The Tokyo girls give you some idea of how many girls are leaving Tokyo, but even they don't have solid numbers.
Research
Tandem Casting, Fusion x3: Intensified research.
The amount of resources you spend on research this month dwarfs all of your previous efforts. 14 meguca months and 14.25 GCU spent on this project trying to brute force your way into an immediate breakthrough.
Even with the enormous resources you throw into it, you still face tremendous trouble trying to bring together different magic types. With so many people to throw at the problem but so little time there's a number of positively odd experiments running through the month. Some are apparently taking the musical metaphor a little too far and even trying to use music directly. Other times you see the positively jarring clashes from people throwing magic at each other, which results mostly in wasteful light displays.
In the end partly through brute force efforts of trying so many mechanisms and with a little help from the research notes you traded for you come up with a usable solution. You end up passing little bits of magic between girls, pushing the magical energy across in a somewhat similar manner to enchanting. You start with a small amount and the partner blends an equally small amount of their own energy into it while holding it stable. You keep passing it back and forth blending a bit more together each time until you get a useful amount. Blend too much at once and you get an unusable mess. You think of it like pouring flour into a mixer gradually working while pouring it all at once just results in a messy kitchen.
It definitely requires a high degree of connection to let someone pass magic into you without resisting, like not flinching when someone throws a punch at you knowing it will stop. Even a bit of resistance can disrupt the fragile process.
It's very different from the previous comparisons to music, but then magic is neither music nor flour. No analogy is likely to hold in all cases.
Generally speaking it will require some training and practice to even use it, and some research time for any new application. You had some extra time though because the Coalitions note's helped you finish early. Your focus for the result of this research was something combining teleportation and barrier magic to interdict teleports and with that time you've got some early results. Shinobu and Aiko managed to handle blending their teleportation and barriers and turn the result towards preventing teleportation, but it's not really at a level you can accept at this point.
Blending magic is both slow and inefficient in how much they can build up. They've managed to stop a teleport in tests with anchors, though it just materializes the object bouncing off the barrier rather than anything more dramatic. But the capability to stop a determined teleporter simply isn't there. A few teleports even at a veteran's casting capability can break through their barrier. Seto can punch through in one try if she puts enough into it, though it degrades her performance severely.
Maybe you could combine it with your charm techniques to get something more functional, but the magic is far more unstable at this point than anything you've dealt with before.
Morale
Welcome home dinners (1.0 vets, $2,000): Every day that the Tokyo teams go out, have special "Welcome Home" dinners (comfort food) prepared when they get back, with the camaraderie of everyone else supporting them in a difficult endeavor.
In spite of the frenzy of activity this month you still set some time aside for safer more normal activity. A good hot meal and some time together to eat has been a staple of human combat morale for centuries for good reason. You don't force anyone to come, but most of your girls do anyway. Teenagers basically never turn down the offer of good food.
Mountain Hiking & Picnic (2.0 vets, $750): A day early in the month (after the first week in Tokyo) spent hiking and appreciating nature. Pack up snacks and a good picnic lunch, and do some mountain hiking in the nomadic area, with a picnic at the top. Have Mami accompany Serena, while Seto goes with the main group. Keep the groups separate since we still want to minimize aura exposure this month.
The mountain hike goes well enough, though not everyone really appreciates nature. There's something to be said for the perspective you gain from standing on a hill and looking out on the land stretching out beneath you though. A view of what you're fighting for. Serena appreciates you going with her, talking to someone that's not affected is nice, though she claims that after living in the wilderness for much of the time since she Contracted she's more than happy to stay indoors.
General
With the global economic slowdown things are a little hardscrabble keeping profits up in your businesses, but you still manage normal profits.
With the finishing of your training program both Tama and Yukari are promoted from green to veteran.
The aftermath of the primary assault on Tokyo is a mixed bag. You've lost a girl straight in front of your eyes, and you don't think you'll ever be okay with that. But you've eliminated about a quarter of the Oni class that were stalking the magical girls of Tokyo and you knew going in there were risks.
More immediately you've got new problems. While you don't have any sort of exact numbers estimates are that dozens of magical girls have been fleeing Tokyo through the holes in the defensive ring you've punched. You've had around forty come to you looking to join up after the string of victories and you doubt you can take them all right away without the safe territory to support them.
Worst still is how many groups on the periphery of Tokyo are dealing with random migrants pushing through their territory and competing for the limited safe resources. It's sparking new problems fast.
The attacks of Tokyo this month, particularly the messy retreat from the final fight of the month have left people quite shaken up though, and the number of spirals was quite severe as a result. Not even counting that you issued everyone present some extra grief cubes just to calm nerves afterwards, including yourself. There were 7 spirals this month: four of them pretty minor including Sayaka having what Kyouko referred to as a crisis of faith. There was also a moderate spiral costing two cubes, but worst still were two extra severe spirals. (2 death level spirals)
Rumors
The disease outbreak in Hong Kong appears to have burned itself out to a large degree, too fast and too lethal. It was at least contained, though none of the explanations really hold much weight, especially as much of the medical workers and researchers that responded died in mysterious circumstances. It screams government cover up to most, but it's unclear who and why.
An American naval vessel shot down a North Korean missile above the Sea of Japan, before it could cross Japan. This follows a steady increase in rhetoric which appears to have driven the North Koreans to saber rattling and the Americans to need to make a show of their own in response.
The economic downturn seems to be proportionally worse in Tokyo with unemployment rising and productivity falling, and suicide rate as ever when people lose jobs have skyrocketed. There has also been an unusual shift of population from Tokyo to the other major metropolitan areas where the economy is performing better.
In magical news, there has been a major breach of the Tokyo encirclement. Casualties in Tokyo are down significantly but many are taking this as a chance to flee. Hino's faith in the Serene now appears somewhat justified. Many wonder however why the Serene's leader previously controlled from the shadows and only now appeared in direct combat.
Resources
- 4 (5) Elite Meguca: Mami (+20% persuasive), Kyouko (can act as if two Elites), Taya (Can fill role of two clairvoyant vets), Seto (Elite teleporter)
- Legendary Serena, +4 vet/elite special
- 58 Veteran Meguca, 6 Green Meguca, 1 Associate
- Upkeep: 21.5 Veteran, 6 Green, 1 Associate
- Support/Training (8.5 Vet)
- 3 vet demon finding training (+20% grief cubes)
- 2 vets on dispatch service (+30% grief cubes additive with demon finding, -1% casualties)
- 2 vet on telepathic communication (-2% pair hunting, -1% pack hunting)
- 1.5 Veteran, Paperpushing
- Jobs (13 Vet, 6 Green, 1 Associate)
- 1 veteran (Hainako) Translation service
- 4 veteran + 5 green working courier business (Minimum 3 vets)
- 1 Akeno Delivery
- 4 Vets (Akane), 1 Green, 1 Associate Restaurant
- 3 vets - Restaurant delivery
- Support/Training (8.5 Vet)
- Upkeep: 21.5 Veteran, 6 Green, 1 Associate
- Grief Cubes 114.3
- Money: $88,950
- Expenses: $30,920
- $1480 upkeep on cellphones (-2% solo hunting, -1% pair hunting)
- $600 upkeep on cable/internet
- $5000 upkeep on apartments
- $8000 upkeep on house
- $300 upkeep on Akiya
- $7400 upkeep on stipend
- $7400 upkeep on food
- $740 upkeep on gear (bikes, shields, misc)
- Income $37,500
- Translator: +$5500 per turn
- Courier Business, Mitakihara: +$9500 per turn
- Courier Business, Kasamino: +$4500 per turn
- Restaurant +$9000 per turn
- Akeno Delivery +$4000 per turn
- Restaurant Delivery +$5000 per turn
- Expenses: $30,920
- Morale: [4 of 10] Your girls are pretty shaken up about the events of this month.
- Assets
- Tiny household shrine: Somewhat reduces losses to morale from deaths. (Bonus Increased by omake)
- Shields: -3% Casualties
-
[*]Basic General Combat Training: -2% Casualties (May decay with losses or recruitment).
[*]Basic Solo Combat Training: -1% Pack Hunting, -2% pair hunting, -3% Solo Hunting
[*]Defending Others Training: -2% Pair Hunting, -1% Pack Hunting
[*]Pack Tactics Training: -4% pack hunting, -2% pair hunting
[*]PvP training: Still terrible, but slightly less so +2% PvP effectiveness
[*]Experienced Hunters +10% grief cube gather rates
[*]Tandem trained
- Healer: 2
- Teleporter: 5+Seto
- Stealth: 2+Kyoko
- Clairvoyant: 3+Taya
- Barrier: 11
- 74 Bicycles (Mobility Bonus)
- 28 Bulletproof vest (-2% casualty)
- 29 Sets of Kevlar Clothing (-4% casualty)
- 3 Sets of Leather (-2% casualty)
- 9 sets hardened leather (-3% casualty)
- Housing (68/93)
- Apartments (40 capacity)
- House (50 capacity)
- Mami's Apartment (HQ of sorts) (Can be traded for $1200 per turn)
- Akiya (5/6 capacity, special)
- Territory
- Urban
- North
- Demon Status: Average -0.1
- Sustainable Harvest: 37
- South
- Demon Status: Average 0.0
- Sustainable Harvest: 37
- North
- Rural
- Demon Status: Weak -4.8
- Sustainable Harvest: 8
- Urban
I've cut down the amount of armor you had a little bit, count it as actual destructive damages from the fights you've been in. It wasn't clearly referenced in the mini-turns, but you knew going in that in these fights you'd actually take armor destruction, and Mami isn't actually the type to note such losses immediately.
Cubes you gained 109 GCU from the Tokyo demons you destroyed. This was knocked down significantly though by various expenses. You burned 14 on grief spirals this turn. Plus a lot of extra on extraordinary magic use and just generally handing them out like candy as a preventative measure after a terrifying retreat.
And there's a couple of options imbedded in here. You have two fatal spirals that you can choose to put with Serena indefinitely (I did secondary rolls which gave you the opportunity to do so if you want to). Plus you have approximately 40 meguca from Tokyo willing to join up.
Tempted to flatten out training upkeep in to a general 10% upkeep to training instead of specific ones highlighted. In retrospect would have made more sense to keep general combat training and tactics working with each other as the upkeep and drop the demon finding to renewable.
As ever I expect a million errors in my post, especially since I wrote it in many little bits over time.
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