Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
I think we want a link to the specific update.
Meguca Micro Empire Quest (PMMM)
- Thread starter inverted_helix
- Start date
I think we want a link to the specific update.
Here you go. As far as I can tell, that quest is just one long, slow slide to a Very Bad End.
But then, TheBleachDoctor is a harsh taskmaster; his Mami quest managed to Bad End in three weeks.
SIDS claims 4,000 lives in the US every year, and they have a "Syndrome" for that. Sudden Adolescent Disappearance Syndrome would claim that many teenaged girls in a few weeks, going by your two-month turnaround time on meguca; it'd be considered a genetic disorder, one that goes back for millenia, and the human genome project would be tying themselves in knots trying to figure out a cause. Probably the only reason they don't mention it in schools is that doing so seems to make it more common (teenagers freak out about it --> more grief spirals).
My big idea, which I'm (slowly, unfortunately; I'm not a very fast writer) writing out an omake for is the idea that the reason the police are observing from a distance rather than doing their usual community outreach/intimidation tactics is that they don't suspect the megucas of being criminals, but of somehow reducing the SADS phenomenon, despite nobody being able to do that ever, and want to know why. Maybe the police captain lost a daughter to SADS earlier in his career, and he thinks Mami might be able to provide, if not an answer, at least some peace in the sense that she can help keep this silent menace from striking as often as it does?
While true that it would be more lives lost than SIDS, there's no proof of anything happening. They just vanish. Proving something like that exists with no bodies would be really tough. I think it would be much more reasonable to simply believe there's a baseline rate of girls running away and dying somewhere out of sight.
Though admittedly the idea of medical experts tying themselves in knots trying to figure it out is somewhat amusing.
There's a few factors that would boost the medical explanation:
- The pattern is too uniform. It'd be relatively uniform across all racial, political, and socioeconomic backgrounds (since the Incubators would concentrate their efforts in order to create a more stable demon population). If it were just girls running away you'd expect it happening much more often in places where girls have poor lives/are depressed/etc, but the phenomenon has too high a baseline and too small a variance for it to just be garden-variety depression leading to suicide.
- The bodies never turn up, indicating some sort of dissolution effect.
- Documentation would indicate similar patterns to those of teenage runaways, but different enough to matter. More depression and withdrawal, less anger, for instance.
Write the omake, and helix can declare it non-canonical if it doesn't match with what he wants to do with the quest.
Already in progress; I'm just kind of a slow writer.
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
Would it be called that if it only effected girls?
I'm open to other names; I just thought it would be darkly ironic to say someone died from a fatal case of the SADS.
Omake: Dragnet: Mitakihara
Dragnet: Mitakihara
"Report's in from the boarding house stakeout, Captain."
Captain Hiroshi Nakamura, Mitakihara Police Department glanced up from the eternal mound of paperwork on his desk. He took the report from the detective, but didn't need to even glance at it to know what it said; the tone of his voice was clear enough.
The detective shook his head. "Eight days of 24-hour surveillance, and nothing. I think we're going to have to face facts, sir: there's just nothing there to find. We've already burned through all the cash overtime for the month, and we're running low on comp time."
Dutifully scanning through the utterly boring report, featuring such choice tidbits as young girls talking about schoolwork and magical girl anime, Captain Nakamura shook his head. "No, Takata. There's definitely something there; I'd pit all my 30 years' seniority on it."
A snort broke Hiroshi's focus on the documents. "Sorry, sir, but I just don't see it. We don't have hard evidence; heck we don't have a crime! Everything we've seen just tells us the same thing: that it's nothing more than a boarding house-slash-club for a bunch of girls who like play-acting and magical girl stuff. Look, we all know what this is ab-"
Detective Takata froze as Captain Nakamura fixed him with a quelling glare. Both very pointedly did not glance at the black-framed photo on the Captain's file cabinet. After a few seconds Takata sighed and bowed his head. "Okay Captain, we've got everything we need on the drug warehouse on 2nd street. We should get the warrants to the judge tomorrow and get the dealers off the street." Neither one of them has to say that this would free up more time for the other stakeout.
The Captain nodded, and Takata left. Hiroshi didn't need to say thank you; both men knew precisely what was and wasn't being said from years of working together. Hiroshi couldn't help glancing at the black frame on his desk, and the bright, smiling purple eyes of his daughter, his darling Miho, missing, presumed dead, for nearly fifteen years now. The hole in his life was still there, even though after all this time she had been a part of it for less time than she had been d- than she had been gone. The word still struck a chord in his heart, not least because there was that small hint of doubt, rolling in his gut, telling him he shouldn't listen to all the experts, shouldn't give up hope.
Sudden Adolescent Disappearance Syndrome, the doctors and psychologists, the so-called 'experts,' called it. A condition as old as human history, as old as time, where a frighteningly large number--tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands annually--of girls at or around Miho's age just vanished, as if into thin air, leaving not so much as a dead body behind. The phenomenon was maddeningly difficult for doctors to investigate, or even for most people to find information on: any area where details of the Syndrome became widely known the number of cases would spike, doubling or even quadrupling, turning a silent killer into a full-blown epidemic. Thus, by mutual consent, information and documentation on the SADS phenomenon was kept out of public view, away from the sight of children, in order to prevent parents from losing their daughters in droves.
These days only the darkest corners of the internet or advanced medical textbooks have been willing to mention SADS, unless of course you were a grieving father looking for help from the medical community. Among the doctors it has remained a closely-guarded secret, kept from vulnerable teenagers. The deliberately spotty and inconsistent information wasn't good enough for Hiroshi, and he had, ever since he learned about SADS, taken it upon himself to compile an "unofficial" list of SADS cases inside the city of Mitakihara. Combing through missing persons cases, homeless statistics, and other records that altogether only a public official would have access to, Hiroshi eventually found himself with one of the more comprehensive set of statistics on SADS, at least the most complete set he could gain access to by himself.
That meant Hiroshi was probably the only person to notice when the number of SADS cases in Mitakihara suddenly dropped to almost zero, two years ago, and that in the past year there hadn't been even a single case in Mitakihara. Hiroshi couldn't understand it; it was a completely local phenomenon, given that what little information he could gether about surrounding areas showed no change in the statistics, but somehow, just in his city, SADS cases seemed to be, at least temporarily, in remission. There was no new treatment, no experimental vaccine in trials; after fifteen years of being, even he had to admit, somewhat obsessed Hiroshi knew every one of the doctors researching SADS by first name and so he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that nothing had changed on the medical front.
And then he happened to run into the surprisingly well-dressed orphan Mami Tomoe, and her little cosplaying commune, or whatever it was. Under most circumstances the name itself would be entirely unremarkable: only the fact that three different reports, each one barely a blip, happened to have the same name on them and happened to come within a few weeks of each other lifted the young woman from a face in the crowd to someone that Detective Takata would be assigned to briefly follow up on. None of the three reports themselves were very interesting either, and Hiroshi would have reassigned Takata that very afternoon, if he hadn't noticed that one peculiar detail: Mami's little group was almost entirely at a high-risk of contracting SADS, and had a history that lasted around two years, right around the time the SADS cases had dropped from a sad, slow, inexorable trickle to zero.
It was nothing like reasonable suspicion--in fact it was barely more than speculation--but Hiroshi could feel his instincts prickling. Somehow, despite all common sense and defying thousands of years of documented failures, Mani Tomoe was managing to do what nobody had managed in thousands of years: find a way to curb the menace of SADS. At that point Hiroshi had no choice but to investigate further: SADS was deep in his bones, and there was no way he could just let a potential breakthrough like this go.
He ordered a covert stakeout of the boarding house and apartment that Mami's group used, not wanting to spook the girls and possibly set off a massive rash of SADS. He started to personally look into the history of Mami Tomoe and some of the other notable figures of the group. As the days of surveillance grew into a week, though, Hiroshi had to face the fact that there may be nothing to find, that Mami Tomoe might not even know that her little LARP clubhouse group or cosplay-themed boarding house--whatever it really was--was stopping the fatal spread of SADS, let alone why.
Gathering his findings into a folder and shutting his computer down for the night, Hiroshi made a decision. On Sunday evening, once his officers' overtime ran out and no more data could be gathered, he would speak to Mami Tomoe, personally. It may not be productive--in fact, it may be extremely unproductive--but he had to know.
----------
Safely hidden on a rooftop overlooking the police station, that she had been using to spy on the police captain, Taura Nakao crouched, her eyes wide and her hands over her mouth.
"Report's in from the boarding house stakeout, Captain."
Captain Hiroshi Nakamura, Mitakihara Police Department glanced up from the eternal mound of paperwork on his desk. He took the report from the detective, but didn't need to even glance at it to know what it said; the tone of his voice was clear enough.
The detective shook his head. "Eight days of 24-hour surveillance, and nothing. I think we're going to have to face facts, sir: there's just nothing there to find. We've already burned through all the cash overtime for the month, and we're running low on comp time."
Dutifully scanning through the utterly boring report, featuring such choice tidbits as young girls talking about schoolwork and magical girl anime, Captain Nakamura shook his head. "No, Takata. There's definitely something there; I'd pit all my 30 years' seniority on it."
A snort broke Hiroshi's focus on the documents. "Sorry, sir, but I just don't see it. We don't have hard evidence; heck we don't have a crime! Everything we've seen just tells us the same thing: that it's nothing more than a boarding house-slash-club for a bunch of girls who like play-acting and magical girl stuff. Look, we all know what this is ab-"
Detective Takata froze as Captain Nakamura fixed him with a quelling glare. Both very pointedly did not glance at the black-framed photo on the Captain's file cabinet. After a few seconds Takata sighed and bowed his head. "Okay Captain, we've got everything we need on the drug warehouse on 2nd street. We should get the warrants to the judge tomorrow and get the dealers off the street." Neither one of them has to say that this would free up more time for the other stakeout.
The Captain nodded, and Takata left. Hiroshi didn't need to say thank you; both men knew precisely what was and wasn't being said from years of working together. Hiroshi couldn't help glancing at the black frame on his desk, and the bright, smiling purple eyes of his daughter, his darling Miho, missing, presumed dead, for nearly fifteen years now. The hole in his life was still there, even though after all this time she had been a part of it for less time than she had been d- than she had been gone. The word still struck a chord in his heart, not least because there was that small hint of doubt, rolling in his gut, telling him he shouldn't listen to all the experts, shouldn't give up hope.
Sudden Adolescent Disappearance Syndrome, the doctors and psychologists, the so-called 'experts,' called it. A condition as old as human history, as old as time, where a frighteningly large number--tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands annually--of girls at or around Miho's age just vanished, as if into thin air, leaving not so much as a dead body behind. The phenomenon was maddeningly difficult for doctors to investigate, or even for most people to find information on: any area where details of the Syndrome became widely known the number of cases would spike, doubling or even quadrupling, turning a silent killer into a full-blown epidemic. Thus, by mutual consent, information and documentation on the SADS phenomenon was kept out of public view, away from the sight of children, in order to prevent parents from losing their daughters in droves.
These days only the darkest corners of the internet or advanced medical textbooks have been willing to mention SADS, unless of course you were a grieving father looking for help from the medical community. Among the doctors it has remained a closely-guarded secret, kept from vulnerable teenagers. The deliberately spotty and inconsistent information wasn't good enough for Hiroshi, and he had, ever since he learned about SADS, taken it upon himself to compile an "unofficial" list of SADS cases inside the city of Mitakihara. Combing through missing persons cases, homeless statistics, and other records that altogether only a public official would have access to, Hiroshi eventually found himself with one of the more comprehensive set of statistics on SADS, at least the most complete set he could gain access to by himself.
That meant Hiroshi was probably the only person to notice when the number of SADS cases in Mitakihara suddenly dropped to almost zero, two years ago, and that in the past year there hadn't been even a single case in Mitakihara. Hiroshi couldn't understand it; it was a completely local phenomenon, given that what little information he could gether about surrounding areas showed no change in the statistics, but somehow, just in his city, SADS cases seemed to be, at least temporarily, in remission. There was no new treatment, no experimental vaccine in trials; after fifteen years of being, even he had to admit, somewhat obsessed Hiroshi knew every one of the doctors researching SADS by first name and so he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that nothing had changed on the medical front.
And then he happened to run into the surprisingly well-dressed orphan Mami Tomoe, and her little cosplaying commune, or whatever it was. Under most circumstances the name itself would be entirely unremarkable: only the fact that three different reports, each one barely a blip, happened to have the same name on them and happened to come within a few weeks of each other lifted the young woman from a face in the crowd to someone that Detective Takata would be assigned to briefly follow up on. None of the three reports themselves were very interesting either, and Hiroshi would have reassigned Takata that very afternoon, if he hadn't noticed that one peculiar detail: Mami's little group was almost entirely at a high-risk of contracting SADS, and had a history that lasted around two years, right around the time the SADS cases had dropped from a sad, slow, inexorable trickle to zero.
It was nothing like reasonable suspicion--in fact it was barely more than speculation--but Hiroshi could feel his instincts prickling. Somehow, despite all common sense and defying thousands of years of documented failures, Mani Tomoe was managing to do what nobody had managed in thousands of years: find a way to curb the menace of SADS. At that point Hiroshi had no choice but to investigate further: SADS was deep in his bones, and there was no way he could just let a potential breakthrough like this go.
He ordered a covert stakeout of the boarding house and apartment that Mami's group used, not wanting to spook the girls and possibly set off a massive rash of SADS. He started to personally look into the history of Mami Tomoe and some of the other notable figures of the group. As the days of surveillance grew into a week, though, Hiroshi had to face the fact that there may be nothing to find, that Mami Tomoe might not even know that her little LARP clubhouse group or cosplay-themed boarding house--whatever it really was--was stopping the fatal spread of SADS, let alone why.
Gathering his findings into a folder and shutting his computer down for the night, Hiroshi made a decision. On Sunday evening, once his officers' overtime ran out and no more data could be gathered, he would speak to Mami Tomoe, personally. It may not be productive--in fact, it may be extremely unproductive--but he had to know.
----------
Safely hidden on a rooftop overlooking the police station, that she had been using to spy on the police captain, Taura Nakao crouched, her eyes wide and her hands over her mouth.
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
I'm not sure that this would be the case. There would probably be some disappearances of teenage girls unrelated to Mami's group, and I'm also pretty sure Area 1 is still wild and still part of Mitakihara. So "not even a single case" probably wouldn't be accurate, even if it is a massively anomalous decrease.
Otherwise an excellent omake.
Cool omake. Not sure how it would fit into canon, but maybe some of the ideas could be adapted later.
Yeah, I'm doubting it'll be canon: for all that it adds verisimilitude to the police procedure, it also potentially adds a great deal of complexity to the game: a political/social component that will not go away, and will only increase as time goes on.
That said, it does give us the intriguing potential for a win condition: formalizing our unofficial little micro-Empire into a genuine institution, something like how Xavier's School for the Gifted works in the Marvel universe. Regardless of this one omake's canonicity, I think we should seriously consider trying to set something like that up anyway, as a long term project.
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
We have paperwork, both for the company we own and the group proper. I figure we are formalized and a genuine institution.
Hmm... interesting idea...
Unfortunately Magical Girls need to be more distributed so that they can hold hunting territory. So a single boarding school won't work. Hmm... maybe a system of exclusive cram schools. Gives an excuse to be active together during after school hours. Fits with Japanese schooling traditions. Gets us additional income flow from the parents. Might be a way for us to help girls keep their grades up... Actually, that might be our entry, girls contract, their grades go down, and then we show up offering a cram school experience.
We need instructors though that we can depend on. Perhaps a role for older magical girls - have them go on to get the certs needed to teach cram schools... got to go research that.
Even more important would be the double-bluff (triple-bluff?): the public thinks we're an exclusive cram school; the parents would be let in on the 'true' purpose, that we've identified their child as having a major risk of developing a fatal case of the SADS, which we can't let the public know about for fear of causing an epidemic. That way the parents would help us with the real cover-up of the meguca community, all without knowing what it is they are really covering up.
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Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
So recently Helix PM'd me and the reason he can't get up the motivation to update is that our analysis of the police situation as unrealistic has broken his suspension of disbelief.
I would like to propose the possible explanation of "Kyuubey mucked with the police to teach us a lesson". I hope that this makes it easier. Another possibility is to simply handwave away the situation, I'd rather have wasted a bunch of actions and megucahours than have the quest die.
I would like to propose the possible explanation of "Kyuubey mucked with the police to teach us a lesson". I hope that this makes it easier. Another possibility is to simply handwave away the situation, I'd rather have wasted a bunch of actions and megucahours than have the quest die.
Oh, yikes, I'm so sorry! If I knew it was going to kill the QM's motivation to write I never would have brought up the police thing!
Um, the "Kyuubey did it to teach us a lesson" route would work. I happen to like my own proposal, that this is all being done "under the table" by a police captain who lost his daughter X years ago. Either would explain why the police are going with an expensive, covert stakeout rather than going with the cheaper, standard procedure route of showing up in an intimidating police car and "interviewing" everyone.
Um, the "Kyuubey did it to teach us a lesson" route would work. I happen to like my own proposal, that this is all being done "under the table" by a police captain who lost his daughter X years ago. Either would explain why the police are going with an expensive, covert stakeout rather than going with the cheaper, standard procedure route of showing up in an intimidating police car and "interviewing" everyone.
The report of being a foreign mafia might also make the police more covert as they would want to gather information and not scare the "big game" away. Especially since the assumption would be that the girls are a front and the "real" mafia are coming in behind them. Might lead to a decision to wait and watch in the hopes of catching someone big and therefor get a promotion.
While this does not seem to be "normal" police procedure, I think that are several possible justifications for the police are acting. I too would love to see this quest revived.
While this does not seem to be "normal" police procedure, I think that are several possible justifications for the police are acting. I too would love to see this quest revived.
So I have been thinking of this quest.
Honestly I'm a really stubborn person prone to getting into multi-day internet arguments over the most inane of points. For me to be convinced of the other side as in this case is highly unusual and pretty much proof positive that I was really badly wrong.
When I came up with the event I basically just didn't put enough thought into it. Also I've been incredibly tainted by television where you see stakeouts of mafia go on for months. That image from television basically made me think that was a reasonable thing to happen. I don't have much real life experience with the police as despite my sometimes radical views I've always stayed legally clean.
I tried to bull past the issue but that wasn't really working well. So I have a few ideas on what I could do.
1) I could treat TheEyes omake as canon, though even he didn't think it quite perfectly explained the situation.
2) I could just back the quest up a month and remove that event and do something else instead as indication of the importance of masquerade preservation.
3) I could just slightly modify the situation and not necessitate a full turn redo. My impression has always been that PMMM is supposed to be "15 minutes in the future" so to speak (though honestly I don't remember now just why I think that). So it's entirely possible to say that police drone use is widespread. Surveillance by drone could be done at a fraction of the cost of a stakeout and maybe make the situation a bit more believable. Though maybe not enough. I feel like society is trending towards increasing amounts of surveillance so it might be reasonable.
Honestly I'm a really stubborn person prone to getting into multi-day internet arguments over the most inane of points. For me to be convinced of the other side as in this case is highly unusual and pretty much proof positive that I was really badly wrong.
When I came up with the event I basically just didn't put enough thought into it. Also I've been incredibly tainted by television where you see stakeouts of mafia go on for months. That image from television basically made me think that was a reasonable thing to happen. I don't have much real life experience with the police as despite my sometimes radical views I've always stayed legally clean.
I tried to bull past the issue but that wasn't really working well. So I have a few ideas on what I could do.
1) I could treat TheEyes omake as canon, though even he didn't think it quite perfectly explained the situation.
2) I could just back the quest up a month and remove that event and do something else instead as indication of the importance of masquerade preservation.
3) I could just slightly modify the situation and not necessitate a full turn redo. My impression has always been that PMMM is supposed to be "15 minutes in the future" so to speak (though honestly I don't remember now just why I think that). So it's entirely possible to say that police drone use is widespread. Surveillance by drone could be done at a fraction of the cost of a stakeout and maybe make the situation a bit more believable. Though maybe not enough. I feel like society is trending towards increasing amounts of surveillance so it might be reasonable.