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Puella Magi Adfligo Systema

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[Q] Grief defenses to max.
-[Q] Immobilize Yuki and everything you can with Grief Fog.
--[Q] Beware the walls.
---[Q] Let Yuki try what she will.
----[Q] No sell every single attack she attempts.
-----[Q] Almost disable her in every way you can think of.
------[Q] Demonstrate superiority.
-------[Q] Kneecap her with your Obrez.
--------[Q] (Stealthily use Grief to make sure the Obrez shot gets through the armour!)
 
[X] Spar.
-[X] You will be sandbagging, to a degree. You're not here to kill her or blow shit up.
--[X] If she inquires about this, demonstrate Prima Luce.
--[X] Don't even harm her directly. Anything you can do that will really hurt her, you can do and pull at the last second. Prima Luce would be overly hostile.
---[X] Other than that, pull no punches.
[X] Ping Homura about mutual defense pact and that they're agreeing to Walpurgis as part of it.

My primary concern is wtf they're getting out of mutual defense. I'm not sure we even care, though. If we knew someone was attacking them we would intervene anyway, and we've already made it clear we won't hold to anything compromising our morals.
 
Always Happening said:
This, basically. Turning their leader into chutney after the thrashing we gave them might spook the fuck out of the other girls, but Yuki doesn't seem like the type to appreciate us pulling our punches, and we want to give her the impression that we are hilariously fucking dangerous to anything and everything that might threaten them.

Now the question is how hard do we go all-in? Do we make it seem like an actual fight, or do we see how long she can avoid being turned into a fine red mist by monomolecular razor clouds?

...We should probably have Rin be the ref, since at least one of us is seriously going to need a medic after this.
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Higure said:
...and if the countermeasure fails, amd we win instantly? The point of this spar is to show her that how terrifying we can be. We'll miss the opportunity to show any of our other tricks if we just focus on stealing her gem.
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We might as well demonstrate some of our other skills, like say the laser beam first. As was said before, a lot of our attacks are simply 'save or die', if she's alright with us throwing things like that around, then I suppose we can just go ahead and cut loose with her in a proper spar. We just need to make sure that there's enough left to regenerate/heal her if things go, um, overboard.
 
Vebyast said:
Just to make sure it's noted: "Location of my choosing" will certainly be "right here, right now". So we should be ready for that.
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Okay, I've been thinking longer about this and... I honestly disagree. For one thing, two of Yuki's friends are here and the sudden blaring WITCH! WITCH! she has every reason to expect from fighting us wouldn't go over well. Not unless the place's magic is set up to regularly attract witches.

But there's another matter and it ties back into what Yuki said:
Firnagzen said:
"This building is mine," Yuki says simply. "This city is mine."
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Something to consider is that the Fukushima group appear to go through grief seeds like nobody's business. They took 20 seeds in a single day for a single fight, if a bad one, prisoner services for a single individual would have them going through five a week, and they're notable for being quite expensive as a general rule.

There's been plenty of discussion as to what the Fukushima group could be spending so much on, but one of the things is enchantment. The building looks like it's heavily enchanted, but by the same token, enchantment is something you figure out. Even if this is her home, Yuki would have to figure out how to make her effects work, presumably using other buildings to do that. If her enchantments last long enough or are nigh-permanent she could have a pretty significant chunk of the city covered with more rudimentary versions of what she has here.

Even with the likelihood that this is closely tied to Yuki's wish magic, it's unlikely to be limited to this building alone: I can't see a high likelihood of her having some special attachment to this place. This is an ordinary abandoned office building, not a place of emotional attachments. Or at least it doesn't appear special in a way that would apply before she made her wish and came to live here.

So there's both motive to take the fight elsewhere, and likely capacity as well.

--------

In other news... I think I have perfect music for this spar: She's sparring against an incredibly powerful meguca in a home invasion scenario, wherein "home" appears to comprise "the entire city," so what better accompaniment then a pair of tracks named "Castle Doctrine" made for a videogame final boss?

​
 
The Phoenixian said:
Okay, I've been thinking longer about this and... I honestly disagree. For one thing, two of Yuki's friends are here and the sudden blaring WITCH! WITCH! she has every reason to expect from fighting us wouldn't go over well. Not unless the place's magic is set up to regularly attract witches.
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No reason she wouldn't warn her friends. If they're loaded up on detection and early-warning systems she may need to do that regardless of location, same way we need to warn Mami.
The Phoenixian said:
If her enchantments last long enough or are nigh-permanent she could have a pretty significant chunk of the city covered with more rudimentary versions of what she has here.
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This is why I think that there's motive to keep it here. She knows we're absolutely terrifying in a fight, but she wants to know more, and that means she needs to bring out the big guns and push us. Which means she needs the most heavily-fortified location she can get.
 
The Phoenixian said:
Okay, I've been thinking longer about this and... I honestly disagree. For one thing, two of Yuki's friends are here and the sudden blaring WITCH! WITCH! she has every reason to expect from fighting us wouldn't go over well. Not unless the place's magic is set up to regularly attract witches.
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I agree with not using Witch stuff simply because of the time it takes. It's not practical in more than one way.

Also, Grief Fog. If we actually don't hold back, Grief Fog is quite OP.

Of course, we'd have to counter whatever Yuki throws at us, but still. Grief Fog is probably good enough to go.​
 
Firnagzen said:
Yuki lands on the roof of an old office building, cloak fluttering around her. You can immediately feel the magic saturating the entire structure, tingling against your mind in intricate webs. They wind tighter, twisting into a dense nexus within the center of the building.
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Firnagzen said:
"Yes?" you say, raising your eyebrows. You can feel the magic rising around Yuki. Almost affectionate, twining around her, and the only word you can really use is that it's welcoming her back.
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Firnagzen said:
It's actually a touch difficult to sense anything in this building - not so much that they're disguised. You can sense two presences in here, other than yourself and Yuki, but there's just so much magic they're almost unnoticeable against the background noise.
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Firnagzen said:
You follow her, soaking in the sense of the building. It doesn't feel hostile, precisely, but it feels deep and unyielding, like the enduring weight of a mountain powerful enough to weather out virtually anything.
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Okay, so. To be clear:
• This building is a nexus of magic so dense that multiple magical girls easily fade into the background.
• The metaphor Sabrina automatically generated was that it feels like "the weight of a mountain".
• Our grief is not inviolate to magic, and has been damaged both by Kyouko's spear and "Ramiel's" laser.
• Neither of those were throwing anywhere near the amount of power around that this building has invested in it - in point of fact, this is the densest and most powerful concentration of magic we have ever seen.

Let me be clear: If Yumi used the full abilities of this building to attempt to incapacitate us right now, even with slight forewarning, I'd expect us to lose. Badly.
 
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Redshirt Army said:
Okay, so. To be clear:
• This building is a nexus of magic so dense that multiple magical girls easily fade into the background.
• The metaphor Sabrina automatically generated was that it feels like "the weight of a mountain".
• Our grief is not inviolate to magic, and has been damaged both by Kyouko's spear and "Ramiel's" laser.
• Neither of those were throwing anywhere near the amount of power around that this building has invested in it - in point of fact, this is the densest and most powerful concentration of magic we have ever seen.

Let me be clear: If Yumi used the full abilities of this building at this moment to attempt to incapacitate us right now, even with slight forewarning, I'd expect us to lose. Badly.
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How fast can Sabrina move if she has to?

Like, no concerns outside of "get out now", how fast? Do we know?
 
veteranMortal said:
How fast can Sabrina move if she has to?

Like, no concerns outside of "get out now", how fast? Do we know?
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Supersonic, at minimum. I don't recommend trying to breach the building with our body, though - that way lies turning Sabrina into a smear on the wall. Try to use grief to breach it and be ready to abort if we can't get through, basically.
 
Just going to point out lasers didn't damage our grief. They held up fine. Also the bands wrapping around Kyouko weren't very thick and it still took several swings with her spear to break the bind.
 
Muramasa said:
Just going to point out lasers didn't damage our grief. They held up fine. Also the bands wrapping around Kyouko weren't very thick and it still took several swings with her spear to break the bind.
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The wall we blocked the lasers with was visibly dented and cracked. They didn't penetrate, but they did damage the construct.

Kyouko's weapons weren't invested with a thousandth of the power this place has.
 
Firnagzen said:
Your blades surge forward, weaving a massive shield of Grief befo-

The glow explodes into a supernova.

It's like staring into an eclipse of the sun. The deep, black penumbra in the lee of your shield, seemingly all the darker for the eye-searing corona of light blazing against the night sk-

Wham.

"Sabrina!"

Wham.

Up. She knocked you up-

Wham.

White hot pain in your side-
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She straight up broke through that shield.
 
Redshirt Army said:
Let me be clear: If Yumi used the full abilities of this building to attempt to incapacitate us right now, even with slight forewarning, I'd expect us to lose. Badly.
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I'm not so sure. IIRC we're carrying around four-plus Clear Seeds of Grief to lay against the power invested in this building. All of the enchanting laid into this building might amount to a few thousand Seeds, if we think the Fukushima girls have been netting 10 excess seeds a month for 20 years. If Hope and Despair balance, our Grief outmasses her building by at least three orders of magnitude. We'd need to set ourselves against her hard and not hold back at all, but I think we could do it.

Put up a solid micron-thin shell at the edge of our radius to catch splash damage. Collect as much of the Fog as we can into a totally solid ten-meter-radius sphere around ourselves, twist it for durability the same way we can twist it for transparency or other properties that require "witchy grief". Begin radiating in ultraviolet, visual, and infrared at a couple gigawatts total power. Set the rest of the fog to micrometer shards of active-grief sharpness and set it to blenderizing, maintaining awareness by measuring the resistance as we churn the entire inside of our radius into ionized soup. Infuse our meat-sack with diffuse fog and use it to distribute acceleration forces, and then go for the side of the building at a few kps-squared. She'll be too busy keeping herself alive to have any chance at setting her will against our own with enough concentration to get through two or three Clear Seeds of grief.
Redshirt Army said:
She straight up broke through that shield.
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I think she caught us before the shield was fully-formed. I also don't know how much Grief we were using there; it may not have been Clear Seed quantities.
 
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Vebyast said:
Collect as much of the Fog as we can into a totally solid ten-meter-radius sphere around ourselves, twist it for durability the same way we can twist it for transparency or other properties that require "witchy grief".
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This will likely require several seconds of trance on its own, which is to say, enough time to die. The rest of it... might work. Might also not, if the inside of the building isn't actually connected to the outside by simple topology.

Onmur said:
There it's Moe that hit us, not the laser. In fact, the shield is noted as still being there, 'all the darker for the eye-searing corona of light blazing...'
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Hmm. I misread that way back when, then.
 
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Redshirt Army said:
This will likely require several seconds of trance on its own, which is to say, enough time to die.
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Does active witchiness take time?

Eh, if so, just form the sphere. It'll be enough to keep her from taking snap-shots while we bust out, and she's not going to be taking more than snap-shots if we're busy turning the rest of our radius into the inside of fusion reactor.

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Redshirt Army said:
Might also not, if the inside of the building isn't actually connected to the outside by simple topology.
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That's what I'm most worried about even for a low-powered spar. If she's got us trapped in a demiplane with closed topology, our best chance is basically to stalemate her and then griefhax a solution or otherwise TTGL our way out.
 
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Vebyast said:
Does active witchiness take time?
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Pretty much everything we do with Grief takes Concentration, the more complex (magically or technologically?) effect we try to achieve, the longer it takes for Sabrina to make it happen. At least, this is what I believe, I don't know for sure.

We didn't check the time back then when we were experimenting with Grief effects, and I don't think we've tried making Grief more durable, so we don't know how long it would take to do such a thing.

There's also some hidden factor as to how long it takes to make Grief constructs/effects, as making the same Grief construct doesn't always take the same amount of time.
 
Redshirt Army said:
She straight up broke through that shield.
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Are you sure you're reading that right?

That was the flash bomb followed by Moe's speed blitz.

edit: The flash bomb was required to generate the shadows Moe needed for her own attack.

edit 2: Whoops. Just got home and didn't read Onmur's post.

edit 3: There are only two instances that I'm aware of in which someone broke through Sabrina's grief. One is where an Ishinomaki girl with 'disrupter fists' actually disrupted and scattered the grief Sabrina was using as well as the instance with Kyouko. Other then that, nothing.

In both instances we never lost the grief. Sabrina could just reform it instantly if she had to.
 
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Vebyast said:
I'm not so sure. IIRC we're carrying around four-plus Clear Seeds of Grief to lay against the power invested in this building. All of the enchanting laid into this building might amount to a few thousand Seeds, if we think the Fukushima girls have been netting 10 excess seeds a month for 20 years. If Hope and Despair balance, our Grief outmasses her building by at least three orders of magnitude. We'd need to set ourselves against her hard and not hold back at all, but I think we could do it.
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Problem: More Grief for us means more mass/volume, and nothing else, unless we have time to concentrate on Witching it. More magic for our opponent, already prepared and invested into the building, means any number of exotic effects. If, just to pick an example out of the air, the building can cause spontaneous combustion at arbitrary locations inside it without needing line-of-sight to a wall... it doesn't really matter how much mass we put into a shield. If the building allows awareness and TK equivalent to our fog, which is a useful utility even without thinking of combat applications... well, then we're about even. Except that magic might be able to ignore airtight barriers, where our Grief fog would at least be limited in its speed of penetration into such barriers if it can get through them at all.

Raw Grief manipulation hits diminishing returns once we've got enough to fill our radius with Fog at a usable density. Years of enchantment hit diminishing returns when the enchanter runs out of ideas.
 
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Onmur said:
Pretty much everything we do with Grief takes Concentration, the more complex (magically or technologically?) effect we try to achieve, the longer it takes for Sabrina to make it happen. At least, this is what I believe, I don't know for sure.

We didn't check the time back then when we were experimenting with Grief effects, and I don't think we've tried making Grief more durable, so we don't know how long it would take to do such a thing.

There's also some hidden factor as to how long it takes to make Grief constructs/effects, as making the same Grief construct doesn't always take the same amount of time.
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We could just pull in all our grief, make a metaphorical hamster ball around ourselves and then just make the entire outer surface release that same laser blast.
 
Onmur said:
Pretty much everything we do with Grief takes Concentration, the more complex (magically or technologically?) effect we try to achieve, the longer it takes for Sabrina to make it happen. At least, this is what I believe, I don't know for sure.

We didn't check the time back then when we were experimenting with Grief effects, and I don't think we've tried making Grief more durable, so we don't know how long it would take to do such a thing.

There's also some hidden factor as to how long it takes to make Grief constructs/effects, as making the same Grief construct doesn't always take the same amount of time.
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Simple active grief use only takes a few seconds. Like generating elements and such 'fire, water etc.'

It's when we try to perform conceptual level bull**** or large constructs is where things take a lot more time or just outright fail.
 
So anyway:

For the spar, I'm guessing all out barring gems shots and dismemberment. She did say she wants to take Sabrina's measure so don't hesitate to go all out and show what she can do. Also telepathy Homu and Mami for info on what Yuki can do.

For the defense pact: Tell her that Sabrina needs to bring this up with her group first. Shouldn't make this sort of decision without consulting Mami, Sayaka, and Homura. Or even Oriko and Kirika.

As for suspicions on Yuki's intentions with the defense pact, It's probably just because she wants an actual long term partnership. Which a mutual defense pact is liable to produce. She already suspects that Sabrina wants to bring big changes to the world.
 
veteranMortal said:
How fast can Sabrina move if she has to?

Like, no concerns outside of "get out now", how fast? Do we know?
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I'm not sure of our maximum acceleration, but the closest thing I can think of to an emergency escape (with a very heavy emphasis on "emergency" given that we haven't dealt with Feathers yet) from a situation where we're trapped in a room is honestly our barrier: Forming the insides takes quite a while, but just making the blank space and moving the entrance around seems significantly faster.

Muramasa said:
Simple active grief use only takes a few seconds. Like generating elements and such 'fire, water etc.'

It's when we try to perform conceptual level bull**** or large constructs is where things take a lot more time or just outright fail.
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For a point of comparison on how esoteric things appear to be able to get without a trance, I'll add here that our barrier is among the objects that don't seem to require a full trance. Back during the first attempt, it looks we were present enough during that moment that we could respond to interruptions. (Since, by all appearances, we had already started concentrating when Mami's telepathic call interrupted us.)

Vebyast said:
I'm not so sure. IIRC we're carrying around four-plus Clear Seeds of Grief to lay against the power invested in this building. All of the enchanting laid into this building might amount to a few thousand Seeds, if we think the Fukushima girls have been netting 10 excess seeds a month for 20 years. If Hope and Despair balance, our Grief outmasses her building by at least three orders of magnitude. We'd need to set ourselves against her hard and not hold back at all, but I think we could do it.

Put up a solid micron-thin shell at the edge of our radius to catch splash damage. Collect as much of the Fog as we can into a totally solid ten-meter-radius sphere around ourselves, twist it for durability the same way we can twist it for transparency or other properties that require "witchy grief". Begin radiating in ultraviolet, visual, and infrared at a couple gigawatts total power. Set the rest of the fog to micrometer shards of active-grief sharpness and set it to blenderizing, maintaining awareness by measuring the resistance as we churn the entire inside of our radius into ionized soup. Infuse our meat-sack with diffuse fog and use it to distribute acceleration forces, and then go for the side of the building at a few kps-squared. She'll be too busy keeping herself alive to have any chance at setting her will against our own with enough concentration to get through two or three Clear Seeds of grief.
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Okay, again: this is a spar, not a war. Seriously. A lot of this planning sounds like a level of threat response for if you're assuming she's going to be actively trying to kill us.
 
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