A few minutes of real time at worst. I don't think she can do anything truly dangerous in that amount of time. I suppose she could beeline for Oriko and kill her, but that just sounds like Diabolus Ex Machina. And also really, really stupid, given her behaviour thus far.
It's my side of paranoia, then.

I mean, I'm thinking we'd be walking away until we were ~175 metres away from Riona (still well within sensing range), Homura timestops (instant action), and gets us.

I doubt Riona brought that many shades, so I think almost two blocks worth of distance should be safe enough?

Bonus paranoia: Tell Homura to circle around and approach us in a direction that would put Riona directly and futher beyond our position:

I was so bored I made this :V :




This is trickery that makes me unhappy. It's clear that 'next meeting' is just a ploy so that we'll either attack her then, or we're setting it so that she lowers her guard and doesn't anticipate we'll attack her before it.

I was unhappy enough for us to attack her in negotiations because negotiations broke down, I'm even more unhappy knowing we're planning in advance to trick her by setting up a future supposed meeting.

I'd like our word to have weight such that if we say "we're letting you go" it actually means "we're letting you go" and even our enemies can trust it -- and if we want to not let her go, we should actually say "No, we can't let you go."
FAKE EDIT: Sorry about long winded response. I feel pressured to act this way due to possible consequences if we do not.

Well, I'm not entirely happy, but 'next meeting' is meant for us to get answers from Riona.

Like, if we decide we're not going for that (Mami, Sayaka, Homura decide Riona's too dangerous), we just gank Riona in a few minutes from timestop with antimagic enchants... instead of doing the same after having that chance to get answers from Riona.

I've given up on redeeming Riona since after last update; at this point I just want this information we might not get another chance to get before it becomes crucial.

How else will we find out information about our weird Soul? Who else has a chance to analyze the feather and find if it's actually weird or just a normal feather (though I'm wary of actually letting Riona see the feather)? Who else can give an useful opinion about Oriko's Soul? What about Clear Seeds?

Some of this might be really crucial, specially if Riona can tell us anything about the Feather that might be a clue towards Feathers, and this might be the last chance we get to find out before we actually need to deal with Feathers...

Again, if Sabrina's friends decide to act now, I guess we'll go with that, but I think there's some really important information we need to get, and Riona's the only one we can get even hints of them from.
 
Poor Firn.

I'm going to unequivocally agree here, but could you clarify as to whether you had intended that from the very beginning? As other posts have pointed out, you'd originally presented her a more morally grey character, and your post just recently clarified you were hedging your words there. The only problem I have is that you'd made a post during the morality debate shitstorm when Rionna told us she was stealing souls which gave me the impression that you were flanderizing her character from grey to black to quell said shitstorm. Which is why...


...This kind of confuses me. The impression Nadia gave us was that she was, at worst, an antisocial antihero, if not a belligerent drunk, and what we got was just a couple steps short of a cackling supervillain. Despite that, about half the thread was willing to compromise if we could find literally any common ground at all, and she could in any sense stop being completely awful, and that's the one thing she's been singularly unwilling to do. She's been escalating since then, with both her and you practically screaming at us "RIONNA IS A TERRIBLE HUMAN BEING", and there's still a good quarter-to-third that would still like to find any good within her at all as a basis to do anything other than kill or gem her. It's Rionna who doesn't want to lend her power to Sabrina, or to be redeemed at all, and once cooperating was put firmly off the table, there was nothing left for the thread to do but fight over her morality.

This post probably stopped being coherent a while ago because I'm in a rush, and I probably missed some thoughts I wanted to express, but I don't think Rionna was a mistake, just... kind of incoherent, story-wise? Now, going forward, we have three options:

>Do a Homu and kill her ass (What Would Madoka Do/Everything can be fixed)
>Do an Oriko, beat her ass into the dirt, and force concessions at gunpoint (Our greatest failure according to basically everyone)
>Throw her in Magic Jail, if not Do a Pleiades and throw her in the Freezer, because she's somehow managed to be worse than Anri fucking Airi (Might as well just kill her at this point etc.)

...All three of which lead to international fallout.

1. Firn has expressed regret that he wasn't "clear enough" about Rionna's character "from the start." She was supposed to come off like Akiko as a clearly villainous character. For some people, that was the reading from the start. Others, for whatever reasons, didn't quite see it that way. Personally, I think the big issue was in a few sentences where Rionna sort of fudged talking about who she has killed. A lot of people were totally okay with her killing grief controllers (i.e., witch makers) and other evil people, but im 95% certain the message we were supposed to get was "I kill bad people and I also randomly kill innocent people including non-meguca sometimes."

2. Im less sure, but still about 80% that the escalation and whatnot has been Firn looking at what's happening in thread and kind of going "what the heck did I do wrong? What's going on here? This character is an evil bitch, what's happening?"

3. This was all kind of covered earlier in another big post I made, which firn confirmed.

4. Firn has been veeeery busy irl during this arc, and the general line is that he feels he fucked something up because of it. He intended to write Rionna as the kind of character that would result in the thread going "fuck what? She be doing evil" and then when that didn't happen he tried to correct for it without retconning anything. Every post he has made about this has added up to "Guys? I have her backstory right here, I wrote it... She's, uh, she's done things that you can't characterize as anything but evil. I'm sorry if I didn't convey that correctly, plz stop fighting over it?"
 
How else will we find out information about our weird Soul? Who else has a chance to analyze the feather and find if it's actually weird or just a normal feather (though I'm wary of actually letting Riona see the feather)? Who else can give an useful opinion about Oriko's Soul? What about Clear Seeds?

When she's our prisoner, and it's clear she's not getting out whether she answers them or not, *then* we can ask her those questions, perhaps in exchange for a softer pillow or something or whatever other concession doesn't let her go free.

Milking her for those questions first (perhaps pretending that we'll let her go if she answers them) and *then* imprisoning her anyway -- that's what doesn't sit right with me.

I was among the people who thought these questions to be important enough to negotiate in *good faith* with her. I don't consider them important enough however to negotiate in *bad faith* with her.
 
Because it's irrelevant: Homura touching a Shade in a timestop later is no less likely than Homura touching a Shade in a timestop now. In fact, it's more likely: Riona would gather them closer around her for protection.

Also, Shades are souls right? And we knew what happens when a timestopped soul in non-physically linked to something else*: nothing.

* Sabrina held Kirika's soul gem in timestop (but not her body); Kirika was physically fine afterwards, no body-soul disconnect appear to have happened

I'm hopeful we'll figure out a way to actually detect the shades, hence avoiding the problem altogether. We'll also have the benefit of superior positioning in a prepared ambush; right now, Sabrina is right next to Rionna and Mami is a few metres away; Homura bringing either of them into timestop requires her getting very close to Rionna, and a shade touching one of Mami's connecting ribbons would work as well. This whole situation is just asking for some weird interaction between timestop and Rionna's powers, to be honest.

I would also call the assumption that touching a shade won't bring Rionna into timetop rather optimistic. Sure, they're souls, but they're also expressions of Rionna's magic, much like Mami's ribbons. It's all hypotheticals until we try, but I'm not willing to bet our best shot at an alpha strike on this.

Riona has seen Sabrina's soul, seeing she doesn't have the intention to attack her.

That's just a hypothesis. And even if it were true, wouldn't it mean that, if we vote to alpha strike right now, Rionna will see it in Sabrina's soul, and therefore be prepared? If anything, it's an argument against attacking immediately.

It's my side of paranoia, then.

I mean, I'm thinking we'd be walking away until we were ~175 metres away from Riona (still well within sensing range), Homura timestops (instant action), and gets us.

I doubt Riona brought that many shades, so I think almost two blocks worth of distance should be safe enough?

Bonus paranoia: Tell Homura to circle around and approach us in a direction that would put Riona directly and futher beyond our position:

I was so bored I made this :V :


Click for original size

Thing is, it may well be that the normal sensing range does not apply to Rionna. She was able to contact Sabrina at a considerable distance, for one. Furthermore, we know she doesn't have a maximum range for her shades, given that some of them are keeping Edinburgh safe. And it seems likely that one of the shades she'd bring on this punitive expedition would be a long-range sensor type.

My operational security procedure is just an attempt at outrunning any shades she might order to stick with us, in order to keep timestop secret.
 
Poor Firn.



1. Firn has expressed regret that he wasn't "clear enough" about Rionna's character "from the start." She was supposed to come off like Akiko as a clearly villainous character. For some people, that was the reading from the start. Others, for whatever reasons, didn't quite see it that way. Personally, I think the big issue was in a few sentences where Rionna sort of fudged talking about who she has killed. A lot of people were totally okay with her killing grief controllers (i.e., witch makers) and other evil people, but im 95% certain the message we were supposed to get was "I kill bad people and I also randomly kill innocent people including non-meguca sometimes."

2. Im less sure, but still about 80% that the escalation and whatnot has been Firn looking at what's happening in thread and kind of going "what the heck did I do wrong? What's going on here? This character is an evil bitch, what's happening?"

3. This was all kind of covered earlier in another big post I made, which firn confirmed.

4. Firn has been veeeery busy irl during this arc, and the general line is that he feels he fucked something up because of it. He intended to write Rionna as the kind of character that would result in the thread going "fuck what? She be doing evil" and then when that didn't happen he tried to correct for it without retconning anything. Every post he has made about this has added up to "Guys? I have her backstory right here, I wrote it... She's, uh, she's done things that you can't characterize as anything but evil. I'm sorry if I didn't convey that correctly, plz stop fighting over it?"
I'll be honest, I know Firn is very invested in this and has been super busy. If it was anyone else who told us that "she's morally grey" is a statement inside which there are lines to be read and that we're somehow supposed to take this WoG and get "she's actually morally black" out of it, I'd call them a liar and a cheater and drop the quest in disgust, because then I could not trust their words anymore.

I know Firn is super busy and recognizes he mishandled this at least in part, so OK. I feel kind of cheated, but we can move past this.

Fortunately the new spoiler doesn't change my course of action at this time, so it's an easier pill to swallow.



Pfft. Spoopy ghost. I dunno why i like this pic. :V
And I was just making this superior, updated version:
 
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I've given up on redeeming Riona since after last update; at this point I just want this information we might not get another chance to get before it becomes crucial.

How else will we find out information about our weird Soul? Who else has a chance to analyze the feather and find if it's actually weird or just a normal feather (though I'm wary of actually letting Riona see the feather)? Who else can give an useful opinion about Oriko's Soul? What about Clear Seeds?

Some of this might be really crucial, specially if Riona can tell us anything about the Feather that might be a clue towards Feathers, and this might be the last chance we get to find out before we actually need to deal with Feathers...

Again, if Sabrina's friends decide to act now, I guess we'll go with that, but I think there's some really important information we need to get, and Riona's the only one we can get even hints of them from.
You are aware there's no way to convice Riona into working with us, right? You already given up on her, you just said so.

That's just a hypothesis. And even if it were true, wouldn't it mean that, if we vote to alpha strike right now, Rionna will see it in Sabrina's soul, and therefore be prepared? If anything, it's an argument against attacking immediately.
If you're calling hypotesis then so it is Homura touching Shades when approaching us. Please don't be hypocritical.

But to answer your question: Sabrina isn't attacking, she's asking for help.
 
When she's our prisoner, and it's clear she's not getting out whether she answers them or not, *then* we can ask her those questions, perhaps in exchange for a softer pillow or something or whatever other concession doesn't let her go free.

Milking her for those questions first (perhaps pretending that we'll let her go if she answers them) and *then* imprisoning her anyway -- that's what doesn't sit right with me.

I was among the people who thought these questions to be important enough to negotiate in *good faith* with her. I don't consider them important enough however to negotiate in *bad faith* with her.
I'm with Aris on this one, Onmur. I don't think we can get any real usable intel from Rionna even if we do postpone to a later meeting. :/
Personally, I don't see much difference between:

- Timestop now (shades should be clustered around Riona, so I see more danger in this). Get Anti Magic enchants and gank Riona.

- Leave now, get distance (Riona has time to do things). Get Anti Magic Enchants and gank Riona.

On the side we end up ganking Riona now, not tomorrow, I really see very little difference. I'd be more wary of our chances of successfully connect to timestop while we're in such close proximity to Riona, than of the chance Riona will manage to counter our timestop without knowing about its existence in the 2 minutes it'd take us to walk away and ask Homu for timestop.

And sure, I'm not certain how much info we can get from Riona, even if we allow time to cool down. (Hell, could we meet up again in half an hour, rather than tomorrow?) But I believe we need to at least try.

We're out to fix the system. It's a magnificiently grand undertaking that'll require us to be really... gud, to put it that way.

Cutting our loses right now would be safer, but not the sort of action I see someone with such a grand goal doing. How are we gonna fix the everything if getting some info out of a socially unadapted girl is beyond us?

This is somewhat my feelings on the quest as a whole, as derived from what our goals are.


EDIT: I forgot, on getting answers from Riona after imprison her, I feel that's likely to simply take too long. I don't expect to get anything out of Riona for a long, long time after that.
 
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If you're calling hypotesis then so it is Homura touching Shades when approaching us. Please don't be hypocritical.

... Yes, I agree. Which is why I specifically pointed it out in the paragraph right above the one you quoted. The whole point is that the risk of shades interacting with Homura's power is too high.

On that note, I think this discussion has run its course. I remain convinced that the alpha strike is too risky. What remains is to vote appropriately.

[X] Onmur
 
...This kind of confuses me. The impression Nadia gave us was that she was, at worst, an antisocial antihero, if not a belligerent drunk, and what we got was just a couple steps short of a cackling supervillain. Despite that, about half the thread was willing to compromise if we could find literally any common ground at all, and she could in any sense stop being completely awful, and that's the one thing she's been singularly unwilling to do. She's been escalating since then, with both her and you practically screaming at us "RIONNA IS A TERRIBLE HUMAN BEING", and there's still a good quarter-to-third that would still like to find any good within her at all as a basis to do anything other than kill or gem her. It's Rionna who doesn't want to lend her power to Sabrina, or to be redeemed at all, and once cooperating was put firmly off the table, there was nothing left for the thread to do but fight over her morality.

I think that changed since the last update, what with Firn going "Rionna is canonically super duper evil, stop trying to excuse her please?".
I know that I was personally forced to abandon peaceful measures recently because of all that.
 
If we're going to finally put her down, then I can say this much- we should give her the minimum time outside our privacy field. Personally, I think we'd be better served with a general plan of "call for all the timestop backup, get the party started while we do because Riona's likely to detect Mami using telepathy". Actually leaving her alone in her hotel room sounds like a good way to get ganked by her soul army. As it is, if we attack now she gets, hopefully, seconds to call on them. She gets several minutes if we pretend to leave first.
 
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Timestop now (shades should be clustered around Riona, so I see more danger in this). Get Anti Magic enchants and gank Riona.

- Leave now, get distance (Riona has time to do things). Get Anti Magic Enchants and gank Riona.
The difference is in the orders that Rionna's shades have. Right now her shades are clustered around her, yes, but why is that dangerous? It lets her give them orders more easily? If we give her time to give them orders then it doesn't matter how easy it is. We can't touch them? We already have to blast our way in on a carpet of antimagic so we don't touch any.

The biggest advantage we can possibly have is Rionna's shades not being in combat mode. That's what we have right now. She is at her weakest right now and any time we give her makes her more and more dangerous as she gives orders to more and more shades to bring them into play against us.

The point about Rionna attaching a shade to us was intended to illustrate that. We can work without being able to see her shades, especially because it sounds like they become visible when she gives them orders - see the demonstration she attempted earlier. Rionna cannot work without time to give orders, and the more orders she gives the worse of a time we have. Like, what kind of intelligence do we envision gaining by watching her? "Oh, she has a teleporter, which I have deduced by... Watching her teleport to her hotel which we don't know the location of and which she can now spend two hours fortifying the hell out of. Fuck."

Much more effective, I think, will be to strategically deny her the ability to give orders. I'll start writing up a vote to that effect. It'll take me a bit because I'm at work.
 
I think that changed since the last update, what with Firn going "Rionna is canonically super duper evil, stop trying to excuse her please?".
I know that I was personally forced to abandon peaceful measures recently because of all that.

More to the point for me was that he told us afterwards that, knowing she's canonically super-duper evil, letting her go was not an option (not in Sabrina's character).

I think Firn assumed initially that by declaring her actions inexcusable, the option of "letting her go" would be immediately considered off the table, but that's not how many of us (including me) think.

On my part I was previously willing to let (temporarily) even a super-duper evil and inexcusable character go, for a variety of practical reasons I've mentioned already across a number of posts (not wanting to violate the trust of negotiations, not wanting to lose the opportunity of her sharing her knowledge and expertise with us, not wanting to overreach our capabilities by passing judgment on crimes committed in other continents, etc).

But if it's not in Sabrina's character, we of course have to try to adjust to a course of action better aligned with what is actually in character for her, even if it's not the course of action *we* would have chosen in Sabrina's place.
 
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The difference is in the orders that Rionna's shades have. Right now her shades are clustered around her, yes, but why is that dangerous? It lets her give them orders more easily? If we give her time to give them orders then it doesn't matter how easy it is. We can't touch them? We already have to blast our way in on a carpet of antimagic so we don't touch any.

The biggest advantage we can possibly have is Rionna's shades not being in combat mode. That's what we have right now. She is at her weakest right now and any time we give her makes her more and more dangerous as she gives orders to more and more shades to bring them into play against us.

The point about Rionna attaching a shade to us was intended to illustrate that. We can work without being able to see her shades, especially because it sounds like they become visible when she gives them orders - see the demonstration she attempted earlier. Rionna cannot work without time to give orders, and the more orders she gives the worse of a time we have. Like, what kind of intelligence do we envision gaining by watching her? "Oh, she has a teleporter, which I have deduced by... Watching her teleport to her hotel which we don't know the location of and which she can now spend two hours fortifying the hell out of. Fuck."

Much more effective, I think, will be to strategically deny her the ability to give orders. I'll start writing up a vote to that effect. It'll take me a bit because I'm at work.
While I can see the advantadges of a "don't give Riona any time" approach, I still feel obligated to leave the option open to try and get the crucial information we could still theorically get from her. Due to the scope of our goals and the fact I can't see any other way to get such information (our soul; the feather) before they become crucially relevant.

I could see... ugh, trying to pacify Riona without dropping the Field, and asking now, then timestop-get-antimagicenchants-gankriona immediately afterwards, but I just don't think it can work, don't think Riona will talk rather than punch right now.

Settling for subduing Riona without finding anything more about out soul, the feather, Oriko's soul, Edinburg... is something I'd go for only if Mami, Homura and Sayaka push for it.
 
While I can see the advantadges of a "don't give Riona any time" approach, I still feel obligated to leave the option open to try and get the crucial information we could still theorically get from her. Due to the scope of our goals and the fact I can't see any other way to get such information (our soul; the feather) before they become crucially relevant.

I could see... ugh, trying to pacify Riona without dropping the Field, and asking now, then timestop-get-antimagicenchants-gankriona immediately afterwards, but I just don't think it can work, don't think Riona will talk rather than punch right now.

Settling for subduing Riona without finding anything more about out soul, the feather, Oriko's soul, Edinburg... is something I'd go for only if Mami, Homura and Sayaka push for it.
Asking her any more questions now probably won't work- she's made it very clear she does not want to talk anymore, and will probably escalate to force before we do if we delay. If we must ask her stuff, we can do it when she's in prison. I wouldn't personally expect her to give those answers, but frankly unless we had a mind reader I wouldn't expect anything to be able to get those answers at this point.
 
Between raising her sister, and punching her killer, she choose the latter over the former.

The implied moral judgement of this statement assumes Rionna didn't have concerns about whether or not rezzing her sister would go horribly wrong (e.g. Deathly Hallows, Monkey's Paw), and assumes her wish wasn't something like ranting "I want to be able to bring this fucker back from the dead and murder them again-" followed by Kyubey interjecting "I can do that for you", followed by an enraged "yeah? fucking do it then!" followed by realizing she fucked up and then turning that anger further on aforementioned sister's killer, newly rezzed. Or wasn't in some other way misled by Kyubey as to the viability of rezzing her sister properly.

Unless we're given more information, I'm not willing to decide that Riona made the binary choice between rezzing her sister and punching her killer, with full awareness of her choice between the two.

Does the result change anything? Riona acted with malice to torture the killer's soul

Firstly, I have a personal issue with attributing actions to people that they didn't do. Yes, we can condemn her for acting with malice to torture the killer's soul. That does not, for me, have any bearing on the fact that I do not want to condemn her for torturing her shades for all eternity, willfully, if that is not in fact what she is doing. If she is, condemn her for that, and if she's not, condemn her for keeping them from moving on to their natural afterlife and running them around like servitors. But I personally am not comfortable with using as a point of decisive argument that her Shades are suffering, if in fact that is not something we know decisively. (This is the specific reason I felt the need to ask, whether or not it has bearing on other people's considerations or not. I am aware that it's not information that looks like it will be changing the present course's momentum at this point; it's something I'd like to know for my personal assessment of the situation, rather than pursuant to any particular argument.)

Secondly, I would say even aside from that, it does change things a bit. If Rionna thinks the Shades are suffering, then she just lied to our face about it, and is definitively okay with suffering-as-punishment-for-false-griefguca in general, and okay with keeping non-meguca and, as she's said, potentially innocent people in a suffering state, and deciding not to care. That's a different person than if she doesn't think her Shades are suffering (or can't afford to think about it that way), who didn't just lie to our face, and thinks she's going around murderlyzing murderers and keeping them in a relatively humane prison, with some unfortunate margin of error of potential innocents that she's decided are acceptable collateral damage. Neither are good, but I would handle the two quite differently, irrespective of Rionna's personal vengeance vendetta of eternitorture against her sister's killer

Again, these are my personal reasons for asking; I'm not attempting to argue a particular change in our course at this point.
 
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Secondly, I would say even aside from that, it does change things a bit. If Rionna thinks the Shades are suffering, then she just lied to our face about it, and is definitively okay with suffering-as-punishment-for-false-griefguca in general, and okay with keeping non-meguca and, as she's said, potentially innocent people in a suffering state, and deciding not to care. That's a different person than if she doesn't think her Shades are suffering (or can't afford to think about it that way), who didn't just lie to our face, and thinks she's going around murderlyzing murderers and keeping them in a relatively humane prison, with some unfortunate margin of error of potential innocents that she's decided are acceptable collateral damage. Neither are good, but I would handle the two quite differently, irrespective of Rionna's personal vengeance vendetta of eternitorture against her sister's killer

I'm pretty sure Rionna wants her shades to be suffering but isn't sure if they actually are or aren't.
 
I'm pretty sure Rionna wants her shades to be suffering but isn't sure if they actually are or aren't.

I don't necessarily conclude the same, but yes, that's also a third track from which to work with regard to dealing with Riona. Although it would make the assessment of whether or not she lied to our face ("yes", "no", or "iunno") less useful for diagnostic purposes, unfortunately.

Either way, unless Firn weighs in, I don't expect we'll manage to get a solid answer out of Rionna about the matter given the present situation, at least, not until or unless we are in a position that Sayaka is able and willing to copy Riona's powers.

Which we still need to warn Sayaka that it will reveal to her that thing we were going to explain, instead of just telling her to do the thing, if we go that direction, by the by. D'ruther not accidentally Witchbomb her, and render all that preparing moot.
 
If we are going to fight Rionna, can we please make the decision after asking Nadia if it's going to start a war or not? Rionna might have people that won't like us doing whatever we plan on doing to Rionna. I mean she's a powerful Magical girl that might have stopped other powerful magical girls from abusing their power.
 
If we are going to fight Rionna, can we please make the decision after asking Nadia if it's going to start a war or not? Rionna might have people that won't like us doing whatever we plan on doing to Rionna. I mean she's a powerful Magical girl that might have stopped other powerful magical girls from abusing their power.
Considering how reclusive Riona is, I doubt it...

And really, anyone who takes offense at us stopping Riona, is most likely someone we'd want to come at us, so they save us the trouble of having to find them. :/
 
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