Puella Magi Imperatrix Mundi, or: Wherein Half Of Japan Tries To Kill You

You know...maybe making the unfamiliars is an unconscious or passive effect, so spending a lot of time close to them 'pushed' some of Yui's soul out or maybe Kyoufu absorbed it. At least those are the first things that come to my mind. But's it's most likely related to the Fragments, either Kyoufu or Moufu, or even one of the other two. Speaking of...

The other thing I'd like to bring up is how Maiko knows there are two more Fragments and she's more worried about those than Fear and Anger. If the Fragments are born from the origin exorcising negative traits/emotions from herself, I mean even then depending on the perspective even traditionally good things can be treated as 'better forgotten' like Hope or Happiness, and Fragments capable of stealing people's hopes and ability to feel happy is pretty worrying, especially for Magical Girls. Otherwise, Lust could be another Fragment that could cause issues, as well as Pride, Envy, Gluttony, and the other 7 Sins which are traditional 'negative' traits to get rid of, but none of those feel like something Origin girl would have in high quantities/qualities. This is a girl with severe self-issues, trying to better herself, and others, by removing emotional traits. Not really the kind of thing a Prideful or Greedy thing to do. She was a girl who was Afraid and Angry, so removed her ability to feel both. Sadness is definitely one of the four, obvious when I actually think about it. Can't think of a good fourth though.

And know that I've laid out all my disjointed thoughts, one last thing comes to mind. Could the Fragments be affecting things on a larger scale with a second passive Aura that has less pronounced affects but much farther range? Probably not, but it's a fun scary idea.

Edit: One last fun idea, Kyoufu absorbed part of Yui's soul and if she absorbs enough Megueca Soul she can become a real girl! Which is kind of terrifying the more I think about it.

SolipsistSerpent said:

Hm... Minor dip in magic capacity, possibly related to that eye in the sky we're still not curious about?

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That's actually very plausible. I know this is magical girls and all, but I can't help but think there can't be that many separate unrelated unknown coincidences going on.

veekie said:

Its her Dignity.
Its going around being all prim and proper and ripping the Dignity out of people.

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But like, in a classy way. Pinky extended.

Redshirt Army said:

You fool, you just made one of the classic blunders.

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Classic blunder #1: Never start a land war in Asia.
Classic blunder #2: Never assume that someone hasn't managed to personify, anthropomorphize and waifu any given thing in the universe yet. Including the universe:

By the way, feel free to improvise or mix-and-match with a write-in rather than sticking to the basic provided options. There's really no right or wrong choice here, but it will obviously shape the impression all three of the new girls have of Yui and friends.

For the sake of planning, I'll also say that Hana is fairly average in potential but has a very solid all-rounder skillset and is probably the best suited for solo Witch-hunting out of... well, basically everyone there except Yui and Maiko. Sae is a bit above average, but her wish magic is gimmicky and situational and while she can hold her own in combat, she's not really suited to it. Reiko is solidly above-average in potential with good combat instincts and significant physical boosts, but is lacking in the offense department on account of her wish magic being abstract and bullshit in roughly equal measure, potentially powerful but difficult to weaponize.

Guile said:

Classic blunder #1: Never start a land war in Asia.

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Sadly, that's not going to stop people from invading Nagamioka.

Zedman7054 said:

The other thing I'd like to bring up is how Maiko knows there are two more Fragments and she's more worried about those than Fear and Anger. If the Fragments are born from the origin exorcising negative traits/emotions from herself, I mean even then depending on the perspective even traditionally good things can be treated as 'better forgotten' like Hope or Happiness, and Fragments capable of stealing people's hopes and ability to feel happy is pretty worrying, especially for Magical Girls. Otherwise, Lust could be another Fragment that could cause issues, as well as Pride, Envy, Gluttony, and the other 7 Sins which are traditional 'negative' traits to get rid of, but none of those feel like something Origin girl would have in high quantities/qualities. This is a girl with severe self-issues, trying to better herself, and others, by removing emotional traits. Not really the kind of thing a Prideful or Greedy thing to do. She was a girl who was Afraid and Angry, so removed her ability to feel both. Sadness is definitely one of the four, obvious when I actually think about it. Can't think of a good fourth though.

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The most informative thing Maiko got from her grimoire was the unknown meguca's hypothetical Witch card, which identified her four familiars by name. I posted the witch card content in a spoiler while still working on the update, if you didn't see that and want to read it.

While the subject won't come up for another update or two, since Maiko doesn't want to get into that situation while dealing with a flock of newbies, I will at least confirm that "sadness" fits one of them (the first one listed, even). While the language of Maiko's grimoire doesn't translate perfectly to any mundane language without losing some shades of meaning, the word used to name the first of the four heavily implies sadness and despair in the Witch-like sense, which Maiko assumes means an aura that causes Soul Gems to darken just by being nearby. Bad juju to be sure, but of a not-unexpected sort.

The fourth one listed, on the other hand, has a name that doesn't really translate well at all, and means something that carries shades of regret, mortality, and remembrance. In the Witch card I gave it as "Memoir", but "Epitaph" or "Memento" would also work. Maiko's not really sure what to make of that one other than "uh... *concern*"

Ok I had an idea while reading that made me feel super smart but you guys have gotten close enough to it that now my idea sounds like a natural extension of your ideas and I'm only fairly smart which is a bummer because I was pretty proud of the extent of my apparent genius before learning I was merely above average

Anyways, emoguca has the ability to strip emotions out of herself and create lesser beings, who retain some degree of memory and ability and go on to strip emotions out of other people, which are themselves likely lesser versions of their hosts.

This implies that the stronger, base ability that Muhou and Kyoufu have partially inherited also has the ability to strip aspects out of other people, else how can these dolls do what they do instead of merely further mutilating themselves?

If course it's possible and even likely that they have their own abilities based on the uniqueness of their existence and that's how they've been creating unfamiliars, but ignore that for now because its all conjecture and doesn't fit the larger, unified theory.

So anyways, Emoguca likely split parts of herself off intentionally, as part of an ability rather than unintentionally as the primary affect of her wish. Her magic is literally to tear apart souls.

But is that really the extent of it? Tear apart souls to what affect? I'm suggesting that she can do more. Specifically, that she can use the pieces of soul she separates from the rest.

We've been noticing an overhead observer with a 'SEP' effect. Sound familiar? Actually, the SEP field goes back further, to when bunnycat's senses were at odds with its technology and it was forced to follow us to find Kyoufu.

I think Emoguca got to Minami, took a part of her and gained a version of her powers, possibly before we were ever alerted to this incident in the first place.

When we began to interact with her dolls, Emoguca took notice of us and used Minami's powers to observe us and deflect attention from itself. During offscreen downtime, she approached us with an active SEP aura and took a small piece of our own soul, giving her... Powers? Knowledge? Strength? But of course Echo couldn't put that in the text, even if Yui is forced to ignore it IC we'd know everything OOC. So we just get these little hints. Like Yui seemingly forgetting something important before shrugging it off.

Emoguca didn't just stumble upon meguca immortality by getting rid of her despair; she is an expert (new?) Soul manipulator who consciously and deliberately excised parts of herself, and is now targeting others to fill the void and improve herself. Her soul is missing pieces, but now there's a little bit of Yui in her to make up the difference.

Check everybody's soul gems as soon as we can to see who's been hit.

Edit: actually Minami being hit fits the abilities displayed but aside from that we have no evidence. An alternative is from the spoiler Echo posted previously, which mentioned a doll named 'memoir'. This doesn't explain the overhead observer, but memoir's aura or abilities could explain the other stranger effects, to borrow a term from worm. Just based on the name.

Edit2: shit redshirt totally got to that idea before me. Curse my merely above average display of intellect!!!!!

redzonejoe said:

Ok I had an idea while reading that made me feel super smart but you guys have gotten close enough to it that now my idea sounds like a natural extension of your ideas and I'm only fairly smart which is a bummer because I was pretty proud of the extent of my apparent genius before learning I was merely above average

Anyways, emoguca has the ability to strip emotions out of herself and create lesser beings, who retain some degree of memory and ability and go on to strip emotions out of other people, which are themselves likely lesser versions of their hosts.

This implies that the stronger, base ability that Muhou and Kyoufu have partially inherited also has the ability to strip aspects out of other people, else how can these dolls do what they do instead of merely further mutilating themselves?

If course it's possible and even likely that they have their own abilities based on the uniqueness of their existence and that's how they've been creating unfamiliars, but ignore that for now because its all conjecture and doesn't fit the larger, unified theory.

So anyways, Emoguca likely split parts of herself off intentionally, as part of an ability rather than unintentionally as the primary affect of her wish. Her magic is literally to tear apart souls.

But is that really the extent of it? Tear apart souls to what affect? I'm suggesting that she can do more. Specifically, that she can use the pieces of soul she separates from the rest.

We've been noticing an overhead observer with a 'SEP' effect. Sound familiar? Actually, the SEP field goes back further, to when bunnycat's senses were at odds with its technology and it was forced to follow us to find Kyoufu.

I think Emoguca got to Minami, took a part of her and gained a version of her powers, possibly before we were ever alerted to this incident in the first place.

When we began to interact with her dolls, Emoguca took notice of us and used Minami's powers to observe us and deflect attention from itself. During offscreen downtime, she approached us with an active SEP aura and took a small piece of our own soul, giving her... Powers? Knowledge? Strength? But of course Echo couldn't put that in the text, even if Yui is forced to ignore it IC we'd know everything OOC. So we just get these little hints. Like Yui seemingly forgetting something important before shrugging it off.

Emoguca didn't just stumble upon meguca immortality by getting rid of her despair; she is an expert (new?) Soul manipulator who consciously and deliberately excised parts of herself, and is now targeting others to fill the void and improve herself. Her soul is missing pieces, but now there's a little bit of Yui in her to make up the difference.

Check everybody's soul gems as soon as we can to see who's been hit.

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Hm. We know one of the Unfamiliars is "Memoir", implying that her ability is to remove, well, memories. I feel like it's more likely she's responsible for this than the original magical girl doing so directly.

I was assuming that the Unknown Meguca got the ability to tear out soul bits into unfamiliars to help a friend. Seeing a friend in the wake of some trauma when you can't help would be a good impetus for a pact with Kyubey. Kyoufu and the rest are bits of that friend that also happened to have the power, as first generation results of the Unknown Meguca's wish.

Mostly, I'm thinking this because it adds an extra layer of tragedy to the whole affair, and that always seems like a safe bet when dealing with this bitch of a universe.

[X] Educational. Let Maiko take the lead, and help her coach the newbies through combat.
-[X] Relaxed. Focus more on getting to know these girls than on the Witch hunting.

Let Maiko do the teaching thing while you get with the friend making! Because your new friends living is important to being able to stay friends.

[] Ask Tomo in what capacity is she here? As a novice seeking more experience, or as a veteran helping to teach and protect the new girls? Because honestly an argument can be made for either.

It's been one hell of a magical week.


Vote fragment for consideration.

Echo said:

I bet there's a formal term for that kind of noun/adjective inverted parallel thingie, but fuck if I know what it is.

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If you want to TV Tropes it, this is a type of Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs.

greynoise said:

If you want to TV Tropes it, this is a type of Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs.

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Mmm, no, not quite? I mean, there's an overlap, but it's not the same core idea. That's a sort of play on words that goes from a sequential combination (things following each other in a list) to a conceptual combination (words modifying each other in a compound noun) that derives its humor from the syntactic sidestep involved.

Based on a bit of poking around on the web, the inverted parallel structure I was talking about would probably be considered a minimalist form of chiasmus or antimetabole condensed to the point that I'm not sure which it would qualify as.

[] Relaxed. Focus more on getting to know these girls than on the Witch hunting.
[] Hands-off. Let the newbies take the lead while you and Maiko hang back to bail them out.
[] Educational. Let Maiko take the lead, and help her coach the newbies through combat.
[] Go fast. Have Minami scout out as many Witches as she can find, then take the lead in combat so the newbies can get a sense for the sheer variety of Witches out there.
[] Go big. Let Maiko and Minami scout out one or two strong Witches, then take the lead in combat so the newbies can see what serious combat looks like.
[] (write-in?)

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Our choice of approach here needs to be optimized to accomplish several objectives:

1. Establish Yui+friends' competence (that is, the belief that they're badasses who know what they're doing and won't fuck up)
2. Establish Yui+friends' benevolence (that is, the belief that they're good people who won't betray or exploit those working for them)
3. Build positive relationships (Yui defaults to friendship as her loyalty-inducing emotion but can do the inspiring leader thing surprisingly well in a pinch)
4. Create willingness/desire to work with/for Yui+friends (because we still cannot afford rogue elements)
5. Impart enough information that the girls here don't get themselves killed before becoming skilled

Obviously there is some overlap here, but we need all of these things. If we absolutely have to we can go without one of them, but we really don't want to and missing two or more could be pretty catastrophic for our overall strategic goals.

So the question is, what approach is likely to accomplish which objectives, and which objectives are likely to be incidentally accomplished anyway such that we don't actually need to emphasize them? I present a chart for consideration (note: charts are great).


These are of course wild guesses as to which approach will accomplish which things but hopefully it's a decent starting point for this discussion.

Hands-off could change a lot depending upon how much advice Yui and Maiko shout from the back lines and whether they actually need to intervene to save someone, and if they do, then how dramatically they have to do so. Yui is pretty good at spinning herself into benevolence+relationship building no matter what she does; the only one that I don't think she could reasonably manage to plant friendship seeds here with is Go Fast because in that scenario it's gogogo toward the next witch all evening with minimal chance to talk, which is the foundation of relationship-building. And I have no idea what will make the best recruitment pitch as a lot of that depends upon the personality of the target girls.

veekie said:

Healing isn't cheap, especially if you're not good at it and wasting energy. Doubly so if you're trying and failing to ignore fatigue.

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There's "healing isn't cheap" and then there's "Yui literally ate so much corruption over the course of this evening that many girls would be dead". If learning to self-heal even a few bruises took an entire grief seed of capacity it wouldn't be considered a useful skill; no one would learn it at all because it would be a lethally stupid idea to waste magic that way.

Either Yui is stunningly awful at healing for whatever reason, has naturally terrible efficiency with her normal magical girl powers (which I don't think is the case as it would make her larger capacity mostly pointless), or she was eating a lot of grief from another cause in addition to her maximum capacity loss.

[X] Educational. Let Maiko take the lead, and help her coach the newbies through combat.

Echo said:

...and you're becoming increasingly certain that Maiko is strangely opposed to being a leader of any sort.

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If you're not in charge, then whatever happens isn't your fault, right Maiko? I feel that.

I'd comment on the subject of Probably-Memoir (Denki?), but if I did that I don't think I'd ever stop screaming.

Ok look you're amazing and I love every post you make but I couldn't finish reading this one without replying with the 'witty' response that invaded my head.

(I'm sorry)

DarkLight140 said:

1. Establish Yui+friends' competence
2. Establish Yui+friends' benevolence
3. Build positive relationships

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Maiko is omniscient
Yui is Omnipotent
As a team, they're benevolent.


And best of all, they want to build a personal relationship with you. Praise Madokami!

DarkLight140 said:

There's "healing isn't cheap" and then there's "Yui literally ate so much corruption over the course of this evening that many girls would be dead". If learning to self-heal even a few bruises took an entire grief seed of capacity it wouldn't be considered a useful skill; no one would learn it at all because it would be a lethally stupid idea to waste magic that way.

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The other corruption value @Camellia quoted was from a much earlier point in the quest. The previous total given was 3110 just before Yui went to bed on Monday.

Magical girls typically burn a hundred-ish points of corruption per day just existing (at least in theory, I'm kinda sloppy about actually tracking that...), and the 24-hour period in question included Yui recharging the stasis field keeping Naoko's body preserved which I've said before costs about as much magic as Naoko herself would passively use in the same amount of time, i.e., three days.

So while I admit I, uh, basically just fudged the numbers to look about right, Yui basically spent only a couple hundred points of corruption trying to learn how to heal herself. That's about how much Maiko burns in 40-ish minutes of nonstop Grimoire use, and a fifth of what Yui's full power beam attack costs. For comparison, a typical grief seed has a capacity around 1500-ish, while older and stronger Witches can be twice that much.

Echo said:

So while I admit I, uh, basically just fudged the numbers to look about right, Yui basically spent only a couple hundred points of corruption trying to learn how to heal herself. That's about how much Maiko burns in 40-ish minutes of nonstop Grimoire use, and a fifth of what Yui's full power beam attack costs. For comparison, a typical grief seed has a capacity around 1500-ish, while older and stronger Witches can be twice that much.

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How that compare to average magical girl using it apart from Healer magical girl gain more with less corruption?

Jrin said:

How that compare to average magical girl using it apart from Healer magical girl gain more with less corruption?

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Almost all of that corruption was spent on the attempts to learn, not the healing itself. Once she got the hang of it it was super cheap, just a few points. Bruises and scrapes are very easy to heal once you know how, and the cost is about the same for everyone who didn't get healing magic directly.

As far as the cost to learn it, trying to force it as quickly as possible didn't help matters, but overall Yui probably picked it up faster than Maiko would have when she was a freshly-contracted 13-year-old due to the advantage her magic sight offered.

Most novice meguca just rely on trying to not get hit, hiding injuries if they do, and waiting out the innate healing. Veterans tend to pick up healing intuitively over time without conscious effort to learn.

[X] Educational. Let Maiko take the lead, and help her coach the newbies through combat.

Redshirt Army said:

You fool, you just made one of the classic blunders.

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Thinking there was no porn of something on the internet?

elftron said:

Thinking there was no porn of something on the internet?

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That's such a fun movie. It makes me sad there are only like two characters in this story who've seen it, since I couldn't find much to suggest it was particularly successful in Japan.

[X] Educational. Let Maiko take the lead, and help her coach the newbies through combat.

I feel like it should be efficient to create a bit of a work division. If Maiko takes one or two of the newbies at a time and teaches them personalised lessons as they fight familiars (and maybe weak witches?), Yui and everyone else can act as backup/crowd control while socialising, talking about their abilities and fighting styles and reviewing how to use them more effectively, and getting to know each other.

(Basically, Maiko teaches by doing, while Yui teaches by brainstorming/explanation/story-time).

We should also mention and do some work on analyzing the logic the witch barriers follow so the newbies and also Yui can learn to do that without Maiko always being there to explain all of it.

(With some common sense rules like "don't cater to a witches obsession unless your really sure of your analysis/strength" and "assume the witch has a trick that will kill you hidden somewhere, and if you can't see it, expect it to appear at the worst possible time").

This also allows us to take what seems like a relaxed pace, but still involves knocking out witch after familiar after witch, because only a portion of the group is fighting at any given moment.

Then if (when) anything suddenly dangerous or even somewhat scary comes up, Yui can just rocket forward and punch it to death, securing her status as a badass who'll protect her friends. Win-win-win.

We should also consider appointing Touma as at least someone who has experience and can be relied on by the newbies, hopefully give our super sentai the recognition she deserves for her skills and heroic disposition. Maybe have her show one or two of the others some tricks to fighting physically.

Echo said:

Also, Yui continues to recommend Shinozaki-san Ki wo Ota Shika ni!, a comedy manga that deals with important topics such as honesty in friendships, accepting yourself and others for who they are, and cute girls who just need to kiss already darn it. AFAIK there's no official translation but scanlations aren't hard to find if you look.

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At least they actually kiss in that one.

[X] Relaxed. Focus more on getting to know these girls than on the Witch hunting.

I'll put this vote in for now, but I like @CovertCloud 's suggestion of divvying up the work and stepping in when necessary to demonstrate our strength.

veekie said:

Probably because potential relates to their impact on the world and rich heiresses tend to hit pretty high there?

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I actually was thinking that Kyuubey is purposefully contracting people useful to Yui to help her along, while maybe using that above reason about potential as a smokescreen of sorts.