Magical Girl Home Base Quest

The plush spider girl's name has switched between spellings all throughout the quest, so I'm not sure it really matters.
If the spelling's off,the vote tally is gonna split the votes for the Kolobok.

Also, I don't know what to vote for. We have that healing item to research but I'm not sure on what else we should be doing.
We also have 10 minor artifacts we can research that we got from Mistletoe a while back.
 
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That funeral scene was nice.
The problem with wands was the problem of waste. You worked much material, but about half of any prepared items was inevitably wasted in the process of crafting- either as cruft, or for being too diminutive to salvage for later. With this wand-maker's bench, though, you could cut much of the opportunity cost away from making wands and other magical weapons as the lost materials were captured by the arrays and held steady for you to re-work later. With a new rod and a liberal application of furnace time and bonding agents, you could, theoretically, use that waste material to make a second, lesser wand. Probably.
This is good, our workshops capability to make wands have improved.
Soon enough, you had a pair of test samples put together, and had along the way cooked up a fabric infuser and embroidery stand. It wasn't the neatest of works, but it would get the job done. You'd probably use it more when you got confident in constructing costumes, but for now it would work to help you get test samples done. Actual testing would be a bitch, but, well, them's the breaks.
So we need to start making costumes.
Once that was all done, a far more important job was on your roster- building urns. One corpse was one too many to store, and you had Work to Do in order to build something suitable. Grabbing your stocks of flat iron and a hammer, you heated the furnace and got to work. Most people would use a ceramic container, but they deserved something finer.
That they do.
When the girls returned, it was with a somber mood and piles of bloodstained loot. In the van were two bodies, already shrouded, and Eowyn clutching her hands around a bloody knife.
Dammit, two more lost.
"Do you mind if I decline to attend?" Jocelyn asked, deathly serious. It took a moment, before you nodded. The younger girls wouldn't understand, but the valiant few who had started with you would. She had been The Enemy, once, even if her blood washed that sin away to your eyes.

"Stay in my room." You replied. "They won't come in, and if they do I'll throw them out."

"For me?"

"For the fact I won't bend over backwards for them." You said, the rod of iron long in your hands as you stepped to the main hall of the building. "We're two halves of the same coin, and they have to respect that."

"Thank you."
That was heartwarming exchange.
Carrying all three jars up to the hostel, you bypassed the ground floor entirely, trecking up the stairs to the second floor and the most recently rehabilitated room. You could fork over the cash to get a new coat of paint applied, and probably would at some point, but for now you needed shelves and emblems. Going back to your workshop, you pulled out a piece of reasonably fine lumber, before planning it down to a neat finish and grabbing your soldering iron. Neat fonts or fancy engraving was past your skill, but it didn't matter. All you needed were three names.

Jasmine Bason

Melissa Gors

Bethany Lewis

They weren't the names you'd ever heard given, but they were still the names of the girls who's mortal remains sat not too far above you. A handful of nails and a hammer would serve to affix them to the shelf, and it didn't take too long to find parts for that shelf in your piles of assorted junk. Once that was done, you dragged it all back up the stairs, and started nailing in the braces for the shelf. Other people could see that it was level later- not that you had to check. This was too important to screw up. The shelf itself didn't really need fastening to the braces, but you took the time to place a few nails anyway, and then came the plaques.
MedB is really going far for them.
"Are you feeling alright?"

"Fine, yes." You muttered, standing up and reaching for your rod. It wasn't where you left it, though, and as your back pinged with pain, you had exactly enough time to watch your life flash before your eyes and you fell to the side, cursing.
No, you're not fine.
You nodded, eyes wet. As she shut the door and left, your eyes started tricking you again with visions of that almost-familiar girl, before a skittering drew your attention. If it was Jocelyn, you'd talk to her later; if it was a rat, then the alley cat would take care of it.
Or the local meguca cat.
And at that, you left the table, stumbling down to your workshop. A one-use protective item? You could do that in your fucking sleep most weeks.
But now you're exhausted, both physically and mentally.
[X] [WORK] No, you want to research an item instead.
-[X] Kolobuk
[X] [WORK] No, you want to research an item instead.
-[X] Kolobuk
Kolobok, not kolobuk.

[X] [WORK] No, you want to research an item instead.
-[X] Kolobok
 
It has not become any more of a better idea to research the Kolobok since the last turn. It wasn't a smart then, it's not a smart move now. Frankly, the kids don't seem to hardy enough to take hits and live anyway. We should start making costumes. If they keep them from dying stright away, then healing becomes a more worthwhile investment.

[X] [WORK] Costume
-[X] Level 1.
 
[X] [WORK] Costume
-[X] Level 1.

Normally I would say this is a waste of our time but it's a cheap item for the new girls who barely have a budget as well a necessary action we'll eventually have to do if we want Costume 2+.
 
I'm not really able to predict which actions are likely to have good or bad in-game effects.
Building a level 1 costume seems worse than building a level 3 trinket, but we don't really understand how any of those things work.

In terms of narrative, we've just built a workship that can build wands more efficiently, so I think we should use it to build wands.

[X] [WORK] Wand
-[X] Level 2.
 
Jasmine Bason

Melissa Gors

Bethany Lewis
They dine in Valhalla tonight.
The plush spider girl's name has switched between spellings all throughout the quest, so I'm not sure it really matters.
It might! In Panopticon Quest, when I asked MJ "Is our red-headed Not!Asuka Pilot girl named Henriette or Henrietta?", Henriette suddenly developed an evil-sister/copy named Henrietta, and she became a major two-arc antagonist. :V

[X] [WORK] No, you want to research an item instead.
-[X] Kolobok

We're going to have more casualties incoming soon, and we need the healing item and knowledge this will give us. We're the only 'hospital' these girls will have.
 
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Is there a reason we cannot build ourselves magical fingers for our hand?
Firstly because we are not that great an artificer yet probably.

Secondly because Medicine Boy didn't just incidentally happen to lose his fingers. There's an implicit principle of exchange, and the loss of his fingers seems to be tied up in the nature of his magic. Something similar is going on in terms of the loss of the magical girls' stable home life- haven't you wondered how they all seem to end up on the street within mere weeks of their powers activating? That's not normal; not everyone is a shitty parent or unaccepting.

But it turns out that magic in this setting comes with sacrifice requirements- gendered ones. Girls sacrifice their future- their life as they were going to live it, the normal comforts and trajectory of their existence. Boys sacrifice "their ability to act without thinking." For Medicine Boy and Homer that meant losing a part of their body in a way that weakens them and slows them down and forces them to act judiciously rather than having the typical physical recklessness of boys their age.

And when you're talking about replacing a body part that was lost as part of a symbolic-ritual "exchange" for the source of your magical power... well, at a bare minimum that's gonna be tricky.
 
Firstly because we are not that great an artificer yet probably.

Secondly because Medicine Boy didn't just incidentally happen to lose his fingers. There's an implicit principle of exchange, and the loss of his fingers seems to be tied up in the nature of his magic. Something similar is going on in terms of the loss of the magical girls' stable home life- haven't you wondered how they all seem to end up on the street within mere weeks of their powers activating? That's not normal; not everyone is a shitty parent or unaccepting.

But it turns out that magic in this setting comes with sacrifice requirements- gendered ones. Girls sacrifice their future- their life as they were going to live it, the normal comforts and trajectory of their existence. Boys sacrifice "their ability to act without thinking." For Medicine Boy and Homer that meant losing a part of their body in a way that weakens them and slows them down and forces them to act judiciously rather than having the typical physical recklessness of boys their age.

And when you're talking about replacing a body part that was lost as part of a symbolic-ritual "exchange" for the source of your magical power... well, at a bare minimum that's gonna be tricky.
Ah. Okay, that makes sense.

As for winding up on the streets bit, I assumed selection bias, in that the ones that don't wind up on the streets don't come to us.
 
From what I gathered, the Workshop-upgrade allows Medicine Boy to create a second Wand one tier lower than the one he set out to build. Which means that every Wand-crafting action now yields five items; two Wands and three Bombs

But Wand is not looking good right now and I really do not want to see the research when Medicine Boy is in such a state. Plus, you know, there is still the chance of him knocking himself out for a few weeks.

[X] [WORK] Costume
-[X] Level 1.
 
But it turns out that magic in this setting comes with sacrifice requirements- gendered ones.

Technically speaking it's tied to the expression of magic, not the gender of the magus (which is being used as "one who has magic" and not as a description of type) which is important. It's just that girls normally work magic through themselves and their friends and partners, while guys build tools for the utilization of magic. Having a magical 'girl' is perfectly possible, if unlikely, and likewise having artifactrix instead of an artificer.
 
Technically speaking it's tied to the expression of magic, not the gender of the magus (which is being used as "one who has magic" and not as a description of type) which is important. It's just that girls normally work magic through themselves and their friends and partners, while guys build tools for the utilization of magic. Having a magical 'girl' is perfectly possible, if unlikely, and likewise having artifactrix instead of an artificer.
Come to think of it, don't the girls living in that garage (the one, uh, Rose I think, visited) have a girl who stitches magical costumes? I guess she'd be an artifactrix then?
 
Well, I'm not surprised that invoking that particular aspect of fire drained Medicine Boy to that degree.
Also, Jocelyn does care! Somewhat. Even if she's a former alchemist in a spider body, she has some humanity. It's nice.

Did we succeed in making the item to protect the caster from one of Homer's scrolls going off?
 
Come to think of it, don't the girls living in that garage (the one, uh, Rose I think, visited) have a girl who stitches magical costumes? I guess she'd be an artifactrix then?

Yep! She's not actually a magical girl, although she was slated to be one. The two approaches of magic aren't mutually exclusive in theory, but in practice there's no way to double dip: never enough time.


As for winding up on the streets bit, I assumed selection bias, in that the ones that don't wind up on the streets don't come to us.

All magical girls end up transient for a while; it's a thing that happens. A silent life is possible, but power is addicting- and with even shitty tools, a magical girl holds so much power...
 
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