Magical Girl Escalation Taylor (Worm/Nanoha)

i'm not joking, i seriously think people are going to walk away from this quest line with hurt feelings, i personally would rather socialize the TSAB, but, like i said, some people have to learn the hard way.
 
Personally, the STAB* team's "Introduction" to the story is just one of several reasons why I personally want as little to do with the organization as we can get away with, and I will be heavily opposed to actually joining them if the vote ever comes up. Among other reasons are; 1) Taylor's canonical distrust of authority coupled with this quest's own stance on distrust of large officially sanctioned organizations such as the Protectorate is equally applicable to the STAB, so joining them would be highly out of character, 2) I am highly critical of the STAB's "Prime Directive" in it's implementation and think it goes too far in some instances, and is too selectively ignored in others, and 3) I feel that Taylor can make more of a difference and do more overall good by staying in and around Earth-Bet and its contemporary parallel instances.

*Misspelling deliberate in context.

A) Technically, there are stories within the Nanoha universe that DO list them as STAB. It's already being translated, after all, and space-time is a more popular term than time-space. It's largely kept to TSAB precisely because of what "STAB" spells out.*

1) Taylor joining or not is unlikely to come up unless SW decides to do a sequel quest, as I don't see her leaving Bet without getting rid of the Endbringers. Her canon overdeveloped need to see the mission done regardless of the consequences to herself would be enough to keep her around until then, at the least. The biggest reason I would consider voting to go with the Sojourner when they leave is that, by then, we'll have eliminated most local issues of a sufficient scale to warrant our continued involvement, heroically speaking, and the way things are laid out now, most of Arcana might come with us. It would be civilian entanglements that would keep her on or returning to Bet.

2) The TSAB is vastly less hypocritical in their version of the prime directive. For them, contact with individuals is fine, regardless of the worlds involved, once contact has been established, so long as it doesn't violate major rules in that first contact(No, "People of Earth! I come bearing Gifts of Befriending! Rejoice, and scream, because Befriending is Painful!"). These rules are fairly laid back so long as people are acting outside of any military roles. Their other policy is not involving themselves in the development of societies that don't meet their minimum standards, though what those standards are isn't all that well established in canon, at least insofar as I recall.

3) That could certainly be interesting to read.

*The shift from letters to numbers is because I wanted to address things in the order you brought them up, but you started labelling things after the first thing I wanted to respond to, so.....

Joke's on you then, since I think it's hilarious. My own sense of spite over this vote would be satiated by seeing the DLG quest die in a ditch without ever being taken, but my sense of schadenfreude appreciates someone else's.

Ah, the Germans. They give us so many wonderful words and concepts.

i'm not joking, i seriously think people are going to walk away from this quest line with hurt feelings, i personally would rather socialize the TSAB, but, like i said, some people have to learn the hard way.

Perhaps you are right. I still have to open that door and see what's there.
 
[X] Daddy's Little Girl

I'd give pretty much anything to get a chance to talk to my dad again. If there's any chance at all of that happening for Taylor, I think she should go for it.
 
The biggest reason I would consider voting to go with the Sojourner when they leave is that, by then, we'll have eliminated most local issues of a sufficient scale to warrant our continued involvement, heroically speaking, and the way things are laid out now, most of Arcana might come with us.
See, I have to dissagree with you on this. I acknowledge that such a choice would probably be the remit of a sequel, but there will still be Plenty of work to do on Earth Bet once the Endbringers are all dead, least of which will be rebuilding all the places they wrecked before that happens. The real thing would be the repercussions of Taylor introducing Magic to Earth Bet, which she would definitely feel responsible for. That alone would probably take several lifetimes at least to sort out (and with IAE pulling shenanigans it's definitely likely Taylor could live to see all of them), but also remember that Parahumans are going to keep popping up for at least another three centuries before all the shards finally run out of power, so there are still going to be new non-magic S-Class threats and other problematic craziness popping up to keep her busy.

I also don't really see Taylor and Arcana having that level of freedom in TSAB administrated space. The Administrated worlds, despite the TSAB itself mostly being a peacekeeping force, still have a very regimented and militaristic society. Even "independent" mages are very closely regulated and restricted without some sort of official mandate to say otherwise. Further, I see them taking one look at the nepotism and other corruption still present in the organization even after the elimination of the brain-jars, and the religious zealotry/revisionist history present in the Saint Church, and being quite disillusioned about any notions of the TSAB being a more "enlightened and fair" society than anything they could find on Earth Bet. Heck, I actually see Taylor being more forgiving of the Jar-Brains than the rest of the TSAB if/when she finds out about them. After all, after everything she's learned about Cauldron, while she may not agree with their ends-justify-means philosophy, she at least understands Why such actions are taken even if she doesn't want any part of it or the organizations that sanctioned it herself.

Really, I see Taylor going the Dr. Jones route once the US government reclaims monopoly of force for powers and starts to tighten restrictions on vigilantism again. Especially once Magic becomes public knowledge, she'll still be able to use most of her powers freely, so long as she doesn't do anything illegal. I see her retiring from heroing either to a job in programming with Dragon Tech, or else teaching university level mathmagics, and every once in a while the government contacts her to help deal with something the normal methods can't handle.

She might be able to find a similar position somewhere in Administrated Space, but the main difference is that Earth Bet is Her world. By then she'd have helped save it from the Endbringers and several other S-Class threats, but there's always more work to be done, and she'd be committed to making sure things on Earth Bet Keep getting better instead of slipping back into the shit-hole it was in her youth. Further, if she left for TSAB space and became a citizen there, their Prime Directive would more or less prevent her from helping her home at all since she would then be beholden to Administrates Space Law. And that's if she could even get back to Earth Bet at all considering the displacement shear cutting off the Bet-Cluster from the rest of the dimensional sea.

The TSAB is vastly less hypocritical in their version of the prime directive.
I never said that the Federation weren't a bunch of hypocrites. Just that the TSAB's prime directive takes its stance on which worlds they can contact too far.

See, the only major restriction in Star Trek's prime directive, at least as far as "Official" first contact is concerned, is that someone on a world has to have developed a method of superluminal space flight. That's it. Full stop. Heck, when Zefram Cochrane built the Phoenix, Earth was in a state of fragmented post-nuclear war societies. The other reason this makes sense for them is simple: This society is capable of superluminal travel. Sooner or later, they are going to find us, so we might as well open dialogue on our terms. The Federation also wasn't above interfering in these transitional worlds' by providing warp technology to nations that hadn't yet developed it if the nation that first did was a government they couldn't get along with. The logic there being "this world's level of science has this capability. If this nation of xenophobic imperialists doesn't use its warp-tech to wipe out these other nations we actually get along with first, they'll find a way to do it themselves within a decade or so, so it's alright to help them get a leg up so we don't have yet another enemy to deal with. The Romulans are bad enough..."

The TSAB, on the other hand, requires a world to be a homogeneous monolith society encompassing the entire world, regardless of that world's ability to traverse the Dimensional Sea. This is short sighted at best and dangerous at worst as I see things. Imagine for a moment an alternate Earth much like ours. It has all of its nations across all of its continents with all of its squabbling. The only major difference is that this version of Earth is a mid-level magic world. Now imagine that one of these nations develops magic based Extra-Dimensional travel methods, quickly followed by several others, and these nations set out in a race to expand their holdings and settle other worlds. Despite these nations controlling the entirety of these extra-dimensional worlds, since their societies began on the fragmentary Earth, the TSAB will not contact them, and may even try to cut them off from areas of the dimensional sea without alerting them. Now imagine that this development of Extra-Dimensional travel and colonial expansion didn't start in the modern era as we know it. It started in the 1940's, and the first nation to discover the existence of the TSAB isn't the Magic!United States, but Magic!Nazi Germany...

I'll just let the implications of that settle in...

Moving on to the second part, selectively ignoring it, in particular I don't agree with the poaching of powerful mages from less developed non-administrated worlds, since doing so can actively hinder that world's ability to develop their own magitech, achieve extra-dimensional travel, and benefit from the resources and opportunities it offers. Now, some people might say "but Almech, they're just one person, and it's magic, who would believe them and what can they really do⸮" My answer to that is that Nanoha magic is actually math. Science. It's consistent and repeatable, not mysterious and unknowable. Once someone gets their foot in the door a lot of the limitations you would normally expect will go away, and history is full of examples of "just one person" who changed our entire understanding of science and the universe. They'll just either have to change the name to something other than magic, or else redefine the word magic to refer to the new branch of science. It wouldn't be the first time a word had its meaning completely reversed from its original definition...
 
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Regarding the fight Taylor had with the TSAB retrieval team on first contact. It seems to me that the only way to prevent that would have been, while talking to the admiral with Dragon, to inquire about the nature of the dangerous artifact they wanted to retrieve. That would have lead naturally to revealing that we already found Lost Logia and it's no longer a threat.

I'd have to go back and check, but I think the lead-in vote was a write-in and that the conversation was a single update. I know Taylor already knew of IAE by that point.
 
I wonder what people are expecting from one vote or the other.

DLG: The "triumphant" return of a character halfway written out months ago in-game? Who Taylor rarely interacted and got along with? Who's powers didn't mesh well with the team before he lost the minions needed for it?

This rarely explained "closure" , meaning you don't expect anything ongoing added to the story, just a brief feel-good note that wasn't gotten when we initially discovered his injury, or got healing assistance from Alexandria and discovered the result? Assuming its feel good at all, and not conflicted wondering if an absent and impaired Danny is better or worse than a controlling Jotun?

Some possibility of his being healed, and healed in a way better than was already attempted, by means unknown and unstated on our side after theories with IAE were dismissed and brains scarcely studied by Tim in favor of cyber-limbs and magic genetics? Perhaps considering whether to try a Crawler-derived mutagen or Simurgh-assisted mind edits on a patient who doesn't recognize the people offering it?

We've been recently told it will involve a visit to the care home he's been kept in. We haven't much else to go on, that I've seen quoted recently at least and not vaguely asserted, on what even to expect beyond an assumption it will be meaningful in some direction as its a quest. Will those wanting to see Danny find any value if it say, reveals some new Master/Bio-Tinker working on shard-bearing invalids and largely unrelated to him (anymore than the Beasts were related to general patrolling, merely revealed) ? Or some other gang or economic? problem causing her to take over his role as Daddy's-Little-Girl should?


Social: Open ended, perhaps problematically so as this was never really formed as a strict vote so much as one person adding votes into their response to "how do readers feel if SW skips the voted-on Fallen raid?" and the bandwagon ran from there. So lets speculate on possible social activities we might see....

Further interaction with Standstill, better integrating her into the team and maybe handing over her new device if its ready? (I don't know its ETA offhand as it was only just voted for, but last story-post implied Tim already working on them).

Maybe instead another go at talking with Perfect Storm about Galea, this time more directed on worldbuilding without the pitfall of overly-broad questions because Silently Watches is having to make up their own?

Taking the Arcana crew to explore any one of the unvisited worlds we hadn't yet, the Volcano-land and others that SW has oft hinted they have ideas for if we ever find time and the urge to pick it? Or even dabbling at that "uplift our worshippers" thing people sure seemed motivated towards in the past, or at least observe and find a resolution to that accidental sideplot beyond simply forgetting them?

A simple Patrol, giving Standstill a chance to work with the team or maybe sniffing around another city for magic potentials to poach? Maclibuin has a device now at least, and it would seem a little strange if Epoch and him have entirely lost their urge for recruitment.... New Yorks a big place, but if we're worried Legend might get pouty theres always Chicago or Houston :V Even just giving SW an opening to show off new characters wouldn't be any less connected to story than Jujak as some are pushing for.


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TLDR, do you want the shiny mystery box of a bonus social vote when we all just talked of wanting more time, or for the DannyQuest to finally nudge its way in after "jokes" and admissions of bringing it up endlessly till people tire of arguing against? t will be a strange thing if the vote goes to DLG thanks to one or two stated "I don't want to see this, I just want it to backfire or just want them to finally drop it" votes.
 
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Social: Open ended, perhaps problematically so as this was never really formed as a strict vote so much as one person adding votes into their response to "how do readers feel if SW skips the voted-on Fallen raid?" and the bandwagon ran from there. So lets speculate on possible social activities we might see....
Not even as entertaining as that. Next activity vote you were going to have 3 social activities rather than the normal 2. Although now you've given me Ideas.

If you want a mystery box social, I'm sure I can think of something ;)
 
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[X] Extra social event

Lol almost forgot to vote. Way too many alerts in my queue each morning.
 
[x] Daddy's Little Girl
Honestly, this has been worrying me since it popped up in the main quest line, and I need to see where it starts.
 

25 Daddy's Little Girl to 23 Extra Social Event votes right now, so I guess if anybody wants to tip the scale back...
 
Buying new skills is part of his build vote. It's been that way literally since you got him.
Vote Part 2

Because they're more to do! When I updated Tim's character sheet from the vote just now, I realized he is sitting at 7 tech points, which is enough to buy any skill on his list and in one case two skills at the same time. Let's get on that because we have absolutely no reason to keep them in reserve.
My apologies then. I based my post off of the previous time we purchased a skill for Tim (Massive Weapons), where the build vote came first and then we voted on which skill to buy in a separate poll following it because we were at maximum Tech points for the remaining skills (it was my first time contributing to a build vote).
 
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