Pursuit / Raspberry Trap (magical girl quest)

"This restaurant sucks."

Those words kind of slip out of your mouth. The four girls sitting on three seats in front of you and the two girls on the bland, beige couch you're sitting on turn around and stare at you. You put your hands in front of your mouth.

"Oh, um, sorry, I know this isn't a dinner date or anything…" you say, but your eyes immediately gravitate towards the two girls sitting on the same chair. One of them, a tall South Asian girl with straight hair cut about her shoulders, stares back at you, twirling her fingers through the cherry blonde curls of a comparatively tiny white girl with closed eyes and then placing her hands over her ears.

"We know as well. There's no need to worry." She coldly smiles back. "Emmy likes it a lot, so I just wanted to take her for a treat. Little things keep us all stable and together, you know?"

"Yeah," you mumble.

"We absolutely do need to be stable and together for this mission, which I assume you all want debriefed to you, yes?" she says to you.

"Yeah," you mumble. The two younger and shier girls to your left and front-left nod. The girl immediately to your right says 'aye', the girl to your front right says 'yes'. 'Emmy' doesn't say anything at all, like she's sleeping.

"This is our target." The tall girl takes out a photo of a somewhat brawny Mediterranean man.

"Oh. I recognise him. He told me how to get to this restaurant."

"You do?" she says. You look up at her, but see her reaching for a bread knife out of the corner of your vision.

"Yeah, uh…"

---

You're probably late — when were you supposed to meet everyone? — you have no clue where you're going. Spend a feverish thirty minutes clambering for your luggage, pass through airport security (can't detect magical weapons), pretend you weren't going to fall down that flight of stairs (you're not that ditzy, you swear), exit Hollywood Burbank Airport.

Were you supposed to be in Burbank? You check your phone's memo, full of notes you've copied from text messages.

'(iris forwarded this to me)
For the good of society
Take out a modern evil
Selflessness alone can't feed us
$10,000 for seven takers, pooled together by the South Cali's Witches Alliance'

Not helpful.

'('anne kathavarayan', """field leader""" for the vague mission with an actual payout)
I live in Burbank. We'll get something to eat at Barnaby's (floor three, Oldfield Shopping Mall) to build rapport before discussing mission details. In person security is best security (picture of cat im nto copying)' (oh, oh, that's the tall girl's name! And did you seriously have to remember leaving that typo in?)

Okay, that's more like it. Only, where's Oldfield Shopping Mall?

You continue to walk outside Hollywood Burbank Airport, fiddling away at your maps app. You press directions, try to press 'current location', your location is off (battery life), you press 'turn it back on and go to the settings menu, you turn it on but it doesn't take you back, press the back button, begin typing Oldfield and accidentally tap on some location in England, get directions to England—

Someone bumps into you, nearly sending your phone flying.

"Hi, sorry!"

"No, no worries!" You turn around. It's a Greek-looking guy in his early twenties with toned muscles, wearing only a white vest and cheap black jogging shorts. As you stop, you notice one of your earphones is dangling by your shoulder, somehow at its max.

"—No, no, you have to understand, it wasn't like we ignored her family on purpose. It was the late 60s, you know, Vietnam, protests, riots… We were caught up maintaining the peace on the home front, making sure our boys had a solid America to go back to." "And what about our girls?" "Obviously we needed to do the best for our girls, but we only have so many resources. What about Elodie Walter, you know? She was murdered more recently, why aren't you reporting on her? —"

"Oh, is that a true crime podcast?" the guy you crashed into asked.

"Yeah, needed something to block out the surroundings."

"I love true crime, I listen to it all the time when I'm jogging. I just find it so fascinating. Although, not the unsolved stuff! It's hard to sleep when you know there are sickos and deviants doing god knows what to our mothers, daughters, sisters, you know."

"Yeah… uh, I'm a little lost. How do I get to Oldfield Shopping Centre?"

"Oh, oh, I'm rambling, anyway—"

---

Anne puts the bread knife she totally wasn't pointing at you on the waiter's stack of everyone's plates as you finish recounting your journey here (making sure to sound better at travelling out loud than you do in your own head).

"It's weird that this guy sounds like he hates murderers and loves women, since we know he kills magical girls."

The girl to her left, your right — an African-American girl with her hair tied in a single bun — raises her hand.

"Oh, so that's why you paid so much and said so little!"

"It's not so much," the dirty blonde facing her cuts in.

"Okay, but, like, we usually clean up the nightmares and demons facing humanity, right? But this guy isn't a demon or anything, he's a real dude. And I'll give you the benefit of the doubt here: you didn't give too many details 'cause you don't know how or why he knows about magical girls, don't want the bastard finding us, right?"

"That's exactly right, Annette," Anne says. Nobody asked for two Annes, and yet…

"Okay, okay. You want us to hunt the hunters," Annette says.

"The Southern California Witches' Association wants us to apprehend or otherwise permanently deal with this individual, who has and remains capable of penetrating defensive and evasive spells and gunning down our peers, yes."

"You don't seem so worried. Neither do you," yes, you, "and you met him. Do you think he knew?"

"I don't know..." you reply.

"Well, we better figure out who this guy is and what he or the thing possessing him wants, right? Otherwise you're next on the cutting board, uh, um… I don't know anyone's names! What's your name." Annette asks flatly.

Well, what is it?

Your enemies

He likes true crime podcasts, but so do you. A little. When you're bored.

The magical system

How did you become a magical girl?

It was a gloomy evening. It would be Christmas break in about three weeks. You felt vaguely sick. It was your last year of elementary school, and your very best friend had told you that he was moving away for middle school. His parents had gotten a promotion, so they'd be going to the Czech Republic. He'd be enrolled in an international school or something, and when he completed all of the work there, he'd get a special certificate that would allow him to study anywhere in the world.

"And then I'll come back for you, okay?" he told you, and smiled. Well, he told all four of you that, but he looked right at you like he wanted to come back for you in particular or something! "We just need to work hard together."

What hurts the most now, remembering that conversation, is the way you coast along life with your natural talent. You're pretty decent at all of your classes and pretty terrible at studying, while your four friends are good to excellent at each and all of your classes and thorough and hardworking in general. North Hempstead is a comfortable place, and you come from such a loving and cherishing family, so you'll definitely be okay. But if you're just okay, you won't be able to keep everyone with you and reunite with all your friends at MIT. You'll drown in an abyss of white water, your body unmarked and alone.

Your thoughts certainly weren't so explicitly morbid back then, but you think it was the first time you felt such a whirlpool of desperation, hopelessness, jealousy. You were going to miss him so much, you were going to disappoint them all, you would never see any of them again once you turned 18...

You lived the furthest away from his house, already said goodbye to everyone else. December is cold and dark, even in a puffy jacket and a scarf.

You know the route home, right? And you're following it, so why aren't you there? Are you just being stupid and impatient and panicky? Petulant child. You'll just phone your parents, who have trusted you to make this route time and time again. You've totally failed them. Not like anything bad will happen to you or that they'll even be unhappy, just a little worried. And yet...

There's no signal? There's no signal. It's like human civilisation was nowhere to be found, which is weird, because there are a lot of people on Long Island.

It was like human civilisation was nowhere to be found. You fell. The shadows at the corner of your vision took everything over. You wanted to vomit. Something leapt at you, barreled you over. A dog licked your face. A crow pecked at your ears. Static filled your ears. You landed in black water.

Maybe that was your saving grace. Once, your dad (your dad!) told you about how there were lots of myths in apparently unrelated waters about a head god parting the waters beyond time. The waters told you, "Sinner, demiurge, what do you think you're doing?" How is a ten year old supposed to know what demiurge means, let alone answer back? How is water supposed to talk?

You looked up demiurge in the dictionary half a year later. You don't really get its relevance? You're twelve. You know why the water can talk now. It's the stuff nightmares are made of, the nightmares that intensify people's hatred, fear and spite to a breaking point alongside the things that feed off it.

You didn't answer that question, though. You picked up a shard of glass and started cutting randomly, splitting apart anything that crawled.

You woke up in your bed at 11pm. Your parents told you came in like usual and went to sleep early, but that didn't seem true, somehow? You got a weird text, though. 'Thanks for saving my life.'

The first weird text of many to come, on the first weird night of many to come.

Gameplay

Basic gameplay is like a normal quest, so I don't think we need to cover that. Vote for either X out of a list of options or a plan, depending on what options you get at the end of any given turn. I hope everything else is simple enough for anyone to follow after reading this full explanation.

History and politics

Are something a fine maiden shouldn't concern herself with. (Yet.)

Hi, I'm Cordova, but you can call me Cordelia, Delia, Lia, or something. I've been using lots of names lately.

I haven't GMed anything for basically forever, and I don't think I've GMed a quest in forever. In this game, you play as a magical girl as part of a team meant to chase down and capture a serial killer of magical girls. Seems simple? Well, I want to run something that has a simple concept, but becomes deeper as you play it, and isn't too easy. I hope you enjoy it, and that everything's clear.

Feel free to ask any question you need to, although I won't necessarily answer it. The first few updates should be every day or two days, but if things get lengthy we'll move to every Thursday.

---

First vote.
Choose one option from each and every category, filling in the write-ins as necessary. I wrote a lot of flavour text, so you probably just want to copy the bold parts.
What's your name?
[X] Write-in.

How old are you?
[X] 12: Too young to be thrown into the mystical line of fire? Probably, but for whatever reason, somebody thought you were old enough to be sent here. Lots of people condescend to you, but because of that they probably won't give you lots of trouble.
[X] 15: In the middle of your teenage years. About the average age for a magical girl.
[X] 18: The age of majority in the so-called sane and stable world (a world you can never fully ignore or run away from…), but older than many of your peers in the enchanting and ethereal world.

What difficulty are you playing on? Oh, you can't choose this?
[X] Normal: A normal and everyday quest experience. If you die, we keep going until we finish the story, which is to say you have infinite respawns.
[X] Hard: A little harder than usual. You'll have to expend some effort keeping everyone alive and happy. You have seven lives -- isn't that a lucky number?
[X] Challenging: 'Please keep both hands on the wheel at all times.' If everyone you care about makes it through this mission, either I'm being more lenient than I promised to be, or you're correcting your mistakes immediately. You have five lives.
[X] Nightmare: Your dearest reality disappears under the sea of black water at the foot of an insurmountable peak. You have three lives.

How strong is your relationship with your family?
[X] Terrible: You are going to cut these people off as soon as possible.
[X] Okay: They're your family. You love them, and they love you.
[X] Devoted: You're your family's golden child, and they'd do anything for you. They fret about you a lot.

How talented are you at magic?
[X] Not very: You're a trainwreck who has no idea what she's doing. You hope you still have lots of potential, though.
[X] Kinda?: You are nothing special, but neither are most of your peers.
[X] Very: People see you as particularly good. They ask you for tips to help them improve and get jealous of you.
[X] Incredibly: You're once in a generation!

For how long have you been a magical girl?
[X] Two weeks: You're a greenhorn, an initiate, a novitiate, a… you get the point.
[X] Six months: You've been crushing evil in the name of good for some time.
[X] Eighteen months: You've lasted long enough to realise that eighteen months doesn't actually make you a veteran.

What kind of magic do you use?
[X] Idolisation: There's a mass of myths, legends and histories about frightening prodigies and people with an overbearing innate spark which blots out everyone else's aspirations. If you ritualistically reenact their most famous feats, then you can capture a fraction of their power. Or so they say. (jack of all trades, as long as someone's done it before)
[X] Radiance: You've always thought that the only way to have your wishes bestowed upon you is by shining brighter than everyone else, whether through the glow of your magical barrage or through the smiles your presence puts on everyone's faces. (light-based offensive magic, strong social presence, interference with other magic-users)
[X] Reversal: Something about the values of this world is deeply repugnant to you, something about you is deeply repugnant to the world. Maybe the world's corrupt, maybe you're corrupt, but for whatever reason, your magic makes your values reality and turns everything around you upside-down. (delay on the operation of common sense and law, anti-social presence but you can turn lies into truth, interference with other magic-users)
[X] Contracts: The grass is always greener on the other side, and you've always felt out of place and dissatisfied. You're willing to sign your life away to be happier, really, so sign away your life you did. Now you have some fraction of some form of otherworldly power. The more you sacrifice protecting that world, the more power you'll be able to use to remain happy. (emotional manipulation + time-space warping, more powerful magic but it leeches your mental and physical health)
[X] Calculation: You're kind of fragile — a little bit asthmatic, a little bit anemic, a little bit sun-deprived. You don't even have the increased strength or ability to do physical feats that most magical girls have! However, you are better than most people at 'working things out', nerd. (strong intuition, speciality in magical theory, information gathering, something that looks like precognition.)


Why did you even accept this mission?
[X] Write-in

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