Note, however, that the house has significantly higher prowess than a senshi. In terms of armor and mobility, I would think that a senshi could be likened to a motorcycle-mounted trooper, and the house to an armored personal carrier. Especially if it can be upgraded further. Plus, it would allow us to relatively safely deploy teams of lower level combatants, such as precures.
Senshi can be upgraded too, quite possibly more easily and more quickly than the house. Furthermore, we can
teleport.
While the Prowess gap between the house and an individual Senshi is significant, we have no certainty that it will remain wide, and it's not so wide that we can remain assured that it will be advantageous to assault targets in a single large, high-visibility chicken house as opposed to doing so with half a dozen smaller, more flexible and agile human-sized targets.
On the subject of loot... Actually, the sword and some other things being available as loot are worrying a bit. The weapon shop, from my understanding, was a legitimate business. What the hell is its merchandise doing in a loot table? Are we the baddies here? And why can't we spend resources to buy said sword?
The weapon shop's business model relied heavily on pit-fighting between enslaved yokai who were magically compelled to injure or even kill each other for the amusement of watchers. The owner should count himself lucky to escape with his life, and has no right to complain if his stock in trade gets carried off by the victorious forces of the anti-slavery side of the civil war.
Food for thought, could Naru animate one of the Sailor Castles? What about the Moon Palace?
I suspect that, as fortifications designed to survive attack by cosmic reality-warping monstrosities, the Sailor Castles and the Moon Palace have magical security against having their internal structure suborned or animated in a way that might compromise their loyalties. Trying to animate them might result in the internal defenses registering Naru as an intruder. After all, making the castle come alive and start attacking its occupants is
just the kind of shit a powerful malevolent sorceress like Nehellennia might try to pull.
Stick it in Nerima. The people over there honestly wouldn't care, or probably even notice it among all the normal chaos in the area.
The downside is, then we'd be back to having one or more of the Senshi living in Nerima, resulting in Nerima bullshit.
It took me most of the next section to realize that the Dark Lady the Fair Remedies were fighting wasn't really Thatcher. You said it and my response was "Well, of course. That makes complete sense."
Honestly, Colonel Black thought the same thing as the shells started landing around them. The most parsimonious explanation for Colonel Blimp's behavior,
after the explosions started and made it obvious he'd double-crossed them somehow, was that he'd gotten a better offer and sold them out to another magical girl villain.
As it is, "Dark Lady" was Colonel Blimp's idea of a joke just on-the-nose enough to work. The man had been planning this for some time, he does have many of the instincts of a Pretty Cure villain and thus does have a hammy streak, and he knew he was
never going to get a chance to make a villain speech
this hammy and dramatic again in his life.
Q Division and the Fair Remedies spent the
entire rest of the Thatcher period cackling about "the Dark Lady," and you can still crack them up about it to this day.
As to the more general eligibility of Margaret Thatcher as a magical girl villain, well, heheheh.
Is there a reason everybody doesn't just use Mana Doping if awakening magic is so difficult?
I assume lack of research and it being both expensive and dangerous.
Luna said that even a hundred years ago, Mana Doping wouldn't have been fatal:
It's possible it's more dangerous than Luna was letting on, but you'd think at some point an unscrupulous or desperate government would have tried using it to awaken an army of magic users.
And Usage's mother did it with a kettle brought with a teenager's allowance. So it can't be expensive.
Hypotheses:
(1) High probability of side effects or instability. Sure, Ikuko Tsukino's use turned out fine, but that may well be because she managed to
specifically mana-dope on blessed curse-breaking healing water, or because she got lucky.
(2) International balance of terror among magical governments agreeing not to do this. Powerful magical entities don't like the idea of rivals easily mass-producing people who could become a threat with 10-20 years' training. It's one thing when an entire nation does so, but that's different. In much the same way, yokai species that are good at making more of themselves through unconventional means (e.g. vampires who turn other people into vampires) tend to be hunted and ostracized.
(3) High likelihood of Masquerade breaches if you awaken very large numbers of nonmagical people who aren't tied into existing magical societies, which ties into (2).
(4) Remember that the same guy who sold us the kettle also sold us a Silver Millennium combat-enhancer relic aligned to Sailor Jupiter for, like... four times the trivial price of that kettle. Sure, it was broken, but it was still really powerful. I'm not sure he's that great at figuring out how much his own stuff is truly worth.
I mean, the current process seems so slow - to the point that even a wealthy country like Britain can't manage to have more than 30 active Spellblades - that you'd think it would be a heavily researched topic.
I should point out that Britain has a great many mages who aren't Spellblades. Spellblades are the British counterpart to Empty Faces, not the British counterpart to mages of all kinds or even "all mages in government service."
