Maneki-Neko can give us Mistcoin, yes, but we have to either deal the killing blow with it or do 3 damage to an enemy with it. Maneki-Neko's offensive stats aren't the best, and it has weaknesses to some of the most common elements. I'm not saying we burn our 1 Mistcoin with Aladdin's ability immediately in the next combat, like I said, we can use it for emergencies.
Persona: HEAVEN (Persona/Sword Art Online/Isekai Multicross)
- Thread starter afreaknamedpete
- Start date
- Crossover Sci-Fi Fantasy
- Location
- Poland
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Maneki-Neko
ThatGuyWithIdeas
Treize died for our sins
- Location
- Romania
None of these personas are all that good (too many weaknesses is a problem they all share). Maneki-Neko is somewhat similar to Shakuntala, but more focused on VIT rather than AGI (E STR and AGI, D MAG and CHT, C VIT vs F STR and VIT, D MAG and AGI, C CHT). 3 weaknesses, 2 of which could be argued to be common (Ice and Wind), with 2 resistances, 1 that might be encountered more often (Elec). Has Electric and Bless attacks, can buff defenses (most likely translates to VIT buffs). Beckoning Gold gives us a way to farm MistCoins via either killing enemies with this persona or having an attack deal 3 damage (aka at least 4 successes on an attack roll), which would allow us to buy things from the MistCoin shop if we want to at some point.
Midas would be a decent physical persona, if a bit lacking in Agility but it also has 3 weaknesses out of which 2 are quite common (Fire and Blunt), but 2 common resistances (Pierce and Ice). Curse of Greed turns an attack or skill into an AOE version of itself and adds +2 advantage (aka any roll that is at least a 3 is a success). Provided no other modifiers intervene, striking a weakness with a Curse of Greed attack puts us at the advantage cap (aka +3, where a 2 or higher is considered a success). Has access to Pierce, Ice and Slash damage, can confuse.
Aladdin is a mixed attacker (D rank STR and MAG, which are decent for now) with high Agility (rank B), but with 4 weaknesses out of which 2 are arguably very common (Pierce and Elec) and a resistance to a common element (Slash). One Step Ahead adds +1 advantage to the next 3 AGI and/or VIT rolls, which would counter weaknesses (provided no other advantages or disadvantages are in play). Has Slash and Wind attacks, can buff AGI.
To that end, think we should go for Maneki-Neko and use it in situations where we can safely farm MistCoins off enemies.
[X] Maneki-Neko
Midas would be a decent physical persona, if a bit lacking in Agility but it also has 3 weaknesses out of which 2 are quite common (Fire and Blunt), but 2 common resistances (Pierce and Ice). Curse of Greed turns an attack or skill into an AOE version of itself and adds +2 advantage (aka any roll that is at least a 3 is a success). Provided no other modifiers intervene, striking a weakness with a Curse of Greed attack puts us at the advantage cap (aka +3, where a 2 or higher is considered a success). Has access to Pierce, Ice and Slash damage, can confuse.
Aladdin is a mixed attacker (D rank STR and MAG, which are decent for now) with high Agility (rank B), but with 4 weaknesses out of which 2 are arguably very common (Pierce and Elec) and a resistance to a common element (Slash). One Step Ahead adds +1 advantage to the next 3 AGI and/or VIT rolls, which would counter weaknesses (provided no other advantages or disadvantages are in play). Has Slash and Wind attacks, can buff AGI.
To that end, think we should go for Maneki-Neko and use it in situations where we can safely farm MistCoins off enemies.
[X] Maneki-Neko
- Location
- Florida
[X] Maneki-Neko
- Location
- USA
[X] Maneki-Neko
Ryumancer
Dragons Are Romance
Aladdin's One Step Ahead is an amazingly powerful defense, actually! And pairing it with Sukukaja means pretty much nothing will ever actually hit us. But frankly? Being able to generate money out of thin air has more utility, and Maneki-Neko makes us pretty good at just... shrugging off damage anyways.
[X] Maneki-Neko
[X] Maneki-Neko
afreaknamedpete
High-Dimensional Overseer
- Location
- Above the Sequences
- Pronouns
- HE/HIM/THEY
Seems pretty unanimous. And Maneki-Neko is arguably the most thematically appropriate to the devil arcana. It was actually a fairly last minute Persona idea, the one it was replacing is being repurposed for another arcana.
Also very minor retcons for consistency from a few edits in the last few chapters (no need to reread):
>Flight timers were inconsistent (30 seconds in chapter, 5 minutes the next), gonna stick with 5-6 minutes for high-level players.
>Your homeroom/japanese teacher is now your English teacher (I found a different japanese teacher to fill the slot).
04/18: Encore of a Rodent's Regret [JUSTICE Rank 1]
afreaknamedpete
High-Dimensional Overseer
- Location
- Above the Sequences
- Pronouns
- HE/HIM/THEY
[X] Maneki-Neko
FRIDAY - April 18th, 2025
Afternoon
The two of you glare across the table from one another, the glass of soda in front of you stale and flat. Agil had left the two of you alone in his bar to, as he says, 'sort things out'. His parting advice was that sharing a drink can smooth things over even between bitter enemies.
The lone glass sits unattended, two untouched squiggly straws sticking out of it like antennae. Cheapskate couldn't even be bothered to get you separate beverages.
"Why don'tcha drink? Must be thirsty running around arrangin' all this bullshit."
"Oh, you first. Please, go ahead, I promise I didn't poison it."
...
Argo the Rat... at first you didn't have a particularly strong opinion regarding her, at least back when you were just a normal SAO player. While she sold exclusive information to the Clearers, her field guide was freely distributed to all lower floors with accurate, comprehensive information. Descriptions of dungeons, safe routes between labyrinths, conditions of special field bosses, and recommendations for anti-status effect equipment... everybody had a copy of it stored in their inventory.
Argo was elusive, but on the lower floors, no name engendered trust quite like «Argo the Rat». 'It's Fine, It's Argo's Guide!' For the players of SAO, those words were worth more than gold.
Of course, everything changed when you became her enemy.
"So... I guess Agil set this up. Sneaky bastard when he wants to be." Hosaka Carina Tomo gives you a lazy wave. You can't help but notice she looks more... haggard than last you met. The fake smile that doesn't reach her eyes, you remember that from your last meeting. But the dark circles? Those were new. "While your here, mind callin' off little miss attack dog? Can't work with her barkin' everywhere."
"No. Meimi will do what she likes."
She rolls her eyes and scoffs. "Yeah, this ain't gonna work. Waste of time. So whatcha want Lux? Figure it's best if we keep this strictly business."
...it was always like this. You were enemies in SAO, though only by happenstance. In another life, if you weren't forced into working with Laughing Coffin you could've been allies, strangers at least. Argo... made every day worse, hunting you from the light while Laughing Coffin stalked you in the shadows. No way out but a virtual grave or a virtual prison.
And that would have been the end of it. You would have forgotten, forgiven. It's not as if Argo was in the wrong.
But she had to drag you back. She couldn't let SAO just END.
"I... just want to know something, Hosaka," you spit out, forcing yourself to use her real name. You were well past the point of honorifics, and addressing her by her first name made you nauseous just contemplating it. "Why are you so obsessed? Why couldn't you just ask me for help instead of threatening me!? In case you forget, SAO is over."
"Really? Tell that to the 300 peop-"
"That's an entirely different issue! You threatened me! And don't you dare lecture me otherwise, have you forgotten I'm the reason there's been any progress in your little mission."
Hosaka growls, rearing up as if to shout, but catches herself before she does so. "Fine, so ya made yer point. Toldja already, I leave your secrets be if ya help me with this. I keep my word."
"Tell me. Say we rescue everyone. Are you going to stop with all... this? Stop being Argo the Rat?" you stare into her eyes. "Stop obsessing over Sword Art Online!?"
"Ya know what gopher-chan, since you're the one that's bringing it up... After this is over, do you go back? Go back to your little high school life and forgot about what ya owe your victims?"
You stare into her eyes without blinking. "Y... you. Do you have ANY IDEA what kind of life I had!? You think I wanted to work with Laughing Coffin!? You think I CHOSE any of this!?"
"Spare me the story," she says, giving a half smile. "I can guess. They forced me into it, they forced me to cooperate, blah blah something like that right? Tch, don't sell me that bullshit. Wasn't there a choice ya had, same as everyone? Could've turned yourself in."
"And what? Spend the rest of SAO in the Army's private prison? Locked up for who knows how long? Live an eternity in a lightless cell?"
"You could've done MORE! You could've shown even a TINY PIECE of the courage the Clearers did!" Hosaka's standing now. Her voice is low and dangerous. "You could've fought back, you could've resisted, you could've informed us! But you just kept working! You were so concerned with your damn survival you never stopped to look at the corpses you left in your wake!"
She's shouting, making fists, shaking with anger. But you stand your ground. "I'm not proud of what I did. But SAO is over. I want that behind me, and I want you to put it behind you."
"Izzat it? It's over, just amnesty for everyone! No closure, no answer, no JUSTICE!?"
"And who are you to administer justice? You were just a player. It's not your responsibility and never was your responsibility to judge me, no, judge any player!"
...Hosaka goes quiet, her early anger spent.
"Responsibility, huh," she says quietly, looking down. "Ya know something? Nobody took Responsibility. Ever. Funny how that works, huh?"
"...what do you mean?"
Hosaka looks up at you again. "I was waiting for the whole game for one ya know. A leader. Someone willing to take responsibility. My friend... Kii-bou, he took all the hate on behalf of the beta-testers... so he took responsibility in his way. But he was the only one. And it wasn't enough."
Hosaka taps her fingers against the table, continuing with a wistful tone. "The Army? We both know how 'effective' they were. «Divine Dragon Alliance» just cared about themselves. I thought... the «Knights of Blood» had the right idea. Lead by example, give everyone a shining star to aspire to. Heathcliff was always kinda quiet and all mysterious-like, but I had high hopes for him. I thought he could learn to lead us all, Aincrad united as one. Heh, turns out I bet on the wrong horse."
The information broker stares down at her feet, struggling to find the will to continue. "You know what I realized Lux? In those early days of SAO, when most people died... they were looking to us. To beta testers. For some kind of... leader. I spent months... then a year looking for one too. Putting up my guides, figuring out where everyone was, trying to... just make things less shit. Nobody ever stepped up. Just headless chickens worrying more about loot, drops and fucking PKing each other."
Silently, almost absently, Hosaka balls up her fists. She's shaking. "But one idiot was trying to hold it all together. One stupid girl who just liked writing guides. It took me a year to realize it but... somehow it was me all along. I was running all the labyrinth scouts. I dictated the safe areas. I was coordinating the anti-LC response. The clearers didn't even move without my say-so, I was the only one who could force them to work together. I woke up one day and suddenly realized the person who was running the show... was me. Maybe if I realized it sooner, 4000 people wouldn't have had to die."
...you never considered it from that perspective but Argo the Rat in many ways was the closest thing SAO had to a leader that everyone had to listen to, one way or another. Certainly, the only thing SAO had to an authority. She didn't rule, dictate or lead... but by controlling information she had her finger on the pulse of every player.
"Whatever you may think, you were just one person. You're no more responsible for SAO than I was. And you have no right to judge me."
"What a hoot, seeing the likes of you squirm. Ya know what it's like? Hearing a scout never returned from the labyrinth, sent to death on your orders? Hearing a guild got decimated cause your guide missed the boss's enrage timer? Hearing a friend died helping ya escape from a stupid little LC gopher's bodyguards? You think you're the only one who was put in an impossible situation!?"
Her eyes light up, her hands slamming down on the table. "So don't ya dare ask me about responsibility! I thought SAO was over too! Ya think I want to be here doing this!? I thought I could just be Tomo again, not Argo the Rat! That the damn adults would take care of everything! But NO! There's NOTHING. No punishment. No investigation! NO JUSTICE! So I'll do it again. I'll take responsibility again. BECAUSE NO ONE ELSE IS GOING TO!"
You stand up to meet her, chair tumbling underneath you. "So that's it? I live the rest of my life in fear of you doxxing me to appease your own sense of justice?"
"Nah, I got a better idea," Hosaka snaps at you. "How's this for an old memory? 'We have decided to make you confess all your crimes with your own mouth.' Remember them? That's what I want. That's true justice. I ain't gonna expose ya, as per our agreement, but if you're going to keep bringin' this shit up, I'm not gonna stop hounding ya. I want ya, all of ya, to confess your sins. To take responsibility."
"No. I'm done with SAO. Everyone is. It's time to move on!"
A ringing bell cuts through the room, interrupting your staring contest. The creaky door to the Dicey Cafe open as Agil bumbles into the room, arms cradling several bags worth of groceries.
"Hey! You girls getting along all... right...?" asks Agil, his eyes wandering across his bar to the completely untouched flat soda, chairs scattered across the floor and Hosaka's steaming red face.
"...no," you answer bitterly. Hosaka just huffs and turns away from you.
Agil shuts the door behind him and sets the bags down on the counter. "Well, uh, feel free to keep talking. I have to get the bar ready for opening, so could you refrain from taking your frustrations out on my furniture?"
"It's fine Agil. We were just finishing up," says Hosaka.
You nod along. For once you agree.
Hosaka looks at you in contemplation, as if testing an idea in her head. "So I take it your not going to do the right thing."
"No, I'm not going to subject myself and my family to the harassment of the public just so you can feel better about yourself."
"Fine, then. You know what? Let me give you a few names." She pulls out her smartphone, scrolling through some list stored there.
"Kashiwazaka Hiyori. Spy for Laughing Coffin."
Your name. What was she plotting?
"Fukazawa Seiichiro. Killed his own damn wife.
Hanako Akazawa. Orange Guild leader, orchestrated the death of an entire guild.
And Kanamoto Atsushi. You should recognize this one."
"Never heard of any of them. Why should I care about these names?"
"No? Guess you Coffins didn't talk about your past lives much, huh? But no matter. They're the only ones I've been able to track down. So ya want to keep hanging around me? Agil trying to make us play nice? Well then, how about you come with me? I'm going to make each and every one of them confess, and I want ya to be there too. I'm going to stare ya in the eye and DARE ya to tell me they deserve to go free. And once that's over, I want ya to tell me one more time if it's just that ya get to walk away."
After that the conversation dies. Hosaka excuses herself, stopping only to apologize to Agil for the mess. You couldn't exactly say this was a productive conversation. The implication wasn't lost to you. For Argo, you ranked right up there with the real murderers on SAO. She wanted confessions, public shaming, some perverse obsession with punishing you all.
Following her around just to have her try to guilt trip you by showing you the worst dregs of SAO didn't exactly sound like a fun way to spend an afternoon. As far as you're concerned, Argo can take her stupid justice and shove it up her rat ass, you had no reason to ever talk to her—
I AM THOU, THOU ART I.
ALL BENEATH THE LIGHT OF TRUTH.
BRING FORTH THE CONDEMNED.
RAISE THE GALLOWS. TIE THE KNOT.
DELIVER ABSOLUTE JUSTICE.
TO GRANT YOU POWER TO DESTROY THE HEAVENS
ALL BENEATH THE LIGHT OF TRUTH.
BRING FORTH THE CONDEMNED.
RAISE THE GALLOWS. TIE THE KNOT.
DELIVER ABSOLUTE JUSTICE.
TO GRANT YOU POWER TO DESTROY THE HEAVENS
Damn it.
This is your fault. For the briefest of moments, you sympathized with her. You understood, in the broadest of senses, who Hosaka Carina Tomo was. Of course, she possessed a wish of her own. If you wanted to continue obtaining power from her, you'd need to play along.
But even if you didn't... at least you're not afraid of her anymore.
"Hey, Hosaka," you call out, stopping the girl at the door.
"What? Changed ya mind?"
"No. I haven't. SAO is over, and the only reason I'm involved at all is that I care about saving everyone. Call it penance, whatever you like, but that's why I'm here, Hosaka." The girl looks at you for one last time as you call out to her, "...and that's why you're too here, right? To save everyone?"
The question hangs in the air between the two of you.
At first, it seems like she isn't going to answer, but then she lets out a small smile. The first genuine one you've ever seen on her. "Hmph. Sometimes ya make a good point. That's right... what we're really here for... is to save them."
"Just making sure you stay focused, Rat."
"Yeah, yeah, I hear ya. One last thing gopher-chan. I'm not sure what you and your PK friend are planning, but if you think it can get you up the Tree then go for it. I figure letting you do your own thing would be more efficient than folding ya into my crew. But if you're really outta ideas... well, I suppose I could use a hand. And if not..."
"Then I'll see you at the top of the World Tree."
"Right. I'm off now, try not to murder anyone gopher-chan."
"Try not to dox anyone, Rat."
>You have barely tolerated Argo the Rat! GRIT has increased! ♪♪♪♪
>Grit ranked up to [Brittle]
>Decreased D penalties for future interactions with Argo the Rat.
AN: No vote, bunching everything together for next chapter.
Last edited:
- Location
- The Z-Cave
Interesting way to take Argo's character. In this world the Phantom Thieves had a major impact on the world and Argo probably admired them for their ability to find seemingly anything as an info broker, this leads to SAO with every authority figure or leader being revealed to be inept or evil further compounded by Kirito not waking up and staying as the big, perfect hero has led her to grow out of her initial character archetype into a more proactive seeker of justice instead of dropping off the face of the plot until the Unital Ring arc.
Makes me wonder if we can make her a part of our growing band of Dark Magical Girls for the sweet drama of it all. But we seem to be doing the P3 thing in that our SLs and party members are separate for pacing purposes.
Makes me wonder if we can make her a part of our growing band of Dark Magical Girls for the sweet drama of it all. But we seem to be doing the P3 thing in that our SLs and party members are separate for pacing purposes.
04/19: That Time My Admin Account got Reset as a Slime [NATURE Rank 1]
afreaknamedpete
High-Dimensional Overseer
- Location
- Above the Sequences
- Pronouns
- HE/HIM/THEY
laugardagr - 19th of Einmánuður
Afternoon
That's... wow. That's one ugly monster.
There were many things you hated about SAO. Spies, Laughing Coffin, PKers... but most everything you hated about SAO could be wrapped up in one word: players.
Take them out of the equation? Well in Aincrad the PvE experience could be... something special. Fun, even. You weren't a Clearer, so you were largely insulated from the stresses of front-line battle against unknown enemies. Your experience with PvE was to pick a zone far under your level, check the guides, and enjoy the closest thing SAO had to entertainment.
Even then, there was one very special category of mob that was the bane of your existence. The bane of all female players.
Tentacle monsters.
They came in all flavors and sizes. Mushroom tentacle monsters on Floor 6. Jellyfish tentacle monsters on Floor 29. Plant tentacle monsters on Floor 47. Slime tentacle monsters in literally every labyrinth. One dungeon on the 31st floor even had skeleton tentacles.
You've heard the arguments. They were classic designs. A grappler-type mob was a logical addition to a melee-focused game. When you figure out the trick they weren't that hard to beat.
You have a better theory. Kayaba was a pervert, and he trained SAO's AI to also be a pervert. You've seen some of the Elf NPCs, the evidence in your opinion was overwhelming.
So you are not surprised in the slightest that ALO, a game that heavily reuses SAO systems, would feature tentacle monsters. But this... well, this was ridiculous.
Isn't this game supposed to be about Norse mythology? Did the Vikings have elephant hentai monsters?
A giant 20-meter-tall tentacle monster shrieks and attacks a Salamander, ripping him in two with an explosion of pixelated gore. The bleach-white monster has dozens of tentacles, each as long as its entire body, with one prominent trunk three times as thick as the rest. You see it crush a rock with one errant swing of its massive trunk, leaving a deep gouge in the stone.
On top of this, the beast's six eyes glow an eerie green, darting uncontrollably, searching for its next prey. The monsters were attacking everything, lone mobs, players, trees, rocks, everything. And what's worse there were hundreds of them.
I'll bet 500 MistCoins those things are programmed to dangle girls upside down by their ankles.
That or outright grope them. For now, all the players in immediate view of you appeared to be male, so that hypothesis would have to remain untested because no way were you going down there to find out.
"«Raphael», it's fine. Just keep increasing the spawn rate."
A voice, calm but tinged with a faint hint of anxiety echoes forth from the hilltop. You had added the GM to your friends list on the vague promise of some in-game reward, though that was just a side benefit to simply speaking with him further. Satoru Mikami struck you as a reasonable person, though likely not high up in RECT's food chain.
"How the hell did the players even find Urðr much less kill her? Ugh, forget it. Just alert me if Verðandi and Skuld awaken."
When you messaged Mikami he asked if you could come to him in «Jötunheimr», ALO's high-level raiding zone, as he was far too busy to come to your location. The zone was an underground dungeon so flight was completely restricted, with Spriggans and Imps managing just a few seconds of air time at best. Conveniently there was an entrance right on the «Alne Plains», minutes away from the «World Tree» itself.
As a non-instanced field dungeon you expect «Jötunheimr» to be populated with hardcore players, seeing is another matter entirely. You heard some rumors in town already— the whole zone was completely overrun by «Beast Type Evil Gods», those tentacle monsters currently spawning on masse. Although normally the mobs dropped almost nothing useful a recent quest was offering massive rewards for hunting them down - namely «Excalibur» of all things. Guess yours was some kind of duplicate.
"Oh, I just had an idea! «Raphael» connect to the area announcement system."
As you round the hill you see the GM, in the flesh... for a manner of speaking. The head of the GMs, «Rimuru» the slime wiggles on the hilltop, half hidden in a field of weeds, speaking to someone you couldn't see. Why was the GM Avatar a slime? Almost all the GMs had slime avatars, though the reason behind the choice wasn't clear to you. You guess it was because they were all perverts.
"ATTENTION ALL PLAYERS! DUE TO A RECENT EXPLOIT, WE ARE ANNOUNCING A SERVER HOTFIX! BEAST-TYPE EVIL GOD MONSTERS WILL NO LONGER OFFER SKILL EXP, SO PLEASE STOP KILLING THEM!"
The GM avatar's voice booms over the battlefield. The players don't seem to care beyond a few scattered boos being shouted his way. All around you, players scramble to corral the mobs, while others prepare magic spells to burn the creatures to ashes. Some players run straight into the midst of the monsters, blades drawn, though they usually get squeezed to death in turn.
"Hello?" you timidly shout. "Satoru... Mikami-san? Were you talking to someone?"
With a wiggle of recognition the Slime... turns around. Well, more like its eye slits just slide along the top of its head and flow into its backside. The maneuver is oddly unsettling, and you wonder how Mikami doesn't get VR nausea controlling such an obviously inhuman avatar.
"Hey, it's the school reporter. I'm talking with «Raphael»! That's just the system AI. Anyways sorry for making you come here, I've been a bit too busy to move around. As you can see there's a bit of a situation here."
"It's no problem Mikami-san," you say, giving a polite bow. "I want to apologize for showing up unannounced the other day."
"No problem, no problem! I hope you don't mind if I work while we talk. Have you logged in much since our last talk? Don't worry, I'm not going to look at your logs or anything invasive like that. I just want to hear your impressions on ALO."
You nod, maintaining the veneer of a concerned SAO survivor. As always, the truth was the best foundation for any lie. "It's just as amazing as SAO. My problems with ALO never had to do with the game itself Mikami-san, mostly how it can affect its players." You nod in the direction of the players currently engaged in open warfare with the tentacle monsters. It's an outright feeding frenzy down there.
"Ah, well... this is an event or something like that. Still trying to figure out what happened, a big blank in the logs, but a quest NPC got assassinated by the players before everything was ready."
"Really? Aren't you a GM Mikami-san? Can't you just... fix things?"
The slime gives you a... smile? Its eyes at least look mirthful. "Please call me Rimuru or «That Slime!» when I'm on the job Lux! And it's not quite that simple— normally if something goes wrong I'd just rollback the servers but the boss isn't having it. 'Go deal with it yourself' he says, the guy never lets me do rollbacks. Can't argue with the boss, can I? So I'm just trying to disincentive the players from killing them."
"Disincentivize them...?" you ask, watching two Gnome characters get strangled to death by the tentacle monsters. "Why not just make the mobs invincible or just close the dungeon? And they're mobs, who cares if they die?"
"I see you trying to fish for quest spoilers! Obvious mod action ruins immersion and the SEED AI really, really hates heavy-handed stuff like that. If all the Evil God monsters get killed it triggers this insane quest chain we were planning for the next update." Rimuru takes a second between his sentences to rattle off a sequence of spawn requests before continuing.
"I don't mind if it activates early, but uh, I'm trying not to let the quest advance just yet since I'm still trying to do some bug squashing right now. I'm still not sure how it happened but one of the main NPCs got killed, and the only one who can respawn her is the boss who's too busy to do anything about it right now. Once all the Evil Gods die the next step in the chain triggers and there goes my window of investigation, so I'm just messing with the spawn rates to drag this out."
Well the stupid NPC attacked me first!
A sudden thought crosses your mind. "Rimuru, can't you just check the logs to find out who killed their master?"
The slime shakes its body vigorously. "There's a HUGE blank in the logs, so I have no idea what happened. Apparently, some players initiated a forced disconnect but the logs are so corrupted I can't even tell who was there!"
This Slime likes the sound of his voice.
You can use this. "Rimiru? I have to say this is very concerning to me. It sounds like you're losing control of your own game. You remember what happened the last time something like this happened, don't you?"
The Slime looks at you in silence. For a moment you think it's going to ask what the hell you were talking about, but instead, Rimuru lets out a long sigh.
"Yeah, yeah—you're right, that was a real mess. It's why I take bug squashing so seriously, we don't want another GBN meltdown. Wait a minute, are asking about that or SAO? That was the work of a single madman—"
"No, I know plenty enough about SAO. The meltdown scenario, can't you see similarities between what's happening here and that incident?" Add a touch of cold reading to an open-ended question, it's the best way you've found to get information out of cooperative contacts. You don't even know what GBN even stands for, but you expect Rimuru will come to his own conclusions.
"Clearly you've done your research. I can offer you a bit more of a nuanced answer if you'll hear it. SEED-based MMOs like ALO use an AI system to substitute the work of what would normally be hundreds of moderators and designers— but it doesn't just generate content based on what designers feed it. Once it runs long enough it starts taking player input and expectations into account. You know, stuff like debuff timers running out just before a killing blow, last-minute level-ups, speed boosts when moving to defend an ally— kino moments! Taken to its extreme it'll respond to player behavior with special quests and NPCs. This can happen even without the GMs realizing."
"And then things get out of control..."
"Right! GBN's problem was that it required a real-life physical item: a Gunpla figure. You can't just hack an Amusphere, but you can hack a plastic figure, so some idiots figured out how to make these decals that would trick the game into giving them bigger stats. There was also this NPC that a group of players wanted to keep around SO MUCH the SEED AI gave it special powers to avoid GM tools. To make a long story short the streams got crossed, raid bosses got bugged, zones became broken, and even the in-game logout feature got disabled for a bit— had to close down the game for months. Got a drinking buddy that was working himself to death for months trying to fix it all."
Okay. Self-reminder to not touch that game with a 10 foot stick. But if Rimuru was already comparing it...
"So you're saying... ALO is going down the same route?"
"No, no, of course not! All I'm saying is that bugs should be taken very seriously and investigated fully cause you never know what might happen if you let the SEED AI do all the work without supervision. It's why I'm down here trying to delay the quest progression instead of stopping it— there's a reason most problems are fixed with a server rollback. I GM nuke one problematic NPC and the SEED will just think it's part of some dumb event and make a whole questline out of it!"
It's a surprising limitation of SEED-based VRMMOs. It was so easy to make with the AI creation tools that many developers didn't exactly know how their own games worked.
Rimuru continues, "I've been doing my best to check every nook and cranny of ALO to find any issues. If I can patch the holes early enough, I won't have to deal with a runaway content-generation engine. Anyways you seem pretty interested in this stuff, are you looking to write for MMO Tomorrow when you graduate?"
"...Huh? Uh, sure. I think the publication is a bit too industry positive, but it's popular for a reason," you say, hoping your vague statement wouldn't be contradicted by anything. You don't know what it's like now but MMO Today, the predecessor of MMO Tomorrow, was a site you frequently followed before you were locked up in SAO. "I see the appeal in VRMMOs but too few reporters touch on the societal implications of prolonged usage, so I'm always interested in the perspective of both players and creators," you say, talking completely out of your ass.
"Hahaha, well, you certainly have a knack for getting others to talk...but you'd better watch out for the hardcore players who read MMORPG magazines if you're going the critical route," he says, shaking his slime body in amusement. "Best use a pen name so you don't get death threats."
Ahh, great. You just bullshitted your way into becoming an amateur journalist.
Not even a lie, you're writing a freaking report later.
"Uh, thanks for the conversation, Rimuru. I guess I'll get going?"
Ask for the reward! That's why we came!
I'm not going to do something so crass! We're here for information!
Completely mistaking the cause behind your visible annoyance, the slime laughs, body wiggling inwards as ripples spread out from its center. "Hey, why the long face? I know that look. Now, now, no need to be embarrassed, I promised you some loot after all... If you care enough about VRMMOs to go all the way to RECT for research then I bet you're secretly quite a gamer yourself. Don't worry, I'll be generous."
The sudden compliment catches you off guard. "...You're right, I do enjoy games," you say, half truth and half lie, "And I want to be able to write about them objectively so I always make it a rule to investigate in person."
"Good, good! I'm touched to see a young adult working so hard despite having to live through SAO. Normally I just give people gift packages or stuff like that. Oh, how about a «Private Pixie»? It was available as a pre-order gift!"
The slime... distends, the blue ball growing... elongating as a bottomless chasm opens in Rimuru's body. Before you can protest a sickly wind carrying a thick acrid black smoke pours forth, enveloping the hilltop. A massive pillar of darkness rises at incredible speed, knocking you backward.
As soon as it starts, the column abruptly stops and begins to shrink. The smoke dissipates, clearing the air of all traces of dark smoke, a lone red-haired pixie soaked head to toe in blue... slime juice shivers on the hilltop.
"Hey,Listen!Fuckingcold!I'vespentmonthsinthisvorefreakstomachletmeoutohthisisJoutenheimerdidyouknowitusedtobeverdantgreenbutthenthefrostgiantking-"
"Uh, I'll pass, thanks."
"Yeah, nobody ever wants the pixies. Can't blame me for trying to offload a few of them. Every single one I've given away in events ends up being sent back."
"-andthentherootsofYggdrasilwereseveredandnonotthestomachagainidon'twanttogobackitsmellslike-" Rimuru swallows the Pixie in one gulp, the slime recompressing into the small ball shape again. "All right, how about this instead? If you want, why don't you try a new system I've been workshopping? You can even write about it!"
"A new system?" you answer, curious to see where he's going with this.
"You know what's ALO's biggest complaint?"
"...the crazy LARPers?"
"I mean the biggest gameplay complaint!"
"The... tutorial pixies being too annoying?"
"Eh, a close second place. No, the biggest issue is with the flight controls. We want flight to be easy, but some players just... never pick it up, you know? The flight controller helps with that but ideally, we want all players to be flying naturally."
You nod, it makes sense. Although you found it very intuitive, Meimi had a lot of trouble. Trying to manipulate an organ that doesn't exist in real life is a challenge, and the worst part is that it's a magic organ, so you don't even get proper physical feedback.
"Now you can eventually learn to fly in ALO, but have you ever thought about what that means? Teaching a man to fly is like trying to teach a slug how to walk, it's a set of new limbs for crying out loud. Maybe if had years of practice or had hardcoded genetic instructions like some birds it'd be possible, but for a regular human? Impossible. But somehow most good players figure out flight in a few weeks. That's only possible thanks to the research of RECT Progress into memory learning."
Sounds very ominous.
"Ah, sorry, still speaking company language. Think of it like this. Learning stuff is hard, you have to practice, fail, all sorts of stuff that can get annoying very quickly. What if instead, you could just learn... suddenly? Like a game character? Have an NPC grant you a title and then suddenly you're bigger, stronger... and smarter. It's what my boss has been working on, automatic direct memory learning through VR."
"You're not just a game company?"
"Please, RECT Progress is a big company! Beyond my Moderation and Curation team, we have hordes of data analysts and plenty of sections working on advancing the scope of VR tech. Our boss, President Sugou, is a leading worldwide expert on the emergent field of cognitive psience with a specialization in memory theory."
Cognitive Psience. You recall hearing the term bandied around a ton before SAO's launch, Kayaba was an early pioneer in applying it to VR. But they didn't cover Cognitive Psience in class yet, it had something to do with brains and something called fluctlights. It's still over your head.
"RECT Progress is best described as a full-service VR conglomerate, to say nothing of our parent company. We dabble in everything, from games to productivity software, to education. We have our fingers in every pie."
Sounds like one of those pies is fleshy, wrinkly, and pink.
"...so you're working on... memory modification? False identities and stuff?"
"Uh, nothing so ominous! First off the higher-level stuff is above my paygrade but it's much more benign than you think. Take, uh, ALO's magic system, it's based on a pastiche of old norse and a made-up language," says Rimuru as he flashes a light spell into existence through ALO's runic magic. "As you level up in a magic skill you comprehend and know more runic power words, which expands your spell repertoire. But the players are still learning the language - the system is essentially teaching them with every skill up, inscribing it into their fluctlight. Or take my slime body! I'm not just a human crawling around the floor. When I'm in this body I AM a slime. The system is simply changing my cognition - or you could say memories - so that it's natural to me."
"Wait so you're saying the game is... changing my memories?" you ask, horrified.
"Don't make it sound so dystopian. All it's doing is making it so that flight is a bit more natural and to help you comprehend old norse. It's all very low-level. We're testing something a bit more advanced though. Look, think of it like this. Wouldn't your life be easier if you could learn a skill IRL with the same ease you do so in game? Buy a VR game and then suddenly you know how to speak English? Learn piano in a single afternoon? What if every human on earth knew how to provide first aid? That's President Sugou's ultimate goal. You should check out some of his interviews when you get the chance, man's got vision."
Rimuru shakes in excitement. "But that's still a ways away. Right now, the best we can do is some in game stuff, which brings me to my offer: «Titles»! it's a new rewards system I'm planning the next update but I need testers. These aren't skills I can just offer a high-level player - it'd totally upset the PvP balance - but for a low-level dabbler like you with VRMMO experience it'd be perfect."
"«Titles»? How would it work?"
"I'll assign a special name to your avatar that will enable special skills. I'd love to say it's all original but it's just some extra data we scraped off the SAO servers, unimplemented features really. The title will essentially imprint the skill onto your fluctlight and grant basic proficiency, it's pretty similar to how a lot of high level combat related Skills functioned in SAO. With a just little practice, you can learn a new skill as easy as flying!"
"Wait, wait," you say, shaking your head. "You're saying you can teach me a new skill just by assigning a title? Not just enabling game features but teaching me something I've never done before!?"
Rimuru looks at you with a rather puzzled expression on his blob body. "...Kinda? It's less teaching than modifying your cognition so that something you think is impossible suddenly becomes possible— and THEN teaching you. It's nothing new. Insect Site uses similar features to help players acclimate into suddenly becoming 2-meter tall praying mantises. Cat Cafe literally turns you into a cat, tail and all. And ALO already does this to make flight more manageable. This is just applied cognitive psience."
Don't overthink it, guy's offering us free power. Your mind is already a lost cause.
"Look, it's no big deal. I just want to see how well these titles function, so I'll offer you one on the condition you report back to me about its performance. Even if you hate it that's still useful information to me, and you could even publish an article about it!"
"W-well... sure. I guess..."
The Slime jumps up and down in place, pleased at your noncommital answer. A familiar pressure builds in your soul— but you're more distracted by this memory question. Exactly... how hard would it be for a malicious VRMMO to directly modify your memories? Was that what happened with Meimi?
"Excellent! Well, just pick something from the list. They're all scrapped SAO skills so it shouldn't be outside of what you're already used to. I'm always looking for feedback from people who aren't already hardcore fans - feel free to PM me anytime!"
You dumbly nod as a menu of options opens up to you. An... interesting spread. You've even heard of some of these before...
FRIDAY - April 19th, 2025
Velvet Room
More? You will find it difficult to hold this many Personas in your heart.
Once you bring me one more seed, I shall expand your tolerance for more souls.
But please, let us not discuss work. Our meal goes unattended.
...
...
Do you have any regrets, contractor?
Ever wished for another chance?
JUSTICE should beware of such wishes.
The wish to change what has come to pass,
is the most dangerous of them all.
To condemn a world to nonexistence,
simply for a chance at a better future?
Take heed of the turning wheel.
There is nothing it cannot defeat.
Eventually, TIME strangles all of us.
I can barely stomach this. It brings forth such unpleasant memories.
...
The only way to turn back the clock is to break the world.
But we need not worry.
The JUSTICE will never behold her Other Side.
For we shall take from her HEAVEN.
[ ] Magdalene
Now, therefore, not only will ye reign with me, but all men who shall receive the mystery of the Ineffable, will be fellow-kings with me in my kingdom. And I am they, and they are I. But my throne will tower over them. And because ye will suffer sorrows in the world beyond all men, until ye herald forth all the words which I shall speak unto you, your thrones shall be joined to mine in my kingdom.
On this account I have said unto you aforetime: 'Where I shall be, there will be also my twelve ministers.' But Mary Magdalene and John, the virgin, will tower over all my disciples and over all men who shall receive the mysteries in the Ineffable. And they will be on my right and on my left. And I am they, and they are I.
-Excerpt from Apocryphal Gnostic Text, Pithis Sophia
STR: Rank F (0 Dice)
MAG: Rank D (2 Dice)
AGI: Rank D (2 Dice)
VIT: Rank D (2 Dice)
CHT: Rank C (3 Dice)
Weakness: Pierce, Blunt
Resist: Bless, Curse, Fire
Skills:
Kouha: Bless magic attack.
Hama: Attempts to disconnect target player.
Dia: Heals target player. Less effective when used on yourself. (Rolls CHT, disadvantage when used on self) Heals 1 HP + Roll result.
[ ] Yudhisthira
The Yaksha asked,—'Who is truly happy? What is most wonderful? What is the path? And what is the news? Answer these four questions of mine and let thy dead brothers revive.'
Yudhishthira answered,—'O amphibious creature, a man who cooketh in his own house, on the fifth or the sixth part of the day, with scanty vegetables, but who is not in debt and who stirreth not from home, is truly happy.
Day after day countless creatures are going to the abode of Yama, yet those that remain behind believe themselves to be immortal. What can be more wonderful than this?
Argument leads to no certain conclusion, the Srutis are different from one another; there is not even one Rishi whose opinion can be accepted by all; the truth about religion and duty is hid in caves: therefore, that alone is the path along which the great have trod.
This world full of ignorance is like a pan. The sun is fire, the days and nights are fuel. The months and the seasons constitute the wooden ladle. Time is the cook that is cooking all creatures in that pan (with such aids); this is the news.'
-Excerpt from Mahabharata
STR: Rank C (3 Dice)
MAG: Rank C (3 Dice)
AGI: Rank D (2 Dice)
VIT: Rank D (2 Dice)
CHT: Rank D (2 Dice)
Weakness: Ailment, Ice
Resist: Bless, Pierce, Wind
Skills:
Tarukaja: Augments Physical Power.
Makakaja: Augments Magic Power.
Kouha: Bless Magic Attack
Shooting Star: Pierce Sword Skill
[ ] Judge Bao
The essence of governing is to have a cleansed heart,
The strategy of life is to follow upright ways.
An elegant stem will eventually turn into a pillar,
Refined steel cannot be bent into a hook.
Rats and sparrows overjoy when the granary is full,
Rabbits and foxes worry when the grassland dies.
History books contain teachings by those deceased:
Don't leave your descendants with only embarrassment!
-Poem attributed to Judge Bao Zheng
STR: Rank D (2 Dice)
MAG: Rank F (0 Dice)
AGI: Rank D (2 Dice)
VIT: Rank D (2 Dice)
CHT: Rank D (2 Dice)
Weakness: Pierce, Curse
Resist: All Elemental Magic (excludes status effects and Curse)
Skills:
Radiant Arc: A Slash/Bless Sword Skill
Patra: Suppresses a Status Effect on Ally. Must roll CHT if targeting a hostile or neutral entity.
Avalanche: A Blunt Sword Skill
...
...
I have now tasted many worlds, many seeds.
The wishes of dreamers, of mothers.
Of regrets and simple greed.
But NATURE desires only a quiet, comfortable life.
A safe life. An unassailable life.
He can teach, he can create.
But he can never lose.
It seems the greatest perversions
Come from the dreams of happy men.
How soft and sticky. It coats your teeth and refuses to wash away.
...
Is Creation such an enjoyable task?
That a man should seek it both in this life and the next?
Perhaps your world would last longer without such dreams.
NATURE shall have to be satisfied with his mundane happiness.
For we shall take from him HEAVEN.
[ ] A Bao A Qu
At each level the creature's colour becomes more intense, its shape approaches perfection, and the bluish form it gives off is more brilliant. But it achieves its ultimate form only at the topmost step, when the climber is a person who has attained Nirvana and whose acts cast no shadows. Otherwise, the A Bao A Qu hangs back before reaching the top, as if paralysed, its body incomplete, its blue growing paler, and its glow hesitant. The creature suffers when it cannot come to completion, and its moan is a barely audible sound, something like the rustling of silk.
-From Book of Imaginary Beings, by Jorge Luis Borges
STR: Rank E (1 Dice)
MAG: Rank E (1 Dice)
AGI: Rank F (0 Dice)
VIT: Rank C (3 Dice)
CHT: Rank C (3 Dice)
Weakness: Slash, Fire
Resist: Blunt, Elec, Ice, Wind
Skills:
Makakaja: Augments Magic Power.
Dia: Heals target player. Less effective when used on yourself. (Rolls CHT, disadvantage when used on self) Heals 1 HP + Roll result.
Recarmdra: Lose X HP. Heal target by X HP. No rolls are used. Can be used to revive RETIRED allies that you can reach.
[ ] Khodumodumo
"Where is this thing, Mother?"
"Come out and see, my child."
So they both went out and climbed to the top of the wall surrounding the calves' kraal, and she pointed to the pass, saying, "That object which is filling the nek, as big as a mountain, that is Khodumodumo."
-Myths and Legends of the Bantu, by Alice Werner
STR: Rank B (4 Dice)
MAG: Rank F (0 Dice)
AGI: Rank F (0 Dice)
VIT: Rank A (5 Dice)
CHT: Rank F (0 Dice)
Weakness: Slash, Fire, Ice, Elec
Resist: Blunt, Pierce, Wind
Skills:
Cyclone: Blunt/Wind Widespread Sword Skill
Triangular: Pierce Widespread Sword Skill
Horizontal Arc: Slash Widespread Sword Skill
[ ] Hundun
How pleasant were our bodies in the days of Chaos,
Needing neither to eat or piss!
Who came along with his drill
And bored us full of these nine holes?
Morning after morning we must dress and eat;
Year after year, fret over taxes.
A thousand of us scrambling for a penny,
We knock our heads together and yell for dear life.
- Poem by Han-shan
STR: Rank D (2 Dice)
MAG: Rank C (3 Dice)
AGI: Rank F (0 Dice)
VIT: Rank B (4 Dice)
CHT: Rank D (2 Dice)
Weakness: Slash, Pierce
Resist: Ailment
Skills:
Bufu: Ice Magic Attack
Dormin: Attempts to put target to sleep. Works on yourself.
Fogna: Releases an obscuring fog over the battlefield
AN: In summary, please select the following:
>Pick a Unique Skill gift. Or reject one.
>Pick a Persona for the JUSTICE arcana.
>Pick a Persona for the NATURE arcana.
As always approval voting is fine.
This is a NO PLAN vote, each section will be counted separately. If you make it a plan, that's fine, but I will separate it out for the purposes of vote counting.
Also just for fun if you pick a Unique Skill give Lux a special Title. Make sure it sounds cool when being shouted by your enemies! This isn't going to be voted on, the QM will just pick whatever he thinks is the most chuuni.
Afternoon
There were many things you hated about SAO. Spies, Laughing Coffin, PKers... but most everything you hated about SAO could be wrapped up in one word: players.
Take them out of the equation? Well in Aincrad the PvE experience could be... something special. Fun, even. You weren't a Clearer, so you were largely insulated from the stresses of front-line battle against unknown enemies. Your experience with PvE was to pick a zone far under your level, check the guides, and enjoy the closest thing SAO had to entertainment.
Even then, there was one very special category of mob that was the bane of your existence. The bane of all female players.
Tentacle monsters.
They came in all flavors and sizes. Mushroom tentacle monsters on Floor 6. Jellyfish tentacle monsters on Floor 29. Plant tentacle monsters on Floor 47. Slime tentacle monsters in literally every labyrinth. One dungeon on the 31st floor even had skeleton tentacles.
You've heard the arguments. They were classic designs. A grappler-type mob was a logical addition to a melee-focused game. When you figure out the trick they weren't that hard to beat.
You have a better theory. Kayaba was a pervert, and he trained SAO's AI to also be a pervert. You've seen some of the Elf NPCs, the evidence in your opinion was overwhelming.
So you are not surprised in the slightest that ALO, a game that heavily reuses SAO systems, would feature tentacle monsters. But this... well, this was ridiculous.
Isn't this game supposed to be about Norse mythology? Did the Vikings have elephant hentai monsters?
A giant 20-meter-tall tentacle monster shrieks and attacks a Salamander, ripping him in two with an explosion of pixelated gore. The bleach-white monster has dozens of tentacles, each as long as its entire body, with one prominent trunk three times as thick as the rest. You see it crush a rock with one errant swing of its massive trunk, leaving a deep gouge in the stone.
On top of this, the beast's six eyes glow an eerie green, darting uncontrollably, searching for its next prey. The monsters were attacking everything, lone mobs, players, trees, rocks, everything. And what's worse there were hundreds of them.
I'll bet 500 MistCoins those things are programmed to dangle girls upside down by their ankles.
That or outright grope them. For now, all the players in immediate view of you appeared to be male, so that hypothesis would have to remain untested because no way were you going down there to find out.
"«Raphael», it's fine. Just keep increasing the spawn rate."
A voice, calm but tinged with a faint hint of anxiety echoes forth from the hilltop. You had added the GM to your friends list on the vague promise of some in-game reward, though that was just a side benefit to simply speaking with him further. Satoru Mikami struck you as a reasonable person, though likely not high up in RECT's food chain.
"How the hell did the players even find Urðr much less kill her? Ugh, forget it. Just alert me if Verðandi and Skuld awaken."
When you messaged Mikami he asked if you could come to him in «Jötunheimr», ALO's high-level raiding zone, as he was far too busy to come to your location. The zone was an underground dungeon so flight was completely restricted, with Spriggans and Imps managing just a few seconds of air time at best. Conveniently there was an entrance right on the «Alne Plains», minutes away from the «World Tree» itself.
As a non-instanced field dungeon you expect «Jötunheimr» to be populated with hardcore players, seeing is another matter entirely. You heard some rumors in town already— the whole zone was completely overrun by «Beast Type Evil Gods», those tentacle monsters currently spawning on masse. Although normally the mobs dropped almost nothing useful a recent quest was offering massive rewards for hunting them down - namely «Excalibur» of all things. Guess yours was some kind of duplicate.
"Oh, I just had an idea! «Raphael» connect to the area announcement system."
As you round the hill you see the GM, in the flesh... for a manner of speaking. The head of the GMs, «Rimuru» the slime wiggles on the hilltop, half hidden in a field of weeds, speaking to someone you couldn't see. Why was the GM Avatar a slime? Almost all the GMs had slime avatars, though the reason behind the choice wasn't clear to you. You guess it was because they were all perverts.
"ATTENTION ALL PLAYERS! DUE TO A RECENT EXPLOIT, WE ARE ANNOUNCING A SERVER HOTFIX! BEAST-TYPE EVIL GOD MONSTERS WILL NO LONGER OFFER SKILL EXP, SO PLEASE STOP KILLING THEM!"
The GM avatar's voice booms over the battlefield. The players don't seem to care beyond a few scattered boos being shouted his way. All around you, players scramble to corral the mobs, while others prepare magic spells to burn the creatures to ashes. Some players run straight into the midst of the monsters, blades drawn, though they usually get squeezed to death in turn.
"Hello?" you timidly shout. "Satoru... Mikami-san? Were you talking to someone?"
With a wiggle of recognition the Slime... turns around. Well, more like its eye slits just slide along the top of its head and flow into its backside. The maneuver is oddly unsettling, and you wonder how Mikami doesn't get VR nausea controlling such an obviously inhuman avatar.
"Hey, it's the school reporter. I'm talking with «Raphael»! That's just the system AI. Anyways sorry for making you come here, I've been a bit too busy to move around. As you can see there's a bit of a situation here."
"It's no problem Mikami-san," you say, giving a polite bow. "I want to apologize for showing up unannounced the other day."
"No problem, no problem! I hope you don't mind if I work while we talk. Have you logged in much since our last talk? Don't worry, I'm not going to look at your logs or anything invasive like that. I just want to hear your impressions on ALO."
You nod, maintaining the veneer of a concerned SAO survivor. As always, the truth was the best foundation for any lie. "It's just as amazing as SAO. My problems with ALO never had to do with the game itself Mikami-san, mostly how it can affect its players." You nod in the direction of the players currently engaged in open warfare with the tentacle monsters. It's an outright feeding frenzy down there.
"Ah, well... this is an event or something like that. Still trying to figure out what happened, a big blank in the logs, but a quest NPC got assassinated by the players before everything was ready."
"Really? Aren't you a GM Mikami-san? Can't you just... fix things?"
The slime gives you a... smile? Its eyes at least look mirthful. "Please call me Rimuru or «That Slime!» when I'm on the job Lux! And it's not quite that simple— normally if something goes wrong I'd just rollback the servers but the boss isn't having it. 'Go deal with it yourself' he says, the guy never lets me do rollbacks. Can't argue with the boss, can I? So I'm just trying to disincentive the players from killing them."
"Disincentivize them...?" you ask, watching two Gnome characters get strangled to death by the tentacle monsters. "Why not just make the mobs invincible or just close the dungeon? And they're mobs, who cares if they die?"
"I see you trying to fish for quest spoilers! Obvious mod action ruins immersion and the SEED AI really, really hates heavy-handed stuff like that. If all the Evil God monsters get killed it triggers this insane quest chain we were planning for the next update." Rimuru takes a second between his sentences to rattle off a sequence of spawn requests before continuing.
"I don't mind if it activates early, but uh, I'm trying not to let the quest advance just yet since I'm still trying to do some bug squashing right now. I'm still not sure how it happened but one of the main NPCs got killed, and the only one who can respawn her is the boss who's too busy to do anything about it right now. Once all the Evil Gods die the next step in the chain triggers and there goes my window of investigation, so I'm just messing with the spawn rates to drag this out."
Well the stupid NPC attacked me first!
A sudden thought crosses your mind. "Rimuru, can't you just check the logs to find out who killed their master?"
The slime shakes its body vigorously. "There's a HUGE blank in the logs, so I have no idea what happened. Apparently, some players initiated a forced disconnect but the logs are so corrupted I can't even tell who was there!"
This Slime likes the sound of his voice.
You can use this. "Rimiru? I have to say this is very concerning to me. It sounds like you're losing control of your own game. You remember what happened the last time something like this happened, don't you?"
The Slime looks at you in silence. For a moment you think it's going to ask what the hell you were talking about, but instead, Rimuru lets out a long sigh.
"Yeah, yeah—you're right, that was a real mess. It's why I take bug squashing so seriously, we don't want another GBN meltdown. Wait a minute, are asking about that or SAO? That was the work of a single madman—"
"No, I know plenty enough about SAO. The meltdown scenario, can't you see similarities between what's happening here and that incident?" Add a touch of cold reading to an open-ended question, it's the best way you've found to get information out of cooperative contacts. You don't even know what GBN even stands for, but you expect Rimuru will come to his own conclusions.
"Clearly you've done your research. I can offer you a bit more of a nuanced answer if you'll hear it. SEED-based MMOs like ALO use an AI system to substitute the work of what would normally be hundreds of moderators and designers— but it doesn't just generate content based on what designers feed it. Once it runs long enough it starts taking player input and expectations into account. You know, stuff like debuff timers running out just before a killing blow, last-minute level-ups, speed boosts when moving to defend an ally— kino moments! Taken to its extreme it'll respond to player behavior with special quests and NPCs. This can happen even without the GMs realizing."
"And then things get out of control..."
"Right! GBN's problem was that it required a real-life physical item: a Gunpla figure. You can't just hack an Amusphere, but you can hack a plastic figure, so some idiots figured out how to make these decals that would trick the game into giving them bigger stats. There was also this NPC that a group of players wanted to keep around SO MUCH the SEED AI gave it special powers to avoid GM tools. To make a long story short the streams got crossed, raid bosses got bugged, zones became broken, and even the in-game logout feature got disabled for a bit— had to close down the game for months. Got a drinking buddy that was working himself to death for months trying to fix it all."
Okay. Self-reminder to not touch that game with a 10 foot stick. But if Rimuru was already comparing it...
"So you're saying... ALO is going down the same route?"
"No, no, of course not! All I'm saying is that bugs should be taken very seriously and investigated fully cause you never know what might happen if you let the SEED AI do all the work without supervision. It's why I'm down here trying to delay the quest progression instead of stopping it— there's a reason most problems are fixed with a server rollback. I GM nuke one problematic NPC and the SEED will just think it's part of some dumb event and make a whole questline out of it!"
It's a surprising limitation of SEED-based VRMMOs. It was so easy to make with the AI creation tools that many developers didn't exactly know how their own games worked.
Rimuru continues, "I've been doing my best to check every nook and cranny of ALO to find any issues. If I can patch the holes early enough, I won't have to deal with a runaway content-generation engine. Anyways you seem pretty interested in this stuff, are you looking to write for MMO Tomorrow when you graduate?"
"...Huh? Uh, sure. I think the publication is a bit too industry positive, but it's popular for a reason," you say, hoping your vague statement wouldn't be contradicted by anything. You don't know what it's like now but MMO Today, the predecessor of MMO Tomorrow, was a site you frequently followed before you were locked up in SAO. "I see the appeal in VRMMOs but too few reporters touch on the societal implications of prolonged usage, so I'm always interested in the perspective of both players and creators," you say, talking completely out of your ass.
"Hahaha, well, you certainly have a knack for getting others to talk...but you'd better watch out for the hardcore players who read MMORPG magazines if you're going the critical route," he says, shaking his slime body in amusement. "Best use a pen name so you don't get death threats."
Ahh, great. You just bullshitted your way into becoming an amateur journalist.
Not even a lie, you're writing a freaking report later.
"Uh, thanks for the conversation, Rimuru. I guess I'll get going?"
Ask for the reward! That's why we came!
I'm not going to do something so crass! We're here for information!
Completely mistaking the cause behind your visible annoyance, the slime laughs, body wiggling inwards as ripples spread out from its center. "Hey, why the long face? I know that look. Now, now, no need to be embarrassed, I promised you some loot after all... If you care enough about VRMMOs to go all the way to RECT for research then I bet you're secretly quite a gamer yourself. Don't worry, I'll be generous."
The sudden compliment catches you off guard. "...You're right, I do enjoy games," you say, half truth and half lie, "And I want to be able to write about them objectively so I always make it a rule to investigate in person."
"Good, good! I'm touched to see a young adult working so hard despite having to live through SAO. Normally I just give people gift packages or stuff like that. Oh, how about a «Private Pixie»? It was available as a pre-order gift!"
The slime... distends, the blue ball growing... elongating as a bottomless chasm opens in Rimuru's body. Before you can protest a sickly wind carrying a thick acrid black smoke pours forth, enveloping the hilltop. A massive pillar of darkness rises at incredible speed, knocking you backward.
As soon as it starts, the column abruptly stops and begins to shrink. The smoke dissipates, clearing the air of all traces of dark smoke, a lone red-haired pixie soaked head to toe in blue... slime juice shivers on the hilltop.
"Uh, I'll pass, thanks."
"Yeah, nobody ever wants the pixies. Can't blame me for trying to offload a few of them. Every single one I've given away in events ends up being sent back."
"-andthentherootsofYggdrasilwereseveredandnonotthestomachagainidon'twanttogobackitsmellslike-" Rimuru swallows the Pixie in one gulp, the slime recompressing into the small ball shape again. "All right, how about this instead? If you want, why don't you try a new system I've been workshopping? You can even write about it!"
"A new system?" you answer, curious to see where he's going with this.
"You know what's ALO's biggest complaint?"
"...the crazy LARPers?"
"I mean the biggest gameplay complaint!"
"The... tutorial pixies being too annoying?"
"Eh, a close second place. No, the biggest issue is with the flight controls. We want flight to be easy, but some players just... never pick it up, you know? The flight controller helps with that but ideally, we want all players to be flying naturally."
You nod, it makes sense. Although you found it very intuitive, Meimi had a lot of trouble. Trying to manipulate an organ that doesn't exist in real life is a challenge, and the worst part is that it's a magic organ, so you don't even get proper physical feedback.
"Now you can eventually learn to fly in ALO, but have you ever thought about what that means? Teaching a man to fly is like trying to teach a slug how to walk, it's a set of new limbs for crying out loud. Maybe if had years of practice or had hardcoded genetic instructions like some birds it'd be possible, but for a regular human? Impossible. But somehow most good players figure out flight in a few weeks. That's only possible thanks to the research of RECT Progress into memory learning."
Sounds very ominous.
"Ah, sorry, still speaking company language. Think of it like this. Learning stuff is hard, you have to practice, fail, all sorts of stuff that can get annoying very quickly. What if instead, you could just learn... suddenly? Like a game character? Have an NPC grant you a title and then suddenly you're bigger, stronger... and smarter. It's what my boss has been working on, automatic direct memory learning through VR."
"You're not just a game company?"
"Please, RECT Progress is a big company! Beyond my Moderation and Curation team, we have hordes of data analysts and plenty of sections working on advancing the scope of VR tech. Our boss, President Sugou, is a leading worldwide expert on the emergent field of cognitive psience with a specialization in memory theory."
Cognitive Psience. You recall hearing the term bandied around a ton before SAO's launch, Kayaba was an early pioneer in applying it to VR. But they didn't cover Cognitive Psience in class yet, it had something to do with brains and something called fluctlights. It's still over your head.
"RECT Progress is best described as a full-service VR conglomerate, to say nothing of our parent company. We dabble in everything, from games to productivity software, to education. We have our fingers in every pie."
Sounds like one of those pies is fleshy, wrinkly, and pink.
"...so you're working on... memory modification? False identities and stuff?"
"Uh, nothing so ominous! First off the higher-level stuff is above my paygrade but it's much more benign than you think. Take, uh, ALO's magic system, it's based on a pastiche of old norse and a made-up language," says Rimuru as he flashes a light spell into existence through ALO's runic magic. "As you level up in a magic skill you comprehend and know more runic power words, which expands your spell repertoire. But the players are still learning the language - the system is essentially teaching them with every skill up, inscribing it into their fluctlight. Or take my slime body! I'm not just a human crawling around the floor. When I'm in this body I AM a slime. The system is simply changing my cognition - or you could say memories - so that it's natural to me."
"Wait so you're saying the game is... changing my memories?" you ask, horrified.
"Don't make it sound so dystopian. All it's doing is making it so that flight is a bit more natural and to help you comprehend old norse. It's all very low-level. We're testing something a bit more advanced though. Look, think of it like this. Wouldn't your life be easier if you could learn a skill IRL with the same ease you do so in game? Buy a VR game and then suddenly you know how to speak English? Learn piano in a single afternoon? What if every human on earth knew how to provide first aid? That's President Sugou's ultimate goal. You should check out some of his interviews when you get the chance, man's got vision."
Rimuru shakes in excitement. "But that's still a ways away. Right now, the best we can do is some in game stuff, which brings me to my offer: «Titles»! it's a new rewards system I'm planning the next update but I need testers. These aren't skills I can just offer a high-level player - it'd totally upset the PvP balance - but for a low-level dabbler like you with VRMMO experience it'd be perfect."
"«Titles»? How would it work?"
"I'll assign a special name to your avatar that will enable special skills. I'd love to say it's all original but it's just some extra data we scraped off the SAO servers, unimplemented features really. The title will essentially imprint the skill onto your fluctlight and grant basic proficiency, it's pretty similar to how a lot of high level combat related Skills functioned in SAO. With a just little practice, you can learn a new skill as easy as flying!"
"Wait, wait," you say, shaking your head. "You're saying you can teach me a new skill just by assigning a title? Not just enabling game features but teaching me something I've never done before!?"
Rimuru looks at you with a rather puzzled expression on his blob body. "...Kinda? It's less teaching than modifying your cognition so that something you think is impossible suddenly becomes possible— and THEN teaching you. It's nothing new. Insect Site uses similar features to help players acclimate into suddenly becoming 2-meter tall praying mantises. Cat Cafe literally turns you into a cat, tail and all. And ALO already does this to make flight more manageable. This is just applied cognitive psience."
Don't overthink it, guy's offering us free power. Your mind is already a lost cause.
"Look, it's no big deal. I just want to see how well these titles function, so I'll offer you one on the condition you report back to me about its performance. Even if you hate it that's still useful information to me, and you could even publish an article about it!"
"W-well... sure. I guess..."
I AM THOU, THOU ART I.
THE SUPPORT OF BIRDS IN THE SKY.
THE PROTECTION OF FISHES IN THE SEA.
MAN INHERITS THE EARTH.
YET NATURE CLAIMS THE REST OF CREATION.
TO GRANT YOU POWER TO DESTROY THE HEAVENS
THE SUPPORT OF BIRDS IN THE SKY.
THE PROTECTION OF FISHES IN THE SEA.
MAN INHERITS THE EARTH.
YET NATURE CLAIMS THE REST OF CREATION.
TO GRANT YOU POWER TO DESTROY THE HEAVENS
"Excellent! Well, just pick something from the list. They're all scrapped SAO skills so it shouldn't be outside of what you're already used to. I'm always looking for feedback from people who aren't already hardcore fans - feel free to PM me anytime!"
You dumbly nod as a menu of options opens up to you. An... interesting spread. You've even heard of some of these before...
[ ] [Nope] Uh, you know what? I've changed my mind. Thanks but no thanks! I don't think I'm gonna play ALO much anyways!
>Delays next SL rank
>The GM will grant you significant narrative leeway in avoiding mod attention and hiding from RECT Progress' notice.
[ ] [True Critical Strike] A high-risk high-reward ability that promises to end fights in a single strike. Interesting.
Unlock Skill: «True Critical Strike». To use this ability you must declare in PLAN before activating any offensive attack. Rather than rolling Xd6, a SINGLE 1d6 is rolled. That result is then multiplied by the number of dice you normally would've rolled, turning it into an all-or-nothing attack. Gain DISADVANTAGE for the next 2 Defensive/Reaction rolls you perform.
[ ] [Holy Sword] You've seen this ability before. There must be a reason Kayaba Akihiko favored it so.
Unlock Skill «Holy Sword». Allows you to equip an offhand shield. Additionally, whenever you succeed on a VIT defensive roll, any extra dice over the DC will be dealt to your opponent as DAMAGE.
(Special interaction when encountering a certain FOOL)
[ ] [Dual Blades] Blade into blade, strike into strike. The style of a lonely hero you've grown to admire.
Unlock Skill «Dual Blades». Allows you to equip two weapons (2 Swords or Sword and Wand). Grants you ONE MORE. Whenever you hit an enemy's weakness for the first time (ie once per individual weakness) make a free attack (enemy still gets a defense roll but cannot counterattack). The free attack will be dependent on your weapon choice (melee skill if 2 Swords are equipped, magic skill if Sword and Wand are equipped). As the activation conditions are the same as SMIRK the ONE MORE attack is usually made with ADVANTAGE.
(Special interaction when encountering a certain STAR)
[ ] Hey, PoH was right! The skill really does exist! Too bad, he was only like... 40 murders away from unlocking it?
Unlock: «Darkness Blade». When in combat with an enemy PLAYER dealing 2 or more damage in a single strike grants you +1 ADVANTAGE on the next attack, stacking with other sources. When in combat performing the Last Hit on an enemy PLAYER will allow you to perform one free melee attack on the nearest opponent with ADVANTAGE (enemy still gets a defense roll but cannot counterattack).
(Special interaction when encountering certain acquaintances)
>Skills will increase in strength with usage.
>Delays next SL rank
>The GM will grant you significant narrative leeway in avoiding mod attention and hiding from RECT Progress' notice.
[ ] [True Critical Strike] A high-risk high-reward ability that promises to end fights in a single strike. Interesting.
Unlock Skill: «True Critical Strike». To use this ability you must declare in PLAN before activating any offensive attack. Rather than rolling Xd6, a SINGLE 1d6 is rolled. That result is then multiplied by the number of dice you normally would've rolled, turning it into an all-or-nothing attack. Gain DISADVANTAGE for the next 2 Defensive/Reaction rolls you perform.
[ ] [Holy Sword] You've seen this ability before. There must be a reason Kayaba Akihiko favored it so.
Unlock Skill «Holy Sword». Allows you to equip an offhand shield. Additionally, whenever you succeed on a VIT defensive roll, any extra dice over the DC will be dealt to your opponent as DAMAGE.
(Special interaction when encountering a certain FOOL)
[ ] [Dual Blades] Blade into blade, strike into strike. The style of a lonely hero you've grown to admire.
Unlock Skill «Dual Blades». Allows you to equip two weapons (2 Swords or Sword and Wand). Grants you ONE MORE. Whenever you hit an enemy's weakness for the first time (ie once per individual weakness) make a free attack (enemy still gets a defense roll but cannot counterattack). The free attack will be dependent on your weapon choice (melee skill if 2 Swords are equipped, magic skill if Sword and Wand are equipped). As the activation conditions are the same as SMIRK the ONE MORE attack is usually made with ADVANTAGE.
(Special interaction when encountering a certain STAR)
[ ] Hey, PoH was right! The skill really does exist! Too bad, he was only like... 40 murders away from unlocking it?
Unlock: «Darkness Blade». When in combat with an enemy PLAYER dealing 2 or more damage in a single strike grants you +1 ADVANTAGE on the next attack, stacking with other sources. When in combat performing the Last Hit on an enemy PLAYER will allow you to perform one free melee attack on the nearest opponent with ADVANTAGE (enemy still gets a defense roll but cannot counterattack).
(Special interaction when encountering certain acquaintances)
>Skills will increase in strength with usage.
FRIDAY - April 19th, 2025
Velvet Room
More? You will find it difficult to hold this many Personas in your heart.
Once you bring me one more seed, I shall expand your tolerance for more souls.
But please, let us not discuss work. Our meal goes unattended.
...
...
Do you have any regrets, contractor?
Ever wished for another chance?
JUSTICE should beware of such wishes.
The wish to change what has come to pass,
is the most dangerous of them all.
To condemn a world to nonexistence,
simply for a chance at a better future?
Take heed of the turning wheel.
There is nothing it cannot defeat.
Eventually, TIME strangles all of us.
I can barely stomach this. It brings forth such unpleasant memories.
...
The only way to turn back the clock is to break the world.
But we need not worry.
The JUSTICE will never behold her Other Side.
For we shall take from her HEAVEN.
[ ] Magdalene
Now, therefore, not only will ye reign with me, but all men who shall receive the mystery of the Ineffable, will be fellow-kings with me in my kingdom. And I am they, and they are I. But my throne will tower over them. And because ye will suffer sorrows in the world beyond all men, until ye herald forth all the words which I shall speak unto you, your thrones shall be joined to mine in my kingdom.
On this account I have said unto you aforetime: 'Where I shall be, there will be also my twelve ministers.' But Mary Magdalene and John, the virgin, will tower over all my disciples and over all men who shall receive the mysteries in the Ineffable. And they will be on my right and on my left. And I am they, and they are I.
-Excerpt from Apocryphal Gnostic Text, Pithis Sophia
STR: Rank F (0 Dice)
MAG: Rank D (2 Dice)
AGI: Rank D (2 Dice)
VIT: Rank D (2 Dice)
CHT: Rank C (3 Dice)
Weakness: Pierce, Blunt
Resist: Bless, Curse, Fire
Skills:
Kouha: Bless magic attack.
Hama: Attempts to disconnect target player.
Dia: Heals target player. Less effective when used on yourself. (Rolls CHT, disadvantage when used on self) Heals 1 HP + Roll result.
[ ] Yudhisthira
The Yaksha asked,—'Who is truly happy? What is most wonderful? What is the path? And what is the news? Answer these four questions of mine and let thy dead brothers revive.'
Yudhishthira answered,—'O amphibious creature, a man who cooketh in his own house, on the fifth or the sixth part of the day, with scanty vegetables, but who is not in debt and who stirreth not from home, is truly happy.
Day after day countless creatures are going to the abode of Yama, yet those that remain behind believe themselves to be immortal. What can be more wonderful than this?
Argument leads to no certain conclusion, the Srutis are different from one another; there is not even one Rishi whose opinion can be accepted by all; the truth about religion and duty is hid in caves: therefore, that alone is the path along which the great have trod.
This world full of ignorance is like a pan. The sun is fire, the days and nights are fuel. The months and the seasons constitute the wooden ladle. Time is the cook that is cooking all creatures in that pan (with such aids); this is the news.'
-Excerpt from Mahabharata
STR: Rank C (3 Dice)
MAG: Rank C (3 Dice)
AGI: Rank D (2 Dice)
VIT: Rank D (2 Dice)
CHT: Rank D (2 Dice)
Weakness: Ailment, Ice
Resist: Bless, Pierce, Wind
Skills:
Tarukaja: Augments Physical Power.
Makakaja: Augments Magic Power.
Kouha: Bless Magic Attack
Shooting Star: Pierce Sword Skill
[ ] Judge Bao
The essence of governing is to have a cleansed heart,
The strategy of life is to follow upright ways.
An elegant stem will eventually turn into a pillar,
Refined steel cannot be bent into a hook.
Rats and sparrows overjoy when the granary is full,
Rabbits and foxes worry when the grassland dies.
History books contain teachings by those deceased:
Don't leave your descendants with only embarrassment!
-Poem attributed to Judge Bao Zheng
STR: Rank D (2 Dice)
MAG: Rank F (0 Dice)
AGI: Rank D (2 Dice)
VIT: Rank D (2 Dice)
CHT: Rank D (2 Dice)
Weakness: Pierce, Curse
Resist: All Elemental Magic (excludes status effects and Curse)
Skills:
Radiant Arc: A Slash/Bless Sword Skill
Patra: Suppresses a Status Effect on Ally. Must roll CHT if targeting a hostile or neutral entity.
Avalanche: A Blunt Sword Skill
...
I have now tasted many worlds, many seeds.
The wishes of dreamers, of mothers.
Of regrets and simple greed.
But NATURE desires only a quiet, comfortable life.
A safe life. An unassailable life.
He can teach, he can create.
But he can never lose.
It seems the greatest perversions
Come from the dreams of happy men.
How soft and sticky. It coats your teeth and refuses to wash away.
...
Is Creation such an enjoyable task?
That a man should seek it both in this life and the next?
Perhaps your world would last longer without such dreams.
NATURE shall have to be satisfied with his mundane happiness.
For we shall take from him HEAVEN.
[ ] A Bao A Qu
At each level the creature's colour becomes more intense, its shape approaches perfection, and the bluish form it gives off is more brilliant. But it achieves its ultimate form only at the topmost step, when the climber is a person who has attained Nirvana and whose acts cast no shadows. Otherwise, the A Bao A Qu hangs back before reaching the top, as if paralysed, its body incomplete, its blue growing paler, and its glow hesitant. The creature suffers when it cannot come to completion, and its moan is a barely audible sound, something like the rustling of silk.
-From Book of Imaginary Beings, by Jorge Luis Borges
STR: Rank E (1 Dice)
MAG: Rank E (1 Dice)
AGI: Rank F (0 Dice)
VIT: Rank C (3 Dice)
CHT: Rank C (3 Dice)
Weakness: Slash, Fire
Resist: Blunt, Elec, Ice, Wind
Skills:
Makakaja: Augments Magic Power.
Dia: Heals target player. Less effective when used on yourself. (Rolls CHT, disadvantage when used on self) Heals 1 HP + Roll result.
Recarmdra: Lose X HP. Heal target by X HP. No rolls are used. Can be used to revive RETIRED allies that you can reach.
[ ] Khodumodumo
"Where is this thing, Mother?"
"Come out and see, my child."
So they both went out and climbed to the top of the wall surrounding the calves' kraal, and she pointed to the pass, saying, "That object which is filling the nek, as big as a mountain, that is Khodumodumo."
-Myths and Legends of the Bantu, by Alice Werner
STR: Rank B (4 Dice)
MAG: Rank F (0 Dice)
AGI: Rank F (0 Dice)
VIT: Rank A (5 Dice)
CHT: Rank F (0 Dice)
Weakness: Slash, Fire, Ice, Elec
Resist: Blunt, Pierce, Wind
Skills:
Cyclone: Blunt/Wind Widespread Sword Skill
Triangular: Pierce Widespread Sword Skill
Horizontal Arc: Slash Widespread Sword Skill
[ ] Hundun
How pleasant were our bodies in the days of Chaos,
Needing neither to eat or piss!
Who came along with his drill
And bored us full of these nine holes?
Morning after morning we must dress and eat;
Year after year, fret over taxes.
A thousand of us scrambling for a penny,
We knock our heads together and yell for dear life.
- Poem by Han-shan
STR: Rank D (2 Dice)
MAG: Rank C (3 Dice)
AGI: Rank F (0 Dice)
VIT: Rank B (4 Dice)
CHT: Rank D (2 Dice)
Weakness: Slash, Pierce
Resist: Ailment
Skills:
Bufu: Ice Magic Attack
Dormin: Attempts to put target to sleep. Works on yourself.
Fogna: Releases an obscuring fog over the battlefield
AN: In summary, please select the following:
>Pick a Unique Skill gift. Or reject one.
>Pick a Persona for the JUSTICE arcana.
>Pick a Persona for the NATURE arcana.
As always approval voting is fine.
This is a NO PLAN vote, each section will be counted separately. If you make it a plan, that's fine, but I will separate it out for the purposes of vote counting.
Also just for fun if you pick a Unique Skill give Lux a special Title. Make sure it sounds cool when being shouted by your enemies! This isn't going to be voted on, the QM will just pick whatever he thinks is the most chuuni.
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afreaknamedpete
High-Dimensional Overseer
- Location
- Above the Sequences
- Pronouns
- HE/HIM/THEY
The AI tried its best! Fingers still suck across the board. (I'm sorry Magdalene, I couldn't make it look right so I gave up)
Most of the time on the Argo picture was spent trying to de-Sinon it. Trying to generate Argo usually just makes a blonde Sinon like 90% of the time.
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afreaknamedpete
High-Dimensional Overseer
- Location
- Above the Sequences
- Pronouns
- HE/HIM/THEY
I think Argo is a victim of being retconned into things thanks to Progressive, ie, if she was a first draft SAO character she'd probably be peripherally involved, at least in Alicization. She's not really a tragic character or anything in canon, but since it's my fanfiction, I'm going full train alternative character interpretation here for DRAMA.
And generally, the world state of this crossover is that P5R, P4G, P3F are canon, the spin offs Personas I'm not touching with a 10 foot pole, and SAO more or less occurred as per season 1, with the AU stuff happening right as Kayaba is defeated due to differing motivations.
Lets see, taking into account that the skills need to be used, because they improve. If we pick something that we don't use much...our problem I guess.
[ ] [True Critical Strike] A high-risk high-reward ability that promises to end fights in a single strike. Interesting.
Unlock Skill: «True Critical Strike». To use this ability you must declare in PLAN before activating any offensive attack. Rather than rolling Xd6, a SINGLE 1d6 is rolled. That result is then multiplied by the number of dice you normally would've rolled, turning it into an all-or-nothing attack. Gain DISADVANTAGE for the next 2 Defensive/Reaction rolls you perform.
A good fight ender, but if we don't finish with this we may well be down and out, our defenses aren't THAT hot.
[ ] [Holy Sword] You've seen this ability before. There must be a reason Kayaba Akihiko favored it so.
Unlock Skill «Holy Sword». Allows you to equip an offhand shield. Additionally, whenever you succeed on a VIT defensive roll, any extra dice over the DC will be dealt to your opponent as DAMAGE.
(Special interaction when encountering a certain FOOL)
This is VIT stat based, and is otherwise great, we get to use it a lot...its just that our VIT is merely rank D, and a lot of our Personas aren't hot at it either.
[ ] [Dual Blades] Blade into blade, strike into strike. The style of a lonely hero you've grown to admire.
Unlock Skill «Dual Blades». Allows you to equip two weapons (2 Swords or Sword and Wand). Grants you ONE MORE. Whenever you hit an enemy's weakness for the first time (ie once per individual weakness) make a free attack (enemy still gets a defense roll but cannot counterattack). The free attack will be dependent on your weapon choice (melee skill if 2 Swords are equipped, magic skill if Sword and Wand are equipped). As the activation conditions are the same as SMIRK the ONE MORE attack is usually made with ADVANTAGE.
(Special interaction when encountering a certain STAR)
Dual Blades goes far, with our Personas as a pseudo-Wild Card, we can almost always hit a weakness if we seek for it, which gives us an Advantaged free hit.
Also would be funny to see Kirito's acquaintances see us use it. Heh.
[ ] Hey, PoH was right! The skill really does exist! Too bad, he was only like... 40 murders away from unlocking it?
Unlock: «Darkness Blade». When in combat with an enemy PLAYER dealing 2 or more damage in a single strike grants you +1 ADVANTAGE on the next attack, stacking with other sources. When in combat performing the Last Hit on an enemy PLAYER will allow you to perform one free melee attack on the nearest opponent with ADVANTAGE (enemy still gets a defense roll but cannot counterattack).
(Special interaction when encountering certain acquaintances)
Blanket PvP buff, and hoo boy its a monstrous one. The narrative effect on meeting LC members would be...interesting. That said it does nothing against NPC mobs, so while it'd let us carve a bloody river through Oberon's harem swarm, we'd be buggered against NPCs, which usually have more unfair stats.
Next, JUSTICE
[ ] Magdalene
Good CHT, but otherwise completely vanilla, being weak to two types of fairly common physical attacks, and resisting both Bless and Curse(we already got other Fire resist options).
Bless/support Persona, which granted we don't have any options for yet.
[ ] Yudhisthira
Offensive leaning stats. Weak to Aiment and Ice, which aren't TOO bad, and resisting Bless, Pierce and Wind.
Comes with offensive buffs and Bless/Pierce attacks, which we currently don't have any of
[ ] Judge Bao
Superb resists, and the first dual typed attack skill we've seen, and removing debuffs is good if we team up with stronger players.
Stats are kind of potato though.
NATURE next
[ ] A Bao A Qu
Terrible offensive stats, but good resists. Purely a healer, though it can revive downed allies.
Not too exciting personally.
[ ] Khodumodumo
Absurdly durable, incredibly strong, but comes with lots of weaknesses.
It covers Blunt, Wind, Pierce and Slash offensively, so its a really good Persona to capitalize on weaknesses.
This guy is MADE for Dual Blades
[ ] Hundun
Status specialist. Sleep and visual obstruction are good for stealth and disengage options, and its fairly tough, but I think we got a fair chunk of this type in our Personas already.
[X] [Dual Blades] Blade into blade, strike into strike. The style of a lonely hero you've grown to admire.
[X] Magdalene
[X] Khodumodumo
[X] Title: The Mirage of Deceit
Dual Blades is classic for a reason.
Broadly useful against all types of opponent, and plays into the Wild Card variety, we'd always have more element options than anyone else, might as well get all out attacks!
Picking Magdalene to add a healing option and Bless attacks. Hama might be handy on trapped players as well.
Khodumodumo is an offensive beast, so once we identify targets' weak points that includes any of its moves, we get to Dual Blades barrage them to pieces.[/I]
[ ] [True Critical Strike] A high-risk high-reward ability that promises to end fights in a single strike. Interesting.
Unlock Skill: «True Critical Strike». To use this ability you must declare in PLAN before activating any offensive attack. Rather than rolling Xd6, a SINGLE 1d6 is rolled. That result is then multiplied by the number of dice you normally would've rolled, turning it into an all-or-nothing attack. Gain DISADVANTAGE for the next 2 Defensive/Reaction rolls you perform.
A good fight ender, but if we don't finish with this we may well be down and out, our defenses aren't THAT hot.
[ ] [Holy Sword] You've seen this ability before. There must be a reason Kayaba Akihiko favored it so.
Unlock Skill «Holy Sword». Allows you to equip an offhand shield. Additionally, whenever you succeed on a VIT defensive roll, any extra dice over the DC will be dealt to your opponent as DAMAGE.
(Special interaction when encountering a certain FOOL)
This is VIT stat based, and is otherwise great, we get to use it a lot...its just that our VIT is merely rank D, and a lot of our Personas aren't hot at it either.
[ ] [Dual Blades] Blade into blade, strike into strike. The style of a lonely hero you've grown to admire.
Unlock Skill «Dual Blades». Allows you to equip two weapons (2 Swords or Sword and Wand). Grants you ONE MORE. Whenever you hit an enemy's weakness for the first time (ie once per individual weakness) make a free attack (enemy still gets a defense roll but cannot counterattack). The free attack will be dependent on your weapon choice (melee skill if 2 Swords are equipped, magic skill if Sword and Wand are equipped). As the activation conditions are the same as SMIRK the ONE MORE attack is usually made with ADVANTAGE.
(Special interaction when encountering a certain STAR)
Dual Blades goes far, with our Personas as a pseudo-Wild Card, we can almost always hit a weakness if we seek for it, which gives us an Advantaged free hit.
Also would be funny to see Kirito's acquaintances see us use it. Heh.
[ ] Hey, PoH was right! The skill really does exist! Too bad, he was only like... 40 murders away from unlocking it?
Unlock: «Darkness Blade». When in combat with an enemy PLAYER dealing 2 or more damage in a single strike grants you +1 ADVANTAGE on the next attack, stacking with other sources. When in combat performing the Last Hit on an enemy PLAYER will allow you to perform one free melee attack on the nearest opponent with ADVANTAGE (enemy still gets a defense roll but cannot counterattack).
(Special interaction when encountering certain acquaintances)
Blanket PvP buff, and hoo boy its a monstrous one. The narrative effect on meeting LC members would be...interesting. That said it does nothing against NPC mobs, so while it'd let us carve a bloody river through Oberon's harem swarm, we'd be buggered against NPCs, which usually have more unfair stats.
Next, JUSTICE
[ ] Magdalene
Good CHT, but otherwise completely vanilla, being weak to two types of fairly common physical attacks, and resisting both Bless and Curse(we already got other Fire resist options).
Bless/support Persona, which granted we don't have any options for yet.
[ ] Yudhisthira
Offensive leaning stats. Weak to Aiment and Ice, which aren't TOO bad, and resisting Bless, Pierce and Wind.
Comes with offensive buffs and Bless/Pierce attacks, which we currently don't have any of
[ ] Judge Bao
Superb resists, and the first dual typed attack skill we've seen, and removing debuffs is good if we team up with stronger players.
Stats are kind of potato though.
NATURE next
[ ] A Bao A Qu
Terrible offensive stats, but good resists. Purely a healer, though it can revive downed allies.
Not too exciting personally.
[ ] Khodumodumo
Absurdly durable, incredibly strong, but comes with lots of weaknesses.
It covers Blunt, Wind, Pierce and Slash offensively, so its a really good Persona to capitalize on weaknesses.
This guy is MADE for Dual Blades
[ ] Hundun
Status specialist. Sleep and visual obstruction are good for stealth and disengage options, and its fairly tough, but I think we got a fair chunk of this type in our Personas already.
[X] [Dual Blades] Blade into blade, strike into strike. The style of a lonely hero you've grown to admire.
[X] Magdalene
[X] Khodumodumo
[X] Title: The Mirage of Deceit
Dual Blades is classic for a reason.
Broadly useful against all types of opponent, and plays into the Wild Card variety, we'd always have more element options than anyone else, might as well get all out attacks!
Picking Magdalene to add a healing option and Bless attacks. Hama might be handy on trapped players as well.
Khodumodumo is an offensive beast, so once we identify targets' weak points that includes any of its moves, we get to Dual Blades barrage them to pieces.[/I]
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ThatGuyWithIdeas
Treize died for our sins
- Location
- Romania
Regarding skills... if we want to pick a skill, I think we go for either Holy Sword (shields would most likely buff VIT and the skill would also allow us to weaponize good results on defensive Vitality rolls) or Dual Blades (improves our offensive capabilities by allowing us to get an extra attack the first time we strike a weakness of an enemy, applies for each weakness the enemy has). True Critical Strike is too risky unless we can set things up so we reach +2 or +3 advantage on the roll where we use it, and it does leave us vulnerable for the next 2 attacks, while Darkness Blade is only useful for PVP (and Dual Blades arguably does what Darkness Blade does better, at least the extra attack part).
For a better idea as to what personas to go for, a recap of the personas we have access to currently and what they provide:
[X] [Dual Blades] Blade into blade, strike into strike. The style of a lonely hero you've grown to admire.
[X] Magdalene
[X] Khodumodumo
For a better idea as to what personas to go for, a recap of the personas we have access to currently and what they provide:
Balanced, highish stat-line (all Cs), access to AOE Electric and Fire magic attacks, AOE madness, AOE Slash physical attack, mutual scan between user and a foe, indiscriminate blind, weak to Bless and Curse, resists physical (aka Slash, Pierce and Blunt are the relevant elements), usage incurs Stress;
Statline focused on CHT, AGI and MAG, hard-dumps STR and VIT, access to Electric and Fire magic attacks and a charm move, weak to Ice, resists Fire and Elec;
Statline focused on VIT, STR and CHT, dumps MAG and AGI, access to Curse magic attack, a poisoning move and a Blunt physical attack, weak to Bless and Fire, resists Curse;
Statline focused on MAG and AGI, dumps STR and VIT, hard-dumps CHT, access to Ice and Wind magic attack and a silence move (which is not going to be all that effective currently, considering that status effect moves depend on CHT, and Havfrue has F rank in that stat), weak to Pierce and Elec, resists Wind and Ice, is due for an upgrade soon;
Statline focused on VIT, MAG and CHT, dumps STR and AGI, access to Electric and Bless magic attacks and a defense booster, weak to Wind, Ice and Curse, resists Elec and Bless, last hits or hits that deal at least 3 damage with this persona generate 1 MistCoin, applicable once per foe.
[X] [Dual Blades] Blade into blade, strike into strike. The style of a lonely hero you've grown to admire.
[X] Magdalene
[X] Khodumodumo
- Location
- The Z-Cave
[X] [Holy Sword] You've seen this ability before. There must be a reason Kayaba Akihiko favored it so.
I'm not good at mechanics but I'd prefer not to copy Kirito if only for difference's sake.
[X] Yudhisthira
I'm going for Yudhistra because of it's good STR stat. We already have good elemental coverage and this adds Bless and since we're going to be playing lots of RPGs from the SAO side of the crossover I think it's a good idea to be able to hit hard when needed and on top of that I never really like trusting Hama/Mudo's RNG.
[X] Khodumodumo
Its variety of weaknesses concerns me but at the same time, its sky-high STR and AoE attacks do a lot to make it very enticing.
Still, if the events of P2 didn't happen here I will eat a shoe given how hard Nyarly is signaling himself here.
I'm not good at mechanics but I'd prefer not to copy Kirito if only for difference's sake.
[X] Yudhisthira
I'm going for Yudhistra because of it's good STR stat. We already have good elemental coverage and this adds Bless and since we're going to be playing lots of RPGs from the SAO side of the crossover I think it's a good idea to be able to hit hard when needed and on top of that I never really like trusting Hama/Mudo's RNG.
[X] Khodumodumo
Its variety of weaknesses concerns me but at the same time, its sky-high STR and AoE attacks do a lot to make it very enticing.
Still, if the events of P2 didn't happen here I will eat a shoe given how hard Nyarly is signaling himself here.
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As much as I don't want to imitate Kirito, not getting access to one of the core mechanics of modern Persona games seems like a bad idea.
Also, interesting implications with the Pixie.
[X] [Dual Blades] Blade into blade, strike into strike. The style of a lonely hero you've grown to admire.
[X] Yudhisthira
[X] Khodumodumo
As much as I didn't want to pick Khodumodumo because of how many weaknesses it has, African mythology is severely underrepresented like...everywhere, and ThatGuyWithIdeas is right in that it's perfect to go with One More.
Also, for the Title...let's go with:
[X] Title: The Lady of Blades
Also, interesting implications with the Pixie.
[X] [Dual Blades] Blade into blade, strike into strike. The style of a lonely hero you've grown to admire.
[X] Yudhisthira
[X] Khodumodumo
As much as I didn't want to pick Khodumodumo because of how many weaknesses it has, African mythology is severely underrepresented like...everywhere, and ThatGuyWithIdeas is right in that it's perfect to go with One More.
Also, for the Title...let's go with:
[X] Title: The Lady of Blades
ThatGuyWithIdeas
Treize died for our sins
- Location
- Romania
As I've said earlier, we really should take a persona with access to healing here, since it is important that we have personal access to some sort of healing move. To that end, since the currently leading persona from the Nature arcana is Khodumodumo, we want to take Magdalene from Justice. Yes, Yudhisthira does have access to abilities that buff physical attacks and magical attacks and we currently don't have a Pierce attack, but the weakness to Ailments coupled with the existence of charm moves means that it is a risky persona to use against enemies with access to these kind of moves, for they can turn those buffs against us. Khodumodumo also covers Pierce as an element, while Maneki-Neko gives access to Bless as element for attacking (and even if we discount that persona, Magdalene also has a Bless magical attack). Also, I believe that having access to healing is more important than having better offensive via buffing attacks.
Actually, it was veekie who noticed how well Khodumodumo and Dual Blades synergize:
Actually, it was veekie who noticed how well Khodumodumo and Dual Blades synergize:
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- Location
- The Z-Cave
This quest has made me nostalgic and led me back to an old favorite of mine the .Hack// franchise which has given me two great chuuni names.
[X] Title: The Antithesis
[X] Title: The Mirage of Deceit
Taken from boss monsters from the Ephitet of Twilight Cubia and Innis.
Cubia is an 'anti-existence' and it fits Hiyori in multiple ways since if we get Holy Sword or Dual Blades we're still effectively the opposite of Kirito and Heathcliff since we hate VR and want to destroy the games. On top of that I really, REALLY want to do the Ragnarok plotline to climb the world tree so the Antithesis is also fitting.
The Mirage of Deceit explains itself.
[X] Title: The Antithesis
[X] Title: The Mirage of Deceit
Taken from boss monsters from the Ephitet of Twilight Cubia and Innis.
Cubia is an 'anti-existence' and it fits Hiyori in multiple ways since if we get Holy Sword or Dual Blades we're still effectively the opposite of Kirito and Heathcliff since we hate VR and want to destroy the games. On top of that I really, REALLY want to do the Ragnarok plotline to climb the world tree so the Antithesis is also fitting.
The Mirage of Deceit explains itself.
[X] [Dual Blades] Blade into blade, strike into strike. The style of a lonely hero you've grown to admire.
[X] Magdalene
[X] Khodumodumo
I kept trying to talk myself into Holy Sword or Darkness Blade for the special interactions but not only does Dual Blades seems to be mechanically the best option, I think it best represents how Hiyori currently feels. Following the crowd on the Persona choice though I'm tempted by Judge Bao + A Bao A Qu or Hundun to either double down on both healing, revival ability, and ailment clearing (or in the case of Hundun ailments/field effects) but most of our current personas have STR as a dump stat so we may want to rectify that (though Fire would still be a problem) in which case healing defaults to Magdalene as has been mentioned.
[X] Title: The Mirage of Deceit
...Sold. I actually was running through some of the Epitaph User nicknames from G.U. in my head like Haseo's Terror of Death but blanked on Innis lol.
[X] Magdalene
[X] Khodumodumo
I kept trying to talk myself into Holy Sword or Darkness Blade for the special interactions but not only does Dual Blades seems to be mechanically the best option, I think it best represents how Hiyori currently feels. Following the crowd on the Persona choice though I'm tempted by Judge Bao + A Bao A Qu or Hundun to either double down on both healing, revival ability, and ailment clearing (or in the case of Hundun ailments/field effects) but most of our current personas have STR as a dump stat so we may want to rectify that (though Fire would still be a problem) in which case healing defaults to Magdalene as has been mentioned.
...Argo is in trouble. That's Johnny Black. That is... not someone she should confront IRL for obvious reasons.
And probably Medjed before them. Well, the original Medjed.
[X] Title: The Mirage of Deceit
...Sold. I actually was running through some of the Epitaph User nicknames from G.U. in my head like Haseo's Terror of Death but blanked on Innis lol.
- Location
- USA
[X] [Dual Blades] Blade into blade, strike into strike. The style of a lonely hero you've grown to admire.
[X] Magdalene
[X] Khodumodumo
[X] Magdalene
[X] Khodumodumo
Ryumancer
Dragons Are Romance
Oh no, she's cute!
[X] [Holy Sword] You've seen this ability before. There must be a reason Kayaba Akihiko favored it so.
[X] Magdalene
[X] Khodumodumo
Hmm, how should I put this... I can't talk myself into Once More fishing. It's a semi-nuke, but it's only once per Weakness. It's probably really good at clearing out mobs, but it feels significantly less useful against bosses, who aren't likely to have a ton of Weaknesses to trigger the nuke, and who we'll have to be aware of the Weaknesses ahead of time if we want to properly burst-damage our way past troublesome phases. Players, too, are less likely to be exploitable (via being prepared to mitigate their weaknesses, if nothing else)
Whereas, we can improve our VIT, being able to equip a shield would almost certainly improve our effective VIT, either as additional Dice, a bonus Success or two, extra Resistances, or even Advantage if the QM's willing to really push the odds. Holy Sword will be similarly effective vs mobs (as a Player, our stat growth is likely to outpace theirs to some extent), is more likely to be effective vs players, and will tilt our build towards far better survivability vs everything, including Bosses, which I would hazard is at minimum as useful as one or two instances of burst damage would be vs Bosses.