......Just out of interest, on the subject of Amu being in serious danger, how effective would you say Amu's raw telekinesis might be against low-level demons, something like a Jack Frost?
That talk with Lulu indicated that, while Amu's fine control might be lacking, she can presently do "big stuff" just fine. How big exactly are we talking when she says "big"? Big like a basketball, as opposed to a tennis ball? Or big like a person, as opposed to football?
Or big like a car?
In the second half of the manga, she telekinetically lifts a broken helicopter and soft-lands it on the roof of a highrise building. While flying. Utau helped with that, but at least fifty percent was Amu, and she's only gotten better since.
The feats of telekinesis shown in Shugo Chara are actually fairly impressive, when you step back and think about it. We've got:
- The charas are capable of lifting and moving objects, with somewhat outsize strength for their size. Not that impressive, but they're psionic projections themselves. Amu inherited the ability, though she's not as good at fine control as Ran or Su would have been.
- Since you mention a football: Kukai, at one point, kicks a football hard enough to do... implausible things. So does Amu. The football match between the two is the sort that makes it
very clear they aren't using muscles for most of it, and their poor classmates basically have to vacate the war-zone. One of them attempts to catch one of Amu's balls, only to find that it keeps spinning in his hands, in fact
speeding up until he loses his grip. This is fairly early in the story.
- The aforementioned helicopter incident. Roughly in the middle. IIRC this is approximately when Utau hits her lowest point, so I doubt she was all that effective; it's probably mostly Amu.
- Yaya got slammed into a metal lamp post towards the end, hard enough to leave an indentation. Score one for the otherwise least effective psionic in the group; she's very hard to hurt. She's also the one to stop a rottweiler later on, and though she stops it by using UMI to make it fall asleep (...and accidentally hits herself as well), it tried (and fails) to bite her, first.
- Tadase's "holy crown" is an area defence that did, at one point, bounce an entire truckload of freshly cut trees that were tumbling down a rather steep slope. Possibly saved Amu's life in doing so; certainly any non-psionic who was hit by that would be turned into tomato soup. They were fully grown, multi-ton trees, moving quickly. The same area defence was also shown to fully block the assault of a...
Has anyone here watched A Certain Scientific Railgun? Do you remember the AIM Burst incident from early in season one?
One of these. A semi-divine, if incoherent, chunk of pure destrudo collected from all the children in Tokyo. In Persona terms, a fragment of Nyarlathotep. It strained him, but he did repel it for long enough for others to deal with it. Tadase is almost 100% defence-specced, but he's good at that.
Shugo Chara is fundamentally a children's series, so the styling is more 'marshmallow man' than 'eldritch horror', but fundamentally it's the same thing.
- Later in the same arc, Amu was trapped in the basement of a collapsing highrise... the same one from earlier, I think. She survived. It's unclear how much of that was Amu, how much was Hikaru and how much was uncontrolled psionic interactions, but it was clear enough that any big chunks of concrete falling towards either one of them triggers some sort of instinctive lashing-out.
It should also be clear that I'm taking the high end of what's plausible, rather than the low end. That's because I
do need her to be somewhat effective in this scenario. Anyway...
......Just out of interest, on the subject of Amu being in serious danger, how effective would you say Amu's raw telekinesis might be against low-level demons, something like a Jack Frost?
I'm going to ignore Black Frost for this analysis, so let's consider this. "Jack Frost is a spirit originating from England. He is a snow elf who brings in cold weather during the winter and is thought to be responsible for the frost that forms on the windows of homes and buildings."
In other words, a fairy. In game terms he's a demon based around magic, with low physical parameters. In lore terms... he's the lesser dangers of cold. The fact that, even when winter is calm, if you're a careless child you can still easily die. Carefree and often considered neutral, because if you do take those precautions... then all Jack Frost does is paint pretty patterns on your windows. That, and he's a part of nature.
Of course the consequences are a little different if you call his attention to a specific point, but the point remains: Jack Frost wouldn't naturally aim to kill someone, he'll just do his thing, and if you get in his way and die... you should have known better. Sometimes, the thing you should have known better is "Don't get on the bad side of someone who can summon him".
= = =
Okay, so Amu.
Amu could easily scatter Jack Frost's body. It's a snowman, basically. Against someone capable of tossing high-speed chunks of concrete around, the force required to destroy one of those is more or less irrelevant, but... would that kill him?
In the game: Yes, none of the engines are capable of showing anything else, if you use enough force you'll break him apart.
In a story: I'm inclined to say no. You could destroy the snowman, sure, but Jack Frost isn't the snowman. It's the weather. The blizzard you're in. The cold snap that you didn't dress for. In Devil Survivors 2, demons are almost completely immune to physical attacks unless the attacker has Nicaea or an equivalent system installed, which Amu certainly does not--so it becomes a question of whether or not she can attack its real self, or at least defend.
Scattering the snowmen, I would say, does prevent it from throwing focused attacks against her... but still leaves the blizzard itself, and she can't attack
that with telekinesis. She could possibly try mind-control... but Jack Frost is too alien for that to work, at least at first try.
On the other hand? Without said focused attacks -- which she could likely block anyway -- she's left with just the blizzard. And if the question is whether or not Amu can deal with a blizzard...
Her 'magical girl' form appears to completely cancel environmental conditions, as seen e.g. when she goes skiing in what amounts to a midriff-less cheerleader outfit. So, um, yes. She apparently can. She
complained, to be sure, but she never seems to get cold.
...
I think it's a stalemate. Funnily enough, many of the stronger demons would be easier to deal with.
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