Shards of a Broken Sun [Megaten/Shugo Chara/Exalted]

I hope this doesn't drain Tadase too much. We're going to need him to protect us from the rift, the collapsing building, and anything that comes out of the rift, and he's going to be the nearest candidate to carry us away once we pass out. Especially if this fails, we'll be relying heavily on his protection.

(That said, "help Nadeshiko" is currently leading, 4 to 3.)
 
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Let's see...

Adhoc vote count started by Baughn on Nov 24, 2023 at 10:52 AM, finished with 90 posts and 8 votes.

  • [X] Help Nadeshiko
    [X] United Front - Close The Rift
    - [X] The rift is a mental hole. A cognitive void. But right next to it, once bright, now flickering, you feel Tadase's determined presence. Tadase is proof that a strong enough cognition can stop the void; so it follows an even stronger one can push it back- one stronger than yours or Tadase's alone.
    - [X] When healing Saaya, you had reached into that cauldron of souls. Dia had been alongside you then. Dia is no longer there, but she wasn't the only one you had ever traveled into that dimension with - once before, Tadase had dived in with you into that starlit road, back when you were looking for your lost Charas. With luck, he can lend you the strength to do so once more.
    - [X] Go to Tadase. For this to work, you don't just need to dive into the sea of souls - you need to gather the memories and souls of all those who knew the classroom as it was before the rift erased it. Kiseki is not Dia; he is no navigator. Instead, he is a king. He won't seek out the souls you need; he will rally them to your call.
    - [X] Platinum Heart: You open your heart and mind, empathically linking yourself to Tadase - with a ruler's authority, you call out to all the other souls, living and dead, who remember the room as it was before the rift: Saaya, Makoto, Takuya, your other classmates. Your teacher. The other teachers. Previous students. Electricians. Construction workers.
    - [X] Using yourselves as a conduit for their thoughts and feelings, you form a combined cognitive web between all the room's previous occupants such that, between you all, you are able to reconstruct the mental space of the room, exactly as it was before.
    - [X] With you and Tadase at the helm of this great unified web of souls, you push.
    - [X] All for one, one for all. Fill the void. Close the rift.
    [X] Help Tadase
    [X] Help Nadeshiko
    -[X] Drawing on Ran's athletic specialization, you conjure a pair of jump ropes, then cap their ends with giant jawbreakers courtesy of Su, for a pair of makeshift bolas. While Nadeshiko has the strixes distracted, you lob the bolas and wrap them around the enemies' wings to bring them down, then pin them to the ground with honey so Nadeshiko can finish them off.
    [X] United Front - Close The Rift
    - [X] The rift is a mental hole. A cognitive void. But right next to it, once bright, now flickering, you feel Tadase's determined presence. Tadase is proof that a strong enough cognition can stop the void; so it follows an even stronger one can push it back- one stronger than yours or Tadase's alone.
    - [X] When healing Saaya, you had reached into that cauldron of souls. Dia had been alongside you then. Dia is no longer there, but she wasn't the only one you had ever traveled into that dimension with - once before, Tadase had dived in with you into that starlit road, back when you were looking for your lost Charas. With luck, he can lend you the strength to do so once more.
    - [X] Go to Tadase. For this to work, you don't just need to dive into the sea of souls - you need to gather the memories and souls of all those who knew the classroom as it was before the rift erased it. Kiseki is not Dia; he is no navigator. Instead, he is a king. He won't seek out the souls you need; he will rally them to your call.
    - [X] Platinum Heart: You open your heart and mind, empathically linking yourself to Tadase - with a ruler's authority, you call out to all the other souls, living and dead, who remember the room as it was before the rift: Saaya, Makoto, Takuya, your other classmates. Your friends. Your teacher. The other teachers. Previous students. Electricians. Construction workers.
    - [X] Using yourselves as a conduit for their thoughts and feelings, you form a combined cognitive web between all the room's previous occupants such that, between you all, you are able to reconstruct the mental space of the room, exactly as it was before.
    - [X] With you and Tadase at the helm of this great unified web of souls, you push.
    - [X] All for one, one for all. Fill the void. Close the rift.
 
Hey, look on the bright side! At least Tadase apparently has a higher Linguistics score than we do if he's been putting that training time into studying! I'm sure he'll be able to sweet-talk JP's into not arresting us for summoning demons at school once he gets out of there!

Once again though, I will be quite surprised if a vote to close the rift wins. Especially given that QM also just revealed a joint action with Nadeshiko is worth enough there won't be a dice roll needed if Amu fights with her.

EDIT: Ooops, looks like one of my edits to it came after the others copied it. I added "Your friends" onto the list of people, I'll take it off my version.
 
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It would actually be a valid 3-point stunt, except you just had one. You get one per story at most.
Aww.

I guess that crazy idea I got when @Winged One mentioned Kagutsuchi wouldn't have been worth 3 dice after all, even if it was valid.

It involved trying to use Dia to peek into the future, in order to connect to and siphon knowledge off a potential future version of Amu herself - specifically, the one from the original version of Shards of a Broken Sun, which may have been a past version of Amu rather than a future version - who used the Dragon Stream to stop the void during Conception, in order to give present Amu knowledge of how to tap into the Dragon Stream and use that knowledge to shut the rift.
 
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I guess that crazy idea I got when @Winged One mentioned Kagutsuchi wouldn't have been worth 3 dice after all, even if it was valid.
That one wouldn't work, because it assumes things that aren't true. I can make that much clear: There is no in-story connection, whatsoever, between this and version one of the quest. That would just complicate things for no real benefit.
 
Maybe, but even if it wasn't the exact version of Amu from the previous quest, as long as some variation of the future exists in which Amu gains knowledge of the Dragon Stream, it could be used to send the knowledge from that version of Amu back into the past. Amu's apparently had at least one precognitive vision already, unless that image of chatting to Saaya was purely a stress-based hallucination.

......It would be such a cop-out if that had just been a stress-based hallucination.
 
Hypothetically doable, though precognition has a lot of limitations on it. It wouldn't be able to predict a solar Amu, but you may have already guessed that.
 
[X] Help Nadeshiko

Given that the rift doesn't seem to be growing much more, and experts are on the way, I'm against any vote that means we are unconcious when said experts get here.

Even if it would mean solving the situation earlier, I do not want to essentially forfeit control of the narrative (and possible have Saaya vanished away by JPs) because we knocked Amu out trying to Stunt close this on a dice roll.

Being revealed as a magical girl to people with camera's and then passing out is asking for Forced Publicity to fuck us, without any chance to control it or dodge the worst parts.

Also, the demons were targeting Saaya. She was their 'summoner'. Nadeshiko's fight is about to get a lot harder, since that distraction is no longer in play.
 
Being revealed as a magical girl to people with camera's and then passing out is asking for Forced Publicity to fuck us, without any chance to control it or dodge the worst parts.
Though I'm pretty sure that bane is gonna stick itself up our derrier, no matter what we do. It WAS a bane, not a boon.

On the plus side - the cameras are currently snapping our resident magical boy Souma Kukai flying people down from the roof. Pretty sure that's more than they what they got from Amu so far, which if her father was any indication, was mainly like a crazy girl with torn clothes and goop in her hair desperately carrying another victim to safety. Her transformation outfit disappeared before she made her way over to Tsumugu.

That might change, depending on how flashy Amu gets with Nadeshiko.

Nadeshiko, bless her, doesn't actually have to worry as no matter how many photos they snap, nobody will ever be able to find her after this, only her twin brother Nagihiko. Since, officially-speaking, she was meant to be overseas and not in Japan and will probably "suddenly go overseas" again as soon as the fight is done.

(Also since Amu will collapse immediately after closing/failing to close the rift, nobody is going to photograph her as a magical girl in that scenario either, the only pictures they'll get will be Tadase hauling her vegetative body out behind him).
 
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Though I'm pretty sure that bane is gonna stick itself up our derrier, no matter what we do. It WAS a bane, not a boon.

On the plus side - the cameras are currently snapping our resident magical boy Souma Kukai flying people down from the roof. Pretty sure that's more than they what they got from Amu so far, which if her father was any indication, was mainly like a crazy girl with torn clothes and goop in her hair desperately carrying another victim to safety. Her transformation outfit disappeared before she made her way over to Tsumugu.

That might change, depending on how flashy Amu gets with Nadeshiko.

Nadeshiko, bless her, doesn't actually have to worry as no matter how many photos they snap, nobody will ever be able to find her after this, only her twin brother Nagihiko. Since, officially-speaking, she was meant to be overseas and not in Japan and will probably "suddenly go overseas" again as soon as the fight is done.

(Also since Amu will collapse immediately after closing/failing to close the rift, nobody is going to photograph her as a magical girl in that scenario either, the only pictures they'll get will be Tadase hauling her vegetative body out behind him).
The bane will happen whatever we do, but the details are important. We should still do our best to manage how the publicity works out. Being conscious is important for that.

I mean, look at the bane we're experiencing right now. It's been nasty with Amu doing everything in her power to fight it, and even going a little beyond her power. Imagine how much worse it would have been if Amu got knocked unconscious when the incident started.

Plus, regardless of the publicity angle, I really want to be conscious for when JP's gets here. Amu is the only one with important information - information about the incident, and information about what to do if JP's isn't entirely friendly. No one else knows they should call Lulu if a bunch of agents try to take everyone into custody.

If you want to vote to knock Amu out, could you throw in a line about telling Tadase to call Lulu? I'd rather someone be awake to do that immediately, before we wake up in a cell without our phone.

(Also, I'd suggest putting "Plan" on your plan name next time. It makes these kinds of edits a lot less messy.)
 
If you want to vote to knock Amu out, could you throw in a line about telling Tadase to call Lulu? I'd rather someone be awake to do that immediately, before we wake up in a cell without our phone.
I'd be happy to, but there's at least one other guy who copied the text of the whole thing, I'm not sure I can do the edit without making the vote counter read his as a different vote (which technically it would be, as it would be missing the new subclause).

To be fair though, it's not like Amu knows much more than Saaya about the rift either. Probably the only thing she could tell them that Saaya couldn't would be how it felt like to her psionically (I assume Saaya would have mostly just been feeling excruciating pain the whole time, due to what she'd been trying to do).

Lulu was supposed to be the one to tell US what to do about the rift when we called her.

And yes, I agree it would be nice to be awake when JP's arrives - but look on the bright side: If we end up going into a coma for a few days, by the time we wake up, Saaya herself will probably also be better and then she might be able to hand us back our Humpty Lock immediately (at least from the audience's perspective, in-story-wise obviously it will have been a few days).

.....This is not what I envisioned us doing without a Humpty Lock when I voted to give it to Saaya. I am also legit surprised at this sudden newfound enthusiasm for closing the rift, it was non-existent 2 discussion pages ago.
 
My experience is that this sort of risky vote... always wins.

It would actually be a valid 3-point stunt, except you just had one. You get one per story at most, barring exceptional brilliance. ...and also I'm not sure anyone's realised why it would be, which means it's not.
Wild-ass guess: You've described Amu as a "low-budget Wild Card" before. Wild Cards gain most of their power by connecting to others, through social links and through accepting other shadows into themselves. This vote is Amu leaning the hardest she ever has into that kind of thing, drawing massively on her connections to other people through the sea of souls. I'm guessing the 3-pointer potential would have been related to that.
 
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I'm guessing the 3-pointer potential would have been related to that.
In Shugo Chara canon, Amu already was the equivalent of a "Wildcard" by Chara user standards on account of having multiple Charas, which was why she was given the title "Joker" among the Guardians (which I think I mentioned somewhere before).

Assuming the Sea of Souls and Road of Stars are seemingly the same thing here, my current speculation is that Baughn called her a "low-budget" Wildcard because she uses Charas and not actual Personas and Charas are "low-budget" Personas that usually disappear after a few years. Unless there's something unrevealed in this quest, she also doesn't have proper Social Links or Velvet Room support, which is what a regular Wildcard would have. The closest thing she might have to that is being able to Chara Transform with other people's Charas. She can access the Road of Stars through Dia, but until she channeled that Persona/demon earlier, she never summoned anything other than her own Charas from it either.

Even though it is effectively what the stunt is proposing, it's an absolute hail mary stretch to think she could reach into the Sea of Souls and try to form/leverage impromptu knock-off Social Links with a whole bunch of random souls that she may not ever have met before, or spoken more than a single sentence to if they were a classmate. The kind of stretch that relies not just on the assumption that the Sea of Souls and the Road of Stars are the same, but that any form of "Social Links" are something she can actually do and not completely out of budget for her (as canonically, there's no Shugo Chara equivalent).

There are multiple ways I could try to justify this. Some of the possible rationales are:

1. She just summoned a Persona to heal Saaya. If you assume it was a Persona, by extension that means she could be graduating from Chara-using Wildcard to Persona-using Wildcard. Which means it may be possible to form Social Links (leaving aside that real Wildcards take months to develop them properly).

2. She always could, already has and just never noticed she had Social Links because she doesn't have a Velvet Room attendant to tell her when she's forged them. She secretly has max rank Links with all the ex-Guardians, half the current Guardians and maybe some of her old friends.

3. She hasn't formed any yet, but will in possible futures and since these "bonds that never break" exist in the Sea of Souls, given it is actually the same thing as the Road of Stars, they are bonds that exist outside space and time. Meaning that future bonds are accessible even to past selves that haven't yet formed them.

4. They're not Social Links. She's borrowing what she thinks of as other people's Heart's Eggs. She was able to meet some she previously met the last time she went to the Road of Stars. Everybody has one and she can Chara Transform with other people's. She's just going to be borrowing a whole lot of other people's at once. Borrowing Heart's Eggs is considered a "low-budget" version of Social Links.

Take your pick.

As the one who wrote the stunt, I personally regard every single one of these as bullshit, even as I argue there's some tiny minute chance they may be possible.

Fortunately, what I personally think also doesn't matter, as I'm not the one grading the worth of the stunts.
 
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Vote closed
Scheduled vote count started by Baughn on Nov 22, 2023 at 5:11 PM, finished with 110 posts and 14 votes.

  • [X] Help Nadeshiko
    [X] United Front - Close The Rift
    [X] United Front - Close The Rift
    - [X] The rift is a mental hole. A cognitive void. But right next to it, once bright, now flickering, you feel Tadase's determined presence. Tadase is proof that a strong enough cognition can stop the void; so it follows an even stronger one can push it back- one stronger than yours or Tadase's alone.
    - [X] When healing Saaya, you had reached into that cauldron of souls. Dia had been alongside you then. Dia is no longer there, but she wasn't the only one you had ever traveled into that dimension with - once before, Tadase had dived in with you into that starlit road, back when you were looking for your lost Charas. With luck, he can lend you the strength to do so once more.
    - [X] Go to Tadase. For this to work, you don't just need to dive into the sea of souls - you need to gather the memories and souls of all those who knew the classroom as it was before the rift erased it. Kiseki is not Dia; he is no navigator. Instead, he is a king. He won't seek out the souls you need; he will rally them to your call.
    - [X] Platinum Heart: You open your heart and mind, empathically linking yourself to Tadase - with a ruler's authority, you call out to all the other souls, living and dead, who remember the room as it was before the rift: Saaya, Makoto, Takuya, your other classmates. Your teacher. The other teachers. Previous students. Electricians. Construction workers.
    - [X] Using yourselves as a conduit for their thoughts and feelings, you form a combined cognitive web between all the room's previous occupants such that, between you all, you are able to reconstruct the mental space of the room, exactly as it was before.
    - [X] With you and Tadase at the helm of this great unified web of souls, you push.
    - [X] All for one, one for all. Fill the void. Close the rift.
    [X] Help Tadase
    [X] Rewind Time - Close The Rift
    [X] Help Nadeshiko
    -[X] Drawing on Ran's athletic specialization, you conjure a pair of jump ropes, then cap their ends with giant jawbreakers courtesy of Su, for a pair of makeshift bolas. While Nadeshiko has the strixes distracted, you lob the bolas and wrap them around the enemies' wings to bring them down, then pin them to the ground with honey so Nadeshiko can finish them off.
 
@SCO, do you mind changing your vote to deal with the tie breaker, you're the only one who didn't change to the new plan after WoG said Dia couldn't be used for the original plan.
 
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