Maybe. Still doesn't get over the whole people who get suddenly woken up at 2AM even when potentially expecting it have a particular state of Not-Awake that must first be overcome before they can reliably function as anything more than what can charitably be described as "zombie-brain". I know that on some of my more unpleasant on-call nights when this happens, I don't care if there's a fire or water flooding through someone's ceiling, I'm legitimately not a functional human being that can string together coherent thoughts for at least the first five minutes after my obnoxious ringtone wakes me up, and the next ten are also more or less done on auto-pilot as I get dressed and grab my kit. This is with me being somewhat used to this routine and expecting the chance of needing to be woken up on my on-call shifts.
The girls here are most certainly not used to this and haven't developed the routine reaction behavior systems they'll need for being functional human beings who were suddenly woken up in the middle of the night, let alone having to shift those grinding mental gears from sleep deprived into combat-zone mode.
In fairness, you're right. There's
definitely going to be a reaction time unless it turns out that the people we're calling actually didn't sleep and were waiting anxiously by the phone for us just in case.
The exact extent of the reaction time is going to vary from person to person, how much things like adrenaline are worth, and theoretically how much the transformation itself is worth.
We might not even need interrogation. We know from Genjuro's interlude that the threads are all connected back to a central location. He couldn't counterattack back to there effectively, but Moon probably can. There's literal threads leading back there, and just one guy with an impractically sharp saw manning the shed.
It is conceivable that there are multiple sheds with the twine divided up among them.
On the other hand, the shed where they keep the godbinding twine is probably a fairly important Onogoro location, so if nothing else if we
could just show up there and start smashing things, at a bare minimum it would give further reasons for Onogoro to consider this whole event an Awful No Good Very Bad Day...
Of course, that's an "if" doing a lot of heavy lifting in there.
Sounds like, with the exception of the one site Moon has been to (which the ritualists will have abandoned by now if they have any common sense),
Do the ritualists know that Sailor Moon can instantly return to any location she's seen?
They know she can teleport but they may not know that specific detail of
how she teleports.
While the one ritual site she's been to is the only one she's capable of finding now, once she's found that one it's connected by literal magic string back to the source. It's not a sure thing, but I think Moon's just as capable as Mercury or Mars, perhaps even more capable, of following that connection.
Caution: Details of how the ritual works and of following 'connections' may or may not function exactly like this. While Unnati would theoretically be able to answer such questions, she's not here and Sailor Moon never got to talk to her face to face.
It's almost like the event progress is deliberately being engineered in such a way as to create crises that will draw our priorities away from the big McGuffin set up as a challenge for us to work around so we don't just roflstomp the rest of the event. 🤔
In-character, Onogoro may have a constant
Armchair Operational Planning malus, but they
do have at least some sense of how to use combined arms to present different categories of threat. They know quite well that the army would be considerably less of a threat without the godbinders and vice versa, that's why they spent a lot of time and effort setting things up to deliver both at once.
Meanwhile, Neptune might have her own scanning abilities, but if we wake her up we need to wake Uranus up, and if we end up not needing the reinforcements she's not going to have much to do.
Honestly, if I had to bet on one of those two to be the one who's ready to go and thinking reasonably clearly within just a couple of minutes of being woken from a sound sleep, I'd bet on Haruka. Michiru seems more like the kind of person who needs to yawn and stretch and brush her hair to feel really human in the morning.
hmm.. you know, there dose appear to be a weakness to the ritual, though It's not so much a weakness but a aspect of how it opperates. It's is on some level a physical binding, As Genjuro recently deomostrated.
It might be theoretically possible to force the ritual to bind something that it shouldn't, that could redirect a spell back into the bindings and use their shared physical medium against it. as break all the bindings tied into that physical medium. might not be a reasonable thing to create in the middle of the battle though. but somethign to think about for the battle after this.
I funny-voted this because I'm picturing somehow managing to UPS a barrel full of dynamite with a fizzing fuse or some other Looney Tunes shit right into an enemy base via the ritual twine.
wow were those dice d100 or d10's that's hilariously terrible for everyone involved but Venus
They were d100s, and yes.
As of the end of Round 3...
Well, Nanoha's having a panic attack because she psychologically Needs to save people from things and now she's got to save two different groups of people from two different things in two places at once.
Dr. Sakurai is firmly in the madness place and strongly suspects she just lost her adopted daughter in a battle she got the girl into.
And Whisper... well, Whisper's okay at the moment and probably feels like she's winning, but I think we can all agree that this probably doesn't end well for her.
So yes. They are all having a very bad night.
At the same time, Whisper is leaving a base on high alert while carrying an item that makes it harder for her to focus on her invisibility and non-detection. An 8 should not get her past both Venus and the various security teams on site, traps, etc... Unless Onogoro have managed to kill of every security team in the base, I don't see how an 8 would allow someone focusing on keeping a dangerous artefact from activating to reach the point she can fly off.
First, Whisper's 8 is a case of trading off personal accomplishment for personal survivability. She
did roll second-highest out of four characters, after all.
So yes, she succeeded in slipping into the metaphorical dragon's lair and stealing the metaphorical dragon's most powerful and dangerous magical treasure, in the 'finest' tradition of the Empty Faces.
And as noted in my reply to JowKeen, I suspect you don't really imagine this ends well for
her, personally.
Second and in a more Watsonian line, it bears remembering that for MCAT, nearly everything is currently being concentrated on the gate defense and the prison break. MCAT only has so many specialist Empty Face hunting teams to go around, and they rely heavily on the Empty Faces somehow tripping an alarm or alerting a mundane guard. A lot of those security personnel are being concentrated into specific preparations for the incoming Onogoro attacks coming in through the gates, and Whisper managed to avoid setting off the alarms because that's a pretty routine capability for Empty Faces.
Whisper might have had a lot more trouble pulling off her escape from Dr. Sakurai's lab and getting away without being shot at if she'd tried it in Round 1 or even Round 2, but with intense close-quarters firefights breaking out on opposite sides of the compound at the same time and MCAT headquarters also worrying about a massive internal security threat from the prison uprising, there's just nowhere near the same density of force, response capacity, and attention in place to stop her.
Guards who are busy frantically piling up furniture behind doors to barricade them against an expected attack by Onogoro samurai, or who are frantically doing the 200-yard dash to get over to the entrance to the prison block, are nearly as incapable of getting in Whisper's way as guards who were murdered by Onogoro directly.
