That is almost literally who she is.
Puella Magi Adfligo Systema
- Thread starter Firnagzen
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- puella magi adfligo systema puella magi madoka magica be gay do crimes (gay) female protagonist bad decisions dating mami tomoe (tomoe mami) diabolical laughter friendship is the best ship handholding identity crises microwaving tea gets you put in the bad place names are important the body is the fursona of the soul this is not the baked goods thread we don't talk about rionna what could possibly go wrong? who in the world is azure sanfrancisco?
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
Congrats, you have correctly identified Murderface.
The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
It's the other way around, actually. All magical girls have a 100 meter limit at which their Soul Gem can control their body. The fact that our Grief control range is also 100 meters (along with some other comments in the narration) suggests that our Soul Gem considers the Grief to be part of our body.
One, do you have any evidence that Nadia isn't reluctant to trust others? We've been explicitly told many times that idealistic magical girls like Mami are the exception, and our past encounters with other girls bear that out.
Every conversation we've had with Nadia has included at least one line to suggest that she's not an idealist. She has no teammates that she can rely on, no territory that she protects; she wanders from place to place selling her services for what she needs to survive. The first time we spoke to her, she told us that the life of a traveling magical girl was "hard". She insists on getting the payment up front, so that she can't get ripped off, even from someone that she considers trustworthy like Mami. And even Mami's word isn't enough for her to believe in Sabrina's powers without proof. She was shocked by the idea that we intend to give the Clear Seeds away and calls it "mad." Everything she's shown us indicates a great deal of cynicism and suspicion towards others.
Two, we would still be doing something extremely idealistic. We're paying her the Clear Seed up front. One Clear Seed is enough for her to retire and live off for the rest of her life. She could decide at any point to bail on us and go live comfortably somewhere, with no real threat of consequences. We would be showing her a great deal of trust.
And if she stays and she continues working with us, she would see us constantly being idealistic, helping others, helping her, and then she'll start trusting us in return, start feeling good about helping people. But trust, friendship and loyalty have to be earned over time, you can't just demand them from someone the first time you meet them.
If you don't like the idea of calling it a "job", then instead ask her to join Team Mitakihara. But however you describe it, treat the offer--and her potential contributions--seriously. The version that @Godwinson is putting forth is dismissive and flippant, and barely touches on the subject before cloudcoocoolandering off into a non sequitur. Being disrespectful is not the way to earn someone's confidence and get them to work with you. (It's also a lie, since we have cash and not just gold.)
[X] The Narrator
Vebyast
Nascent Transhuman
Showing a certain amount of idealism is necessary. Without that she'll dismiss us as just another con man. That offer of a clear seed, for example - either we're putting a great deal of trust in her and hoping that she'll really work with us, or we don't actually intend to let her get away with it for some reason. I agree that we don't want to seem like a complete nutcase, but there are better ways to do that than making out like a feudal warlord. Even "team mitakihara" wouldn't work - she's too perceptive and she's no doubt run into exactly that kind of nationalistic ideal dressed up as the power of friendship. It's an obvious tactic when you run around in poofy dresses by default. No, what we probably want to do is stay as a cloud cuckoolander, but give her just enough to realize that, underneath our idealism and naivety, we're serious, strong, and thinking far enough ahead that we aren't just going to die like chumps.
As an example: We're casually joking about having stolen guns and gold from the Yakuza. Clearly nutty, right? Except, when you think about it, we're strong enough that we can joke about stealing guns and gold from the Yakuza. Similarly, asking about powerful magical girls we can recruit just makes sense, right? Except danger sense, long-range teleportation, and mental defenses, combined with our question about nasty groups of meguca, say a lot about the scale and intensity of the fights we're expecting and how much power we're looking to build. Asking about her enchantments serves a similar purpose.
[x] Godwinson
As an example: We're casually joking about having stolen guns and gold from the Yakuza. Clearly nutty, right? Except, when you think about it, we're strong enough that we can joke about stealing guns and gold from the Yakuza. Similarly, asking about powerful magical girls we can recruit just makes sense, right? Except danger sense, long-range teleportation, and mental defenses, combined with our question about nasty groups of meguca, say a lot about the scale and intensity of the fights we're expecting and how much power we're looking to build. Asking about her enchantments serves a similar purpose.
[x] Godwinson
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Diomedea
A piece of the continent
- Location
- The interblag
- Pronouns
- She/Her
[X] The Narrator
I usually don't vote, but I do feel Godwinson's vote is making the same error we avoided with Kyouko. We know that we're a magical girl classic, and it should be apparent as long as Nadia sticks semi-around. The goal is to get her to stick around, and then win her trust, just like with Kyouko. We're already tripping way too many "too good to be true" alarm bells. Give her a short term benefit to stick around, or she might head away to the impending explosion she is expecting Mitakihara is going to be.
I usually don't vote, but I do feel Godwinson's vote is making the same error we avoided with Kyouko. We know that we're a magical girl classic, and it should be apparent as long as Nadia sticks semi-around. The goal is to get her to stick around, and then win her trust, just like with Kyouko. We're already tripping way too many "too good to be true" alarm bells. Give her a short term benefit to stick around, or she might head away to the impending explosion she is expecting Mitakihara is going to be.
AuraTwilight
The Sorcerer of Smiles
- Location
- The Silver City
It's not about what I expect to happen so much as the fact that there is a non-zero probability of something going wrong. Poking humans with a Clear Seed is unethical because if something bad or irreversible happens, uh, OOPS.
If Clear Seeds 'remove depression', the most likely manifestation of that, based on the canon precedent of Wraiths, is that those humans become emotionless P-zombies. OOPS.
Witches tend to ignore Grief Seeds AND Soul Gems, and Clear Seeds are effectively an inbetween. Witches by their very nature are SO insular that they create entire pocket dimensions to isolate themselves from reality. Witches like Walpurgisnacht are an outlier.
Throwing a Clear Seed at a witch to dewitch them is idiotic and infeasible because literally nothing about Soul Gem or Grief Seed mechanics works like that. All data from our experiments with Clear Seeds already indicates that a Clear Seed is MISSING something, probably Hope, and that merely emptying it out isn't good enough. Since Clear Seeds empty out Grief Seeds voraciously to the point of risking itself hatching, combined with the data point that Witches refuse to give up control of their grief when hatched and active, the more likely scenario is that the Clear Seed is possibly destroyed in the attempt to cleanse a Witch, as the Witch becomes hostile at it. The souls inside Clear Seeds are quiescent, and thus are not winning a battle of wills, here.
We're not fucking selling Clear Seeds. We don't NEED to, we can literally kill any witch we want in seconds, and Sabrina's already established as not wanting to hold grief-cleansing or Clear Seeds as exchange or collateral. Literally the LATEST update has her saying she wants to give Clear Seeds away. We don't need to coerce people to give us Grief Seeds to turn into Clear Seeds, that's going to happen on it's own. Who WOULDN'T want a one-week use resource to suddenly last multiple centuries?
Appletank
Acquire Cheese
IIRC, the main objection to messing with Clear Seeds is that they're still the soul of a person probably locked inside it? We really want to avoid traumatizing them further. I am especially worried about what paradigms you're working off of when you think smashing them is a good test. Unless that's a joke. A poor one. Meguca souls are for saving.
- Location
- Borneo
Always Happening
We could have prevented this.
- Location
- On a train with no brakes
>poking people with grief/clear seeds
I'm pretty sure I can say unequivocally we are not making Evil Nuts. If Kanna's already made them and there are still some lying around, I'd like to study them, but they are firmly in Bad Science™ territory.
I'm pretty sure I can say unequivocally we are not making Evil Nuts. If Kanna's already made them and there are still some lying around, I'd like to study them, but they are firmly in Bad Science™ territory.
Vebyast
Nascent Transhuman
Another example, since I'm thinking about it. Bennouna's answer to our question about high-power magical girls with something like "I don't know anybody nearby", and our response is undoubtedly going to be something like "Anywhere is good, we have transportation". Yet again, straightforward answer, simple on the surface, but combined with our question about existing magical girl power structures, the implications - we have the tools to become a global superpower and possibly even an intent to do so, ranging from building international dream teams to projecting hard power anywhere on Earth.
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DB_Explorer
Purveyor of alternate realities.
- Location
- San Diego, California
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Homura: Speak like that again and I will shoot you in the gem.
- Location
- Illinois
Look, there's two ways we can go about doing this. We can do what you're saying, we can leverage things on people and build a proper system of our own and etcetera, and there's a lot to be said for that, there really is.
In point of fact, there's so much to be said for it that I'm really quite torn between the two options, and here's why:
The proper response to this is "we can give out cleansing and maintain seeds without giving out clear seeds for free. Maintaining something as a commodity which we can trade for services will in the long term allow us to better coordinate and leverage others, which will save more lives and improve quality of life for more people. Without leverage we are stuck with being unable to organize and maintain a group of meguca on anything but good will. Meguca on the whole are not people with jobs, are not upstanding citizens, etcetera, due to their various traumas. With leverage we can pressure them to behave. Without leverage we will be inviting looting and theft in Mitakihara with no way to prevent it except by threats. And making those threats against gucas we've already given clear seeds to -- what good does that accomplish? We want to be able to impose a moral code on meguca in our city, and really, eventually on meguca in our world. That is one of our goals, law and order. It's secondary to keeping people alive, yes. But it is a goal.
We can maintain a successful system in Mitakihara by keeping gucas alive and well on limited timescales. We can refresh seeds to three weeks, four weeks of grief space and it will keep people alive just as well as clear seeds as long as we refresh regularly, and in Mitakihara we can do that on basically nil time -- anytime anyone wants a seed refreshed, they just need to pass within 100m of us and we just rip grief to a three/four week level.
But giving people clear seeds for free is giving them license to behave however they want, as well as basically ensuring they'll remain alive regardless of our involvement. There is a tradeoff. Is this bad? Not necessarily, keeping gucas in cleansing is a major objective. But it will limit our ability to enforce law and order."
Some of your argument is garbage, Narrator. "Blah blah we should act less idealistic blah blah yahoo." You have valid points, but that argument, regardless of justification, just makes you sound hardman. Our idealism is not wrong. Sounding idealistic is not wrong, because it's fucking true. The argument you had ought to be making is that passing around clear seeds for free is an inefficient way of pursuing our ideals -- because it is.
... *checks post*
Of course, we already committed to giving away clear seeds for free in the last update, after I forgot to object to it.
*facedesks*
In point of fact, there's so much to be said for it that I'm really quite torn between the two options, and here's why:
The proper response to this is "we can give out cleansing and maintain seeds without giving out clear seeds for free. Maintaining something as a commodity which we can trade for services will in the long term allow us to better coordinate and leverage others, which will save more lives and improve quality of life for more people. Without leverage we are stuck with being unable to organize and maintain a group of meguca on anything but good will. Meguca on the whole are not people with jobs, are not upstanding citizens, etcetera, due to their various traumas. With leverage we can pressure them to behave. Without leverage we will be inviting looting and theft in Mitakihara with no way to prevent it except by threats. And making those threats against gucas we've already given clear seeds to -- what good does that accomplish? We want to be able to impose a moral code on meguca in our city, and really, eventually on meguca in our world. That is one of our goals, law and order. It's secondary to keeping people alive, yes. But it is a goal.
We can maintain a successful system in Mitakihara by keeping gucas alive and well on limited timescales. We can refresh seeds to three weeks, four weeks of grief space and it will keep people alive just as well as clear seeds as long as we refresh regularly, and in Mitakihara we can do that on basically nil time -- anytime anyone wants a seed refreshed, they just need to pass within 100m of us and we just rip grief to a three/four week level.
But giving people clear seeds for free is giving them license to behave however they want, as well as basically ensuring they'll remain alive regardless of our involvement. There is a tradeoff. Is this bad? Not necessarily, keeping gucas in cleansing is a major objective. But it will limit our ability to enforce law and order."
Some of your argument is garbage, Narrator. "Blah blah we should act less idealistic blah blah yahoo." You have valid points, but that argument, regardless of justification, just makes you sound hardman. Our idealism is not wrong. Sounding idealistic is not wrong, because it's fucking true. The argument you had ought to be making is that passing around clear seeds for free is an inefficient way of pursuing our ideals -- because it is.
... *checks post*
Of course, we already committed to giving away clear seeds for free in the last update, after I forgot to object to it.
*facedesks*
Right, great, we fucking... Goddammit. Well, time to find a new plan, because we no longer have a damn thing to leverage anyone with besides force. Fuck, dammit.
I fucking... *groans*
Ok.
Vebyast
Nascent Transhuman
We said that we'd give them away for free. I see nowhere where we said we'd give them away to anybody that asked without conditions attached. We impressed on Bennouna that we were biasing toward reasonable magical girls and I see no reason why we wouldn't continue doing that. We additionally just made it clear that we expect to fight people that make trouble, and "doing evil shit with our clear seeds" is obviously one of the things that we'd be dealing with.
Personally, I don't see how we could sell them in the first place. We can steal shit from organized crime whenever we want money. We have infinite grief seeds. What else could we ask for?
Personally, I don't see how we could sell them in the first place. We can steal shit from organized crime whenever we want money. We have infinite grief seeds. What else could we ask for?
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Onmur
Archangel of Nutella.
... Hugs?
Torgamous
Aspiring Gynoid
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Grief Seeds empty out Clear Seeds.
The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
I never said that we shouldn't act idealistic. In fact, if you'll read my post, I specifically said that we should behave idealistically, and that doing so can potentially eventually earn us Nadia's loyalty.
I'm just suggesting that when we ask Nadia to work with us, we put it in terms that she can understand within the typical meguca paradigm, by offering payment for services rendered. Or barring that, that we at least make the offer in a way that seems like we actually respect her and what she can do for us and not like her recruitment is an afterthought in between our various wacky hijinks.
Quirky can be endearing in a fictional character, but no one wants to work with, rely on or take orders from someone who's a total flake, especially when their lives are on the line.
Gratitude. Cooperation. Loyalty.
Torgamous
Aspiring Gynoid
- Pronouns
- She/Her
How are we supposed to sell something in exchange for gratitude? You get significantly better returns there by not calling it a sale.
I'm with you here, but it looks like you're sabotaging this by conflating it with acting like a regular magical girl. We just need to act more professional, now is not the time silliness.
And we did that with Kyoko by being unfailingly nice. We only introduced capitalism to our relationship with Kyoko after we'd already firmly established in her mind that we're an idealist first and foremost. That impression is even more important in the person who we expect to be telling a whole lot of people about us.
Do what we can and ask her to do what she will. Gratitude, cooperation, loyalty.
Kinruush
Who?
- Location
- USA
As @Vebyast noted, we don't need to hand out Clear Seeds to just anyone. If anyone asks for one outright, we even have a built in justification in that we're still testing them and so are only giving them out on a limited basis, primarily to people we interact with regularly so as to more carefully track whether there are complications from their use. That isn't even really an excuse, since we aren't yet certain about all their effects, so we should keep an eye on their holders anyway. So, we can use Grief cleaning to manage larger groups and give out Clear Seeds carefully for free as a sign of trust and goodwill. At no point would we be holding magical girls' lives hostage, but we still wouldn't be giving up our primary leverage over any meguca visiting Mitakihara.
There's a difference, I think, between being nice and being a cloudcuckoolander like some are suggesting.
Torgamous
Aspiring Gynoid
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Right. I agree. I said that.
Vebyast
Nascent Transhuman
She's perceptive enough to handle what we're giving her right now. Everything we've said today, underneath a layer of obfuscating wackiness, is dead serious. She's going to realize over the course of the next update that we know exactly what we're asking her to do and exactly what that offer of a clear seed means. This isn't us asking for her help in between our wacky hijinks. This is wacky hijinks covering up a legitimate and motivated attempt to change the world with her as a key member in our opening gambit.
Um, it's the opposite, right? Grief Seeds steal Grief from Clear Seeds, not the other way around; this is why our Grief Seed almost hatched when exposed to a Clear Seed with a week's worth of Grief in it.
Grief attraction hierarchy:
Soul Gem < Clear Seed < Grief Seed
That's the whole reason we think we're onto something regarding Dewitching by making Clear Seeds in the first place: Grief Seeds don't take Grief from other Grief Seeds, but they do take Grief away from Soul Gems.
Kindly don't forget, @rkyeun, that what you're suggesting is human experimentation on torture victims: Grief/Clear Seeds are, best as we can tell, the souls of teenage girls who have already suffered immense pain and suffering. And you want to try hitting one with a hammer?
Wait, @Firnagzen, is the Soul Gem - meguca body connection limit really 100 meters? I thought we had gem-coma-d someone before by standing next to them and moving their Gem away to a point well within the range of our control before. If this is accurate it's a big clue as to our powers.
It's... kind of not, though. Until @Godwinson gets around to fixing it, it's the plan where we say this:
This is not what you say to a veteran magical girl whom you've just met to inspire confidence in your ability to be a good boss; this is the kind of thing you say when you want to make everyone back away from the crazy person, take the Clear Seed she's offering, and run before she inevitably gets herself killed by being a crazy ditz. Until it's fixed:
[X] The Narrator