Vebyast
Nascent Transhuman
Two months later, Haru, Yuuki, and Kanna walk out of the meguca internship interview room having acquired a joint controlling interest in the Japanese economy.
Puella Magi Adfligo Systema
- Thread starter Firnagzen
- Start date
-
- Tags
- 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?
- Location
- Auf dem Tisch
I'm still very unclear why pretty much every current platform seems more interested in preemptively telling this woman we're child soldiers before she goes to bed than finding out why she's actually talking to us about this in the first place or what she actually even knows.
Screw it, I don't even know what my vote is right now anyway.
[x] Figure out her angle
-[x] If she's worried we're dragging Hetumi into barriers, well, okay. Maybe be a little indignant about that.
-[x] If she's worried her daughter might join our colourful frilly cult, allay those fears.
-[x] If she's worried about us, she probably knows it's legitimately dangerous; pivot that into a sitrep and hint at bigger plans.
-[x] If we realise she's ALSO been holding back in order to protect us from potential memetic threats, keep in mind that it's customary to pour alcohol for each other because it's gonna be a long night.
-[x] If she's truly an innocent, resist the urge to destroy her soul; The Talk can come later.
[x] Request a meeting to talk business later.
[x] Thank you, ma'am.
Screw it, I don't even know what my vote is right now anyway.
[x] Figure out her angle
-[x] If she's worried we're dragging Hetumi into barriers, well, okay. Maybe be a little indignant about that.
-[x] If she's worried her daughter might join our colourful frilly cult, allay those fears.
-[x] If she's worried about us, she probably knows it's legitimately dangerous; pivot that into a sitrep and hint at bigger plans.
-[x] If we realise she's ALSO been holding back in order to protect us from potential memetic threats, keep in mind that it's customary to pour alcohol for each other because it's gonna be a long night.
-[x] If she's truly an innocent, resist the urge to destroy her soul; The Talk can come later.
[x] Request a meeting to talk business later.
[x] Thank you, ma'am.
Karnewarrior
Leastmost of the Hanged Man Arcana
Sabrina, I write to you with shocking news! Haruka Shizuki tried to have me assassinated to make sure I didn't discover her plot to kill Haruka Shizuki!
Signed, your faithful spymistress, Haruka Shizuki
[ ] Expose her immediately!
[ ] I should kill Haruka Shizuki before she can kill Haruka Shizuki! Contact my spymistress! (This option is available because of your intrigue skill)
[ ] I challenge Haruka Shizuki to a duel for endangering the life of Haruka Shizuki! Haruka Shizuki shall be my second! (This option is available because of your martial skill)
[ ] Perhaps some gold will change Haruka Shizuki's mind? (This option is available because of your stewardship skill)
[ ] Contact Haruka Shizuki and warn her that Madokami would disapprove! (This option is available because of your learning skill)
Torgamous
Aspiring Gynoid
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It really is a shame that we can't be openly Madokhist in this universe. @Godwinson, is Sabrina going to be making up for lost time in PMAV?
Karnewarrior
Leastmost of the Hanged Man Arcana
Ya know, we could probably talk with Mami about that after we successfully navigate Tetris. We could start a secret cult to Madoka. Or just join Homura's.
theauthor
Birdie
- Location
- Soerabaja
Then we can either endless holy war with this shaminist infidel or excommunicate uncooperative magical girls.
Edit : Just as i shitposting about ck2 someone just now makes a crusader kings quest
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The Phoenixian
The Glacier Witch
- Location
- My own little world
Right then, sorry I am definitely deep into the incoherent part of my day cycle. I'm pretty sure I'm getting different goals tangled up too.
The WoG is kinda intended as more of a supporting argument here. Trying to cut down to the core of it...
Haruka has her own goals in this conversation, her own knowledge, and her own personal context for understanding of magical girls.
We have our guesses, but we don't really know before we talk more to her. If she's looking through rose tinted lenses, that necessitates one response. If she's jaded, that necessitates another.
Ironically, dealing with that as an actual person in the conversation would probably be comparatively easy.
Engaging with that from outside all in one chunk is... harder. It's like figuring out how to fit an entire conversational tree into a vote.
To post a couple massively exaggerated and fictitious examples, an old woman reminiscing in comfort about the old days is a different matter from a greedy businesswoman, is different from an agitated mother bear. You don't want to sidle up to the mother bear and carefully backing or running away from the business woman or reminiscing woman is going to get you odd looks at best. Even if you want the same things from all of them, you need different approaches.
(The stuff about running roughshod over her, seems to come from my own personal goal of "facilitate others to do what they want" Which, bleh, is damn hard to put into a vote, but in retrospect I don't think it's quite the issue here.)
Diomedea
A piece of the continent
- Location
- The interblag
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I agree Godwinson's vote is a little too eager to jump on the child soldier train. I mean, meguca are child soldiers, but if she's looking back with rose-tinted glasses and is just happy to talk to some more real life magical girls, rubbing that in her face is going to be shocking. Do we want to begin our conversation by shocking her? We're definitely reacting closer to the Kyoko side of the cynicism scale, which if she isn't cynical is just going to be us putting our foot in our mouth.
The Phoenixian's current vote gets the ball rolling, and lets us get the story from Haruka's own mouth, rather than us assuming it.
The Phoenixian's current vote gets the ball rolling, and lets us get the story from Haruka's own mouth, rather than us assuming it.
- Location
- USA
This is something I seriously do not understand from @Onmur and others. Everyone saying we should never even consider cooperating with Kyuubey, seems to continue to be extremely dependent on the Kyubey-provided telepathy network, to the point that at least a few potential disasters are being held back only by the possibility to emergency-contact Homura for a reaction or planning session.
Shouldn't you all be worrying about a way to replace that network, both for secrecy and to ensue control of it? Or is there some evidence that Kyubey would never maliciously refuse to connect our call to a prior-accepting girl?
Anyways, a lot of the people saying not to ask Kyuubey about the water-user that Haruka knew...are saying to ask Kyuubey to let us telepathy Nadia about it, so same issue really.
Unless I am misunderstanding, it really feels like you are saying "We can't work with Kyuubey until we can convince it that we can be believed, so we should never even start trying to prove ourselves to it."
Its too hard, so we never even try? To form an argument about why our methods of energy-generation might surpass the Incubators, or to start researching a method that will surpass it, we need to have /their/ details on the current method. You can't try to address someones positions or work on their beliefs if you don't even know them, no diplomat goes into a negotiation blind if they have any means to try and get info.
Have you looked at Knigget's plan? Its got 5 votes to the lead ones 10 and 7, looks like.
[] Ask how involved she was in the whole thing. Try to understand how much she knows about stuff without actually revealing the existence of the stuff she doesn't know.
-[] She confronted us for a reason... Does she just want to know more about this kind of stuff?
-[] Is she just looking to make sure her daughter is safe? Cuz she totally is! Hardly involved at all beyond just being a friend we can unwind with.
Short, focuses on getting more info from her, no mention of immediately dumping all the horror of meguca life.
Vebyast
Nascent Transhuman
Grief-enchanting a telepathy router for Mami to copy is near the very top of my science list. I believe it to be entirely within our capabilities and probably not even particularly difficult.
Onmur
Archangel of Nutella.
... Why?
What part of using our magic, probably in conjunction with other meguca's, in order to figure out a Grief/energy generating system requires KB's input?
Let's say we managed to create a Grief enchantment that somehow bootstraps itself into generating a Seed's worth of Grief a minute. We go to KB. We tell him we'll make more of these only if it promises to stop the Witch system. Once we got this enchant we can hold over KB's head, we make a deal.
It's a very simple example; I'm not saying that this, specifically, is doable. But generating Grief ex-nihilo through magic use is very much something we can do, so in the future, creating a perpetual Grief generating enchantment sounds like it could be done! If it could generate as much Grief as a Grief Seed does, then that's good enough to start trading with KB.
At which point do we need KB's cooperation before then?
Higure
Witch of Faith
- Location
- The Golden Land
Kyubey has the research of millenia on hand. We can casually violate physics (giving us a huge advantage), but fully understanding the problem and the full workings of the current system would be absurdly valuable, if not necessarily required, in order to create our own.
- Location
- USA
Do we have a detailed measurement of that rate? Not just how much grief we detect a seed holding, or how much various emotions produce or anything. But how much energy the Incubators get from one after aquiring it.
How can we surpass a benchmark we do not actually know? We won't have any idea when we've actually achieved success!
----
As for The Phoenixian's plan, I'm mainly wary (given the way conversation in the thread as a whole has gone, and thus potentially BrinaPilot) of the open-ended nature of "Fill Haruka in on what we are trying to do".
Its hard to figure out a meaning of that which, unless stated otherwise, doesn't include our desire to revise the current Grief/Witch system? Or at least our openly-stated desire to alter the grief-seed economy that Magical Girls depend on and go to war over? (Remembering that Heroin is more valuable by weight than gold, and possibly moreso than raw uranium, how would you say Grief Seeds are valued by Meguca? Its a biological need and not just an enjoyable treatment to their ailment).
Seems still a bit further than we want to dump on her immediately without planning or having others around.... and again with it being so open ended, could be anything from an info-dump to a short briefing.
Onmur
Archangel of Nutella.
Please explain what sort of 'system' you want to create, because I just want something we can exchange with KB for a promise to stop witching out people/other evil stuff.
Meanwhile, we deal with Magical Girls by making their lives better.
I don't see where does KB's millenias of research come into this.
Furthermore, until such a point in which we actually prove that we can create energy better than KB does, I'd find it hilariously naive to ask information on the issue from KB, and not expect it to give us all the information we ask for... tailored to match KB's ends.
We either ask KB for information on how to subvert its system, in which case it'll flat out deny us, because why would it let us threaten the system?
Or we ask KB information on Grief/energy/whatever and it gives us everything but what we need to subvert the system, because why would it let us threaten the system?
Or we don't trust KB.
- Location
- USA
We ask how to help it improve its energy generation to exceed quoatas and time targets, and it.... actively sabotages it to protect the current technology?
Why are you describing Kyuubey like a capitalist radio-baron trying to fight off television? Theres no competition here because theres no personal motives (I don't think specific regional incubators, if thats even a thing, get incentivized to do better?) and we aren't a competitor, theres only the global motive of "everyone wants to tell entropy to shove right off."
Or its like Academia, and you are positing Kyuubey as the senior professor trying to sabotage our thesis so we don't get credit in journals? Even then the incentive is to steal it for themselves xD.
The question is, what incentive does any agent dealing with an all-living-beings problem like entropy (let alone one lacking emotions and individual motivations) have to sabotage us and not recruit us?
The scarier Kyuubey is, the more capable it is of convincing Madoka to contract no matter what we've previously done. What does it possibly risk by investing a small part of its effort into a speculative new technology, what harm do we actually pose to its current technology operating in the other 95% or whatever of the global population?
The only way we possibly pose a threat to it, such that it has any incentive to step in and sabotage us now , is if Kyuubey is somehow incapable of establishing a Madoka contract at any point in the future because of an action we take (not just the delays we cause now).
Onmur
Archangel of Nutella.
Remember that time when we asked Kyuubey if we should use our powers to create more Grief for him, and he dismissed us out of hand, pointing how the best way to do that was to fight Witches like a nice little meguca?
The milennia old 'rational' paperclip maximizer doesn't believe we can do this. It didn't told us how we could experiment with our powers in order to help his quota, it didn't answer to our offer with an offer of knowledge so that in the future we might be able to help him so.
It just told us to go along with his plan. Kyuubey believes his plan is best.
Unless we change that, unless we make Kyuubey believe we can create something better for him, it will keep doing the same thing.
You want Kyuubey to give us information that would help us create better grief/energy generating systems?
Fine. I wouldn't trust him to give us good information, but maybe that's just me. However, first you need to give him a reason to do it. KB giving up the information is not something that'll happen if it doesn't believe it would be useful.
Finding out how much Grief a Seed generates, how quickly? That's trivial. Any big secrets of Grief generation or... something...
Actually, what do you think would be important information Kyuubey would give us in order to better create Grief/energy? Because at the moment, I can't think of an example.
- Location
- Texas
I would actually say that Kyuubey has a huge incentive to sabotage Sabrina and company if they start to succeed at bringing magical girls together to cooperate.
Kyuubey is not interested in uplifting humanity into a Kyuubey-equivalent state of technological power. It's optimizing for grief production, not for human flourishing. We know because we can see how it has behaved, and it's busy mind-wiping witnesses to maintain a masquerade.
The biggest (plausibly likely) threat to Kuubmanity vis a vis Earth humans is that humans use magic to bootstrap themselves up rapidly into something that can be a problem for Kyuubeys. And that would be pretty straightforward to do if humans knew how wishing worked and were able to make informed wishes that built upon each other and leveraged previous and future wishes.
Sabrina passing out clear seeds is not a serious problem. It's maybe an inconvenient dent in their energy budget, but Sabrina won't live forever, and the Kyuubeys manifestly are working to make sure they do live forever. She could give every magical girl in the world a personal clear seed, and defeat every single witch, and that would just be the equivalent of destroying the Earth; reducing its magical grief output to zero. Which is an outcome they're prepared to accept, even if it's not optimal.
The big problem is Sabrina getting magical girls to work together, and live long enough start learning things and sharing knowledge, and possibly approach some magical singularity tipping point where all of the sudden humanity can change the script on the Incubators. Clear seeds are inconvenient; Sayaka, without the danger of running out of magic and constantly meeting new magical girls and adding their powers to her own, is a possible existential threat.
That's where I think the negotiations inevitably are doomed to break down. Sabrina could hand the incubators a better grief engine, and I think they'd still be untrustworthy, because humans using magic to become gods is a plausible scenario and not one they are likely to be sanguine about.
Kyuubey is not interested in uplifting humanity into a Kyuubey-equivalent state of technological power. It's optimizing for grief production, not for human flourishing. We know because we can see how it has behaved, and it's busy mind-wiping witnesses to maintain a masquerade.
The biggest (plausibly likely) threat to Kuubmanity vis a vis Earth humans is that humans use magic to bootstrap themselves up rapidly into something that can be a problem for Kyuubeys. And that would be pretty straightforward to do if humans knew how wishing worked and were able to make informed wishes that built upon each other and leveraged previous and future wishes.
Sabrina passing out clear seeds is not a serious problem. It's maybe an inconvenient dent in their energy budget, but Sabrina won't live forever, and the Kyuubeys manifestly are working to make sure they do live forever. She could give every magical girl in the world a personal clear seed, and defeat every single witch, and that would just be the equivalent of destroying the Earth; reducing its magical grief output to zero. Which is an outcome they're prepared to accept, even if it's not optimal.
The big problem is Sabrina getting magical girls to work together, and live long enough start learning things and sharing knowledge, and possibly approach some magical singularity tipping point where all of the sudden humanity can change the script on the Incubators. Clear seeds are inconvenient; Sayaka, without the danger of running out of magic and constantly meeting new magical girls and adding their powers to her own, is a possible existential threat.
That's where I think the negotiations inevitably are doomed to break down. Sabrina could hand the incubators a better grief engine, and I think they'd still be untrustworthy, because humans using magic to become gods is a plausible scenario and not one they are likely to be sanguine about.
Well we'll just have to get rid of the capitalist market economy then, naturally.
Dantalion
Insight: 366
- Location
- A Guest Room at the Brass Embassy, dying of Frenzy
- Pronouns
- Any
Most important things would likely be how much Grief they get per Seed, how many Seeds they get on average in a given period, and how they convert Grief -> Whatever energy they use.
First two give us a target quantity of Grief, third gives potential for making better Grief (if we know how they use Grief, we can consider how to make the Grief they get more efficient).
As for it giving faulty information, I'd think it more likely that, if Kyubey doesn't think we can do better, it wouldn't give us anything at all. Some sort of security clearance issue, most likely.
Kyubey omits data more often than it falsifies data, after all. As such, the only answer of the three that could be untrustworthy is the last one.
PhDEevee
Mathematician and Questgiver
- Location
- Sydney
I don't, actually. Do you know roughly when in the quest that was so I can reread it? Kyuubey's generally pretty forthcoming when asked for information, except on other magical girls from what I recall.