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Puella Magi Adfligo Systema

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[X] Redshirt Army

That personnel file thing is amazing <3 And the imagery of a swarm of Sabrina-chibis rushing her Moms

Minor nitpick with the update, though I'm not sure how the final vote worked out on the issue and its hopefully not a problem (didn't see anyone comment, surprisingly).
Sabrina asked the Pleiades to connect her to their existing call, rather than direct a call to Niko herself.... wouldn't that still allow for a false identity ? If we presume Kyuubey-switchboard isn't obligated to offer an honest caller-ID or anything, but is obligated to correctly connect you to the person you ask for (or simply refuse, as with Illusion-guca or whoever). So chances are, it was Niko or one of the other on-sight Pleaides (that is, ones potentially compromised) who told us it was Niko calling, rather than us using it as a possible vector to positively ID her.

What would Kyuubey do if we asked to telepathy Kanna Hijiri anyways?
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The differences in actual vote plan don't look too large, but I'm going Redshirt for the discussion differences. Basically what I want to see is:
1. We should absolutely ask Homura for timestop, for all the reasons mentioned. Niko is a high value asset, risks to the Asunaro girls are higher value than most foreigners (both for the Mami connection and the large single grouping of unusually cooperative allies) , and between the canon spinoffs and things like shopping trips it seems very clearly established that Homura is willing to leave Mitakihara on speculative-gains missions. The Clear Seed in play isn't even relevant really, we'd have asked for nearly the same help (lack of infinite energy didn't stop any of the canon antagonists in KM from being major problems after all) for any attack on Niko et all.
2. We should absolutely wake Sayaka up and have her be involved in this, whatever her eventual role (even if its going back to sleep). We just had two or three speech votes on how to try and reassure Sayaka about her usefulness, this very same day....it would be absurd to then leave her out of a crisis over the mild annoyance of sleep.
3. I'd very very much like it if we could get Kirika, Oriko, or both brought along. Kirika already proved herself once (for usefulness and safety) on a community service parole, and I really don't see any better method for convincing Homura to ease up on them than more of these. It also seems crucial to keeping Oriko and Kirika from getting too upset or rebellious about their continuing confinement and punishment, and I think Oriko can probably tolerate being left behind if Kirka is allowed to go.
4. I'd like to leave Sayaka behind on home defense if possible (and alert Kyouko and thus her kohai to be on watch, possibly the other two I can't remember who got healed by Sendai) , IF we end up not using time stop for some reason. If we are, then its probably fine to bring her with us.
 
In the case Niko's wish causes shenanigans that'd allow Hijiri to 'hack' her telepathy communications...

What if we tried to telepathy Hijiri at some point? I wonder if we could get something out of it. Not likely, but Niko's wish is... special enough, in a way.
 
Trying to telepathy Hijiri is definitely something we should bring up in the meta conversation with our bombees. I doubt it will work, but it might be worth trying. Even better would be to re-establish telepathy with Niko and with Niko only and, again, pass her a passcode. Worst case scenario is Hijiri does intercept telepathy and provides false verification. In which case we're right back where we started.

I can actually see Homura timestopping over mid-telepathic wake-up call and forcing us to ask her to go back and get Sayaka. I don't think a timestop meeting will be imposing on her at all - everyone on the team uses our griefbending freely, after all, and Sayaka and Yuma have yet to refuse healing to someone who needs it. While Homu is something of an outlier being the only Neutral member of the group, I doubt she's selfish enough to consider us using timestop to be an imposition rather than just something she does for the team.

More of an imposition would be having her use timestop on the Pleiades, since they're not Homubombed, but I don't think asking her would be out of line, given the crisis situation.

And 100% Sayaka should be woken up. We don't need to blare the Red Alert in her metaphysical ear, but we definitely need her at the meeting. Worst case scenario is she chooses Home Defense and heads back to her place for a nap before she takes up Madokaguarding. If we try to keep this from her to save her beauty sleep, I'm pretty sure Kyouko will stop being our #1 threat of stabbings.
 
Racoras said:
What would Kyuubey do if we asked to telepathy Kanna Hijiri anyways?
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When we asked Kyubey to connect us to meguca that we knew the name of, but hadn't met, he refused. So if we ask him to connect us to Hijiri and he does, that would indicate that we've spoken to her (in person or over telepathy), in which case she's already replaced Niko.
 
Racoras said:
Sabrina asked the Pleiades to connect her to their existing call, rather than direct a call to Niko herself.... wouldn't that still allow for a false identity ?
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Oh, good catch. Meant to reside that point earlier but fell asleep in the middle of posting and forgot to add it. (... much like this post. >_>)

Maybe the best way would be to privately ping the meguca we met earlier and ask her to keep us abreast of the stolen inventory while we prep to leave? If she answers and wants to know why, call it checking on a hunch. If she's confused about what we're even talking about or we get the stock "The brain you have dialed... has been disconnected. If you need help... hang up... and then dial your Incubator." recording, well, that smells an awful lot like a Bad Thing.

This is, of course, all presuming her wish exploit doesn't just a let her stick a rootkit in all seven of them and sub herself seamlessly
 
There kind of needs to be some wish shenanigans going with Niko and Hijiri in order for the whole swap thing to work.

Else, the first time one of the Pleiades tried to telepathy Niko after the swap, Hijiri would've been found out.

I think that the two of them are considered the same person to some extent, so Kyuubey/Jyuubey might help Hijiri's cover by, say, letting her listen in on every telepathic conversation Niko's got.

Or something. PMKM does not have the most well made plots. :p
 
That... depends on how the telepathy network's address system works, doesn't it? I mean, it seems like it doesn't find its destination based on the name that you think when it makes the connection, or we could just call meguca that we've only heard of. Perhaps it works based on the sender's mental image of the person. After Hijiri had come up to the Saints as "Niko", if whenever they tried to contact Niko they thought of the last time that they'd seen "her", then their image of "Niko" would be tied to Hijiri instead.

It's a theory, anyway.
 
Weren't they already using crazy wide-area magic to make people unaware of Kyuubey in the canon Kazumi story?

Did they ever keep using telepathy routinely? Did they know how it worked, vis a vis Kyuubey being the actual mechanism for it? That may just be a capability they gave up by giving Kyuubey the big boot.
 
There is no "address system". This is one of the old phone systems, before they invented switches, where there were no numbers and you called the operator and asked them to connected you to a business or person. Ever heard the phrase "Patch it through" or the term "Patch cable"? Those are from the same operation: A telephone operator grabbing a cable and manually connecting two lines, "patching" the network. And, as you may expect, there is no addressing scheme: It's all stored in the operator's head and they choose what connections to make based on what you ask for. Kyubey works the same way: We could ask him to connect us to that girl we talked to last week in $place and he'd make some connection that he thinks would satisfy that request.

I fully expect that we could ask to be connected to "The person we met on the roof and gave a clear seed to", or "The person that was following that person", or "The Kanna Hijiri that was created by Kanna 'Niko' Hijiri's wish".
 
Remember OpSec here; we had The Asunaro Talk in a privacy bubble, so Kyuubey doesn't know we know about Hijiri.
 
Vebyast said:
There is no "address system". This is one of the old phone systems, before they invented switches, where there were no numbers and you called the operator and asked them to connected you to a business or person. Ever heard the phrase "Patch it through" or the term "Patch cable"? Those are from the same operation: A telephone operator grabbing a cable and manually connecting two lines, "patching" the network. And, as you may expect, there is no addressing scheme: It's all stored in the operator's head and they choose what connections to make based on what you ask for. Kyubey works the same way: We could ask him to connect us to that girl we talked to last week in $place and he'd make some connection that he thinks would satisfy that request.

I fully expect that we could ask to be connected to "The person we met on the roof and gave a clear seed to", or "The person that was following that person", or "The Kanna Hijiri that was created by Kanna 'Niko' Hijiri's wish".
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Except my whole point was that people using telepathy don't normally make a verbal request to Kyubey to be connected. They just think that they want to be connected and they are (if it's someone they've met) or aren't (if it isn't or the person is dead) without any awareness of Kyubey's involvement. So what information from the sender's mind is used to determine who to contact? A name or a memory of their last meeting or a soul resonance or what?
 
The Narrator said:
Except my whole point was that people using telepathy don't normally make a verbal request to Kyubey to be connected. They just think that they want to be connected and they are (if it's someone they've met) or aren't (if it isn't or the person is dead) without any awareness of Kyubey's involvement. So what information from the sender's mind is used to determine who to contact? A name or a memory of their last meeting or a soul resonance or what?
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Most likely some greater outpouring of the same tech. QB probably reads the mind of and connects the guca before they can process the thought that they want to speak to her.
 
I'd expect that a magical girl acting to open telepathy would use a set of actions similar to those that she'd use to communicate telepathically, in which case it's straightforward for Kyubey to monitor all magical girls at all times watching for them to try opening telepathy. I'd expect that success at opening telepathy depends entirely on whether Kyubey can identify a concrete target. Also recall what happens if it can't make that identification - the magical girl probably asks for assistance, in which case Kyubey gets corrective feedback that it can use to refine its targeting. Repeat for a few thousand years and I'd expect it to be so effective as to resemble magic.
 
Karnewarrior said:
Most likely some greater outpouring of the same tech. QB probably reads the mind of and connects the guca before they can process the thought that they want to speak to her.
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That would imply that Kyubey is constantly reading the surface thoughts of everyone on the telepathy network. Which is terrifying to contemplate, but I'm pretty sure it's not the case, or else several things from the series would have gone differently. (He would have known what Homura's deal was right from the start, for instance, and wouldn't have been surprised by Madoka's wish.)

Vebyast said:
I'd expect that a magical girl acting to open telepathy would use a set of actions similar to those that she'd use to communicate telepathically, in which case it's straightforward for Kyubey to monitor all magical girls at all times watching for them to try opening telepathy.
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I was thinking something similar, but it can't be tied to their MG powers at all, since select non-meguca can also open telepathic communications. In some way, the intent to communicate telepathically reads differently from other thoughts in a way that Kyubey can detect. Maybe he modified their subconscious to add the equivalent of #telepathy to the output? :p
 
The Narrator said:
I was thinking something similar, but it can't be tied to their MG powers at all, since select non-meguca can also open telepathic communications. In some way, the intent to communicate telepathically reads differently from other thoughts in a way that Kyubey can detect. Maybe he modified their subconscious to add the equivalent of #telepathy to the output? :p
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Well, it's easy with actual Magical Girls. They're running on Kyuubey-built hardware, so there's any number of things that could be built in.

Harder to understand with baselines.

Edit: Can muggles generally initiate telepathic calls, or only receive them?
 
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The Narrator said:
I was thinking something similar, but it can't be tied to their MG powers at all, since select non-meguca can also open telepathic communications. In some way, the intent to communicate telepathically reads differently from other thoughts in a way that Kyubey can detect. Maybe he modified their subconscious to add the equivalent of #telepathy to the output? :p
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:p

Firn has mumbled about subvocalization before and it's a strong candidate. Another plausible option is that he's directly reading out neurons to obtain the hypotheses that're generated for the feed-forward models that underlie things like proprioception and the internal monologue. It would be informative to see if we can cut off telepathy by consciously suppressing the connection to our body's brain in the same way that we'd shut off pain.
 
See also: Madoka contacting Sayaka via telepathic call in the morning on episode 2 of the show.
 
It could also be magic.

:p

Say, use the power of EMOTIONS in WANTING TO COMMUNICATE, and KB serves as a router?

KB seemingly can add whoever it wants to the telepathy network, so I doubt it's got to do with bodily mods.
 
Kyubey habitually erases people's memories, so he must have some way to read and write information on a normal human's brain.

Given that normal humans can only receive or send telepathic messages if Kyubey specifically chooses to add them to the network (trying to spontaneously telepath Nagisa didn't work, for example), the idea that he plants some sort of subconscious trigger to flag certain thoughts as telepathic messages and not others doesn't seem to be out of the question.
 
Kirika's antimagic doesn't interfere with telepathy. It could be that it's a deeper kind of magic - we still don't know how soul gems work and antimagic doesn't interfere with those - but I believe that it more strongly supports the hypothesis that the telepathy is fully nonmagical.
 
Or, since Kirika's anti-magic only affects active magical effects, and there are already a subset of magical things that it doesn't affect (soul gem's ability to control a body, the costumes produced by transformation, summoned weapons), telepathy is just one of those things that's too low-level to qualify.

Actually, have we ever seen telepathy being used while anti-magic was in effect? I don't remember much conversation during the fight against O&K, and in every case since then we were her allies and she was exempting us from the effects.
 
Apropos of nothing.

[Q] Would this be a terrible moment to record ourselves talking so we can finally hear our own voice?
-[Q] ...
--[Q] OK, back to emergency situation.
 
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