Skelethin
Barebones Writer
It is marked as an Armed Device - the Pendulums are its weapons.
American Magical Girl - (DxD Human SI)
- Thread starter Skelethin
- Start date
Skelethin
Barebones Writer
Shamal uses them in the PSP games, and a couple times in the series, but mostly she is running what seems like a dozen support and observation spells plus whatever defense or barrier work that needs doing.
Honestly Sona is the type and generally fills the role that Klarwind is using used for, though that would require Sona breaking down and being willing to use anything that might possibly be even slightly related to Magical Girl Stuff, so who knows if that would ever happen.
She'll break down when Maho Shoujo Crimson Rias wrecks her shit repeatedly. Remember, they are supposed to be rivals.
As I understand it, Sona actually LIKES magical girls. Its just that she wants to be recognized as a serious and respectable person...and Serafell overplays it so much its causing her cringe.
UrsaTempest
Don't Panic!
That said, you can see how good Lint is. She read about useless lesbian, and after digesting it, decided she will not be one. Marvelous, this is rather uncommon.
Harems/Polycules are lame in my opinion, there is never enough development for all the characters involved nor how they interact with each other, all those social dynamics are just kinda waved away as they don't involve the main character.
So hopefully Lint will chase off the garden tools and hoard all the fluff.
So hopefully Lint will chase off the garden tools and hoard all the fluff.
Skelethin
Barebones Writer
Honestly, if a polycule doesn't have enough fluff going on for every member to be getting enough development, then its too big and needs to be trimmed down (with the potential to bring some members back once the fluff ratios even out). So I can understand and fully respect your position on this.
I absolutely refuse to write a polycule/harem situation that is the romcom equivalent of collecting pokemon. I always hate those stories and I have dropped so many for exactly that reason. It is even one of the things that Tina is planning to force Issei to deal with, one way or another.
So do not be afraid to let me know if it starts getting too 'collector' and not enough fluff.
Chapter 14 - Ur 7
New
Skelethin
Barebones Writer
~~~~
American Magical Girl
Chapter 14
~~~
"You have something…" Ereshkigal motioned towards something on my shoulder as she worked to finish the preparations for what was hopefully Valerie's last treatment.
More specifically, the very prominent hickey on my left shoulder that Lint had given me last night after she had finally taken the next step in that part of our relationship.
Not that I knew why she treated me getting her her own Device so dramatically, nor why her 'I do' had resounded with such ceremony and finality.
Honestly, I had expected her to cave and give me one of those slips marked out to ask if we could explore with some level of detail specified days ago. Not to just kiss me out of the blue.
NOT that I minded in the least. Finally getting a taste of her body properly had already been an absolute delight, and we hadn't even gotten each other properly topless yet.
Hands had wondered further, but she seemed content to take it slow, and I wanted to properly explore every inch so it wasn't like I was complaining either.
I just give the goddess a smug grin.
"And you know exactly what it is. We weren't exactly quiet last night." I tell her proudly.
Her face went blank for a moment before a sultry smile covered her face. "And not even slightly ashamed of it."
An eyebrow raised nearly of its own accord. "Should I be?"
"Well…" The Mistress of the Underworld paused, tapping one finger against her plush lips. "One thinks that a Chief High Priestess worshiping someone more than their own goddess to be quite shameful indeed."
My brain screeched to a halt.
What.
"I…"
What.
"..."
…what…
"I have questions."
"I would almost be disappointed if you didn't." Said the goddess who was enjoying this entirely too much.
"Chief High Priestess? When did that happen?"
"Let's see… building a shrine in my honor - in a temple dedicated to my pantheon no less - made you a Priestess."
Fair, I guess… though that hadn't been my intention…
"Then when you passed trials that left even my sister naked and powerless before me elevated you to High Priestess."
I… did do that too, didn't I? Not that I had considered any of that. I just needed to reach Ereshkigal to do something, anything really, that might actually heal Valerie.
"Finally, you reminded me why I was happy to remain here, performing this thankless task. You inspired me to once again be proud to be a goddess of humanity."
"I… did that?"
The blonde haired goddess nodded as she stepped in closer to me despite being a full head shorter, I only now noticing she had stepped around Vaelrie's bed to approach.
"You did." She near whispers, a hand coming to rest on my chest, near my heart.
A thought struck me as some dots appeared to line up, before I gave her a slight scowl. "Don't tell me you are only actually telling me this because you are jealous."
"The ways of the divine are strange and mysterious." She deflected, adopting a regal tone even as her fingers latched onto the collar of my shirt.
"...all this because I didn't heal the marks she left behind?"
"That… may have contributed." The underworld goddess admitted with a blush, briefly unable to look me in the eye.
I sigh.
"I had healed them at first… but then she gave the most disappointed puppy eyes ever, so I stopped." I paused. "So she pounced and gave me four more to replace the one I healed."
Ereshkigal laughed softly, likely imagining the little gremlin doing exactly that.
"So I see." She said, finally able to return her eyes to mine. "This has been a while coming, and the excuse was the final push I needed to express it."
"I see." I said.
And I did. It was rather simple, once I thought to look at things from her perspective.
Here I was, a mortal from a land far from here, with no connection to her, her pantheon, or the culture she was associated with. I went out of my way - over half a continent, from Eastern Europe to basically the exact center of the Middle East - and into a literal war zone (thanks Bush!) in order to find her, specifically, ignoring all the other deities that could have helped, including the much closer, more famous, and honestly the rather likely to help Egyptian pantheon to do so.
And I brought with me the Faith and Belief in a version of herself that had been a pinnacle of what I imagined a deity could be when faced with an impossible choice. She wasn't perfect, I didn't necessarily approve of her choice, but she honestly cared, and honestly tried, and that meant so much to me.
So it wasn't a position that I had any real issues or objections to - depending on a few questions I had for later about expected duties.
I leaned down and captured her lips in a gentle kiss.
"Thank you for finally telling me, my goddess." I told her once the brief kiss was over.
She smiles at me, looking inordinately pleased with herself.
Why am I surrounded by so many smug cats!?! I whine quietly to myself.
"That does bring up one question I have had about divinities in this world." She perked up. "How much does the Faith and Belief of Mortals affect the gods?"
"That." She says after a brief pause, though she still refuses to let go of me. "That is a complicated question. To put it simply, a god is a being of divinity that has names and titles attributed to them. The more that god works, lives, and acts in line with those Names and Titles, the more the belief and faith given to those names and titles empowers them. And if they act too far against them, keeping those Names and Titles will actively weaken them. So deities are known to cast off any Names or Titles that they feel no longer benefit them."
"And what happens to the cast off Names?"
"If there is enough power, Faith, and Belief in them, another god would generally pick it up. Otherwise - if there isn't a close enough fit, or no one is willing - a new version of that god bearing that Name will be born resembling and with most of the memories that are expected from the Name, while based on the Faith, and Belief empowering it."
"Provided," she quickly clarified, "of course, that the deity in question only gave up - willingly or otherwise - the Name, and was not killed while still bearing it. Dead divinities remain dead unless explicitly brought back, though others may gain similar Names or Titles in the future."
So both better and worse than I feared.
Better in that there aren't likely to be armies of forgotten but not dead gods running around waiting for literally any excuse to bust back on the scene like some demented divine kool-aid man.
Worse in that without a distinct enough revival, other gods - or even the same god that had effectively ditched that Name and Role centuries or millennia ago - would simply take advantage of the increased power with essentially no cost to themselves.
Though that still gave some of the idea I had for the collab with Serafall what they needed to grow.
"Which means that when we spark your revival through the event with Serafall, you can force a version of Ishtar that is more like you."
"Umm…" The blonde goddess in front of me gave me a slightly confused look. "What do you mean 'like me'?"
I blinked, before remembering a key detail that separated the Servant versions of Fate Ishtar and Ereshkigal from their original counterparts - they were summoned into a vessel.
"So, quick history lesson on that version of Ishtar and Ereshkigal." I explained. "They were summoned as Servants - a specific type of vessel designed to house the spirit of Heroes and other humans or human-like entities that earned a place in the Throne of Heroes, collected from across all of human history. Which means…"
"That they aren't meant for Divinity."
"Exactly. They were instead summoned into a human host whose personality was so similar that their personalities blended together 70/30, divine to human. And, of course, this human was already an exceptional individual on her own, even beyond her physical form." I gestured towards the goddess' body, who blushed slightly at the implication.
"So exceptional that she held a unique trait so strongly that even the gods themselves that merged with her personality never realized that they, too, kept it."
Ereshkigal went to take a step back, though I held her hand close. There was something that looked a lot like fear and regret - a vulnerability that she suddenly felt the need to cover - that filled her face even as she moved like she desperately wanted to run away, but was completely unwilling to pull her hand from mine to do so.
"You see Rin, the girl who became the host of not one, but two goddesses, managed to hold onto a single trait that was unheard of among the culture she was raised in. A culture that would have gladly sacrificed enemies, strangers, innocents, even family members or entire orphanages full of children if it got them a single step closer to their goal of reaching the Root of All Things."
The look on the goddess' face slowly morphed from concern, to fear, to disgust as I went on.
"She was a decent person."
Her face went blank as she attempted to process the seemingly odd statement.
"Rin was a decent person. Rather than using strength to abuse the weak, be needlessly petty, or do anything, no matter how heinous, needlessly cruel, or evil, to get ahead… she was a good person. And so the divinities that shared her form became better people as a result."
I looked directly in the eyes of a goddess, whose face was stricken with so much confusion and doubt, all underlying a fear she couldn't put a name to.
"You became a better person."
Then I pulled her into a hug when she started to protest, before I leaned in and gently claimed her lips once.
"So why don't we plan on bringing back your sister as a better person, too?"
She smiled at me, a tear falling from her eye as she realized both what she had given up to become the new her, and what she had gained.
Ereshkigal, goddess of the underworld, Mistress of Kur, nodded in agreement.
~~~
It took significantly longer than strictly necessary to get everything settled again to focus on finishing Valerie's treatment.
Aside from a mildly weepy goddess, and needing to do something to cover the most obvious results of last night's activities - and a goddess that attempted to make that worse - there weren't too many distractions as Lint was off practicing under the careful eye of Laevatein as he oversaw both the magics newly open to her, and the using of himself as her new device.
According to Ereshkigal, the new device was holding stable despite the greatly increasing workloads she had subjected the connections over the past few days as she redirected the connections between Gear and Wielder through the device.
Not that it would ever be able to contain all the communication that seemed to pass between the two. Instead information acted much like water or electricity - it would follow the path of least resistance, and going through the device was set to have next to no resistance at all. And all signs pointed to Sephiroth Graal being content with not needing to regularly reforge the soul it was housed in to change that.
Though we would need Valerie awake and actively engaging with it to be sure.
I pulled The Book of Darkness closer to review in her pages how the spirit in the new device was doing after having the last several days to settle into its new existence.
While everything took longer than our initial optimistic hopes, the extra time proved well worth it. So far the device showed great progress in its learning capability, the configuration updates thanks to Darkness, and skill at connecting a User to their Sacred Gear. All with none of the strain or bleedover I had initially been concerned about, though the real test remained.
Ereshkigal was confident that regardless of anything else, both Valerie and the device would be in good condition once this was completed.
"Device reads green across the board." I read out, even as Razing Heart silently shifted me into my Barrier Jacket just in case.
The goddess nodded at my words, her hands going to gently cup the dhampir's head. "Starting treatment."
There was startlingly little for me to actually see, even with Razing Heart augmenting my vision. Even Darkness had little to report beyond what the device Valerie was currently wearing on her hands was telling her.
Which was that the girl was finally waking up.
"Gasper!" A desperate voice screamed out as red eyes flew open, the blonde in the bed suddenly sitting upright, her hand reaching out for something only she could see.
"Valerie!" I called out desperate to go comfort her, though not willing to provoke her by moving closer.
A soft yellow glow erupted first from the crystals on her gloves, and then from the magic circle that spun into existence under her bed as a wave of something washed over the bed ridden girl.
It was in the span of an instant that her eyes went from panicked terror to actually seeing what was around her.
Something Darkness quietly reported was the result of whatever mind magics Marius had hit her with being completely wiped away.
The girl boggled at her surroundings, so glaringly different than anything in Romania or any of the Tepes castles she had been surrounded by her entire life. It was only due to the goddess remaining seated behind her that I was the first person she locked eyes on.
"You…" Her voice sounded like it was coming from someone who thought they might still be in a dream. "You saved me, didn't you?"
I nodded, slowly taking a step forward before lowering myself to one knee to be at eye level with the other girl.
"You stopped me from hurting everyone."
I nodded again, desperately searching for words that would not come.
"...thank you…" The words came out as barely a whisper, and I couldn't stop myself from leaning forward and taking the smaller girl into my arms, even as she instantly broke out crying.
"Gasper?" She asked, her words barely loud enough for me to hear despite being so close even as she clung to me with a desperate strength.
"He ran into some issues escaping, but he found someone to help him." I explained softly. "He ended up needing to be reincarnated into a devil, but his King cares for him greatly and dotes on him like a little sister."
She hiccuped an almost laugh at the end, before whispering something I only caught the tail end of. "...see him?'
I smiled, though she wouldn't be able to see it.
"Don't worry Valerie. I will take you to see him soon."
She just hugged me tighter with nearly bone crushing force, tears running down her face as she was finally free.
American Magical Girl
Chapter 14
~~~
"You have something…" Ereshkigal motioned towards something on my shoulder as she worked to finish the preparations for what was hopefully Valerie's last treatment.
More specifically, the very prominent hickey on my left shoulder that Lint had given me last night after she had finally taken the next step in that part of our relationship.
Not that I knew why she treated me getting her her own Device so dramatically, nor why her 'I do' had resounded with such ceremony and finality.
Honestly, I had expected her to cave and give me one of those slips marked out to ask if we could explore with some level of detail specified days ago. Not to just kiss me out of the blue.
NOT that I minded in the least. Finally getting a taste of her body properly had already been an absolute delight, and we hadn't even gotten each other properly topless yet.
Hands had wondered further, but she seemed content to take it slow, and I wanted to properly explore every inch so it wasn't like I was complaining either.
I just give the goddess a smug grin.
"And you know exactly what it is. We weren't exactly quiet last night." I tell her proudly.
Her face went blank for a moment before a sultry smile covered her face. "And not even slightly ashamed of it."
An eyebrow raised nearly of its own accord. "Should I be?"
"Well…" The Mistress of the Underworld paused, tapping one finger against her plush lips. "One thinks that a Chief High Priestess worshiping someone more than their own goddess to be quite shameful indeed."
My brain screeched to a halt.
What.
"I…"
What.
"..."
…what…
"I have questions."
"I would almost be disappointed if you didn't." Said the goddess who was enjoying this entirely too much.
"Chief High Priestess? When did that happen?"
"Let's see… building a shrine in my honor - in a temple dedicated to my pantheon no less - made you a Priestess."
Fair, I guess… though that hadn't been my intention…
"Then when you passed trials that left even my sister naked and powerless before me elevated you to High Priestess."
I… did do that too, didn't I? Not that I had considered any of that. I just needed to reach Ereshkigal to do something, anything really, that might actually heal Valerie.
"Finally, you reminded me why I was happy to remain here, performing this thankless task. You inspired me to once again be proud to be a goddess of humanity."
"I… did that?"
The blonde haired goddess nodded as she stepped in closer to me despite being a full head shorter, I only now noticing she had stepped around Vaelrie's bed to approach.
"You did." She near whispers, a hand coming to rest on my chest, near my heart.
A thought struck me as some dots appeared to line up, before I gave her a slight scowl. "Don't tell me you are only actually telling me this because you are jealous."
"The ways of the divine are strange and mysterious." She deflected, adopting a regal tone even as her fingers latched onto the collar of my shirt.
"...all this because I didn't heal the marks she left behind?"
"That… may have contributed." The underworld goddess admitted with a blush, briefly unable to look me in the eye.
I sigh.
"I had healed them at first… but then she gave the most disappointed puppy eyes ever, so I stopped." I paused. "So she pounced and gave me four more to replace the one I healed."
Ereshkigal laughed softly, likely imagining the little gremlin doing exactly that.
"So I see." She said, finally able to return her eyes to mine. "This has been a while coming, and the excuse was the final push I needed to express it."
"I see." I said.
And I did. It was rather simple, once I thought to look at things from her perspective.
Here I was, a mortal from a land far from here, with no connection to her, her pantheon, or the culture she was associated with. I went out of my way - over half a continent, from Eastern Europe to basically the exact center of the Middle East - and into a literal war zone (thanks Bush!) in order to find her, specifically, ignoring all the other deities that could have helped, including the much closer, more famous, and honestly the rather likely to help Egyptian pantheon to do so.
And I brought with me the Faith and Belief in a version of herself that had been a pinnacle of what I imagined a deity could be when faced with an impossible choice. She wasn't perfect, I didn't necessarily approve of her choice, but she honestly cared, and honestly tried, and that meant so much to me.
So it wasn't a position that I had any real issues or objections to - depending on a few questions I had for later about expected duties.
I leaned down and captured her lips in a gentle kiss.
"Thank you for finally telling me, my goddess." I told her once the brief kiss was over.
She smiles at me, looking inordinately pleased with herself.
Why am I surrounded by so many smug cats!?! I whine quietly to myself.
"That does bring up one question I have had about divinities in this world." She perked up. "How much does the Faith and Belief of Mortals affect the gods?"
"That." She says after a brief pause, though she still refuses to let go of me. "That is a complicated question. To put it simply, a god is a being of divinity that has names and titles attributed to them. The more that god works, lives, and acts in line with those Names and Titles, the more the belief and faith given to those names and titles empowers them. And if they act too far against them, keeping those Names and Titles will actively weaken them. So deities are known to cast off any Names or Titles that they feel no longer benefit them."
"And what happens to the cast off Names?"
"If there is enough power, Faith, and Belief in them, another god would generally pick it up. Otherwise - if there isn't a close enough fit, or no one is willing - a new version of that god bearing that Name will be born resembling and with most of the memories that are expected from the Name, while based on the Faith, and Belief empowering it."
"Provided," she quickly clarified, "of course, that the deity in question only gave up - willingly or otherwise - the Name, and was not killed while still bearing it. Dead divinities remain dead unless explicitly brought back, though others may gain similar Names or Titles in the future."
So both better and worse than I feared.
Better in that there aren't likely to be armies of forgotten but not dead gods running around waiting for literally any excuse to bust back on the scene like some demented divine kool-aid man.
Worse in that without a distinct enough revival, other gods - or even the same god that had effectively ditched that Name and Role centuries or millennia ago - would simply take advantage of the increased power with essentially no cost to themselves.
Though that still gave some of the idea I had for the collab with Serafall what they needed to grow.
"Which means that when we spark your revival through the event with Serafall, you can force a version of Ishtar that is more like you."
"Umm…" The blonde goddess in front of me gave me a slightly confused look. "What do you mean 'like me'?"
I blinked, before remembering a key detail that separated the Servant versions of Fate Ishtar and Ereshkigal from their original counterparts - they were summoned into a vessel.
"So, quick history lesson on that version of Ishtar and Ereshkigal." I explained. "They were summoned as Servants - a specific type of vessel designed to house the spirit of Heroes and other humans or human-like entities that earned a place in the Throne of Heroes, collected from across all of human history. Which means…"
"That they aren't meant for Divinity."
"Exactly. They were instead summoned into a human host whose personality was so similar that their personalities blended together 70/30, divine to human. And, of course, this human was already an exceptional individual on her own, even beyond her physical form." I gestured towards the goddess' body, who blushed slightly at the implication.
"So exceptional that she held a unique trait so strongly that even the gods themselves that merged with her personality never realized that they, too, kept it."
Ereshkigal went to take a step back, though I held her hand close. There was something that looked a lot like fear and regret - a vulnerability that she suddenly felt the need to cover - that filled her face even as she moved like she desperately wanted to run away, but was completely unwilling to pull her hand from mine to do so.
"You see Rin, the girl who became the host of not one, but two goddesses, managed to hold onto a single trait that was unheard of among the culture she was raised in. A culture that would have gladly sacrificed enemies, strangers, innocents, even family members or entire orphanages full of children if it got them a single step closer to their goal of reaching the Root of All Things."
The look on the goddess' face slowly morphed from concern, to fear, to disgust as I went on.
"She was a decent person."
Her face went blank as she attempted to process the seemingly odd statement.
"Rin was a decent person. Rather than using strength to abuse the weak, be needlessly petty, or do anything, no matter how heinous, needlessly cruel, or evil, to get ahead… she was a good person. And so the divinities that shared her form became better people as a result."
I looked directly in the eyes of a goddess, whose face was stricken with so much confusion and doubt, all underlying a fear she couldn't put a name to.
"You became a better person."
Then I pulled her into a hug when she started to protest, before I leaned in and gently claimed her lips once.
"So why don't we plan on bringing back your sister as a better person, too?"
She smiled at me, a tear falling from her eye as she realized both what she had given up to become the new her, and what she had gained.
Ereshkigal, goddess of the underworld, Mistress of Kur, nodded in agreement.
~~~
It took significantly longer than strictly necessary to get everything settled again to focus on finishing Valerie's treatment.
Aside from a mildly weepy goddess, and needing to do something to cover the most obvious results of last night's activities - and a goddess that attempted to make that worse - there weren't too many distractions as Lint was off practicing under the careful eye of Laevatein as he oversaw both the magics newly open to her, and the using of himself as her new device.
According to Ereshkigal, the new device was holding stable despite the greatly increasing workloads she had subjected the connections over the past few days as she redirected the connections between Gear and Wielder through the device.
Not that it would ever be able to contain all the communication that seemed to pass between the two. Instead information acted much like water or electricity - it would follow the path of least resistance, and going through the device was set to have next to no resistance at all. And all signs pointed to Sephiroth Graal being content with not needing to regularly reforge the soul it was housed in to change that.
Though we would need Valerie awake and actively engaging with it to be sure.
I pulled The Book of Darkness closer to review in her pages how the spirit in the new device was doing after having the last several days to settle into its new existence.
While everything took longer than our initial optimistic hopes, the extra time proved well worth it. So far the device showed great progress in its learning capability, the configuration updates thanks to Darkness, and skill at connecting a User to their Sacred Gear. All with none of the strain or bleedover I had initially been concerned about, though the real test remained.
Ereshkigal was confident that regardless of anything else, both Valerie and the device would be in good condition once this was completed.
"Device reads green across the board." I read out, even as Razing Heart silently shifted me into my Barrier Jacket just in case.
The goddess nodded at my words, her hands going to gently cup the dhampir's head. "Starting treatment."
There was startlingly little for me to actually see, even with Razing Heart augmenting my vision. Even Darkness had little to report beyond what the device Valerie was currently wearing on her hands was telling her.
Which was that the girl was finally waking up.
"Gasper!" A desperate voice screamed out as red eyes flew open, the blonde in the bed suddenly sitting upright, her hand reaching out for something only she could see.
"Valerie!" I called out desperate to go comfort her, though not willing to provoke her by moving closer.
A soft yellow glow erupted first from the crystals on her gloves, and then from the magic circle that spun into existence under her bed as a wave of something washed over the bed ridden girl.
It was in the span of an instant that her eyes went from panicked terror to actually seeing what was around her.
Something Darkness quietly reported was the result of whatever mind magics Marius had hit her with being completely wiped away.
The girl boggled at her surroundings, so glaringly different than anything in Romania or any of the Tepes castles she had been surrounded by her entire life. It was only due to the goddess remaining seated behind her that I was the first person she locked eyes on.
"You…" Her voice sounded like it was coming from someone who thought they might still be in a dream. "You saved me, didn't you?"
I nodded, slowly taking a step forward before lowering myself to one knee to be at eye level with the other girl.
"You stopped me from hurting everyone."
I nodded again, desperately searching for words that would not come.
"...thank you…" The words came out as barely a whisper, and I couldn't stop myself from leaning forward and taking the smaller girl into my arms, even as she instantly broke out crying.
"Gasper?" She asked, her words barely loud enough for me to hear despite being so close even as she clung to me with a desperate strength.
"He ran into some issues escaping, but he found someone to help him." I explained softly. "He ended up needing to be reincarnated into a devil, but his King cares for him greatly and dotes on him like a little sister."
She hiccuped an almost laugh at the end, before whispering something I only caught the tail end of. "...see him?'
I smiled, though she wouldn't be able to see it.
"Don't worry Valerie. I will take you to see him soon."
She just hugged me tighter with nearly bone crushing force, tears running down her face as she was finally free.
Of course all the relationship drama spikes as the sleeping beauty awakens. I am going to get to that stupid polycule vs harem talk sometime, dammit.
At least I finally got Valerie to wake up this chapter. Only 3 chapters later than originally planned.
Ended up on deciding to make Valerie's magic a soft yellow rather than the light blue I originally was thinking. Let me know what you think of that.
For those that are interested in... extra spicy content there will be an extra chapter that covers what happened to spark the beginning of this chapter over on QQ. Far too spicy for SB/SV, but it contains nothing plot relevant that isn't also in this chapter so feel free to skip it if that isn't your thing.
Final thing - I think I have settled on trying to update this 3 times a week. We shall see how well that continues. Wish me luck.
At least I finally got Valerie to wake up this chapter. Only 3 chapters later than originally planned.
Ended up on deciding to make Valerie's magic a soft yellow rather than the light blue I originally was thinking. Let me know what you think of that.
For those that are interested in... extra spicy content there will be an extra chapter that covers what happened to spark the beginning of this chapter over on QQ. Far too spicy for SB/SV, but it contains nothing plot relevant that isn't also in this chapter so feel free to skip it if that isn't your thing.
Final thing - I think I have settled on trying to update this 3 times a week. We shall see how well that continues. Wish me luck.
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- Location
- Belgium
You know, I just had the idea that this story might be one of the very few where Mil-tan actually gets his wish.
Valerie with the Sephiroth Grail can arrange for the Girl part, and Tina with her Devices can arrange for the Magical part.
You just need to make sure Issei knows how to subcontract someone...
Valerie with the Sephiroth Grail can arrange for the Girl part, and Tina with her Devices can arrange for the Magical part.
You just need to make sure Issei knows how to subcontract someone...
Skelethin
Barebones Writer
He is currently Schroedinger's dead.
That is to say, if the plot needs him to have died already, he did. If the plot needs him alive for some reason, then he didn't die.
I need to develop Valerie some more first before the plot decides.
Regardless, Valerie is likely to be responsible for when he died.
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So he's in a catbox. Gotcha.
UrsaTempest
Don't Panic!
Being a god sounds complicated eh
- Location
- United States
I read something on QQ where that happened. Sona was pisssssed.
Well I got up to chapter 9 so I should probably leave a review, but this is probably where I'll get off.
Your writing style is really fun and engaging, the main character is enjoyable, and (in earlier chapters) enjoyably chaotic. Lint is similarly engaging (initially).
Your fight scenes are also fun and interesting to follow.
I think my issue is that as the story has progressed the more crackish it has gotten and it feels to me like as of chapter 9, the cracks have really started showing. In particular the major issue for me is the sudden extreme and random power jumps, often followed by retcons to explain where these came from.
The first chapter sets up a premise: the MC has ended up in DxD and wants to power up, despite being stuck as a normal human. They get their hands on magic guns and (somehow) have a magical tattoo designed which will help them overcome their lack of ability. They are headed to Kuoh for the start of canon after a 3 month road trip, in which the MC can presumably train up for their current state of "nobody with no training" to "actually relevant to canon characters."
Then we start the next bit, and Tina has been having/causing a bunch of trouble with local churches as she passed through due to idiocy (presumably on both sides) and has been misidentified as a Devil. Cool fight scene with new, somewhat stronger exorcist sent to deal with the troublemaker. Great! New character, cool fight.
Oh now the magical tattoo required a powerful priest or even a goddess fragment? Ok…. Well I guess that's one justification for no one else getting the op technique. And we're dealing with vampires next. Cool, Europe is a stronghold for them. Makes sense you'd encounter them on your cross Europe road trip to get to Kuoh.
She has also apparently invented dozens of Nanoha style devices in this month(?) training period, but they were iterations to get her to the "being a magical girl with a nanoha reminiscent device" story premise so it's fine.There's also a cool scene establishing that Tina's cartridge power ups have a huge cost in prep time. Showing some of the limitations of the character, along with her inability to teleport.
Then rapid fire:
Edit:some rewording to better clarify a couple of points in the final paragraph.
Your writing style is really fun and engaging, the main character is enjoyable, and (in earlier chapters) enjoyably chaotic. Lint is similarly engaging (initially).
Your fight scenes are also fun and interesting to follow.
I think my issue is that as the story has progressed the more crackish it has gotten and it feels to me like as of chapter 9, the cracks have really started showing. In particular the major issue for me is the sudden extreme and random power jumps, often followed by retcons to explain where these came from.
The first chapter sets up a premise: the MC has ended up in DxD and wants to power up, despite being stuck as a normal human. They get their hands on magic guns and (somehow) have a magical tattoo designed which will help them overcome their lack of ability. They are headed to Kuoh for the start of canon after a 3 month road trip, in which the MC can presumably train up for their current state of "nobody with no training" to "actually relevant to canon characters."
Then we start the next bit, and Tina has been having/causing a bunch of trouble with local churches as she passed through due to idiocy (presumably on both sides) and has been misidentified as a Devil. Cool fight scene with new, somewhat stronger exorcist sent to deal with the troublemaker. Great! New character, cool fight.
Oh now the magical tattoo required a powerful priest or even a goddess fragment? Ok…. Well I guess that's one justification for no one else getting the op technique. And we're dealing with vampires next. Cool, Europe is a stronghold for them. Makes sense you'd encounter them on your cross Europe road trip to get to Kuoh.
She has also apparently invented dozens of Nanoha style devices in this month(?) training period, but they were iterations to get her to the "being a magical girl with a nanoha reminiscent device" story premise so it's fine.There's also a cool scene establishing that Tina's cartridge power ups have a huge cost in prep time. Showing some of the limitations of the character, along with her inability to teleport.
Then rapid fire:
- Lindt isn't just a medium tier exorcist - she's one of like the 4 strongest people in the church
- Tina can easily and instantly blast through wards on the personal fortress of a leader from an extremely stony magical faction.
- Tina can throw down with the leaders of extremely strong magical factions.
- Tina displays an esoteric aspect of senjutsu that was never established and is mentioned in story to require decades of training even from people who already can use senjutsu that allows her to completely ignore such issues as "being completely out of power".
- Tina's previously established inability to teleport also ceases to matter because when corned she can just pull a random artefact out of her ass to do it all for her.
- Tina can just press one of her devices up against a sacred gear and install a bunch of new software that turns the healing time of a character under expert medical care from "months" to "now".
Edit:some rewording to better clarify a couple of points in the final paragraph.
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Lindt is a female version of Freed, I believe, so her ability to kick much butt seems legit to me.
His sister, I think?
They're both cloned I think?
Skelethin
Barebones Writer
Lol. Lmao even.
More seriously, nearly all of your complaints are some form of misunderstanding, or outright misreading of the text.
In order:
Lint is only upper tier exorcist (implied by the fact she was read in on the secret that God is dead, a very carefully guarded secret), and is effectively the heir designate for one of the top 5. Meaning she isn't strong enough currently to take over the top 5 position, but she is expected to be able to fill it once Griselda Quarta is ready to retire and open the slot.
Or to put it another way, Lint is currently an upper tier exorcist that is still growing and expected to become truly elite in the next few years.
And Tina was still only able to win their fight because Lint spent nearly the entire thing testing her and playing around. If the shield to bind capture counter hadn't worked, Tina would have lost. And they both know it.
To answer the next two together:
You are either vastly overselling vampires in general (they are strong but not that strong as a faction, definitely not an 'extremely strong faction'), overestimating the defenses in place by an order of magnitude, or vastly underestimating what sort of magic Tina is throwing around.
Marius is not a particularly strong leader among the Tepes faction, and not even close to being the heir. The only reason in canon he wasn't an outright joke is he had Valerie's Grail in his back pocket with fucking Rizevim Lucifer backing him, and even then he was a cowardly mastermind type that was unable claim the heirship. Here he is completely lacking Rizevim's support, and is left with only his own power/backing to invest in the wards. And she never fights him, because he is too much of a coward to show his face without a 100% sure win so she never fights a leader.
Divine Buster, as mentioned in the chapter, was created as a spell to pierce through the innate protections of divinity. It is still laughably weak compared to it's goal, but it remains extremely good at punching through stuff, and was buffed by both Touki enhancement and Buster(need to fix that to Blazer) mode.
Regardless, Tina never throws down with a leader of a faction. In fact the only one actually close to an elite among the vampires is Maria(who is only a leader of her group of misfits, not any faction at large), and she instantly no-sells what Tina had used to take apart Marius' elites(which only reinforces how pathetic he himself is). And Tina very much does not fight her, running away instead.
For her Senjutsu:
That's literally what her seal forces her to do. It takes in a tiny amount of raw natural energy from around her, injects it into her system, them 'detonates' to purge any remaining unpurified bits after a brief time. So she has to purify it completely within that brief window, or deal with the backlash. And this is always running, 24/7, at some level. So she has had no choice but to get good at it.
And it's an established skill in canon that is treated as a fundamental part of senjutsu, even if how good people are at it varies and is never really brought up. So you could make the same assertions about Koneko and Kuroka or literally any other senjutsu user about never truly "being completely out of power".
Not that it affects anything besides ki, and as a side effect stamina, in the first place, with her primary focus being on mana.
Tina is unable to just teleport like most casters are down to be able to, and that remains true. Instead she has access to a teleport spell that requires a specific device(The Book of Darkness, which has access to all of her spells and spells in progress, the latter of which includes a teleport option), and a long and very obvious cast time that acts as a literally beacon to the magically sensitive that screams "someone is casting a big spell here". The only reason she got away with it is because the vampires didn't even try to stop her, and the ward they thought would block it couldn't.
Finally you show a fundamental misunderstanding and misreading of both the issue with Valerie's healing, and the steps necessary to get there.
Ereshkigal could heal all the damage in less than a week as is, except for the obvious side effects of the Sacred Gear proceeding to redo a bunch, though not close to all, of the damage basically as soon as she wakes up again.
Obviously not the desired outcome.
So to make sure the Graal doesn't instantly reopen a bunch of the wounds, she would need a significant amount more time. Because the Graal has no limits as to what it does, both as what it can do, and what it subjects it's wielder to.
Tina offers to create a new device that is specifically designed to be able to act as a limiter and help facilitate communication between SG and wielder.
This still takes several days to create - and several more to configure and condition to handle the work - before healing can be completed.
So it does nothing even remotely close to 'turn the healing time to now' and instead mitigates the worst side effects of the healing of a goddess whose entire domain is souls. Even then - spoiler alert for the last chapter - it still takes longer than initial estimates of a week to finish.
And to give an idea of where Tina is on the power scaling, she is several volumes ahead of the main cast, but only by like a handful.
Test tube fraternal twin.
She is a bit younger(I always put Freed at mid twenties, Lint is barely 20 here) but it's otherwise she is genetically a gender swapped twin.
They are both a product of the Sigurd Institute, and their attempt to breed/grow via cloning more descendents of Sigurd(Siegfried depending on your preferred mythology reference) capable of working holy swords and Gram(Balmung).
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I remember that, it was more because her sister kept visiting/asking about the magical girl. That ship will have already sailed in this fic lol.
One more magical girl when an entire team has already moved into town isn't as big a deal.
DualFront
Perhaps, this is Hell
Tina, Tina, Tina...
How the hell is it that you are the Useless Lesbian here!?
Skelethin
Barebones Writer
Sona is going to have a lot of headaches anyway as she is person 1 that Serafall comes to when she has new Magical Girl news. And for all that Tina had been stomping around Europe, it has mostly been male exorcists who would absolutely refuse to admit they got defeated by a Magical Girl of all things.
So details get brushed under the carpet.
And it's not like anyone would think to ask the vampires, or that many of them even know (just those at the castle, but those mostly have the same fragile male ego problem as the exorcists).
Their upcoming trip to Northern Europe will leak some information, and there is zero chance that Lint doesn't end up doing Magical Girl Shit when she inevitably ends up back at the Vatican when Tina heads to Japan.
And all that is without Serafall realizing that Tina specifically is there/who Tina is to seek her out.
Then the devils get to meet the Magical Girl once she runs face first into the plot.
Hey! She has been doing pretty good for herself!
Not wrong though.
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MiracleGrow
Miracles for only $19.99 [They/Them]
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Not sure why people are being weirdly intense about what 'makes sense' in a setting where the protag gets stronger by looking at tits. Magical girls are magical girls you don't need to think about it so hard.
Anyways enjoy what I'm seeing yipeee
Anyways enjoy what I'm seeing yipeee
Press X to Doubt
*Begins button mashing X* /j