Cherie Magica
- Thread starter Ghoul King
- Start date
- Crossover
- Location
- Wherever
The next chapter is in fact FINALLY going to get to exactly this point!
(I've been spending literal years trying to find a place for it to come up in the story, it's been incredibly frustrating, I want to write this scene dammit)
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Canonically we don't really get a proper justification per se, but Kyubey says the potential- the energy he's harvesting- for whatever reason peaks between like, 13 and 17 and is higher in girls than boys.
Strictly, this seems to imply he could go after other ages and genders but just doesn't for whatever reason eg it being less effort for the returns.
Like, we don't actually have a reasoning for why it's higher there, but that's what we're told.
Movement 8: Limelight
- Location
- Wherever
It took a few minutes of fiddling to determine that Rose could in fact sense Liba...'s Labyrinth entrance, and thus could in fact follow Liba without any additional complications. From there the two drifted back toward Boston, with Liba helping Rose to keep herself sustained non-lethally, which itself lead to a brief conversation in which it came up that Rose's initial perception of applying the Witch's Kiss was that of drinking 'dark water' from a 'well'. Rose made this sound so profoundly unappealing a perception that Liba was left wondering why Rose 'drank' anyway if it was so unpleasant, but Liba decided not to explicitly ask (yet) as Rose seemed... fragile, for lack of a better word.
Usually Liba wouldn't care that she was speaking to someone in a 'frail' state of mind, but the initial conversation with Taylor had caused Liba to realize that she did, in fact, still have something of a need for social interaction with... humans wasn't the right word, obviously, but Liba wasn't sure what the correct word would be in this case. Whatever the case, Kyubey and Cubette had yet to satisfy this need, whereas talking with Taylor-slash-Rose actually had met it some. While Liba had high hopes that this 'Witches can be talked to and reasoned with and befriended and so on' principle would in fact generalize readily, she didn't want to assume; if Rose 'broke' or decided she didn't want to hang with Liba anymore or whatever, Liba might find herself without a friend-or-whatever-you'd-call-this for quite some time to come.
So for the moment she was playing it safe, not pressing Rose on topics that were interesting but seemed like they had decent odds of upsetting her.
On the plus side, Rose's mood settled over the course of... a couple hours? It felt like a couple hours to Liba, but she didn't exactly have a watch. (She considered making one, then had doubts it would be properly time-accurate and so dismissed the idea, at least for the moment) Enough so that Rose actually initiated conversation on her own, mildly surprising Liba. "So... what's your... real reason for this... 'mission' with Noelle?" Rose asked, sounding hesitant. Her song radiated a fair amount of suspicion that wasn't making it into her telepathic 'voice', and Liba metaphorically bit down on annoyance at realizing she had no idea what was normal for telepathy. Was Rose trying to cloak her suspicion? Or was the telepathy just naturally not communicating it for some reason?
Then Liba really registered the actual substance of the question and had to think for a minute to figure out what Rose was really asking. "I didn't lie, you know," she said to stall, then felt annoyed at herself for falling back on deception again when it was probably not called for, then paused and realized that actually Taylor-slash-Rose was still pretty close to a complete unknown so maybe open honesty was dangerous in this case. Man, doubting my instincts like this better stop at some point, this is obnoxious.
Rose spoke up before Liba could decide on how to follow up on that. "You told m- you claimed you had brain damage." Rose sounded less accusatory than Liba would've expected, but definitely had that 'I feel lied to' tune to her.
Liba hummed for a moment to stall, then decided to just be explanatory. "Well, for one I didn't actually say that. I brought up a relevant comparison and allowed Taylor to assume that this exact, specific scenario I was bringing up was exactly, specifically applicable to me." Rose's song made it pretty clear she wasn't placated at all. "Okay, look, the unvarnished truth would obviously not have been believed or resulted in violence directed in my direction, or hey both. I couldn't just ignore the topic because this singing thing I do is in fact not at all inside my control -I'm still weirded out you don't do it, honestly- so I had to say something, and to be honest I picked the explanation I did because it was in some meaningful sense close enough to the truth in terms of communicating what's going on with me without actually tripping the 'you're lying' or the 'you're the enemy and I need to kill you' responses."
"Oh," Rose said in mild startlement, which was interesting to Liba, though she wasn't entirely sure what specifically was startling Rose. In any event, Rose jumped tracks. "... I still want to know why you're doing this... 'mission' with Noelle. You were certainly not truthful before."
Unseen to Rose, Liba's head tilted consideringly in her Labyrinth. "Well, no, I was pretty much completely honest. Passed some of the truth off as dumb jokes when Taylor was clearly not willing to buy the truth, but I seriously didn't lie about any of that. That said!" Rose's song twitched in response, leaving Liba to wonder if sudden volume changes were a thing that bothered Rose in general. "I must admit that I left out some key stuff! Like- okay, did Kyubey give a spiel about trying to kill Scion?"
"What." Yeah, that's about what Liba figured; the possibility not raised and basically unimaginable.
"Yeah, I kind of figured. Okay, do you want me to do this explanation or do you want it re-explained from the horse's mouth?" Rose's confusion went up, so Liba didn't bother to wait for her to actually request a clarification. "I mean 'do you want me to get Kyubey to do the explanation again, or do you want me to try explaining it'."
Rose's song radiated caution, which fair 'nuff, while she said, "I think I'd rather hear it from someone with more emotional sensitivity than a rock. A dead rock."
Liba chortled at that characterization, considered commenting she wasn't exactly Miss Sensitive herself, then decided against it; she wasn't sure yet if Rose was the sort to take offense at that kind of thing or find it funny or what. "Okay, so according to Kyubey, Scion is actually an alien, like y'know an alien from outer space not an illegal immigrant though I guess he's that too, not a particularly lucky parahuman."
Rose's doubt was loud, but she dubiously commented, "People never did find a likely candidate for who became Scion, I suppose. But... so? What, is Scion an escaped criminal from Kyubey's homeworld or something?"
Liba rolled that thought around in her head, as it was an angle she hadn't thought of on her own before, but... Liba was skeptical that Kyubey would tell the story it had told as a lie to cover 'I'm just hunting an escaped convict'. Alien, with alien mentality, so not impossible, but honestly, if Kyubey was telling the truth and Liba had been in its position, she'd have been way more likely to use the 'chasing a criminal' explanation to avoid broaching all this weird shit with 'Scion passed out powers and all for some reason'. So ultimately she said, "To be honest, that would be a great lie to convince people to help it, but nah, Kyubey says Scion is the source of powers and also going to blow us all up once he's done running his science experiment, and it wants us to kill the fella because something-or-other about killing the universe faster or something. I didn't really believe Kyubey initially, honestly, so I didn't exactly commit this part to memory."
There was a long silence that Liba wasn't sure how to parse -Rose's soundscape went quiet and uninformative for some reason- before Rose made an incredibly aggrieved noise and remarked, "What- who- why do you believe this nonsense, and what the hell does Noelle have to do with it?"
Liba hummed consideringly for a minute. "To be honest I'm like 80/20 on don't believe vs do believe? Like I'm pretty inclined to think Kyubey was telling something it believes to be more or less truthful-"
Cubette interjected, startling both Liba and Rose, who had entirely forgotten she was there. "While anti-entropy contractor Kyubey is perfectly capable of being incorrect, it is a point of pride with him that he does not tell untruths." Liba made a mental note of that phrasing; 'a point of pride'. She wondered if this was an example of Kyubey and Cubette disagreeing on emotional topics, or if Kyubey would agree with the phrasing. Certainly, Cherie-slash-Liba had already become strongly confident Kyubey didn't like to feel like a liar...
Rose made a disbelieving noise of disgust, reminding Liba that Taylor had in fact known that magical girls become Witches; Rose's reaction suggested she too felt Kyubey had deliberately tried to hide some pretty big details. Another mental note made, Liba carried on as if no one had spoken up at all. "But! While I'm skeptical Kyubey has painted a truly accurate picture of events, as it happens I don't really care!" Liba noted that both Rose and Cubette were pretty thrown by that. About equally strong of confusion relative to their respective trends-so-far, actually. "While I refuse to go get smeared by Scion, I'm perfectly happy to test Kyubey's theory with great violence via other people. It's not like the glowing idiot is important by conventional human understanding of the world, so if Kyubey is wrong, whatevs."
Rose was strangely appalled by all this. It took her possibly a full minute to actually marshal a response (Though Liba noted she didn't actually stop following Liba), and said response was still pretty angry and horrified. "He's a Hero who helps people. What the hell is wrong with you? If you think we can seriously kill Scion, kill a- a fucking Endbringer instead! And- what the hell does this Noelle have to do with any of this?"
Liba metaphorically sat back, thinking hat also metaphorically placed firmly on non-metaphorical head. "Huh. Will Noelle even be able to reach them?"
"What?" Taylor bit out, angrily bewildered.
"Y'know, the thing with the resting period stuff. Leviathan sleeps in the briny deeps, the Simurgh is in outer space, and Behemoth apparently just swims in the Earth's molten core like it's a swimming pool. And one of 'em did a thing not that far back, so probably Noelle would have to wait a few months, and that seems impractical and/or kinda shitty."
"What??" Taylor eloquently added, anger fading into full confusion, and Liba wished she knew the other Witch well enough to guess why the anger would be fading now. Ah well, something to keep in mind for later.
"Well, we have like three basic options as far as I see it. Option one is to wait until we think an Endbringer is going to attack soon, then jump on convincing Noelle, hope she agrees quickly, and then hope we can arrange for her to be shipped out to the Endbringer attack before they bail. This has a bunch of obvious failure points like that we don't know when or where they'll attack, can't be certain Noelle will agree so quickly, and magical crap is mostly invisible to non-magical people so convincing the Protectorate to teleport a seemingly-normal girl to an Endbringer fight will probably be a whole wall o' problems all by itself." Rose sounded very much like she hated how reasonable all this sounded, but didn't speak up when Liba took a moment to order her thoughts on the remaining bits. "Plan second is that we talk Noelle into becoming a magical girl ASAP and then make sure she doesn't become a Witch, ie help her beat up our fellow Witches and probably hide all the 'Witches are what magical girls become' stuff so she doesn't get all weird and uncooperative on us on the off-chance this stuff bothers her." Rose's 'these are reasonable points and I hate it' tune intensified, while she remained conspicuously silent. "And third place is the same as second place, except we prep her for joining our coven of Witches ahead of time and don't even try to keep her staying a magical girl, and I guess just try to convince her to use her wish really effectively or something? Just kind of waste the whole 'this magical girl will be hella strong' thing, basically."
Unexpectedly, Cubette spoke up again, though at least Liba (and Rose) hadn't forgotten about her again so it was less startling. "Excuse me, it sounds as if you're assuming Noelle's 'Witch' form will be a substantial loss in fighting strength?"
Liba tilted her head consideringly (And tweaked a part of her garden that was still out of whack from Taylor's rude home invasion), because, well, yes, that had seemed implied by Kyubey's explanation of how all this worked, but the question rather implied Cubette thought this was untrue. "It was the impression Kyubey gave me with its explanation," she ultimately went with, shunting blame elsewhere -and then mentally frowned as it occurred to her this was another habit that had been very useful in the Vasil household but was perhaps not a habit Liba wished to retain. She briefly considered trying to take back the blame-shifting, then decided she wasn't bothered enough to try to correct it in this particular case, not when it might distract from the conversation at hand.
Cubette tutted, or at least Liba interpreted the noise as that sort of disapproval even though it didn't really sound like a human tutting. "That is incorrect. While it's ambiguous how tight the correlation truly is given how radically different the assorted elements are in so many ways, a girl who has great Potential will have a greater 'ceiling' on the kind of change their wish can effect, in turn will have greater capacity to overcome threats of any kind in combat while in their 'magical girl' form, in turn will produce a Witch that is more likely to shed its Labyrinth and is more likely to require either multiple magical girls or a magical girl with particularly great Potential to be overcome, and will also produce more entropy-free energy in the process. This Noelle will almost certainly significantly eclipse the two of you when she becomes a Witch."
Huh. Interesting. "Huuuuh. Still, I'm not sure how we'd get Scion-" Liba noted that Rose spiked aggravation, and rolled her hundred eyes two hundred times. "-or an Endbringer into her Labyrinth so she could fight them, so-"
Kyubey faded in like a dream in front of Liba and very rudely interrupted. "Her product will be powerful enough it will likely not bother to form a Labyrinth."
Liba blinked a few hundred times at that, absently noticing Rose evincing quite a bit more confusion. "Cubette said Labyrinth-shedding was a thing Witches do after they've been around for a while. Like a caterpillar making a chrysalis and becoming a butterfly or whatever?" Liba ignored Rose's rising confusion at hearing the phrase 'Labyrinth-shedding', aside to tamp down a bit of upset and horror attached to it. She wasn't sure, but she suspected this was some lingering thing from Taylor having been really hostile to Witches, like maybe Rose was thoughtlessly reacting with horror because Taylor would've been horrified by the idea, same as Liba kept catching herself thoughtlessly applying Cherie behaviors that didn't necessarily make sense to cleave to anymore.
Cubette made an ambiguous humming noise while her song suggested to Liba this was 'I didn't say that but I'm not going to directly call you stupid', which was annoying because there was probably zero chance of her honestly admitting to whatever she was thinking so Liba would be stuck with just the suspicion unless and until Cubette did similar stuff often enough to be a clear pattern of evidence, but it was Kyubey who actually spoke up. "That is the more common scenario, but sufficiently powerful product will not bother. The most promising theory is that it's a matter of self-confidence, where product sheds its Labyrinth when it no longer fears the world beyond its Labyrinth, hence why sufficient initial power skips past the Labyrinth stage." Liba doubted this scenario; she didn't feel like she was scared of much of anything- hm. Admittedly she didn't want to get smeared by Scion. And didn't rate her chances very high against Endbringers. And there were plenty of other parahumans Cherie had been relatively casually familiar with that Liba hadn't really thought about but now that they were on her mind she wouldn't want to be forced into a duel to the death with them. Hmmm.
"Why... why does he keep using 'product' to refer to Witches?" Rose asked Liba in what felt like a whisper. Was that a thing you could do telepathically?
"It is what you are," Kyubey blandly replied, implying that if telepathic 'whispering' was a thing Rose certainly hadn't succeeded at performing it. "I normally do not use the correct terminology because humans have a variety of irrational, counterproductive responses to it, but product has never been known to successfully destroy their Grief Seed, so I see little reason to continue using the incorrect terminology in this context."
Rose sputtered her way through an incoherent series of objections, repeatedly shooting herself down or otherwise correcting herself, clearly disliking the 'dehumanizing' aspect of this 'product' label but then getting caught on points like that she didn't want to call herself human or a 'person'. Liba hummed thoughtfully to herself as she felt out her response to the label; she'd kind of ignored it before, and... thinking on it? She'd ignored it because she really didn't mind. Witch was certainly a cooler term, calling to mind magical power, but it also had connotations of isolation, of being shunned for precisely the things that gave one power (Which Liba found interesting now that she was thinking it out; who came up with this Witch label in the first place? Liba would've expected something more straightforwardly monstrous given Kyubey's 'elemental evil' spiel. 'Demon' or something), and Liba wasn't terrifically fond of that connotation. 'Product' described a good or service that was made with a purpose to be utilized by people, and while there was an implication of being generic or interchangeable that seemed rather silly to apply to beings of such dramatic variability, Liba supposed that from Kyubey's perspective it wasn't actually inaccurate. If every Witch contributed to its 'anti-entropy' job thing regardless of their individual quirks, then in some very real sense most of them amounted to a number on a spreadsheet for its purposes.
Actually, that reminded Liba: "Hey, where are Grief Seeds going when you do the thing with the hole in your back, anyway?" she asked, interrupting Rose's latest flustered attempt to argue the 'product' label was inappropriate and cruel or something. Liba noted that Rose's initial spike of irritation and outrage went away basically immediately, giving way to intense curiosity instead. Convenient.
There was an extended silence where Kyubey and Cubette's emotions did that silent communication thing again (So probably telepathic whispering was possible somehow) and Liba strongly considered calling them out this time, but before she could convince herself it was a strategically worthwhile show of her hand Cubette spoke up. "They are transported to the nearest negative entropy generation plant for processing." Liba noted that this was a non-answer answer, and that it seemed to be the sum total of what Cubette intended to say. She also noted that Rose was dissatisfied with this answer but not spiking suspicion or hostility or the like; she didn't seem to be interpreting it as an evasion or the like.
"I figured something like that, yeah, but like... details?" Liba was remembering that thing Cherie experienced where the Witch blipped out in pain or something, having this suspicion 'processing' was a destructive process, but she didn't want to come out and say it explicitly. Sometimes people let slip info they were trying to hide if you didn't get them thinking you were pressing for that info, and while on the whole Liba didn't really care what Kyubey and company might do to her Grief Seed after she died in the event she did die, if Kyubey and Cubette felt it really important to hide 'we destroy Grief Seeds once the Witch is dead' that would raise questions about their intentions. If Liba were in their position as she understood it, her main motive for hiding destructive processing would be not wanting to give away an intention to inevitably betray Witches to get at their delicious energy.
"I would simply direct you to a video, but I do not believe the network is readily accessible to product," Kyubey remarked. Wait, what?
"Hold up, are you saying you want to link me to a Youtube video of some History Channel shit?" Liba asked, because that sure sounded like what Kyubey was trying to say. How would that work? She'd yet to see an Incubator cell phone or equivalent...
"I am not familiar with those terms," Kyubey blandly responded with. Its tinny song suggested it was being honest, even. "Excuse me, I have submitted a request outlining the experiment; this will have to wait until the request is processed."
"Experiment?" Rose repeated back blankly, clearly completely lost.
"Wait wait wait, is 'the network' this telepathy shit?" Liba asked, suddenly suspecting she understood what Kyubey was doing a terrible job of trying to say.
"That was its original primary purpose, as it happens, though its scope has expanded considerably since the days when that was all the network supported," Cubette answered, her song sounding like she found this conversation a little boring but liked being helpful enough to participate anyway.
"Kyubey wants to send me a link to a Youtube video of History Channel shit in my brain?!?" Liba couldn't decide if that sounded like the lamest possible use for telepathy or if it sounded awesome. Both? It could be both; both. She noted Rose's song playing out the routine of 'wait, is that what that means?' so apparently it made some amount of sense to Rose too.
"I am not familiar with those terms," Kyubey repeated, its song faintly scratching out irritation. "It will likely take a day or more for my request to be processed and approved, in any event, so there is little point in continuing this topic."
"I wasn't asking for a step-by-step explanation, just a basic idea of what happens to a Grief Seed once the Witch is dead," Liba said with some irritation. Like yeah now she wanted that alien Youtube link, but that had not remotely been on her mind beforehand.
"Dead?" Cubette remarked in some confusion.
Liba felt confusion right back. Surely the aliens who could make literal fucking magic happen knew what death was? So what was Cubette confused about? "Yeah? Dead? One or more magical girls beat their body to pieces, their Labyrinth goes away, all that remains is the Grief Seed as a corpse-analogue?" Cherie had gotten to see it happen, after all.
"Oh my," Cubette remarked. "I believe there has been a very significant misunderstanding." Liba noted that Rose spiked dread, though Liba herself really had no idea why that might be. "The situation you describe is not meaningfully 'fatal' to a Witch. So long as the Grief Seed remains intact, the Witch is not irretrievable. A Grief Seed that has been filled with 'Grief' will eventually reform its Witch if not processed before this occurs."
(... now I'm a goddamn rock...)
Rose was experiencing horror for some reason, which Liba decided to file off the edges but not push down on too hard. Rose would inevitably learn what Liba could do; better to keep a light touch overall, minimize the odds of Rose deciding retrospectively some sudden shift in her feelings was evidence of undue influence. Liba herself was... really just going 'this makes sense, but I would never have guessed it'. She already knew Cherie's body had stopped being her keymost anchor point to existing and functioning, the Soul Gem having taken that function, and she was quite sure her Grief Seed was just Cherie's Soul Gem with a new outfit so obviously the principle was the same, but Cherie had sort of assumed that her body being destroyed would mean her Soul Gem would be stuck technically alive but functionally dead, and in turn to the extent Liba had given the topic thought she'd figured this remained true and of course generalized to other Witches, like the hanging mannequin one. She would never have guessed the body could just be rebuilt, but really, her Grief Seed had built this body from scratch, so...
"Okay so in summary if we talk Noelle into this she'll probably be able to just roll right up to an Endbringer and put up her dukes, she'll probably be invisible to them-"
"The 'endbringers' have shown no sign of awareness of the Witches that precede them," remarked Cubette idly, her song implying this really was a mildly interesting factoid to her.
"-so... hold on, what?" Liba failed to complete her thought, struggling to come to grips with this bomb Cubette had dropped into the conversation.
Rose contributed, "Witches do what?" sounding... offended? Liba wasn't sure why she would sound offended, what the offense would be about; not enough familiarity with Rose. (Or Taylor, for that matter)
Kyubey took up the thread, its song sounding... actually mildly enthusiastic? Maybe? "Witches that shed their Labyrinths generally switch from a passive strategy of applying the Witch's Kiss and waiting for the marked human to come to them to instead more directly assaulting their victims. In most cases they additionally change the pacing and scale of their attacks, going longer between kills but performing more at a time. Often they coincide these attacks with natural disasters, major military actions, or Endbringer attacks. It is uncertain if this is why they do so, but it has the benefit of obscuring their own contributions, allowing them greater freedom to act undetected." Huh. That was all an interesting set of insights Liba really would've liked to hear about sooner, and broadly logical-seeming? If Liba had remained committed to murder for sustenance and had someday abandoned her Labyrinth, she'd probably have ended up doing pretty much that, herself.
"You- she- Cubette said Witches precede Endbringers," Rose said, and Liba wasn't really sure why she was fixated on that point.
"Excuse me, this conversation is quite interesting, but I am overdue for sleep. Apologies," Cubette abruptly remarked before fading out entirely. Uh. Okay. It... didn't sound like Cubette was bailing in a suspicious way with suspicious timing? Liba could buy that Cubette had just crossed that threshold from 'tired' to 'can't stay awake any longer' and just not mentioned being tired earlier. Some humans did that kind of thing.
Kyubey carried on as if Cubette bailing hadn't just happened, "This did not occur with the first two Endbringer attacks, but all later ones have always been preceded by at least one product approaching the target city as much as a full day ahead of the attack and waiting for it to start before initiating their own attack." Huh. Neat.
"That's impossible," Rose flatly declared, offended and angry and suspicious. Huh?
In Liba's Labyrinth, Kyubey's head tilted, which seemed kind of pointless to Liba. Rose couldn't possibly see it, after all. "As it has consistently happened for over 15 years, 'impossible' is clearly incorrect." The tone was mild as always, but Liba couldn't help but hear reproach in it. She wasn't sure if she was just expecting it that strongly or if she was actually picking up on something.
Rose didn't back down. "Endbringers can't be predicted. If they could be, Heroes would be ready and waiting for them, every time, not scrambling in response to an attack starting. They're even immune to precognition somehow."
Kyubey's head tilted the other way. Was this an expression of frustration? "Many of the apparent physical limitations of parahuman abilities are not physical laws at all. Many Endbringer 'immunities' are simply rules imposed by Zion as part of its experiment. This particular 'protection' is such a case; magic is not bound to this limitation."
Rose began making incoherent sounds rather like someone choking on a large piece of food, and it occurred to Liba that they hadn't actually previously gotten to the part of Kyubey's spiel that went 'powers only pretend to cheat physics'. Uh, whoops? Come on, a lot was happening in Liba's life, you couldn't expect her to track every little thing.
"WHY," Rose rather rudely asked with the intensity of an angry lesbian serial killer finding you in bed with a dude after you'd claimed to be a lesbian yourself. (Liba was sure glad she didn't have to worry about that happening again. Probably. Probably? Shit, she still didn't know enough about Witch biology and psychology and all, maybe not? She was pretty sure she hadn't had a single sexy thought this entire time, but fuck, sometimes Cherie went a week not thinking about that stuff at all, such as during a stressful move, maybe she totally did still have a sex drive! How would that fucking work-)
"We do not have a definitive answer and as yet have no rational theories for why Zion's species does the things they so consistently do," Kyubey replied blandly while its tune scratched out what pretty much had to be irritation. Like, old-scars-this-has-irritated-me-for-years irritation, not 'this girl I am talking to right now just annoyed me'.
There was a very long, extremely pregnant pause where Liba could tell Rose was in the middle of having an aneurysm, though Liba couldn't have told anyone why. Liba was starting to think maybe this whole 'kind of rush Taylor-then-Rose into dong the thing and then moving right along' plan was actually a very poor fit to the girl. Maaaan. This was why Cherie had normally tried to scope people out for at least a couple of days before interacting with them if she was expecting to interact with them for even half a day. Admittedly Liba had done this because waiting for two days with nothing to do would be incredibly boring for a human girl who needed to eat and sleep and deal with her makeup and all that jazz and had seemed liable to be twenty times as miserable for a Witch who had the one not-that-demanding biological need, ie it had been more a desperate plan than anything else, but really, when were Cherie's plans not laced with a heavy dose of desperation?
"His SPECIES?" Rose finally let loose with. Oh, Liba had the light bulb go off. That's what she's hung up on! "Are you seriously saying there's an entire species running around the- the galaxy-"
"We have reason to suspect they have reached other galaxies, but cannot confirm such suppositions directly as yet," Kyubey cut in, which struck Liba as interesting. Was this another topic Kyubey cared about? Was it somehow an extension of the emotion bugaboo?
"-passing out superpowers in twisted science experiments that end in blowing up the planets?" Rose sounded pretty angry and exasperated, which seemed silly to Liba, but hey, she'd done a dumb and not tried to figure out Taylor at all beforehand so who knew what was going through the other Witch's head!
"I would not word it that way, but you seem to have correctly grasped the essentials," Kyubey said, which was... possibly the closest thing to a compliment Cherie-slash-Liba had heard Kyubey say? Man, so many interesting bits coming up. Maybe Liba should get somebody else aboard just to see more sides to Kyubey! (Wait, recruiting Noelle would do that if successful, never mind)
"WHY," Rose repeated in that exact same 'this knife in my hand is going in your throat if you don't give the perfectly correct answer' tone from earlier. "Wait, aliens aren't just real, they're so common this is a sustainable strategy?!?" Rose switched to, which was an angle Liba hadn't considered but now that it was in the air... that was a really good point! Also: Liba was intensely disappointed that her reality had lots of aliens but none of the cool parts like space federations or MiBs helping a bunch of cool aliens to secretly live on Earth. "How- how have we not seen any signs yet? Alien radio, or..." Rose trailed off.
Kyubey stretched itself in Liba's Labyrinth, distinctly reminding her of a sleepy cat, minus the yawn. "I am only minimally familiar with any human programs searching for 'aliens' and could not say what they are doing wrong," it said, which felt snipe-y to Liba but Cherie had often people-watched and critiqued mental blind spots and whatnot. Liba found it... weirdly plausible and relatable to imagine Kyubey getting SETI explained and going 'yeah, that was never going to find anyone for X, Y, and Z reasons I find painfully obvious'. Since its song didn't give any particular signs of dishonesty... she tentatively suspected this was in fact a blunt, thoughtless statement of truth? "And as I previously stated, the reasons for Zion's species' actions are not known to us. They consistently rebuff attempts to communicate with them, often with violence, and there is no obvious rational explanation for their actions." Oh yeah, Kyubey did say something about asking Scion directly or whatever, didn't it?
There was another long pause before Rose changed topics entirely. "Why this Noelle girl? I- Tay- fuck-" So Rose was struggling with that 'the memories don't actually feel like another person's entirely' thing, too. "-Noelle makes sense from a... humanitarian perspective. But Kyubey doesn't 'get' the humanitarian perspective-" Liba found this framing interesting; it seemed like a hint as to why Taylor had continued working with Kyubey even though she knew what was going on and very much did not like it. "-and now you're all talking about just pointing the poor girl at a target as a weapon, and I'm just left wondering why you weren't contacting Eidolon, or hell, trying to aim one of the more powerful supervillains at Scion? This is, frankly, a gross plan, but it also seems dreadfully inefficient." Liba noted a very distinct sense of offense filtering in through Kyubey's song. Like, not just the probably-annoyance at emotional terms it kept giving off, but something clearly alike to a human being affronted because you said something disrespectful about a topic near and dear to their heart.
It was also kind of a good set of points now that Rose pointed it out? Liba hadn't given any thought to trying to point Legend or whoever at Scion, but she hadn't because she was mostly thinking in terms of herself, the options in her relatively immediate reach as Witch of Sun and Song. It honestly hadn't occurred to her until just now to really look at things in terms of 'what could Kyubey do, and what would make sense for it to do'. But from that perspective, why had Kyubey not done so? Liba was pretty sure its invisibility was a choice rather than something it had no control over, for example...
"There are many reasons," Kyubey non-answered, but before Liba could call it on that it carried on, its song seeming to carry an undertone of agitation. "Active parahumans are compromised by Zion's connection to their brains, for one."
Wait, what?
"For another, it appears to be standard practice among Zion's species to encode failsafes into various of the 'powers' so they are restricted in their ability to be turned upon Zion's species. It seems unlikely that a parahuman can kill Zion; if its general defenses are insufficient protection against a given 'power', it is assumed that the 'power' will have such a failsafe encoded to prevent its usage upon Zion."
No no, go back a step, what was that about possibly mind control?
"That is not sufficient reason to not try, of course, and it is admirable how Cauldron persists in their efforts in spite of their complete lack of success, but wishes seem a far more promising avenue, and secondarily magical girls and now possibly product."
Rose made an annoyed noise. "You need to back up because I feel like you just skipped past a whole bunch of context you're just expecting me -us- to already know, and I don't know how to even begin to react or what questions to ask when you're just dropping all this on us with no warning, context, or real explanation."
"I am explaining things," Kyubey said in its bland way, making it sound condescending, which Liba was maybe actually thinking wasn't a true assessment anymore? Its record-scratch of a song was hard to read, but she didn't sense any signs of condescension from it.
"I have questions!" Liba volunteered when a lull occurred that seemed to suggest Rose and Kyubey weren't in the middle of an incomplete thought. "Okay like first: trivial, dumb, but! Why do you keep calling Scion Zion? It's not his name."
"It is the designation it offered when asked by a human reporter," Kyubey non-answered-
"Oh. Oh! They do sound alike, he only spoke up that one time, his voice was low... maybe that is what he said," Rose said, her song... weirdly satisfied by this. Sure, okay, whatever. Liba decided to drop this dumb topic they were both obviously wrong on.
"Okay whatever NEXT QUESTION: the fuck was that about compromised brains from having powers?" Because Liba had her power, had Cherie's power, and that was cool and useful and now Kyubey seemed to be suggesting it had a concerningly UNcool element to it?!
"I covered this before," Kyubey stated in its bland tone with no sign of a question -fuck. Yeah, Liba was pretty sure Cherie had been misreading Kyubey this whole time. Cherie had taken this kind of moment as condescension, maybe sarcasm. Liba was more inclined to think it was honest confusion.
In the spirit of this suspicion, Liba deigned to not take offense and instead said, "Re-explain it. With lots of words and sub-explanations." Which was short of her and a lot of people would've gotten all offended at ~waaaah not polite enough waaaah~, but Cherie had never cared, Liba wasn't about to start now, and also she suspected Kyubey wouldn't care.
Kyubey tilted its head at Liba in her Labyrinth. What did that motion mean, coming from Kyubey? On a human Liba probably would've interpreted it as 'why are you being weird', basically. "I would-"
Rose blurted, "The coronas!" Excuse you, what? "People with powers have special brain bits! The corona... pollen... something? I forget. There's two of them, they show up in random places in the brain, they're weird in other ways? I don't remember exactly what the popsci magazine said."
Liba couldn't remember anything about that, but Kyubey made a vaguely agreeing sound and said, "Yes, as part of assigning a 'power' to a parahuman those pieces of Zion are inserted. We do not yet have a full understanding of their function, but though the effect appears to be subtle we have a large body of evidence that they influence the behavior of their associated parahumans in targeted ways."
Liba suddenly had a horrible leap of intuition, and pulled her Grief Seed out from under her military hat-helmet-thing. Yeah, it was still a cats-eye marble-looking thing, just like with Cherie, though... the silver frame was new. Pretty sure. Actually, wasn't it less see-through before? Then she leaned down to Kyubey and asked, "Is the cats-eye crap in my Grief Seed this... Scion-flesh crap?" with a fair amount of dread.
Rose made an ambiguous noise of confusion shaded into alarm while Kyubey stared at the Grief Seed in exactly the same way it stared at everything else. "I cannot be certain without use of specialized equipment," it finally admitted, "but while Grief Seeds vary in appearance, they almost always have the appearance of being an empty glass shell if not currently filled with Grief. So it is certainly possible, yes."
"Oh no," Rose murmured telepathically. "My Grief Seed has... something inside it, too."
Liba blinked a couple hundred times in confusion at that. "I thought Taylor didn't have any powers?" Admittedly it hadn't explicitly cropped up, and Kyubey was still being kind of terrible about not covering important crap before it forced itself into relevance, but Liba was pretty sure the encounter with Taylor would've gone very differently if she'd had any number of possible powers.
"I- she- no? Not that I'm aware?" Rose said with a bunch of confusion backing it Liba interpreted as not being about uncertainty of the truth but rather about all the other things to be confused about here. "Can you get a power without realizing it?"
Liba had a minor trauma flashback to Cherie being buried alive (And strongly considered committing firmly to 'I am not Cherie' in hopes it would make such memories less immediate, never mind she was pretty sure it would be untrue) and shortly answered, "Not fucking likely." Then she gritted metaphorical teeth and made herself be a bit more explanatory. "You get powers from going through a fucking miserable, awful experience, where you're desperate for any kind of answer and will grasp at any lifeline-"
"We are strongly confident that is intentional," Kyubey added in, the failing-to-read-the-fucking-mood little shit, but Liba resolutely ignored it.
"-so if Taylor had a power, she'd know, and unless you're processing memories way slower than I did then you would know too," Liba finished with.
There was a pause while Rose's song wrung out dread for some reason. The hell? "Something awful like... turning into a monster while realizing you were murdering people for no reason?" she finally asked in a quiet, deeply unhappy tone, sounding like she expected the answer to be 'yes' but really preferred to exist in a universe in which the answer was 'no'.
Liba filed away that bit of insight into Taylor's psychology for later and said, "Uh... yeah, that sounds like something that might cause a trigger event, yeah." So, what, Taylor had triggered at the same time as becoming a Witch? Was that even possible? "So... great, we're compromised too. Super. Does this mean we'll feel an inexplicable urge to dress in bright primary colors and beat up other idiots doing the same?" Liba asked only partially sarcastically. Cherie had never had such urges, but it was a pretty cape-specific thing so who knows, right?
"You already do that," observed Kyubey mildly, which brought Liba up short, causing her to really look at the outfit she'd spun out of thought and feeling. Huh. It does kind of look like a cape costume. Huh. What does Rose look like?... wait, was that a joke?
Rose's song made it clear she was all kinds of uncomfortable with this set of topics so Liba was only mildly caught off guard by her backing the conversational track significantly. "So why girls, anyway?" Uh. Okay? "You told me- told Taylor that 'potential' was tied to how important and impactful someone was likely to be to... human society, I guess? And society is skewed toward putting men into positions of importance. Shouldn't we be going after someone who would otherwise someday be President of the United States, not this Noelle girl?"
Liba blinked about two thousand times at that, because that was an angle that had never occurred to Cherie, but in retrospect she'd been kind of hung up on that theory where Kyubey was the projection of some anime nerd trying to roleplay a mascot from a magical girl anime so the gender point had an implied explanation. In the context of Kyubey apparently being an Actual Factual Alien... uh... yeah. Why only girls?
"Potential is only part of the formula, and specifically is a multiplier, if you will." Oh goodie, math. Cherie had never done well with math. Liba doubted she'd be any better. "The process of creating a Contract involves a non-trivial expenditure of energy in a conventional sense; for a Contract to be a net decrease in entropy, the Contracted individual requires a minimum level of what we shall call 'power', as derived from their Potential amplifying their emotional volatility's impact." Wait, what? "This emotional volatility factor is a primary reason why we 'outsource' Contracting; even those Incubators who have the neurological deficiencies necessary to experience emotions are insufficiently volatile to cross the threshold wherein Contracting would actually decrease entropy, at least not without more Potential than any Incubator has exhibited in known history."
Uh. This cast a very different light on Kyubey's bugaboo about ~feelings~. Liba wasn't sure what the light in question was, but she had this sneaking suspicion her entire model would need to be trashed wholesale. She'd been assuming Kyubey not liking suggestions that it had feelings was a superiority complex about calm rational actor behavior being ~the bestest and smartest way to be~, but apparently fixing the universe was actually impossible without being a Big Feelings person? Was Kyubey actually jealous? Or something more in that territory, anyway?
"That's, uh, that's a- I don't know how to take that, but it doesn't answer the question at all," Rose complained and ah crap Liba had gotten totally distracted from the point by the potentially-fascinating insight into Kyubey's brain.
"I was under the impression it was widely-known among humans that females are broadly more emotionally volatile than males and individuals undergoing puberty are particularly volatile," Kyubey responded in its bland way and ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME-
"Well-" Rose started to say, but the world will never know what she meant to say.
"Holy shit, you cannot be serious. You bought this shit humans say about themselves?" Liba was in disbelief. "Like okay the puberty thing is true-ish and I guess that explains why you've come across like such a perverted creep-" Both Rose and Kyubey's songs made it clear they were deeply confused, but whatever! "-but the gender thing? Really? Really? Did you actually people-watch? Did you do studies with controls? Do you actually have some space emotion-dar that can quantify human feelings as a number, because hey, fuck you, I do! And my emotion-dar abso-fucking-lutely does not show girls as being more emotional than boys except kind of sort of in the very narrow period where girls are tending to hit puberty and boys are still waiting on that crap! And I have all those qualifiers because this shit is correlated way more to crap like whether they're fucking abused, not to mention how their abuser goes about the abuse, not to gender! You should be targeting the brats raging about what giant assholes their parents are, or the populations that are systematically oppressed by The Man who get their teeth kicked in if they openly complain that they don't like dying slowly, or any number of other primary metrics, not cutting out boys because of dipshit propaganda about how girls are soooo much more ~emotional~ than boys!"
Kyubey's song suggested indignant offense, though... mild? Or maybe that was just its song being tinny, ugh. "We have done studies, and the observable data indicates our methodology is correct."
"Right, right, let me guess, your studies conveniently include the girls you're targeting, who you prime to become soldiers in a shadow war against elemental evil trying to devour their friends and family, and also prime them so learning various truths about how all this shit actually works is liable to traumatize them, thus leading to greater emotional volatility," Liba sneered out.
"Grief," Rose inexplicably threw in at a whisper. Huh? "You get more... depressed, I guess... as Grief accumulates in your Soul Gem."
Liba blinked a hundred times at this detail. That hadn't come up at all- wait. Wait wait wait. Was that what had been going on in the first Labyrinth? Cherie had felt like she had when the Daddy figure would smack her with massive depression, because that was literally exactly what had happened, just it was from her own Soul Gem? "Holy shit another thing to skew these idiot studies?"
Kyubey was conspicuously silent for a very, very long period of time while Rose and Liba continued their travel to Boston, everyone too busy processing everything that had just happened to start conversation back up.
Abruptly, Kyubey spoke up. "If you'll excuse me, I suddenly have a very urgent paper to submit," and then vanished. Wait, again? This was just like the telepathy-working-on-Liba thing!
There was another pause before Rose spoke up. "Did you just- did we just convince Kyubey to prey upon men who are already suffering?"
"Oh shit! You're right!" Rose's song got vaguely depressive. "We'll need a new name, one that's gender-neutral!" Rose got confused. "I nominate Product, personally, has a nice ring to it." Rose got offended.
"I- you- can't you take this seriously? We just- we might've just made an awful system even more awful, if this results in the entire magical girl system becoming more explicitly predatory!" Rose was very upset, which, y'know, whatever.
"Okay like first of all it doesn't actually matter to us except inasmuch as it might affect our chances of getting a powerful ally for this whole 'kill Scion' mission, which at this point seems like it ought to be our highest priority? I'm inclined to think Kyubey is totally honest about the blow up the planet thing, and hey, we live on the planet! Everybody lives on the planet! If we fuck up and the Incubators spend a bit being slightly more mean to humans in however long we have before the Earth-shattering kaboom, who the fuck cares!" This whole conversation had radically changed Liba's perception of Kyubey from 'kind of derpy but reasonably effective deliberate liar and manipulator' to a herp a derp member of a species of derp that had stumbled into a fucked-up web of deception through a series of derps that worked well enough from their perspective so they'd codified the derp-ception into something that was almost like intentional deception.
"I- hadn't... really... Scion is a Hero." Liba did not sigh. This was a heroic effort she deserved headpats for, presumably from a giant who could actually reach her head. "And... we just proved Kyubey is really wrong on some things. Maybe- maybe the Incubators are misinterpreting what... Scion's species... are doing?"
"I mean, I guess we can check whenever Kyubey or Cubette comes back, but 'blows up a planet when done fucking around on it' seems really unlikely to be a wild misunderstanding of a completely innocent or downright heroic act." Come the fuck on, Rose.
Rose was conspicuously silent, her song playing that collage of bits Cherie had always thought of as 'never meet your heroes'. Liba wasn't at all surprised when Rose blatantly changed the subject after a minute. "I'm... I'm thirsty. Can you help me with that?" The sad thing was Rose's surge of shame was still lesser than the 'never meet your heroes' shame. What, did she really look up that much to the golden moron?
Whatever. "Sure, might as well get topped off, we shouldn't be far off from Boston." Liba was pretty sure she recognized some of the dirge-person clumps they were passing by. Nearby towns, presumably, not that Liba could've guessed at their names even slightly.
"... thanks," Rose said, clearly still very upset. Liba rounded that off a tiny bit; she really didn't feel like playing the role of patient partner right now.
"Easy-peasy, time to pick some targets!" Liba declared, already eyeing some isolated individuals...
Usually Liba wouldn't care that she was speaking to someone in a 'frail' state of mind, but the initial conversation with Taylor had caused Liba to realize that she did, in fact, still have something of a need for social interaction with... humans wasn't the right word, obviously, but Liba wasn't sure what the correct word would be in this case. Whatever the case, Kyubey and Cubette had yet to satisfy this need, whereas talking with Taylor-slash-Rose actually had met it some. While Liba had high hopes that this 'Witches can be talked to and reasoned with and befriended and so on' principle would in fact generalize readily, she didn't want to assume; if Rose 'broke' or decided she didn't want to hang with Liba anymore or whatever, Liba might find herself without a friend-or-whatever-you'd-call-this for quite some time to come.
So for the moment she was playing it safe, not pressing Rose on topics that were interesting but seemed like they had decent odds of upsetting her.
On the plus side, Rose's mood settled over the course of... a couple hours? It felt like a couple hours to Liba, but she didn't exactly have a watch. (She considered making one, then had doubts it would be properly time-accurate and so dismissed the idea, at least for the moment) Enough so that Rose actually initiated conversation on her own, mildly surprising Liba. "So... what's your... real reason for this... 'mission' with Noelle?" Rose asked, sounding hesitant. Her song radiated a fair amount of suspicion that wasn't making it into her telepathic 'voice', and Liba metaphorically bit down on annoyance at realizing she had no idea what was normal for telepathy. Was Rose trying to cloak her suspicion? Or was the telepathy just naturally not communicating it for some reason?
Then Liba really registered the actual substance of the question and had to think for a minute to figure out what Rose was really asking. "I didn't lie, you know," she said to stall, then felt annoyed at herself for falling back on deception again when it was probably not called for, then paused and realized that actually Taylor-slash-Rose was still pretty close to a complete unknown so maybe open honesty was dangerous in this case. Man, doubting my instincts like this better stop at some point, this is obnoxious.
Rose spoke up before Liba could decide on how to follow up on that. "You told m- you claimed you had brain damage." Rose sounded less accusatory than Liba would've expected, but definitely had that 'I feel lied to' tune to her.
Liba hummed for a moment to stall, then decided to just be explanatory. "Well, for one I didn't actually say that. I brought up a relevant comparison and allowed Taylor to assume that this exact, specific scenario I was bringing up was exactly, specifically applicable to me." Rose's song made it pretty clear she wasn't placated at all. "Okay, look, the unvarnished truth would obviously not have been believed or resulted in violence directed in my direction, or hey both. I couldn't just ignore the topic because this singing thing I do is in fact not at all inside my control -I'm still weirded out you don't do it, honestly- so I had to say something, and to be honest I picked the explanation I did because it was in some meaningful sense close enough to the truth in terms of communicating what's going on with me without actually tripping the 'you're lying' or the 'you're the enemy and I need to kill you' responses."
"Oh," Rose said in mild startlement, which was interesting to Liba, though she wasn't entirely sure what specifically was startling Rose. In any event, Rose jumped tracks. "... I still want to know why you're doing this... 'mission' with Noelle. You were certainly not truthful before."
Unseen to Rose, Liba's head tilted consideringly in her Labyrinth. "Well, no, I was pretty much completely honest. Passed some of the truth off as dumb jokes when Taylor was clearly not willing to buy the truth, but I seriously didn't lie about any of that. That said!" Rose's song twitched in response, leaving Liba to wonder if sudden volume changes were a thing that bothered Rose in general. "I must admit that I left out some key stuff! Like- okay, did Kyubey give a spiel about trying to kill Scion?"
"What." Yeah, that's about what Liba figured; the possibility not raised and basically unimaginable.
"Yeah, I kind of figured. Okay, do you want me to do this explanation or do you want it re-explained from the horse's mouth?" Rose's confusion went up, so Liba didn't bother to wait for her to actually request a clarification. "I mean 'do you want me to get Kyubey to do the explanation again, or do you want me to try explaining it'."
Rose's song radiated caution, which fair 'nuff, while she said, "I think I'd rather hear it from someone with more emotional sensitivity than a rock. A dead rock."
Liba chortled at that characterization, considered commenting she wasn't exactly Miss Sensitive herself, then decided against it; she wasn't sure yet if Rose was the sort to take offense at that kind of thing or find it funny or what. "Okay, so according to Kyubey, Scion is actually an alien, like y'know an alien from outer space not an illegal immigrant though I guess he's that too, not a particularly lucky parahuman."
Rose's doubt was loud, but she dubiously commented, "People never did find a likely candidate for who became Scion, I suppose. But... so? What, is Scion an escaped criminal from Kyubey's homeworld or something?"
Liba rolled that thought around in her head, as it was an angle she hadn't thought of on her own before, but... Liba was skeptical that Kyubey would tell the story it had told as a lie to cover 'I'm just hunting an escaped convict'. Alien, with alien mentality, so not impossible, but honestly, if Kyubey was telling the truth and Liba had been in its position, she'd have been way more likely to use the 'chasing a criminal' explanation to avoid broaching all this weird shit with 'Scion passed out powers and all for some reason'. So ultimately she said, "To be honest, that would be a great lie to convince people to help it, but nah, Kyubey says Scion is the source of powers and also going to blow us all up once he's done running his science experiment, and it wants us to kill the fella because something-or-other about killing the universe faster or something. I didn't really believe Kyubey initially, honestly, so I didn't exactly commit this part to memory."
There was a long silence that Liba wasn't sure how to parse -Rose's soundscape went quiet and uninformative for some reason- before Rose made an incredibly aggrieved noise and remarked, "What- who- why do you believe this nonsense, and what the hell does Noelle have to do with it?"
Liba hummed consideringly for a minute. "To be honest I'm like 80/20 on don't believe vs do believe? Like I'm pretty inclined to think Kyubey was telling something it believes to be more or less truthful-"
Cubette interjected, startling both Liba and Rose, who had entirely forgotten she was there. "While anti-entropy contractor Kyubey is perfectly capable of being incorrect, it is a point of pride with him that he does not tell untruths." Liba made a mental note of that phrasing; 'a point of pride'. She wondered if this was an example of Kyubey and Cubette disagreeing on emotional topics, or if Kyubey would agree with the phrasing. Certainly, Cherie-slash-Liba had already become strongly confident Kyubey didn't like to feel like a liar...
Rose made a disbelieving noise of disgust, reminding Liba that Taylor had in fact known that magical girls become Witches; Rose's reaction suggested she too felt Kyubey had deliberately tried to hide some pretty big details. Another mental note made, Liba carried on as if no one had spoken up at all. "But! While I'm skeptical Kyubey has painted a truly accurate picture of events, as it happens I don't really care!" Liba noted that both Rose and Cubette were pretty thrown by that. About equally strong of confusion relative to their respective trends-so-far, actually. "While I refuse to go get smeared by Scion, I'm perfectly happy to test Kyubey's theory with great violence via other people. It's not like the glowing idiot is important by conventional human understanding of the world, so if Kyubey is wrong, whatevs."
Rose was strangely appalled by all this. It took her possibly a full minute to actually marshal a response (Though Liba noted she didn't actually stop following Liba), and said response was still pretty angry and horrified. "He's a Hero who helps people. What the hell is wrong with you? If you think we can seriously kill Scion, kill a- a fucking Endbringer instead! And- what the hell does this Noelle have to do with any of this?"
Liba metaphorically sat back, thinking hat also metaphorically placed firmly on non-metaphorical head. "Huh. Will Noelle even be able to reach them?"
"What?" Taylor bit out, angrily bewildered.
"Y'know, the thing with the resting period stuff. Leviathan sleeps in the briny deeps, the Simurgh is in outer space, and Behemoth apparently just swims in the Earth's molten core like it's a swimming pool. And one of 'em did a thing not that far back, so probably Noelle would have to wait a few months, and that seems impractical and/or kinda shitty."
"What??" Taylor eloquently added, anger fading into full confusion, and Liba wished she knew the other Witch well enough to guess why the anger would be fading now. Ah well, something to keep in mind for later.
"Well, we have like three basic options as far as I see it. Option one is to wait until we think an Endbringer is going to attack soon, then jump on convincing Noelle, hope she agrees quickly, and then hope we can arrange for her to be shipped out to the Endbringer attack before they bail. This has a bunch of obvious failure points like that we don't know when or where they'll attack, can't be certain Noelle will agree so quickly, and magical crap is mostly invisible to non-magical people so convincing the Protectorate to teleport a seemingly-normal girl to an Endbringer fight will probably be a whole wall o' problems all by itself." Rose sounded very much like she hated how reasonable all this sounded, but didn't speak up when Liba took a moment to order her thoughts on the remaining bits. "Plan second is that we talk Noelle into becoming a magical girl ASAP and then make sure she doesn't become a Witch, ie help her beat up our fellow Witches and probably hide all the 'Witches are what magical girls become' stuff so she doesn't get all weird and uncooperative on us on the off-chance this stuff bothers her." Rose's 'these are reasonable points and I hate it' tune intensified, while she remained conspicuously silent. "And third place is the same as second place, except we prep her for joining our coven of Witches ahead of time and don't even try to keep her staying a magical girl, and I guess just try to convince her to use her wish really effectively or something? Just kind of waste the whole 'this magical girl will be hella strong' thing, basically."
Unexpectedly, Cubette spoke up again, though at least Liba (and Rose) hadn't forgotten about her again so it was less startling. "Excuse me, it sounds as if you're assuming Noelle's 'Witch' form will be a substantial loss in fighting strength?"
Liba tilted her head consideringly (And tweaked a part of her garden that was still out of whack from Taylor's rude home invasion), because, well, yes, that had seemed implied by Kyubey's explanation of how all this worked, but the question rather implied Cubette thought this was untrue. "It was the impression Kyubey gave me with its explanation," she ultimately went with, shunting blame elsewhere -and then mentally frowned as it occurred to her this was another habit that had been very useful in the Vasil household but was perhaps not a habit Liba wished to retain. She briefly considered trying to take back the blame-shifting, then decided she wasn't bothered enough to try to correct it in this particular case, not when it might distract from the conversation at hand.
Cubette tutted, or at least Liba interpreted the noise as that sort of disapproval even though it didn't really sound like a human tutting. "That is incorrect. While it's ambiguous how tight the correlation truly is given how radically different the assorted elements are in so many ways, a girl who has great Potential will have a greater 'ceiling' on the kind of change their wish can effect, in turn will have greater capacity to overcome threats of any kind in combat while in their 'magical girl' form, in turn will produce a Witch that is more likely to shed its Labyrinth and is more likely to require either multiple magical girls or a magical girl with particularly great Potential to be overcome, and will also produce more entropy-free energy in the process. This Noelle will almost certainly significantly eclipse the two of you when she becomes a Witch."
Huh. Interesting. "Huuuuh. Still, I'm not sure how we'd get Scion-" Liba noted that Rose spiked aggravation, and rolled her hundred eyes two hundred times. "-or an Endbringer into her Labyrinth so she could fight them, so-"
Kyubey faded in like a dream in front of Liba and very rudely interrupted. "Her product will be powerful enough it will likely not bother to form a Labyrinth."
Liba blinked a few hundred times at that, absently noticing Rose evincing quite a bit more confusion. "Cubette said Labyrinth-shedding was a thing Witches do after they've been around for a while. Like a caterpillar making a chrysalis and becoming a butterfly or whatever?" Liba ignored Rose's rising confusion at hearing the phrase 'Labyrinth-shedding', aside to tamp down a bit of upset and horror attached to it. She wasn't sure, but she suspected this was some lingering thing from Taylor having been really hostile to Witches, like maybe Rose was thoughtlessly reacting with horror because Taylor would've been horrified by the idea, same as Liba kept catching herself thoughtlessly applying Cherie behaviors that didn't necessarily make sense to cleave to anymore.
Cubette made an ambiguous humming noise while her song suggested to Liba this was 'I didn't say that but I'm not going to directly call you stupid', which was annoying because there was probably zero chance of her honestly admitting to whatever she was thinking so Liba would be stuck with just the suspicion unless and until Cubette did similar stuff often enough to be a clear pattern of evidence, but it was Kyubey who actually spoke up. "That is the more common scenario, but sufficiently powerful product will not bother. The most promising theory is that it's a matter of self-confidence, where product sheds its Labyrinth when it no longer fears the world beyond its Labyrinth, hence why sufficient initial power skips past the Labyrinth stage." Liba doubted this scenario; she didn't feel like she was scared of much of anything- hm. Admittedly she didn't want to get smeared by Scion. And didn't rate her chances very high against Endbringers. And there were plenty of other parahumans Cherie had been relatively casually familiar with that Liba hadn't really thought about but now that they were on her mind she wouldn't want to be forced into a duel to the death with them. Hmmm.
"Why... why does he keep using 'product' to refer to Witches?" Rose asked Liba in what felt like a whisper. Was that a thing you could do telepathically?
"It is what you are," Kyubey blandly replied, implying that if telepathic 'whispering' was a thing Rose certainly hadn't succeeded at performing it. "I normally do not use the correct terminology because humans have a variety of irrational, counterproductive responses to it, but product has never been known to successfully destroy their Grief Seed, so I see little reason to continue using the incorrect terminology in this context."
Rose sputtered her way through an incoherent series of objections, repeatedly shooting herself down or otherwise correcting herself, clearly disliking the 'dehumanizing' aspect of this 'product' label but then getting caught on points like that she didn't want to call herself human or a 'person'. Liba hummed thoughtfully to herself as she felt out her response to the label; she'd kind of ignored it before, and... thinking on it? She'd ignored it because she really didn't mind. Witch was certainly a cooler term, calling to mind magical power, but it also had connotations of isolation, of being shunned for precisely the things that gave one power (Which Liba found interesting now that she was thinking it out; who came up with this Witch label in the first place? Liba would've expected something more straightforwardly monstrous given Kyubey's 'elemental evil' spiel. 'Demon' or something), and Liba wasn't terrifically fond of that connotation. 'Product' described a good or service that was made with a purpose to be utilized by people, and while there was an implication of being generic or interchangeable that seemed rather silly to apply to beings of such dramatic variability, Liba supposed that from Kyubey's perspective it wasn't actually inaccurate. If every Witch contributed to its 'anti-entropy' job thing regardless of their individual quirks, then in some very real sense most of them amounted to a number on a spreadsheet for its purposes.
Actually, that reminded Liba: "Hey, where are Grief Seeds going when you do the thing with the hole in your back, anyway?" she asked, interrupting Rose's latest flustered attempt to argue the 'product' label was inappropriate and cruel or something. Liba noted that Rose's initial spike of irritation and outrage went away basically immediately, giving way to intense curiosity instead. Convenient.
There was an extended silence where Kyubey and Cubette's emotions did that silent communication thing again (So probably telepathic whispering was possible somehow) and Liba strongly considered calling them out this time, but before she could convince herself it was a strategically worthwhile show of her hand Cubette spoke up. "They are transported to the nearest negative entropy generation plant for processing." Liba noted that this was a non-answer answer, and that it seemed to be the sum total of what Cubette intended to say. She also noted that Rose was dissatisfied with this answer but not spiking suspicion or hostility or the like; she didn't seem to be interpreting it as an evasion or the like.
"I figured something like that, yeah, but like... details?" Liba was remembering that thing Cherie experienced where the Witch blipped out in pain or something, having this suspicion 'processing' was a destructive process, but she didn't want to come out and say it explicitly. Sometimes people let slip info they were trying to hide if you didn't get them thinking you were pressing for that info, and while on the whole Liba didn't really care what Kyubey and company might do to her Grief Seed after she died in the event she did die, if Kyubey and Cubette felt it really important to hide 'we destroy Grief Seeds once the Witch is dead' that would raise questions about their intentions. If Liba were in their position as she understood it, her main motive for hiding destructive processing would be not wanting to give away an intention to inevitably betray Witches to get at their delicious energy.
"I would simply direct you to a video, but I do not believe the network is readily accessible to product," Kyubey remarked. Wait, what?
"Hold up, are you saying you want to link me to a Youtube video of some History Channel shit?" Liba asked, because that sure sounded like what Kyubey was trying to say. How would that work? She'd yet to see an Incubator cell phone or equivalent...
"I am not familiar with those terms," Kyubey blandly responded with. Its tinny song suggested it was being honest, even. "Excuse me, I have submitted a request outlining the experiment; this will have to wait until the request is processed."
"Experiment?" Rose repeated back blankly, clearly completely lost.
"Wait wait wait, is 'the network' this telepathy shit?" Liba asked, suddenly suspecting she understood what Kyubey was doing a terrible job of trying to say.
"That was its original primary purpose, as it happens, though its scope has expanded considerably since the days when that was all the network supported," Cubette answered, her song sounding like she found this conversation a little boring but liked being helpful enough to participate anyway.
"Kyubey wants to send me a link to a Youtube video of History Channel shit in my brain?!?" Liba couldn't decide if that sounded like the lamest possible use for telepathy or if it sounded awesome. Both? It could be both; both. She noted Rose's song playing out the routine of 'wait, is that what that means?' so apparently it made some amount of sense to Rose too.
"I am not familiar with those terms," Kyubey repeated, its song faintly scratching out irritation. "It will likely take a day or more for my request to be processed and approved, in any event, so there is little point in continuing this topic."
"I wasn't asking for a step-by-step explanation, just a basic idea of what happens to a Grief Seed once the Witch is dead," Liba said with some irritation. Like yeah now she wanted that alien Youtube link, but that had not remotely been on her mind beforehand.
"Dead?" Cubette remarked in some confusion.
Liba felt confusion right back. Surely the aliens who could make literal fucking magic happen knew what death was? So what was Cubette confused about? "Yeah? Dead? One or more magical girls beat their body to pieces, their Labyrinth goes away, all that remains is the Grief Seed as a corpse-analogue?" Cherie had gotten to see it happen, after all.
"Oh my," Cubette remarked. "I believe there has been a very significant misunderstanding." Liba noted that Rose spiked dread, though Liba herself really had no idea why that might be. "The situation you describe is not meaningfully 'fatal' to a Witch. So long as the Grief Seed remains intact, the Witch is not irretrievable. A Grief Seed that has been filled with 'Grief' will eventually reform its Witch if not processed before this occurs."
(... now I'm a goddamn rock...)
Rose was experiencing horror for some reason, which Liba decided to file off the edges but not push down on too hard. Rose would inevitably learn what Liba could do; better to keep a light touch overall, minimize the odds of Rose deciding retrospectively some sudden shift in her feelings was evidence of undue influence. Liba herself was... really just going 'this makes sense, but I would never have guessed it'. She already knew Cherie's body had stopped being her keymost anchor point to existing and functioning, the Soul Gem having taken that function, and she was quite sure her Grief Seed was just Cherie's Soul Gem with a new outfit so obviously the principle was the same, but Cherie had sort of assumed that her body being destroyed would mean her Soul Gem would be stuck technically alive but functionally dead, and in turn to the extent Liba had given the topic thought she'd figured this remained true and of course generalized to other Witches, like the hanging mannequin one. She would never have guessed the body could just be rebuilt, but really, her Grief Seed had built this body from scratch, so...
"Okay so in summary if we talk Noelle into this she'll probably be able to just roll right up to an Endbringer and put up her dukes, she'll probably be invisible to them-"
"The 'endbringers' have shown no sign of awareness of the Witches that precede them," remarked Cubette idly, her song implying this really was a mildly interesting factoid to her.
"-so... hold on, what?" Liba failed to complete her thought, struggling to come to grips with this bomb Cubette had dropped into the conversation.
Rose contributed, "Witches do what?" sounding... offended? Liba wasn't sure why she would sound offended, what the offense would be about; not enough familiarity with Rose. (Or Taylor, for that matter)
Kyubey took up the thread, its song sounding... actually mildly enthusiastic? Maybe? "Witches that shed their Labyrinths generally switch from a passive strategy of applying the Witch's Kiss and waiting for the marked human to come to them to instead more directly assaulting their victims. In most cases they additionally change the pacing and scale of their attacks, going longer between kills but performing more at a time. Often they coincide these attacks with natural disasters, major military actions, or Endbringer attacks. It is uncertain if this is why they do so, but it has the benefit of obscuring their own contributions, allowing them greater freedom to act undetected." Huh. That was all an interesting set of insights Liba really would've liked to hear about sooner, and broadly logical-seeming? If Liba had remained committed to murder for sustenance and had someday abandoned her Labyrinth, she'd probably have ended up doing pretty much that, herself.
"You- she- Cubette said Witches precede Endbringers," Rose said, and Liba wasn't really sure why she was fixated on that point.
"Excuse me, this conversation is quite interesting, but I am overdue for sleep. Apologies," Cubette abruptly remarked before fading out entirely. Uh. Okay. It... didn't sound like Cubette was bailing in a suspicious way with suspicious timing? Liba could buy that Cubette had just crossed that threshold from 'tired' to 'can't stay awake any longer' and just not mentioned being tired earlier. Some humans did that kind of thing.
Kyubey carried on as if Cubette bailing hadn't just happened, "This did not occur with the first two Endbringer attacks, but all later ones have always been preceded by at least one product approaching the target city as much as a full day ahead of the attack and waiting for it to start before initiating their own attack." Huh. Neat.
"That's impossible," Rose flatly declared, offended and angry and suspicious. Huh?
In Liba's Labyrinth, Kyubey's head tilted, which seemed kind of pointless to Liba. Rose couldn't possibly see it, after all. "As it has consistently happened for over 15 years, 'impossible' is clearly incorrect." The tone was mild as always, but Liba couldn't help but hear reproach in it. She wasn't sure if she was just expecting it that strongly or if she was actually picking up on something.
Rose didn't back down. "Endbringers can't be predicted. If they could be, Heroes would be ready and waiting for them, every time, not scrambling in response to an attack starting. They're even immune to precognition somehow."
Kyubey's head tilted the other way. Was this an expression of frustration? "Many of the apparent physical limitations of parahuman abilities are not physical laws at all. Many Endbringer 'immunities' are simply rules imposed by Zion as part of its experiment. This particular 'protection' is such a case; magic is not bound to this limitation."
Rose began making incoherent sounds rather like someone choking on a large piece of food, and it occurred to Liba that they hadn't actually previously gotten to the part of Kyubey's spiel that went 'powers only pretend to cheat physics'. Uh, whoops? Come on, a lot was happening in Liba's life, you couldn't expect her to track every little thing.
"WHY," Rose rather rudely asked with the intensity of an angry lesbian serial killer finding you in bed with a dude after you'd claimed to be a lesbian yourself. (Liba was sure glad she didn't have to worry about that happening again. Probably. Probably? Shit, she still didn't know enough about Witch biology and psychology and all, maybe not? She was pretty sure she hadn't had a single sexy thought this entire time, but fuck, sometimes Cherie went a week not thinking about that stuff at all, such as during a stressful move, maybe she totally did still have a sex drive! How would that fucking work-)
"We do not have a definitive answer and as yet have no rational theories for why Zion's species does the things they so consistently do," Kyubey replied blandly while its tune scratched out what pretty much had to be irritation. Like, old-scars-this-has-irritated-me-for-years irritation, not 'this girl I am talking to right now just annoyed me'.
There was a very long, extremely pregnant pause where Liba could tell Rose was in the middle of having an aneurysm, though Liba couldn't have told anyone why. Liba was starting to think maybe this whole 'kind of rush Taylor-then-Rose into dong the thing and then moving right along' plan was actually a very poor fit to the girl. Maaaan. This was why Cherie had normally tried to scope people out for at least a couple of days before interacting with them if she was expecting to interact with them for even half a day. Admittedly Liba had done this because waiting for two days with nothing to do would be incredibly boring for a human girl who needed to eat and sleep and deal with her makeup and all that jazz and had seemed liable to be twenty times as miserable for a Witch who had the one not-that-demanding biological need, ie it had been more a desperate plan than anything else, but really, when were Cherie's plans not laced with a heavy dose of desperation?
"His SPECIES?" Rose finally let loose with. Oh, Liba had the light bulb go off. That's what she's hung up on! "Are you seriously saying there's an entire species running around the- the galaxy-"
"We have reason to suspect they have reached other galaxies, but cannot confirm such suppositions directly as yet," Kyubey cut in, which struck Liba as interesting. Was this another topic Kyubey cared about? Was it somehow an extension of the emotion bugaboo?
"-passing out superpowers in twisted science experiments that end in blowing up the planets?" Rose sounded pretty angry and exasperated, which seemed silly to Liba, but hey, she'd done a dumb and not tried to figure out Taylor at all beforehand so who knew what was going through the other Witch's head!
"I would not word it that way, but you seem to have correctly grasped the essentials," Kyubey said, which was... possibly the closest thing to a compliment Cherie-slash-Liba had heard Kyubey say? Man, so many interesting bits coming up. Maybe Liba should get somebody else aboard just to see more sides to Kyubey! (Wait, recruiting Noelle would do that if successful, never mind)
"WHY," Rose repeated in that exact same 'this knife in my hand is going in your throat if you don't give the perfectly correct answer' tone from earlier. "Wait, aliens aren't just real, they're so common this is a sustainable strategy?!?" Rose switched to, which was an angle Liba hadn't considered but now that it was in the air... that was a really good point! Also: Liba was intensely disappointed that her reality had lots of aliens but none of the cool parts like space federations or MiBs helping a bunch of cool aliens to secretly live on Earth. "How- how have we not seen any signs yet? Alien radio, or..." Rose trailed off.
Kyubey stretched itself in Liba's Labyrinth, distinctly reminding her of a sleepy cat, minus the yawn. "I am only minimally familiar with any human programs searching for 'aliens' and could not say what they are doing wrong," it said, which felt snipe-y to Liba but Cherie had often people-watched and critiqued mental blind spots and whatnot. Liba found it... weirdly plausible and relatable to imagine Kyubey getting SETI explained and going 'yeah, that was never going to find anyone for X, Y, and Z reasons I find painfully obvious'. Since its song didn't give any particular signs of dishonesty... she tentatively suspected this was in fact a blunt, thoughtless statement of truth? "And as I previously stated, the reasons for Zion's species' actions are not known to us. They consistently rebuff attempts to communicate with them, often with violence, and there is no obvious rational explanation for their actions." Oh yeah, Kyubey did say something about asking Scion directly or whatever, didn't it?
There was another long pause before Rose changed topics entirely. "Why this Noelle girl? I- Tay- fuck-" So Rose was struggling with that 'the memories don't actually feel like another person's entirely' thing, too. "-Noelle makes sense from a... humanitarian perspective. But Kyubey doesn't 'get' the humanitarian perspective-" Liba found this framing interesting; it seemed like a hint as to why Taylor had continued working with Kyubey even though she knew what was going on and very much did not like it. "-and now you're all talking about just pointing the poor girl at a target as a weapon, and I'm just left wondering why you weren't contacting Eidolon, or hell, trying to aim one of the more powerful supervillains at Scion? This is, frankly, a gross plan, but it also seems dreadfully inefficient." Liba noted a very distinct sense of offense filtering in through Kyubey's song. Like, not just the probably-annoyance at emotional terms it kept giving off, but something clearly alike to a human being affronted because you said something disrespectful about a topic near and dear to their heart.
It was also kind of a good set of points now that Rose pointed it out? Liba hadn't given any thought to trying to point Legend or whoever at Scion, but she hadn't because she was mostly thinking in terms of herself, the options in her relatively immediate reach as Witch of Sun and Song. It honestly hadn't occurred to her until just now to really look at things in terms of 'what could Kyubey do, and what would make sense for it to do'. But from that perspective, why had Kyubey not done so? Liba was pretty sure its invisibility was a choice rather than something it had no control over, for example...
"There are many reasons," Kyubey non-answered, but before Liba could call it on that it carried on, its song seeming to carry an undertone of agitation. "Active parahumans are compromised by Zion's connection to their brains, for one."
Wait, what?
"For another, it appears to be standard practice among Zion's species to encode failsafes into various of the 'powers' so they are restricted in their ability to be turned upon Zion's species. It seems unlikely that a parahuman can kill Zion; if its general defenses are insufficient protection against a given 'power', it is assumed that the 'power' will have such a failsafe encoded to prevent its usage upon Zion."
No no, go back a step, what was that about possibly mind control?
"That is not sufficient reason to not try, of course, and it is admirable how Cauldron persists in their efforts in spite of their complete lack of success, but wishes seem a far more promising avenue, and secondarily magical girls and now possibly product."
Rose made an annoyed noise. "You need to back up because I feel like you just skipped past a whole bunch of context you're just expecting me -us- to already know, and I don't know how to even begin to react or what questions to ask when you're just dropping all this on us with no warning, context, or real explanation."
"I am explaining things," Kyubey said in its bland way, making it sound condescending, which Liba was maybe actually thinking wasn't a true assessment anymore? Its record-scratch of a song was hard to read, but she didn't sense any signs of condescension from it.
"I have questions!" Liba volunteered when a lull occurred that seemed to suggest Rose and Kyubey weren't in the middle of an incomplete thought. "Okay like first: trivial, dumb, but! Why do you keep calling Scion Zion? It's not his name."
"It is the designation it offered when asked by a human reporter," Kyubey non-answered-
"Oh. Oh! They do sound alike, he only spoke up that one time, his voice was low... maybe that is what he said," Rose said, her song... weirdly satisfied by this. Sure, okay, whatever. Liba decided to drop this dumb topic they were both obviously wrong on.
"Okay whatever NEXT QUESTION: the fuck was that about compromised brains from having powers?" Because Liba had her power, had Cherie's power, and that was cool and useful and now Kyubey seemed to be suggesting it had a concerningly UNcool element to it?!
"I covered this before," Kyubey stated in its bland tone with no sign of a question -fuck. Yeah, Liba was pretty sure Cherie had been misreading Kyubey this whole time. Cherie had taken this kind of moment as condescension, maybe sarcasm. Liba was more inclined to think it was honest confusion.
In the spirit of this suspicion, Liba deigned to not take offense and instead said, "Re-explain it. With lots of words and sub-explanations." Which was short of her and a lot of people would've gotten all offended at ~waaaah not polite enough waaaah~, but Cherie had never cared, Liba wasn't about to start now, and also she suspected Kyubey wouldn't care.
Kyubey tilted its head at Liba in her Labyrinth. What did that motion mean, coming from Kyubey? On a human Liba probably would've interpreted it as 'why are you being weird', basically. "I would-"
Rose blurted, "The coronas!" Excuse you, what? "People with powers have special brain bits! The corona... pollen... something? I forget. There's two of them, they show up in random places in the brain, they're weird in other ways? I don't remember exactly what the popsci magazine said."
Liba couldn't remember anything about that, but Kyubey made a vaguely agreeing sound and said, "Yes, as part of assigning a 'power' to a parahuman those pieces of Zion are inserted. We do not yet have a full understanding of their function, but though the effect appears to be subtle we have a large body of evidence that they influence the behavior of their associated parahumans in targeted ways."
Liba suddenly had a horrible leap of intuition, and pulled her Grief Seed out from under her military hat-helmet-thing. Yeah, it was still a cats-eye marble-looking thing, just like with Cherie, though... the silver frame was new. Pretty sure. Actually, wasn't it less see-through before? Then she leaned down to Kyubey and asked, "Is the cats-eye crap in my Grief Seed this... Scion-flesh crap?" with a fair amount of dread.
Rose made an ambiguous noise of confusion shaded into alarm while Kyubey stared at the Grief Seed in exactly the same way it stared at everything else. "I cannot be certain without use of specialized equipment," it finally admitted, "but while Grief Seeds vary in appearance, they almost always have the appearance of being an empty glass shell if not currently filled with Grief. So it is certainly possible, yes."
"Oh no," Rose murmured telepathically. "My Grief Seed has... something inside it, too."
Liba blinked a couple hundred times in confusion at that. "I thought Taylor didn't have any powers?" Admittedly it hadn't explicitly cropped up, and Kyubey was still being kind of terrible about not covering important crap before it forced itself into relevance, but Liba was pretty sure the encounter with Taylor would've gone very differently if she'd had any number of possible powers.
"I- she- no? Not that I'm aware?" Rose said with a bunch of confusion backing it Liba interpreted as not being about uncertainty of the truth but rather about all the other things to be confused about here. "Can you get a power without realizing it?"
Liba had a minor trauma flashback to Cherie being buried alive (And strongly considered committing firmly to 'I am not Cherie' in hopes it would make such memories less immediate, never mind she was pretty sure it would be untrue) and shortly answered, "Not fucking likely." Then she gritted metaphorical teeth and made herself be a bit more explanatory. "You get powers from going through a fucking miserable, awful experience, where you're desperate for any kind of answer and will grasp at any lifeline-"
"We are strongly confident that is intentional," Kyubey added in, the failing-to-read-the-fucking-mood little shit, but Liba resolutely ignored it.
"-so if Taylor had a power, she'd know, and unless you're processing memories way slower than I did then you would know too," Liba finished with.
There was a pause while Rose's song wrung out dread for some reason. The hell? "Something awful like... turning into a monster while realizing you were murdering people for no reason?" she finally asked in a quiet, deeply unhappy tone, sounding like she expected the answer to be 'yes' but really preferred to exist in a universe in which the answer was 'no'.
Liba filed away that bit of insight into Taylor's psychology for later and said, "Uh... yeah, that sounds like something that might cause a trigger event, yeah." So, what, Taylor had triggered at the same time as becoming a Witch? Was that even possible? "So... great, we're compromised too. Super. Does this mean we'll feel an inexplicable urge to dress in bright primary colors and beat up other idiots doing the same?" Liba asked only partially sarcastically. Cherie had never had such urges, but it was a pretty cape-specific thing so who knows, right?
"You already do that," observed Kyubey mildly, which brought Liba up short, causing her to really look at the outfit she'd spun out of thought and feeling. Huh. It does kind of look like a cape costume. Huh. What does Rose look like?... wait, was that a joke?
Rose's song made it clear she was all kinds of uncomfortable with this set of topics so Liba was only mildly caught off guard by her backing the conversational track significantly. "So why girls, anyway?" Uh. Okay? "You told me- told Taylor that 'potential' was tied to how important and impactful someone was likely to be to... human society, I guess? And society is skewed toward putting men into positions of importance. Shouldn't we be going after someone who would otherwise someday be President of the United States, not this Noelle girl?"
Liba blinked about two thousand times at that, because that was an angle that had never occurred to Cherie, but in retrospect she'd been kind of hung up on that theory where Kyubey was the projection of some anime nerd trying to roleplay a mascot from a magical girl anime so the gender point had an implied explanation. In the context of Kyubey apparently being an Actual Factual Alien... uh... yeah. Why only girls?
"Potential is only part of the formula, and specifically is a multiplier, if you will." Oh goodie, math. Cherie had never done well with math. Liba doubted she'd be any better. "The process of creating a Contract involves a non-trivial expenditure of energy in a conventional sense; for a Contract to be a net decrease in entropy, the Contracted individual requires a minimum level of what we shall call 'power', as derived from their Potential amplifying their emotional volatility's impact." Wait, what? "This emotional volatility factor is a primary reason why we 'outsource' Contracting; even those Incubators who have the neurological deficiencies necessary to experience emotions are insufficiently volatile to cross the threshold wherein Contracting would actually decrease entropy, at least not without more Potential than any Incubator has exhibited in known history."
Uh. This cast a very different light on Kyubey's bugaboo about ~feelings~. Liba wasn't sure what the light in question was, but she had this sneaking suspicion her entire model would need to be trashed wholesale. She'd been assuming Kyubey not liking suggestions that it had feelings was a superiority complex about calm rational actor behavior being ~the bestest and smartest way to be~, but apparently fixing the universe was actually impossible without being a Big Feelings person? Was Kyubey actually jealous? Or something more in that territory, anyway?
"That's, uh, that's a- I don't know how to take that, but it doesn't answer the question at all," Rose complained and ah crap Liba had gotten totally distracted from the point by the potentially-fascinating insight into Kyubey's brain.
"I was under the impression it was widely-known among humans that females are broadly more emotionally volatile than males and individuals undergoing puberty are particularly volatile," Kyubey responded in its bland way and ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME-
"Well-" Rose started to say, but the world will never know what she meant to say.
"Holy shit, you cannot be serious. You bought this shit humans say about themselves?" Liba was in disbelief. "Like okay the puberty thing is true-ish and I guess that explains why you've come across like such a perverted creep-" Both Rose and Kyubey's songs made it clear they were deeply confused, but whatever! "-but the gender thing? Really? Really? Did you actually people-watch? Did you do studies with controls? Do you actually have some space emotion-dar that can quantify human feelings as a number, because hey, fuck you, I do! And my emotion-dar abso-fucking-lutely does not show girls as being more emotional than boys except kind of sort of in the very narrow period where girls are tending to hit puberty and boys are still waiting on that crap! And I have all those qualifiers because this shit is correlated way more to crap like whether they're fucking abused, not to mention how their abuser goes about the abuse, not to gender! You should be targeting the brats raging about what giant assholes their parents are, or the populations that are systematically oppressed by The Man who get their teeth kicked in if they openly complain that they don't like dying slowly, or any number of other primary metrics, not cutting out boys because of dipshit propaganda about how girls are soooo much more ~emotional~ than boys!"
Kyubey's song suggested indignant offense, though... mild? Or maybe that was just its song being tinny, ugh. "We have done studies, and the observable data indicates our methodology is correct."
"Right, right, let me guess, your studies conveniently include the girls you're targeting, who you prime to become soldiers in a shadow war against elemental evil trying to devour their friends and family, and also prime them so learning various truths about how all this shit actually works is liable to traumatize them, thus leading to greater emotional volatility," Liba sneered out.
"Grief," Rose inexplicably threw in at a whisper. Huh? "You get more... depressed, I guess... as Grief accumulates in your Soul Gem."
Liba blinked a hundred times at this detail. That hadn't come up at all- wait. Wait wait wait. Was that what had been going on in the first Labyrinth? Cherie had felt like she had when the Daddy figure would smack her with massive depression, because that was literally exactly what had happened, just it was from her own Soul Gem? "Holy shit another thing to skew these idiot studies?"
Kyubey was conspicuously silent for a very, very long period of time while Rose and Liba continued their travel to Boston, everyone too busy processing everything that had just happened to start conversation back up.
Abruptly, Kyubey spoke up. "If you'll excuse me, I suddenly have a very urgent paper to submit," and then vanished. Wait, again? This was just like the telepathy-working-on-Liba thing!
There was another pause before Rose spoke up. "Did you just- did we just convince Kyubey to prey upon men who are already suffering?"
"Oh shit! You're right!" Rose's song got vaguely depressive. "We'll need a new name, one that's gender-neutral!" Rose got confused. "I nominate Product, personally, has a nice ring to it." Rose got offended.
"I- you- can't you take this seriously? We just- we might've just made an awful system even more awful, if this results in the entire magical girl system becoming more explicitly predatory!" Rose was very upset, which, y'know, whatever.
"Okay like first of all it doesn't actually matter to us except inasmuch as it might affect our chances of getting a powerful ally for this whole 'kill Scion' mission, which at this point seems like it ought to be our highest priority? I'm inclined to think Kyubey is totally honest about the blow up the planet thing, and hey, we live on the planet! Everybody lives on the planet! If we fuck up and the Incubators spend a bit being slightly more mean to humans in however long we have before the Earth-shattering kaboom, who the fuck cares!" This whole conversation had radically changed Liba's perception of Kyubey from 'kind of derpy but reasonably effective deliberate liar and manipulator' to a herp a derp member of a species of derp that had stumbled into a fucked-up web of deception through a series of derps that worked well enough from their perspective so they'd codified the derp-ception into something that was almost like intentional deception.
"I- hadn't... really... Scion is a Hero." Liba did not sigh. This was a heroic effort she deserved headpats for, presumably from a giant who could actually reach her head. "And... we just proved Kyubey is really wrong on some things. Maybe- maybe the Incubators are misinterpreting what... Scion's species... are doing?"
"I mean, I guess we can check whenever Kyubey or Cubette comes back, but 'blows up a planet when done fucking around on it' seems really unlikely to be a wild misunderstanding of a completely innocent or downright heroic act." Come the fuck on, Rose.
Rose was conspicuously silent, her song playing that collage of bits Cherie had always thought of as 'never meet your heroes'. Liba wasn't at all surprised when Rose blatantly changed the subject after a minute. "I'm... I'm thirsty. Can you help me with that?" The sad thing was Rose's surge of shame was still lesser than the 'never meet your heroes' shame. What, did she really look up that much to the golden moron?
Whatever. "Sure, might as well get topped off, we shouldn't be far off from Boston." Liba was pretty sure she recognized some of the dirge-person clumps they were passing by. Nearby towns, presumably, not that Liba could've guessed at their names even slightly.
"... thanks," Rose said, clearly still very upset. Liba rounded that off a tiny bit; she really didn't feel like playing the role of patient partner right now.
"Easy-peasy, time to pick some targets!" Liba declared, already eyeing some isolated individuals...
I've mentioned before that I'm blatantly, obviously autistic. Something I haven't talked about before is this gave me an unusual perspective on emotion, especially vis-a-vis social statements about how emotion intersects with gender. Oh, not immediately, but... pretty quickly.
When I was first running across pop culture making statements like 'boys don't cry' and 'girls are more emotional than boys', I metaphorically nodded along at these obviously-accurate statements. After all, I and my family members fit to them quite well; I have cried a bare handful of times in my entire life, for example, and the main time I remember doing so was a heroic effort to make myself cry in response to the season 1 finale of the original Sailor Moon anime; I had to actively, intentionally dwell on the whole 'best friends all dying as everybody pushes to complete the mission' stuff and do hard-to-describe brain stuff to get any tears to flow. (And I still didn't cry very much, honestly) In another era, I might never have exited this stage; if I was in a small community these claims seemed fully accurate to with no access to broader depictions of humans, this could easily have been the end of this topic for me.
As I lived in an era of television, though, in short order I realized the context of these statements didn't actually fit to these being foundational biological facts. If Boys Don't Cry was actually Just How Things Work, nobody would say it in most contexts, same as how normally nobody points out that humans are bipeds or that people sleep when tired. It certainly wouldn't take the form of a mother trying to shame her son into not crying, which was one of the most common ways for this claim to show up in pop culture; a son crying would be a confusing oddity, a thing for the mother to go 'What?? That's not supposed to happen???' in response to, if this notion were actually widely true.
It took longer for me to become similarly sure 'girls are more emotional than boys' was a load of nonsense, because pop culture didn't so consistently contradict the claim while actively invoking it -it was usually stated while a girl was being emotional and a boy not so it was resonant with the scene itself, at least- but I eventually noticed framing differed a lot more than what I call content. Like, female characters will get framed as being 'upset' where a male character would get framed as 'angry', and a male character's emotional response is more likely to be presented as justified/appropriate/understandable than a female character's emotional response in a lot of fiction, where a given piece of media might actually show a given male character being both angry more often and more intensely than a given female character but present it as if the female character getting moderately mad one time is Irrational Hysteria while the male character getting apocalyptically angry multiple times is A Rational Hankering For Justice. That kind of thing.
So that's a notable chunk of what underlies part of this chapter, and indeed my overall approach to the Incubators in general.
Also: this rant at Kyubey was actually supposed to happen as Cherie yelling at Kyubey in the first chapter. Early in it, at that! (Which is worth noting since chapter 1 is easily 2-3 other chapters in length) But Cherie obstinately refusing to believe any of this crap meant I couldn't find a natural opportunity for it to come up. Though I actually like this version better than what I'd originally had in mind, but still, wow, quite the delay there.
By a similar token we're finally getting to the Boston arc! Finally! Like five chapters after I'd originally thought would happen! Because yes there's been a Boston Arc™ planned since before I actually posted any chapters, but it just keeps not actually happening.
Cherie as a main character really does make a mess of my nice, neat rails. I generally like what results better, honestly, but still, it makes for a lot of frustration in the meanwhile.
Oh, and have a link to my Ko-fi in case you appreciate what I do and all.
When I was first running across pop culture making statements like 'boys don't cry' and 'girls are more emotional than boys', I metaphorically nodded along at these obviously-accurate statements. After all, I and my family members fit to them quite well; I have cried a bare handful of times in my entire life, for example, and the main time I remember doing so was a heroic effort to make myself cry in response to the season 1 finale of the original Sailor Moon anime; I had to actively, intentionally dwell on the whole 'best friends all dying as everybody pushes to complete the mission' stuff and do hard-to-describe brain stuff to get any tears to flow. (And I still didn't cry very much, honestly) In another era, I might never have exited this stage; if I was in a small community these claims seemed fully accurate to with no access to broader depictions of humans, this could easily have been the end of this topic for me.
As I lived in an era of television, though, in short order I realized the context of these statements didn't actually fit to these being foundational biological facts. If Boys Don't Cry was actually Just How Things Work, nobody would say it in most contexts, same as how normally nobody points out that humans are bipeds or that people sleep when tired. It certainly wouldn't take the form of a mother trying to shame her son into not crying, which was one of the most common ways for this claim to show up in pop culture; a son crying would be a confusing oddity, a thing for the mother to go 'What?? That's not supposed to happen???' in response to, if this notion were actually widely true.
It took longer for me to become similarly sure 'girls are more emotional than boys' was a load of nonsense, because pop culture didn't so consistently contradict the claim while actively invoking it -it was usually stated while a girl was being emotional and a boy not so it was resonant with the scene itself, at least- but I eventually noticed framing differed a lot more than what I call content. Like, female characters will get framed as being 'upset' where a male character would get framed as 'angry', and a male character's emotional response is more likely to be presented as justified/appropriate/understandable than a female character's emotional response in a lot of fiction, where a given piece of media might actually show a given male character being both angry more often and more intensely than a given female character but present it as if the female character getting moderately mad one time is Irrational Hysteria while the male character getting apocalyptically angry multiple times is A Rational Hankering For Justice. That kind of thing.
So that's a notable chunk of what underlies part of this chapter, and indeed my overall approach to the Incubators in general.
Also: this rant at Kyubey was actually supposed to happen as Cherie yelling at Kyubey in the first chapter. Early in it, at that! (Which is worth noting since chapter 1 is easily 2-3 other chapters in length) But Cherie obstinately refusing to believe any of this crap meant I couldn't find a natural opportunity for it to come up. Though I actually like this version better than what I'd originally had in mind, but still, wow, quite the delay there.
By a similar token we're finally getting to the Boston arc! Finally! Like five chapters after I'd originally thought would happen! Because yes there's been a Boston Arc™ planned since before I actually posted any chapters, but it just keeps not actually happening.
Cherie as a main character really does make a mess of my nice, neat rails. I generally like what results better, honestly, but still, it makes for a lot of frustration in the meanwhile.
Oh, and have a link to my Ko-fi in case you appreciate what I do and all.
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SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
I wonder if any of Scion's species have discovered and are playing around with Magic as an energy source or if their refusal to talk to the Incubators has successfully hidden it from them?
Well, Scion will be learning about it shortly, at least.
Kyubey's species being kind of morons about some things does seem like it's canon. Dangerous, tricksy morons, but morons.
Well, Scion will be learning about it shortly, at least.
Kyubey's species being kind of morons about some things does seem like it's canon. Dangerous, tricksy morons, but morons.
- Location
- america
Most certainly. Powers are crazy. There are so many species even on Earth, and the Entities represent the potential of their home planet across every iteration. In story, we saw only the three.
I highly doubt no alien species has magic besides Incubators.
What is interesting is that they won't communicate with them. It tells me that they know something's up.
Anyway, this chapter was waaaay too talky and not enough doey imo. I don't care about expanding the magic system, that should have come later. I just want more adventures of Cherie the singing witch.
Kai Merah
Hound Hearted Hedonist
- Location
- Somewhere in the corners of my imagination
Man, I love how Cherie keeps kneecapping Kyubey's preconceptions and exposing how incredibly dumb and irrational the Incubators are, despite their supposed lack of emotions. The above quotes are my favourite lines in the chapter.
Takareer
Words and feathers
- Location
- Ontario, Canada
This is so disgustingly realistic, I'm appalled. It takes away all the mystery of telepathy while at the same time being irrefutably probable. You can't even claim that this explanation unfairly expects alien problems to be human-like, since as far as we know every evolving system has the tendency to lump features onto existing constructs rather than create a new dedicated construct. It also hits close to home (I'm a software engineer); oh, just add one more feature Taka, one teensy weensy little feature! Now one more! Oh, you added so many, how about another one, shouldn't matter too much right?
This, and other similar cases, is one of the major components of why I love your writing. You don't take the route of "this thing in the original work is weird, it must be stupid" that some other works take. Instead you try, and almost always succeed, at creating a realistic world that still admits all the elements we saw in the original work. Many bits of the worldbuilding in this chapter are delightfully clever, as well!
As what I wrote above would imply, I for one enjoyed the talking. If the story was entirely talking it would be bad, and if what was being talked about was less cleverly done it would also be bad... but as long as there are "do-y" chapters, I think that chapters like this only enhance the story. Especially, they serve to differentiate it from the many action-only stories that one might otherwise read.
Grail-kun
"Omnipotent Wish-granting Device"
- Location
- Fuyuki
Obviously this wasn't Urobuchi's (Watsonian) reasoning and the Doylistic reasoning is clear (Madoka is a magical girl series, duh), but I remember someone bringing up that there is a meaningful difference between boys and girls which might matter to Incubators, suicidal thoughts vs suicide rates. Namely, girls tend to have a higher rate of suicidal thoughts (which the Incubators might want in their depression farms) while guys tend to have a higher rate of suicide deaths (which the Incubators definitely do not want!).
- Location
- Wherever
To be honest, 70% of the talking is about getting Rose properly on-board with things because she's not a character you can just hustle into advancing the plot without question (I tried! I just wanted to get to Boston already!), 20% of it is characters planning things out when everyone involved has a very incomplete understanding of things so all planning attempts iterate through multiple steps of 'what do you mean the world actually works in a way that makes my plan unviable or severely sub-optimal?' and the remaining 10% of it is me having fun writing these characters bouncing off each other. In my ideal fantasy world -emphasis here on fantasy- we'd have glossed over almost this entire chapter in a paragraph or two and my audience would psychically know everything of relevance so they would correctly interpret character interactions in later scenes and the Boston Arc™ would've already started this very chapter.
As-is, we have only just exited what I've been calling The Prologue, which was not supposed to be 10 Threadmarks and over 90,000 words. My earliest, most naive plans called for meeting Noelle in chapter 2, not to mention implicitly expected to spend less than 10,000 words on chapter 1. (As opposed to the 23k words chapter 1 actually is; I desperately wanted to split it into at least two different chapters but could not find an at all acceptable break point) I severely underestimated the amount of work that would go into getting the characters in the right locations and getting the right information to the audience in a reasonably organic manner in the context of a crossover where so many things cannot go unquestioned -which was dumb of me, as Monster already showed that even for a singular canon my perception of the source material was very divergent from the generally-agreed-upon version.
But we are finally past the majority of the hurdles in establishing things and getting people (Both the characters and the audience) to actually know things that are essential to know, so this should be the last chapter that's quite so thoroughly 'characters standing in a room talking to each other for an hour'.
I'm pretty sure the creators intend for the Incubators to be Evil Schemers, the sort that have all the cards and carefully leverage their every advantage as best they can to advance their heinous agenda unnoticed by anyone who can stop them, and most fans certainly take them in roughly this manner, but the collective picture painted at best places them as absurdly short-sighted (In a manner that flies in the face of them having been running this system since literally the dawn of human history), and less generously places them as sloppy, sub-optimal, and disinterested in trying to improve a system that works okay but could work far better with a number of relatively minor changes to how they handle things. Especially since there's a lot of things canon doesn't strictly make impossible to be happening, but for meta reasons I'm highly skeptical anyone involved considered the possibility that the Incubators could theoretically be doing these things not mentioned in the original anime.
And if you actually take seriously Kyubey's claim that emotion is not a part of the standard Incubator psychological profile, it simultaneously becomes the case that carefully-malicious trickery of highly emotional humans seems a rather difficult thing for them to consistently do and suddenly various moments canon wants you to take as 'Kyubey deliberately lies by omission, the jackass' make far more sense to be Kyubey genuinely going "I didn't think it was relevant" or the like.
(I will readily admit I also just tend to read characters as acting out of ignorance rather than malice as a simple bit of projection, but there are plenty of characters where I've started out doing that and canon has successfully convinced me that no, they're actually malicious; Madoka actually started by having me inlined to take Kyubey as a willfully malicious actor and then flipped me into the opposite read as it escalated its attempts to bluntly convince the audience Kyubey is Intentional Evil)
To be honest, I arrived at this purely off the 'terminals' thing; if the Incubators are already remote-controlling puppet bodies somehow, and they have telepathy, it's only natural to expect that the remote control of fleshy terminals operates on similar principles to the mind-to-mind contact between fleshy beings. At which point I'm already implying telepathy can transmit far more than audio at a reasonable fidelity, and in fact am implying it can do so at high speed at an interstellar scale; it's only a tiny jump from there to imagine such a system being expanded into an internet-analogue, complete with Incubator Youtube and all.
(It's also worth mentioning Covid influenced how I wrote this; seeing how stuff like video calls and streaming and so on exploded in the face of people needing to be more physically separated made me a lot more confident in approaching Incubators as heavily relying on an internet-analogue as a plausible scenario. I'd always been thinking in these terms long before any chapters got posted, but Covid took this from 'neat, feels logical to me, but maybe other people would find it absurd' to 'yeah, people will accept this without question'. If somehow this chapter had been made, say, four years ago, I'd have probably felt a need to have conversation occur in which Kyubey or Cubette explicitly talked about their societal makeup more)
That said...
... I certainly appreciate this commentary, as this absolutely is a thing I shoot for, and I absolutely get frustrated by how often I see fanfic going 'I don't understand how this bit of the source material could work as presented, so I'm assuming it's stupid and broken instead of trying to figure out if maybe it could work somehow that's just not immediately obvious to me'. (I used to read 'rationalfic' a lot, then stopped precisely because this was a major hallmark of the style: assume canon is dumb and poorly-constructed in every way, and try to come up with a more 'rational' model... which is often even more arbitrary and irrational than the source material, as a bonus reason to not be interested)
Kyubey is consistent about implying that the point at which the Incubators actually get their 'negative entropy' payout is the point at which a magical girl becomes a Witch, and Kyubey is already perfectly happy to leave contractees unaware that their flesh-and-blood body is a puppet that will shrug off any amount of damage and only the Soul Gem matters. It would be pretty trivial to just let Magical Boys slit their wrists, shoot themselves in the head, walk in front of a car, try to drown themselves, etc, and when none of that works just not bother to explain to them why -after all, repairing the body uses magic, which generates Grief, which means they'll Witch out sooner. A small rate of them would luck into destroying the Soul Gem in the process,but canon Kyubey is pretty clearly not concerned with optimizing this system; they would try harder to prevent moments like Mami getting eaten if shooting for perfection was an actual goal.
So I don't find that terribly compelling a thought process.
As-is, we have only just exited what I've been calling The Prologue, which was not supposed to be 10 Threadmarks and over 90,000 words. My earliest, most naive plans called for meeting Noelle in chapter 2, not to mention implicitly expected to spend less than 10,000 words on chapter 1. (As opposed to the 23k words chapter 1 actually is; I desperately wanted to split it into at least two different chapters but could not find an at all acceptable break point) I severely underestimated the amount of work that would go into getting the characters in the right locations and getting the right information to the audience in a reasonably organic manner in the context of a crossover where so many things cannot go unquestioned -which was dumb of me, as Monster already showed that even for a singular canon my perception of the source material was very divergent from the generally-agreed-upon version.
But we are finally past the majority of the hurdles in establishing things and getting people (Both the characters and the audience) to actually know things that are essential to know, so this should be the last chapter that's quite so thoroughly 'characters standing in a room talking to each other for an hour'.
I'm pretty sure the creators intend for the Incubators to be Evil Schemers, the sort that have all the cards and carefully leverage their every advantage as best they can to advance their heinous agenda unnoticed by anyone who can stop them, and most fans certainly take them in roughly this manner, but the collective picture painted at best places them as absurdly short-sighted (In a manner that flies in the face of them having been running this system since literally the dawn of human history), and less generously places them as sloppy, sub-optimal, and disinterested in trying to improve a system that works okay but could work far better with a number of relatively minor changes to how they handle things. Especially since there's a lot of things canon doesn't strictly make impossible to be happening, but for meta reasons I'm highly skeptical anyone involved considered the possibility that the Incubators could theoretically be doing these things not mentioned in the original anime.
And if you actually take seriously Kyubey's claim that emotion is not a part of the standard Incubator psychological profile, it simultaneously becomes the case that carefully-malicious trickery of highly emotional humans seems a rather difficult thing for them to consistently do and suddenly various moments canon wants you to take as 'Kyubey deliberately lies by omission, the jackass' make far more sense to be Kyubey genuinely going "I didn't think it was relevant" or the like.
(I will readily admit I also just tend to read characters as acting out of ignorance rather than malice as a simple bit of projection, but there are plenty of characters where I've started out doing that and canon has successfully convinced me that no, they're actually malicious; Madoka actually started by having me inlined to take Kyubey as a willfully malicious actor and then flipped me into the opposite read as it escalated its attempts to bluntly convince the audience Kyubey is Intentional Evil)
To be honest, I arrived at this purely off the 'terminals' thing; if the Incubators are already remote-controlling puppet bodies somehow, and they have telepathy, it's only natural to expect that the remote control of fleshy terminals operates on similar principles to the mind-to-mind contact between fleshy beings. At which point I'm already implying telepathy can transmit far more than audio at a reasonable fidelity, and in fact am implying it can do so at high speed at an interstellar scale; it's only a tiny jump from there to imagine such a system being expanded into an internet-analogue, complete with Incubator Youtube and all.
(It's also worth mentioning Covid influenced how I wrote this; seeing how stuff like video calls and streaming and so on exploded in the face of people needing to be more physically separated made me a lot more confident in approaching Incubators as heavily relying on an internet-analogue as a plausible scenario. I'd always been thinking in these terms long before any chapters got posted, but Covid took this from 'neat, feels logical to me, but maybe other people would find it absurd' to 'yeah, people will accept this without question'. If somehow this chapter had been made, say, four years ago, I'd have probably felt a need to have conversation occur in which Kyubey or Cubette explicitly talked about their societal makeup more)
That said...
... I certainly appreciate this commentary, as this absolutely is a thing I shoot for, and I absolutely get frustrated by how often I see fanfic going 'I don't understand how this bit of the source material could work as presented, so I'm assuming it's stupid and broken instead of trying to figure out if maybe it could work somehow that's just not immediately obvious to me'. (I used to read 'rationalfic' a lot, then stopped precisely because this was a major hallmark of the style: assume canon is dumb and poorly-constructed in every way, and try to come up with a more 'rational' model... which is often even more arbitrary and irrational than the source material, as a bonus reason to not be interested)
Kyubey is consistent about implying that the point at which the Incubators actually get their 'negative entropy' payout is the point at which a magical girl becomes a Witch, and Kyubey is already perfectly happy to leave contractees unaware that their flesh-and-blood body is a puppet that will shrug off any amount of damage and only the Soul Gem matters. It would be pretty trivial to just let Magical Boys slit their wrists, shoot themselves in the head, walk in front of a car, try to drown themselves, etc, and when none of that works just not bother to explain to them why -after all, repairing the body uses magic, which generates Grief, which means they'll Witch out sooner. A small rate of them would luck into destroying the Soul Gem in the process,but canon Kyubey is pretty clearly not concerned with optimizing this system; they would try harder to prevent moments like Mami getting eaten if shooting for perfection was an actual goal.
So I don't find that terribly compelling a thought process.
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SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
He's pretty clearly both. I remember he was rather deliberately manipulating Kyoko into getting herself killed chasing after Sayaka, to leave Madoka without a support structure and admitted as much to Homura. But on the other hand, a lot of his other comments do seem to indicate some degree of ignorance. I just figure that he's got no innate talent for (or even real interest in) human interaction but enough experience to successfully manipulate inexperienced teenagers some of the time.
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Absolutely love this series. I don't say it often enough or loudly enough! Especially how you handle the incubators. And extra especially how you have integrated the settings. Not to mention that Liba (née Cherie) is a fantastic POV character. I love how she ignored all the important stuff and is now kicking herself for not paying attention, but not too hard because she still only sorta cares.
Is this intentional?
- Location
- Wherever
Nope!
And it has now been corrected, both here and on Ao3. It's just supposed to be another Cherie-slash-Liba comment. For some reason I made this type of mixup repeatedly, but I'd thought I'd caught them all.
And glad to hear all this, given it's basically all the stuff I most care about and put the most thought into getting right, not to mention a big part of what I enjoy about the crossover's concept at all. (This turned into a Real 'Fic instead of a one-off joke because the idea of Cherie being largely pretty blase about the core Grimdark Reveals of Madoka sounded like a really great core to build on)