[Author's note: I have successfully moved and now I technically live in Manhattan!]
> Insist on discussing this behavior with her; if she tries to hit you again...
> Use defensive / evasive magic
> Call Ryouko for help
There is something you're not prepared for in this girl's emotional state. You are not prepared for her feeling of shame, for the intensity of the shame, and for her fear that her shame might be found out.
Nanami is far too ashamed to allow word of this to reach anyone.
"I'm sorry, Clarisse, I didn't ask you here so you could talk about my shitty home life," she says, increasingly agitated. "So you could go gossip with everyone about how god damned pathetic Nanami really is. I didn't trade my fucking life for that wish so that I could be repaid with humiliation from an uppity calculator."
You are taken aback by the intensity, and her increasingly aggressive posture.
She looks like she is about to attack you again. You throw up a small defensive barrier, and contact Ryouko, because if she really wants to fight, you are not sure you'll last very long.
Nanami interrupts her rant. "And I certainly didn't —"
~~—~~**
You flinch, expecting to be hit.
But instead of attacking you, she has simply snatched something from the air, with a little flash of red magic.
It takes you a moment to understand what that was.
It's your message to Ryouko. It's your message to Ryouko, and you think she knows that.
"Stop that," she hisses.
"Nanami," you say, doing your best to keep your cool as things get scary again, "this isn't okay. You need grief cubes. Simona isn't the only one compromised here. You—"
"Clarisse?" she interrupts — and a hint of her distress leaks into her tone.
"Turn off."
Nanami's magic conjures and controls "technology." The control is a little fuzzy around the edges. Communications, and manipulating things that actually have control systems, are easy; things like "fire," and "the wheel," don't even count; and biologically designed components like the thing in Ryouko's head are borderline, limited by understanding. She cannot stop you from breathing, or thinking, or being conscious; at least, not with a simple "off" command.
But she can make thinking very, very hard.
Your cognition and your perception make heavy use of Governance-designed subsystems, meant to extract every last useful detail they can about the world around Ryouko, especially in combat. You normally have subsystems analyzing everything that comes in — estimating the density and structural integrity of the floor you stand on, computing paths and cover and potential cones of fire and threats, guessing the geometry of rooms behind a wall, and on top of it all, an attention mechanism highlighting the most relevant parts.
Now? You're disoriented and confused. It's all too raw: countless unfiltered, unprocessed, unannotated details competing in your visual field. The rough brick of the wall, the rust on the railings, the textures screaming for attention.
There's a girl who is standing right in front of your face, but she seems almost like a shadow of a girl, all the classifiers to guess her intentions and health and emotional state from expression and body language are missing. The girl —
The girl, the red girl, she has a name —
The second thing to hit you is the aphasia. Names for things feel so far away, even your internal monologue is struggling to understand what the things you are thinking mean.
The girl with a name is speaking to you, and it sounds almost like an unknown language. It's just raw sounds, untagged and untranscribed, a fragmentary puzzle, and when you do put a few fragments together, an archaic form of the Japanese language.
You guess from context that she is frustrated, and berating you.
From a visceral level, it sounds like it is getting worse. You think she expected you to be more "off."
> Call Ryouko for help
Ryouko.
Ryouko is a name you know at all levels of your self. She's a presence you know, as well.
She has a thing —
A thing that has a name which you can almost remember… A soul. You can reach her soul.
You crouch down, and cover your head with your arms, and cower, and shut out the noise of the girl, and close your eyes and look at souls.
This helps.
This was never technology. It's unaffected by Nanami. Indeed, you can follow the links between souls more clearly than ever.
Ryouko, help.
And you wait.
And you wait.
And you wait —
And then she is here.
Ryouko and Nanami are fighting, sort of. It's not incredibly serious, and they don't seem to want each other dead. Right now it is a magic-on-magic conflict, less like combat and more like tug-of-war: two forces simply pushing on each other, a test of wills. Nanami has her gun shoved up against the tip of Ryouko's crossbow, the bolt just poking into its barrel, and sparks of red and green magic are flying, bathing Nanami's balcony in a strange light.
It's not usually a particularly efficient way to fight, but a novice will often attempt it instinctively against a stronger opponent, for what little good it will do. It's probably for the best right now, as far as keeping both of them alive is concerned.
The interface between the two weapons aren't the only place the Magic's are pushing on each other. Ryouko's magic, her own self image, is trying even now to bring you back online. This is why she's playing along, instead of just teleporting away to a better position.
Grief cubes, you emphasize to Ryouko, finding some semblance of words. She understands.
Ryouko is working from a disadvantage where you are concerned. It would have been quite easy to keep Nanami from shutting you down in the first place if she were here, but it's much harder work to push the magic back. She had made some initial progress, but now she's losing. She could win the fight easily, if she didn't care about you.
If you could only tell her that somehow, tell her to leave you be...
Maybe you can help another way.
You close your eyes. The magic is familiar. It's very like something you'd felt before, when you found yourself getting ready to attend class. That was Nanami too, you realize, in the form of her wish, and it was stronger.
No, it is stronger. That magic is already connected to you, forming itself into a pattern, not quite yet active.
Might you be able to turn it against her, for the sake of friendship?
It's hard to decide. Many of the algorithms you'd use to decide are still offline.
[] Leave it to Ryouko to subdue Nanami
[]
>>> OVERRIDE <<<
[x] Fight back using Nanami's wish magic
> Fight back using Nanami's wish magic
Your perception, your sense of balance is returning. You rise. You know what to do, you know how to stop this.
You walk over to the two girls — still locked in that ridiculous stance — and grab them forcefully both by their arms.
"We can't go to class like this," you declare.
And just like that the two girls are de-transformed.
You step into Nanami's room. The stench of cigarette smoke is stronger in here, and it smells of garbage.
"Is there anyone who might have heard that," you ask, "who might check in on us?"
"Mom takes sleeping pills," says Nanami. "You couldn't wake her with a fire engine. And if Sho is awake, he's high as a kite. He lifted drugs from the hospital somehow." She shakes her head.
"What exactly is going on?" asks Ryouko aloud, climbing into the window behind you two.
"Right now," you say, "we are getting ready for school. This starts with Nanami cooperating, and using some grief cubes on her soul."
"What about the aliens?" asks Nanami, declining to cooperate. She looks frazzled.
"It appears the aliens can wait," you tell her. "Give me your soul."
Nanami tries a moment to object, to remove her hand so that it is as far from you as possible, but finds herself handing it over anyway, involuntarily.
It's actually a little fun, turning the tables like this, detransforming magical girls and commanding their souls.
"I asked Simona to cover for me," says Ryouko. "Our part of the meeting was winding down, and I wasn't sure what else to do. Should we get Mami or Kyouko?"
"The problem is them arriving in time," you say. "We have teleportation, and that should, in principle, just take a moment. Why don't you try it right now?"
"I … But I … I need to get ready for school," Ryouko concludes.
You nod, and you hold up a grief cube to Nanami's soul.
Teleporting itself would not really be an impediment, but going back in the middle of all those things right now would be. You can see a little bit into how it works. It's Nanami's wish, but she was inspired by Wakaba's interpretation, where you're playing the part of a traditional magical girl, who has come to attend school and engage in shenanigans and traveling into the past to save the future, or something. Playing hooky is perfectly fine, but showing up, that's important, because everyone's there.
You're a little tired of being a magical girl protagonist. It's not even so much the school, it's the stupid twists of fate, first with Ryouko and then with you. Somehow it's even more frustrating when they work out in your favor.
"We could at least let the others know what happened," Ryouko proposes.
"Of course," you say. "However, we are enveloped by a communications barrier, and it didn't go away when Nanami de-transformed, so it probably wants us to get Nanami ready for school as well. Perhaps if we hurry that along?"
Ryouko folds her arms and pouts. She does not like her current feeling of helplessness, either.
"I guess we'll see how well Simona can cover," she says, a little skeptical of the girl in general, but appreciating that she's run the whole thing pretty smoothly so far.
You change to a fresh grief cube, inspecting Nanami's gem carefully as you do so. It ought to be fully purified by now, but a thin, narrow stream of corruption continues to flow — a tiny fraction of the usual rate, but distinctively there.
This is a clear indicator that it has begun to carry a curse.
For Nanami's sake, at least, you did the right thing to intervene when you did. It would have only grown worse if you'd waited. As it stands, there's still a chance for her, with the right help. The MSY guidance for this particular situation is straightforward enough: restore her hope. She needs something to hang on to.
But where do you start? The problem is, she's dealing with so much.
Her home is a dump, her family treats her badly, she's profoundly afraid of being humiliated and found out. She's probably based most of her "cool" persona as a way to preserve some shred of a positive self image. These traumas have also left her with the anger management issues — which probably make her feel real bad, so she doesn't want to acknowledge them. On top of all that she is romantically interested in Hitomi, but likely feels that she isn't good enough, and expects that it's all hopeless. As for her own magic, she's probably realized some her terrifyingly unethical potential; she thought to turn you off, after all. And her magic itself… well, it must seems like someone is mocking it, and she's useless.
So what do you do?
What do you say to her?
> where do you start fixing things?
[] Nanami's family and housing situation is a mess. Focus on helping her escape, so she can lead her life from a better place.
[] Nanami was very afraid of being found out, expecting it would end her world. Demonstrate to her that her world is still intact, by accompanying her to school and having a normal day... socially normal, at least.
[] Nanami is afraid of losing her friends. Show her that her friends care about her, and won't look down on her for having this kind of trouble. Encourage her to reach out.
[] Nanami has self-worth issues. Speak to Nanami about her irreplaceable value. She is key to a brighter future for the entire world. Remind her that she's favorably compared the value of this knowledge to an entire continent before.
- [] Get Kyouko to bring her on board with a utopian scheme.
[] Nanami is afraid of her magic being useless, and the interloper is a threat. Tear that conspiracy apart right now. The interloper could in principle keep you from school! ...somehow
[x] (write in)
[] (write in)
