so I finally got around to reading and catching up with this after being recommended it for Goddess knows how long, and, let's see. this is going to be a long post and it's possible i've forgotten something enormous that makes half of it nonsense, so bear with me.
On 31 Jan 2022 the Winston Weaver fertilizer plant caught fire, distracting your questmistress. In subsequent days it made the front pages of national newspapers due to the ammonium chloride's explosive potential. It would have been the biggest explosion in US history had it all gone off, excepting only the atomic bomb tests. It burned for like a week.
But it did not explode and kill everyone.
first of all, that sounds emotionally terrifying. I'm glad you're okay.
second...
so, Clarisse has an awful lot of problems right now, huh.
cosmic, universe-shaking problems, a lot of them are, but really, I'd put her tendency to turn
madly, desperately passionate at #1. it's
probably not magical spillover from someone else's personality. it probably
is something to do with Ryouko's genetic predilection to bloodlust. it's
definitely something to do with love and justice and all that good magical girl stuff. but mostly i think it's Clarisse's inexperience with squishy hormonal human-ness. really, the power of love is a frightening thing, and not just when used to protect. for example, that time when Kyouko 'accidentally' handed over root access to her endocrine system to Clarisse. that wasn't a bug. there are no coincidences in this world. only the mistakes of youth, runaway wish magic and other such troublesome inevitabilities.
maybe consider emotional suppression when that feeling shows up at inopportune moments? the power of love is certainly an amazing thing, but I don't think Clarisse has quite mastered it yet. and if mishandled it might just, with all the good intent in the world, doom an infinite amount of people to an infinite amount of suffering so I think perhaps a teensy bit of caution is in order! and the tools are available! she's not had much experience having emotions, still, so there's no shame in using training wheels in these high-risk situations. so:
[x] respond to out-of-control emotions with stubborn inhumanity. maybe set up contingencies keyed to dangerous emotional states and the presence of incubators.
third, contracting.
so, contracting is bad. really bad. it's something that's likely to only be offered when Clarisse is in a vulnerable emotional situation. it would, again, be a shockingly bad idea to contract for any reason that's on Clarisse's mind when the Incubators actually approach. however, Clarisse is exception upon exception. she's under no obligation to share the emotional vulnerabilities of a human 100% of the time. even if they are an exciting emotional rollercoaster.
but more importantly, we, ooc, know from canon that the Incubators not only don't have much control over the effects of wishes, but also
can't even predict the effects of many wishes. with potential on the level of Clarisse's, she's capable of making wishes that completely wreck their system with them wholly incapable of realizing they've done so until the wish is granted. it might even be possible to make a wish that, after fully resolving its constraint on fate and the cycles of karma, leaves behind an uncontracted Clarisse. or some other sort of grand fraud. while i think the chances of making this work are slim at best, it would be very funny to pull off, and might be worth considering as a last-resort option. really if they can't offer total omnipotence, they're making a pretty bad deal. have they even
watched any magical girl anime?
on the other hand... well, they're the
Incubators. they don't have a monopoly on wishes. they're probably tapping off some of the potential there and then before even getting into the effects of being a soul gem. why
not simply make a wish without even needing them? it should be possible.
[x] look into wishes without incubators.
Sakura might know.
-[x]
zettai zettai daijoubu is a type of wish magic, perhaps - don't underestimate it! even at 3% strength, don't underestimate it!
[x] find out if Nanami's magic is limited to
Governance technology. if there's even a chance it can get at Incubator technology, it could be game-changing.
fourth, timelines.
so, causality is currently all twisted up like a pretzel and might shatter into pieces at any moment. this might be a problem for, well, everyone who can ever exist, really.
as a revolutionary girl with none of that soul gem nonsense holding her back, Clarisse shouldn't really be settling for anything less than saving everyone. and that means
everyone. the Star Empire, the people of 2011, the Governance, the Ceph. maybe Gretchen, she doesn't seem to be doing too good. I'm not quite sure what this would entail, unfortunately - the job of rebuilding all of causality and the karmic cycles of the universe to
not involve
literally building Hell is quite a big one.
however, wish magic implies limiting conditions on how the timeline can be built. it's possible that a series of events in which a wish goes unsatisfied is inherently paradoxical and thus paradoxes the wish (and perhaps its maker) out of existence. the most binding of
those, I think, is Clarisse van Rossum's wish. in the worst case, this might make her lifespan equivalent with the timespan of the phenomenon of 'human history'. this is
sort of bad. it's possible that killing Walpurgisnacht would, um. mean that history has to end because there's no Clarisse van Rossum to witness it, and events would be conjured to facilitate that, in the absence of Gretchen or a time-looper. conversely, knowing the identity of the magical girl who became that witch allows speculation into her strengths and, such as they are, weaknesses.
as such:
[x] look into intercepting and purifying Walpurgisnacht early, over the Pacific in a place of minimal historical relevance.
[x] do NOT look into ascending to godhood right now.
[x] do NOT show the aliens feathers or ribbons yet.
[x] do NOT change the course of human history any further until Walpurgisnacht is out of the picture.
with that in mind, I'm going to posit a model of the current arrangement. rather than sequential events, it might be more useful to consider 'the Star Empire', 'Mitakihara 2011' and 'Governance 2460' to be three distinct 'scenarios' linked by the traversal of numerous magical girls, but not actually meaningfully linked causally now that everything is broken. in theory, there are only two timelines, but... well, we haven't actually committed to gluing the Star Empire and Mitakihara 2011 together. in broad strokes, though, a question might be - is it a good idea to reduce the timeline count to 1 by meddling with boundary conditions, or would that break too much and would it be better to just make a better-than-ever future starting in Mitakihara 2011?
the thing is... it's more complicated than that too, because we want to also help the Ceph. and we've resolved not to give up on past events, back with Sakura Momo. so we might need to save the Ceph
from the insatiable bloodlust of Princess Ryouko in the past. I'm sure she enjoyed
drinking their blood very much and was very
very cute in
battle but that is not a reason not to do so. so:
[x][Card] Offer the return of the memoria, but...
[x] Use it to ask about the subject matter and the aliens' history.
-[x] Particularly, their relationship with the Incubators (eee?)
-[x] Particularly, their war with the Star Empire (try to be tactful about this one!)
another thing:
there's a complicating factor to all this that might just be the Gordian knot we need to cut to fix everything.
we know that the Incubators want to encourage civilizations to become mental gestalts to contract on a species level. we know that the Incubators
are themselves such a gestalt. we know that their goal is to use the energy of the soul to overcome entropy and prolong the universe, a goal they pursue single-mindedly, seeming to have no other interests. finally, we know that they lack the capacity to contract on their own terms, and consider emotion to be a form of mental illness. suppose, thus, that the Incubators' model for ideal grief extraction is something
they already, willingly, did to their own civilization. and, furthermore, that they did so because they believed it to be the
only way to prolong the lifespan of the universe. rather than raging against the dying of the light, they threw their own souls into the furnace, and now expect others to do the same. it's even possible that
the universe would not have survived long enough for humanity to even evolve, if not for them. certainly we can't be confident enough that this isn't the case as to boldly and unreservedly wish the Incubators out of existence.
even so, if i can be bold, i would posit the possibility of a 'golden timeline' in which, perhaps, magical girls were never bound to the laws set down by the Incubators. perhaps what was best of the Star Empire was scattered to the winds of space and survived, in countless pockets across the galaxy, awaiting the resurgence of humanity. perhaps the Cephalopods were never brought so low as they were? perhaps even the Incubators can be redeemed or saved somehow; it would not be impossible for the power of a true magical girl, I think. perhaps the universe lives on, forever, its existence sustained simply as a byproduct of the countless little hopes and fears, triumphs and indignities, of innumerable mortal lives well-lived? or perhaps the goddesses, on their timeless thrones of stardust, weave threads of karma unending in which hope outweighs despair, and, in the vastness of eternity, find time enough for love and fleeting human lives? I think our Clarisse is fighting for such a thing. I think she can do it, if only she can find a way to spread her wings...
such romantic visions aside, there are things Incubators like. mostly grief yield. there are a lot of very unpleasant things they can do, certainly, but there are also a lot of very unpleasant things they would very much rather not do. it's also possible that the actions they would take when pressed lack subtlety or finesse, and that Clarisse's potential and uncontacted nature will make them hesitate to write her off, instead trying to manipulate her into contract, until it is far too late for them. they are powerful, but they have vulnerabilities, and the nature of their collective mind is possibly quite inflexible in its directives.
so, in summary:
[x][Next] Go confront Oriko and
share explanations. Be a little nicer to her, but not unnaturally so. Remember that using her power can be traumatic and ruinously dangerous to her psyche, but plotting and carrying out murders was still her choice.
-[x] Do NOT ask Kyouko for help persuading her - Oriko's more likely to be cooperative without someone who's known to use passive mind magic in the room.
-[x] Reassure her about not starting a war with the Incubators any time soon. She seemed terrified about the prospect of a time war earlier. (Every time someone gives Kyuubey a grief seed, he gets a galaxy's worth of energy. Assume the Incubators aren't fussy about using it to deal with
specifically you.)
--[x] Even so, ask her why she thinks a war with the Incubators is worse than
creating Hell.
--[x] Ask her for help avoiding the 'war with the Incubators' scenario for now.
-[x] Discuss any interesting information about alien history with her.
-[x] Ask her about Clarisse van Rossum.
--[x] Ask her about 'Walpurgisnacht hates time travelers'.
--[x] Ask her for help planning an early attack on Walpurgisnacht.
--[x] Ask her about exceptions to the 'magical girls die if another magical girl receives their power', now that we know about at least two.
-[x] Offer to pull her in on the Paradox Committee, but only if Machina is okay with it.
-[x] Ask her about ways of bringing on board other territories' magical girls and dealing with the 'lack of new contracts' situation.
-[x] Maybe offer to use her power for her so as to spare her the burden of seeing terrifying apocalyptic futures. Full honesty, since she'll probably be suspect of this. It can't be worse than trying to be Kyuubey.
finally, and this is terribly important:
[j] If you meet the Dimension Witch, Yuuko, on the road, cut her down. Her bargains are crueler, perhaps, than the Incubators', and she takes more pleasure in them than they ever could.
. It's back! I'm so sorry to hear about your life difficulties though; I hope things for you and near you go a bit better from now on ❤.