To make people actually remember, here's it once for posterity: Minako is nonbinary and uses they/them. This message will be pinned so you people stop getting it wrong and pissing me off. If you get it wrong in the future I'm going to be much less nice, considering you have to scroll past it just to read the quest.
Because it is true that there basically isn't such thing as a safe time to test out your powers on a Witch, with these sorts of powers. There aren't really 'practice' Witches. They're all pretty dangerous. So it's going to be a risk at some point, unless we never try it at all... which is a valid decision, but I have this odd feeling that that won't fly.
Look, practicing empathy powers on Witches without going crazy from it, is baby steps towards the ultimate goal of being able to use empathy powers on Rin without the same.
[X] Watch its behavior. Understand what it does and see if it has familiars. (DIFFICULTY 2: If it notices you, it WILL attack)
It's probably not the best move ever, but I would rather not throw Minako into 3 suffering minds at once. If we find a single witch I would be okay with Minako using their powers on it. But a Walpurgisnacht made of 3 witches that have been forcibly fused together? No, not unless things get desperate.
"The Incubators hate us 'cause of what we did here. Your mom thinks the Walpurgis seed is only gonna last a century but I think it might last a bit longer than that. We really stirred up the hive and they hate us. More than they normally do." You turn towards Minako.
The real question is: after 100 years will Kyouko and Sakura have gotten their issues resolved such that the incubators aren't able to deal with them anymore?
The real question is: after 100 years will Kyouko and Sakura have gotten their issues resolved such that the incubators aren't able to deal with them anymore?
[X] Have Mina experiment with their powers. (???: Extremely Hazardous)
This is a bad plan, but then again there's no good way to get this over with. You turn to Minako. "Hey, so...mind giving that mindwhammy thing a try again?"
"Shit what?"
"Well, you said it fucked with the witch last time, right? I got a spare seed and I can handle this thing. I just wanna see if it does anything to this one!"
Minako flicks their head left and right. "That seems like a terrible idea, mama."
"Yeah, it probably is. But let's be honest, there's no good time to learn this kind of thing. Zero. None. There's no training ground. There's no training witch. If we wanna understand your powers, we gotta try at it. And, hell, if it works..."
Minako glances between you and the Witch, then claps their hands together. They wince as two eyes open on their chest. "T-there's the magi." They hiss through clenched teeth, shaking their head. "I could feel them clawing at themselves."
"So that's two eyes..." You glance between the eyes on their chest and the grimace on their face. "What's three?"
"Iunno, I think three is when it starts affecting us both." They shake their head.
"Hrm..." You scratch the neck behind your gorget. "Well, okay, so empathy is about sharing feelings, right? So maybe three eyes is feedback?"
"M-maybe? How would that work?"
"Well, think about it! You interact with their powers, they feed you despair, you feed them back! You use your power and that sends it right back, but worse?" You shrug. "I mean, magi powers are super variable and act in wildly different ways so it could do something completely different, but you wouldn't have that third eye if it was just self-destructive."
"But wouldn't Kyubey want a wish that's self-destructive? You said that its system was-"
"-hostile, yeah. But that's the rub. Kyubey wants magi to fall, but it doesn't actually affect the wish, nor does it affect what your powers are. It's like redirecting power that you already had. Souls betray entropy, blah blah, soul when reapplied can do wild shit."
Minako blinks. "So...wait, so that was actually true?"
"Yeah, Kyubey usually lies with omission and half-truths."
Minako turns away from you. The creature in the distance rumbles, feet quaking the ground as it lets out a shriek that ripples the clouds and sends snow hurling backwards. Little eddies of snow turn to ash, then snow, then ash, then back to snow before they hit the ground. The world hisses as the witch's feet pound the earth, as the Walpurgisnacht slowly lumbers across.
Minako claps their hands together. Two eyes are already open as they grimace...then the third eye shoots wide open.
Their arms splay out as the third eye glows and their mouth opens wide in...pain? Fear? You can't tell what. The snow around their feet explodes outwards as the labyrinth around you corrupts and twitches.
The witch immediately stumbles, one leg flickering before it vanishes. There's a spray of something that looks like blood from the witch, and the entire thing stumbles as it lets out an agonized scream.
You look upwards.
And sure enough, the leg was ported just overhead.
"HolyfuckingSHIT-!" You grab Minako and tackle them out of the way just before the leg hits the ground.
It's a horrible, thunderous sound. The leg crashes into the snow and ash with a boom, followed by the faint cracking of bone and tearing of tissue. The leg collapses into itself and the snow around it begins to hiss with steam.
The witch screeches again, missing an arm and a leg and pieces of its face as it stumbles around mindlessly, bits of it catching fire before hissing with steam. The wind flicks backwards and forwards, churning with ash and snow and wind and flame before the air splits. Ice cracks in half, and the ground slowly spreads into a gigantic ravine.
And takes you and Minako with it. You fall with Minako tight in your arms, clearly unconscious as the ground reveals a floor of ice and bone. You hit the ground first. The armor takes the brunt of the fall, but you can still feel the sting from the hit. You pull yourself to your feet, and you've never, ever let go of Minako throughout the entire thing.
You tap Minako. "Hey, hey Mina. Mina, wake up. Now is not the time for a fucking nap wake up."
You tap their head again. They're out cold.
"Fuck!"
You pull them over your shoulder. "Rosso-fuckin'-Fantasma."
Four hands immediately stretch out to keep Minako on your back. You stand up to your feet, your child still strapped to your back. You whip your hands out, and immediately, sixteen more spears stretch out from your sides. They rattle with every step you take, the chains inside shaking.
The hands that hold them are all of them armored, all of them ready, flexing with each step. They move in sync, each hand ready, each hand up, each hand steady.
You know the witch is going to descend into the ravine. You know how these things go. But now you have a handicap. "Fuck me. Fuck me fuck me fuck me."
As though to mock you, you see it. You see a hand flexing overhead. The fingers twitch, the palm rumbling and chitin rolling over the canyon as you see it. It drags across the ice ahead before the fingers dig in deep. The creature lowers itself, the weight of the thing yanking it down as steam billows from it, as the motion straight-up turns snow into ash, as the ravine's walls burst into flame in a second before turning to ice the next.
It's gigantic, with a colossal fur-wreathed red sun in place of a face. The body is a ribcage, the sternum snapped open and turned into a cage for an oversized heart. The legs look completely inhuman, shaped like those of a bear but wrapped in chitin and each sporting either a hand or a wretched stump. One close by seems to be spewing blood as the creature stumbles overhead, but upon closer inspection...it's centipedes.
This witch is spewing centipedes everywhere.
The sun itself has a hole in it, a cube-shaped hole that your child tore out of it in their experiment. The sun looks wildly unstable, twitching in humiliation and terror as the body collapses at the ice floor.
It's pretty clear by now that this witch is Skadi from the first quest, just with the component witches combined in a different way. Hell, its name is Njord, who was married to Skadi at one point in Norse mythology.
Bring in the dead magi who made up skadi, witch them out, port the seed over and insta nuke. Low effort, and low reward but at the same time if they can do that all day then there's no reason not to, given witch only needs to get lucky once.
Still, plausible deniability is all gone now that we've seen it port in.
It had been three-thousand, six-hundred and twenty-two days since she broke up with Homura. Madoka was working out that morning. Nothing too strenuous, definitely nothing on par with Sayaka or Kyouko or Akane or Tomo's insane workouts, but then again, she was only human.
Welp
That escalated and basically refused to stop since Madoka has been apparently counting the days since their breakup for ten fucking years with change
Mmm
Eh, doesn't matter what I think about it, it's certainly a valid interpretation of their relationship
Why the fuck that song is so mediocre it half-assed it's way through it's childhood all the way to the uneventful retirement doing nothing of note in the meantime whatsoever
Lol, now I don't want to bring Homu in because Sayaka is gonna tank her real hard, since Seykuu isn't in a good headspace atm
That moment when you don't trust your protag not to fuck things up so much they'd regret it later instead of, well, us
Yeah. I know witch fights are never safe, even with a weak witch, but I think a Walpurgisnacht is too much too soon for Minako right now. It does make for good story telling though.
I mean, if the second part was the result of Homu looping for a thousand times to make an ideal reunion with Doka I'm gonna scream from a high tower and report it for breaking my hopes and dreams?
That would require for Homu to learn how to loop past her first checkpoint tho
Something she showed being unable to experiment with during her full out breakdown, so I'm not sure what would incentivize her to turn the clock on the shield in the timeskip
I think you shouldn't be paranoid? I think it was just what it looks like. Homura's learned and grown, and so, for that matter, has Madoka. They're not back together, but they do have feelings for each other, and will be in each other's lives at least a little from here.
It was meant to be self-contained, I feel, rather than some vital plot point where it'll turn out in Chapter 4 that Lady Rin is actually Homura's evil child from the future who went into the past to destroy the world.
That's a thing you can do. Make stories to give narrative and thematic closure.
It was meant to be self-contained, I feel, rather than some vital plot point where it'll turn out in Chapter 4 that Lady Rin is actually Homura's evil child from the future who went into the past to destroy the world.
There's a sequel tho? Right here? Closing a story clearly doesn't necessarily exclude a possibility of future continuation. Sayakaquest is a self-contained arc, yet here we are.
There's a sequel tho? Right here? Closing a story clearly doesn't necessarily exclude a possibility of future continuation. Sayakaquest is a self-contained arc, yet here we are.
