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.
it's still on her hand; the way Homura fights is very much "End the fight as quickly as possible, with as few fatalities as possible". So that typically means timestop, steal gem, and then threaten until the threat leaves.
Nine times out of ten it is enough to stop any fight with a magi. And she hasn't had to kill people for a while.
That and with the way she holds her gun and her knife, it keeps it in view at all times. Homura knows how easy it is to steal a soul gem. And since the natural location for her own is right on her hand, she would rather keep it in sight.
And it just so happens that the Harries technique does exactly what she wants it to.
This theory proposes that the canon timeloop is, actually, the 420th timeloop.
I call this theory "420 Homura it". And yes, if Homura has to suffer 300+ more loops in order for this theory to be correct, then that's a sacrifice we'll all have to meme.
[X] What's Rin's endgame? What is she trying to do, and what will she accomplish, if we don't stop her?
[X] What can she tell us about the incoming war? Information about our enemies and their abilities, at least the important ones; likely times the Glow will attack, and their likely targets.
[X] What about her, Oriko's, future? We want to help her as much as anybody else, is there anything we need to know?
[X] What's Rin's endgame? What is she trying to do, and what will she accomplish, if we don't stop her?
[X] What can she tell us about the incoming war? Information about our enemies and their abilities, at least the important ones; likely times the Glow will attack, and their likely targets.
[X] What about her, Oriko's, future? We want to help her as much as anybody else, is there anything we need to know?
[X] What's Rin's endgame? What is she trying to do, and what will she accomplish, if we don't stop her?
[X] What can she tell us about the incoming war? Information about our enemies and their abilities, at least the important ones; likely times the Glow will attack, and their likely targets.
[X] What about her, Oriko's, future? We want to help her as much as anybody else, is there anything we need to know?
[X] What's Rin's endgame? What is she trying to do, and what will she accomplish, if we don't stop her?
[X] What can she tell us about the incoming war? Information about our enemies and their abilities, at least the important ones; likely times the Glow will attack, and their likely targets.
[X] What about her, Oriko's, future? We want to help her as much as anybody else, is there anything we need to know?
[X] What's Rin's endgame? What is she trying to do, and what will she accomplish, if we don't stop her?
[X] What can she tell us about the incoming war? Information about our enemies and their abilities, at least the important ones; likely times the Glow will attack, and their likely targets.
[X] What about her, Oriko's, future? We want to help her as much as anybody else, is there anything we need to know?
"Right..." You breathe in through your nose. "I guess that means I have to ask questions. First off, what is Rin's endgame? What's she trying to do, and what will she accomplish if we don't stop her?"
Oriko fidgets, fingers flexing around her champagne glass. She glances up to you, then at the glass. She sips at it a few times. "She...is attempting to ascend."
You blink. "Beg your pardon?"
"Rin views herself as above magi, as the true successor to the Incubators. She believes she can control the power of both witches and magi without losing her humanity. She is under the impression that her soul is the true self, that the soul is the only part of a person that matters."
"Except that ain't true." Kyouko leans in. "As much as the soul is a powerhouse, it's just one aspect of the human condition, especially for magi. We've seen what happens when a body is destroyed; the soul can't continue. It's one part of the self, like the brain and the body."
"That matters little to the Lady." Oriko presses a hand into her temple. "She wants to fuse with the largest, most powerful witch she can find. Her soul gem directly interacts with grief seeds. You've seen it, right?"
"A white dot, yeah." You nod. "I've seen it before."
"It is a two-part soul gem: one gem, one grief seed. The grief seed is slotted in, and it enhances the scope of her control. Without it, while she would still be powerful, she would lose control when a magi left a one-hundred meter radius. But with it..."
"She can control an entire city of magi."
Oriko nods. "She was always dangerous, but that grief seed turns her from a concern to a danger."
"And she plans to slot in the Walpurgisnacht seed instead," Kyouko mutters.
"With a seed of that strength and power, she would not only have wider control, but the effects would be..." She trails off. Her eyes squint shut, her head tilting to the side as she bites her lip. She looks up to the ceiling, and you come in to press your hand into her shoulder.
"Hey. Hey, whoa. No need to force yourself."
"I apo...I apologize." She fidgets again. "I'm...I thought I could handle it."
You shake your head. "Do you think we should keep-"
"Yes."
You take a deep breath. "Alright. Then...what about the war? We should at least be able to learn about the major players, people to look out for and major threats."
"I mean, I ran into Saskia, we have Iruka, and there's this 'Yuri' character..." Kyouko counts them on her fingers.
"Saskia is flesh manipulation, which means that she can and will target civilians and use them. She's dangerous and I would recommend you kill-"
"No," Kyouko interrupts. "She's a fucking kid."
"She is a danger to everyone," Oriko shoots right back. "Emiko is...was Rin's enforcer."
You wince.
"Iruka was a teacher and witch expert. She was there to understand and fuse witches."
"Wait, so..." You turn to the hallway, and behind the door you see the shadow shift. "So Iruka was the witch fuser."
"I would still recommend you keep watch on her." Oriko shakes her head. "The Rider, as she prefers to be called, is Rin's transport through Kasamino. She is her personal bodyguard, and her powers are centered around the chariot."
"What's the catch with the chariot?"
"She can make it move at mach 5, and it will immediately reform. It's her transportation, her weapon, and her tool."
"So she functionally has a reusable railgun," Kyouko mutters. "Cool."
"There is also the portalsmith. She's among the youngest of the Circle, responsible for porting witches into Mitakihara."
"Shadowbitch?"
"Misaki. Assassin."
"Anyone else?" You cross your arms.
"I was one of them. Kirika was an afterthought, but I was considered a deep cut. The Glow had me for a year." Oriko pauses. "And there are two more; I don't know that much about them, but I believe that at least one of them was once a member of the Tokyo Seven. If you've heard of them."
Kyouko leans in. "Any clue what they'll prioritize?"
"The Walpurgisnacht seed is the top priority; the ultimate goal is claiming that. Beyond that, probably Mina. Rin knows that their power is a problem. There's also Sayaka; according to Rin's understanding, she takes a major leadership role. The other adult magi are all a potential problem, but Sayaka represents a lynchpin."
You grimace. You turn to Kyouko, then turn right back. "Well, I mean, she had half of it right."
"We co-run this fucking town," Kyouko says. "And I hold councils. This isn't some fucking dictatorship or whatever."
"I don't think Rin can comprehend a cohesive leadership that isn't a cult of personality," you mutter. "But what about an approach?"
"Well, they're assuming that the family is going to hole itself in town. You lock yourselves down and try to secure the seed, which will be heavily guarded."
"We outnumber them, yeah?" You shrug.
"You did before. But Rin is not above summoning a surplus of magi. She could have Yuri bring in a vanguard of disposable magi."
Kyouko murmurs. "So we'd need to probably take care of Yuri. Either when the battle starts or just beforehand. Probably steal and deprogram."
"There's no guarantee of that," you say right back. "We don't know how deep her loyalty runs."
"Well...yeah. This is all going to be stuff that'll have to be brought up at our meeting tomorrow."
You both look to Oriko, who shrugs. "Well, don't underestimate Rin. While everything is focused around her, she is still going to ask for advice from the Circle. She knows them, she trusts them, and they have enough autonomy to disagree. So she actually does have a council of sorts."
"Right." You lean backwards. "And when do you think they're gonna hit?"
"As soon as possible. Probably..." She checks the clock. It reads 23:43. "A little over thirty hours from now."
"Crack of dawn," you mutter. "They need just as much time to prepare as we do."
"They can't just launch in, and while Rin will send disposable drones consistently, hard strikes with the Inner Circle are always planned. If anything, the strike with Emiko was a test to see how quickly Mitakihara could respond."
You must have been trembling, because you can feel Kyouko squeeze your hand.
"Do you think Rin will replace her?"
"There's not enough time and too much risk for just one day. Probably not." Oriko glances at you. "It's why Rin is going to retaliate. Because your killing Emiko probably accelerated her plans."
"And now, you." You lace your hands together. "What about you?"
"What about me?" She straightens up in her chair.
"What about your future?"
She pauses. She swallows hard, then rubs the back of her neck. She stares at you. "I don't really care what happens to me."
"But we do," you say. "And don't say it's predetermined."
Oriko frowns. "But...there are very few outcomes that work for any of us."
"Yeah." Kyouko smiles. "So?"
"We rebuilt this city on impossible odds." You smile. "We can do it again." You glance to the side. "But first thing's first: I'm going to have to see if we can't evacuate this city."
[=]
[X] Yeah.
Your name is Minako Miki-Sakura. And you smirk as you tell Mami and Takane exactly what you think of this plan.
"I'm fucking built on bad ideas."
You take a look around. "And we're about distant enough from anything too bad, I think." You raise the grief seed to your gem. "Ready?"
Takane nods. Mami shakes her head, but she still raises her gun.
You close your eyes. Your gem is a little bit blackened by the combat just earlier. You think of your mom coated in blood. You think of the look of horror in her eyes, the thousand-yard stare. You think about how you wanted this. You wanted to understand your parents.
And now you do. Oh, you so fucking understand.
You press the grief seed into your gem.
Your mama saw someone witch before. She described in the week following Mami's recovery how when someone's soul gem cracks, the being that they were before ceases to be. The soul gem is shaped like an egg, perfect for hatching into a new being. The egg is lined with cracks. The cage around it melts into slag. The grief consumes the color of the gem before quickly overtaking its container.
What follows is an explosion of light and sound. A familiar dread washes over you as the flooded train car you're on is rocked. The air turns green with smog and smoke, before the draft turns into lace. The train cars next to you are unrooted, forced upwards as the water ripples and turns solid. The grief seed in your hands rockets upwards, twirling wildly as the grief materializes.
A child's cry can be heard, turned into two, then three, then ten as the witch hatches, born again as two legs crash into the newly-reformed floor. Legs flex and grow from the earth, all made of plastic and lace, glimmering porcelain and shimmering metal.
The uprooted train cars transform, wheels turning into buttresses, windows wrapping around columns and metal into wood and ceramic.
The witch stumbles in front of you, well over fifty feet tall as she floats above the ground. The lacy dress drags across the floor,as a string ties the myriad dolls that make its body together.
It floats over you, the eyes glowing with a sun-like glow from inside the doll.
You spread your feet, your girlfriend steels her ground, and Mami raises her gun.
[] Use your power on it. [DIFFICULTY 3: You already have! You know this witch's traumas, and frankly, they're real bad.]
[] Weaken the witch. [DIFFICULTY 3: You know how to fight this thing, but the rebirth has given it some new tricks.]
[] Joint strike with Mami and Takane. [DIFFICULTY 3: This will weaken the witch significantly and allow you a potential opening, but there's still no guarantee here.]
Seeing as every option is equally difficult, I'm going with the agressive option.
[X] Joint strike with Mami and Takane. [DIFFICULTY 3: This will weaken the witch significantly and allow you a potential opening, but there's still no guarantee here.]
[Q] Actually maybe you're not made of bad ideas after all.
This witch is both creepier and more dangerous than I was expecting.
[X] Joint strike with Mami and Takane. [DIFFICULTY 3: This will weaken the witch significantly and allow you a potential opening, but there's still no guarantee here.]
"The Rider, as she prefers to be called, is Rin's transport through Kasamino. She is her personal bodyguard, and her powers are centered around the chariot."
"She can make it move at mach 5, and it will immediately reform. It's her transportation, her weapon, and her tool."
[X] Joint strike with Mami and Takane. [DIFFICULTY 3: This will weaken the witch significantly and allow you a potential opening, but there's still no guarantee here.]
Also: Have we asked about Rin's capabilities in combat herself, or would Oriko not know that?
[X] Joint strike with Mami and Takane. [DIFFICULTY 3: This will weaken the witch significantly and allow you a potential opening, but there's still no guarantee here.]
Well, by the numbers, all the options are equally bad. Meaning we can't choose wrong!
[Q] Shake off the feeling Oriko set you up.
-[Q] Well, she did, but you assumed she did so in a good way, but now everything's looking awful, so-
--[Q] Damn it, you didn't shake off the feeling.
---[Q] Take a malus for the next roll.
[X] Joint strike with Mami and Takane. [DIFFICULTY 3: This will weaken the witch significantly and allow you a potential opening, but there's still no guarantee here.]
I suspect there's a fundamental disconnect with how you're defining bad decisions and how I'm interpreting the term. It's not a bad idea if it works, it was a good idea you didn't fully understand.
Per my understanding, there's actually a valid strategy here. If you look at how pros and AIs play Go, for instance, you will see that as long as they're ahead, they'll invest heavily in making the game simpler and easier to understand. But once they're behind, they'll make the game more complicated and confusing. This is because, if you know you'll probably win, you benefit from certainty; but if all your certain answers only have despair to offer you, you go hunting in areas of uncertainty. Because your best guess is that you'll lose, but in paths with high variance, you can still be wrong.
Per my understanding, there's actually a valid strategy here. If you look at how pros and AIs play Go, for instance, you will see that as long as they're ahead, they'll invest heavily in making the game simpler and easier to understand. But once they're behind, they'll make the game more complicated and confusing. This is because, if you know you'll probably win, you benefit from certainty; but if all your certain answers only have despair to offer you, you go hunting in areas of uncertainty. Because your best guess is that you'll lose, but in paths with high variance, you can still be wrong.
[X] Joint strike with Mami and Takane. [DIFFICULTY 3: This will weaken the witch significantly and allow you a potential opening, but there's still no guarantee here.]
"Split! We gotta weaken it first before we try...something." You circle the witch. "I think that's the key to avoiding overload."
"Overload?" Takane asks.
"Yeah. Empathic overload." The witch crackles with the sound of porcelain grinding against porcelain as lace flutters in front of you and the myriad eyes of the dolls above bathe you in a subtle red glow. You twirl your bat overhead.
"It's three on one," you whisper to yourself. "How fuckin' bad can it get. Three on one-"
The witch rears back. The plastic legs surrounding you bend and kick, a full arm erupting out of its head. The fingers twitch and shudder before the hand they're attached to slams into the ground at high speed. The earth rocks, ground shaking and rippling like a soft mattress. You barely manage to dodge between the fingers as they tap onto the ground like they're playing piano.
You dash out between the fingers just as it clenches into a fist, as the plastic joints squeak and grind against ceramic before the witch retreats its hand back into its body. It hovers over the ground, the ceramic chattering and sliding and grinding as finally a piece of its back explodes in a shower of yellow smoke and shards.
A second explosion rocks it soon after, this time colored green. The witch shrieks as a doll's head hits the ground before more explosions rock its back. Behind it, you see both Mami and Takane firing from afar, quickly reloading guns and cannons in an attempt to burst it down.
But unfortunately for all three of you, it's already prepared. Six arms erupt from its back and scramble onto the ground from the holes ripped into its body, pulling it onto its back as the witch's heads crack and pull themselves open.
The eyes all stare in different directions. One pair stares at you, another at Takane...and three pairs at Mami.
Mami barely dodges out of the way as the witch's entire body crashes into her Tiro Finale cannon, devouring the weapon whole as it scrambles across the ground. Its arms slide everywhere, crashing into buildings and sliding against fabric and ripping holes in the ground. There's a spray of stuffing with every frantic slide of its fingers as it chomps and bites on its way towards Mami.
So far, it's not that dissimilar to how the first fight went. It's a little more aggressive, a little rougher this time, but...
Then you scan it. You close your eyes.
And you are promptly overwhelmed. The force knocks you backwards as your brain is filled to bursting with screams and noise. Your eyes narrow as you try to find some place to moor yourself. As the sound becomes unfathomable. You shake your head.
"Not weak enough!" You pull your bat behind your head as the witch begins to flicker and glitch. "We gotta put some more dents in it before I can get through to it!"
Another gunshot from a new cannon by Mami, and this one rips an arm off of the body. It spirals through the air in a shower of shards and pieces as the joints separate and the arm collapses.
Except it doesn't finish falling to the ground. The palm stretches outwards, the shattered part of the arm falling away. The joint locks into place before slamming right back into the witch's back. The entire body tumbles to the side, the witch shuddering and shaking and screaming as it rolls towards Takane.
She punches the torso with a shotgun gauntlet before firing six rounds into its torso. Shrapnel rips into the body, tearing out the back and shredding linen as the witch twists itself again. The spinning arms form a hideously oversized tiller as the witch rips the ground and threatens to flatten Takane. She only barely dodges the spin as Mami keeps on firing.
That is, until a leg from underground kicks the entire cannon upwards. A full new porcelain leg materializes, stretching to the height of a radio tower before slamming its foot downwards. Mami dashes backwards, the cannon knocked clean out of her hands before she twirls around. Her ribbon wraps around her arm, six strings turn into six barrels and, a single band twists into a rotary cylinder.
A barrage of fire shreds the base of the new foot as another leg emerges from the ground behind her.
"She's bringing in familiars!"
As Mami is dealing with a swarm of hideously huge legs, a series of spider-like hands crawls out of the ground, each the size of a bus. Takane fires wildly around her, dashing to the side, upwards, backwards, back back back back as the both of them are utterly distracted.
Which leaves you with the witch. A large, angry witch who stares at you with a million glass eyes. The witch rears its head back, spittle of red string spraying from its myriad mouths as it charges towards you. You barely dodge out of the way, your bat clanging against its skin as the two of you circle each other. You twirl the bat in your hand.
"Okay. Okay...okay." You breathe out. "I'm not here to kill you. I'm here to understand."
The witch hisses in response. A tongue of red-hot glass rolls out of its mouth as string dangles across the ground and the entire body bends and breaks. The hands keep it crawling, its eyes locked on you as the sound of gunfire and explosions echo around the both of you.
And then you dash. The witch comes in with a wild swing, but you manage to dodge by the skin of your teeth and keep a solid grip on your bat. It skids across magical metal before you take your momentum, spin, and shatter another arm. The witch howls before coming in with another swing of its hand. This time you treat it like a baseball swing; the hand shatters on impact.
The witch rears back. Its faces all stare you down as your weapon hovers just above the ground and the air grows thick with anticipation. From here you can tell you've already done a number on it; bits of fabric dangle like torn flesh, myriad broken limbs flexing and sliding across felt ground. The tongue in its mouth threatens to dribble onto the ground and its eyes are beginning to grow dull.
[] Beat it down further. [DIFFICULTY 1: It's hurting real bad, but beating the witch too much might make empathy difficult.]
[] Understand. [DIFFICULTY 2: This is still not easy.]
