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.
[X] One of you can take care of it; you don't need all three magical girls. (DIFFICULTY 1) Your wife is Sayaka Miki, but thankfully you've convinced her of dumber things before.
[x] One of you can take care of it; you don't need all three magical girls. (DIFFICULTY 1) Your wife is Sayaka Miki, but thankfully you've convinced her of dumber things before.
Have one or the other go, but have whoever doesn't go on standby just in case.
[x] One of you can take care of it; you don't need all three magical girls. (DIFFICULTY 1)Your wife is Sayaka Miki, but thankfully you've convinced her of dumber things before.
If it's an ambush, better to have our backup outside the barrier. The Witch hasn't spawned yet, after all, so that's where any enemies will be waiting.
At the same time, Sayaka solo'd a triple-Walmart (Skadi-tier) Witch in the opening post, and it's a fair assumption that all Adultguce are at a similar level. This won't be an easy fight, but it should certainly be a winnable one.
At the same time, Sayaka solo'd a triple-Walmart (Skadi-tier) Witch in the opening post, and it's a fair assumption that all Adultguce are at a similar level. This won't be an easy fight, but it should certainly be a winnable one.
True. It's also early in the quest. So it should be an entertaining fight, but unless we get rolls as bad as we did early on fighting Walpy we should be fine.
[x] One of you can take care of it; you don't need all three magical girls. (DIFFICULTY 1)Your wife is Sayaka Miki, but thankfully you've convinced her of dumber things before.
"I'm going with Takane," you say.
"Hey, no. I'm not letting you go in alone."
"Think about it, Sayaka. If this is a plant, then that means there's probably an ambush." You look around. "Akane's on the other side of town, Sukuyo has a deadline, Tomo has her own side of town to take care of, and the other magi are busy with their own territories. And we both know that you're better against an assault than I am."
She tenses up under your grip. You give her a reassuring kiss on the cheek. "Look at this way: we clear this up, you repel any stupid fucker who tries crossing that bridge, and then we go on the date. Maybe have that boat sex."
She tenses up again before relaxing under your grip. "I...okay. Right. Alright. Sure." She looks back up at you. "But that's a no on the boat sex."
"Oh, come on, it'd be hot!"
She just rolls her eyes and falls off the edge of the water tower. You, meanwhile, take a few steps back, stretch your legs, then take a soaring leap off the tower. You fly over several blocks in a single bound, momentum carrying you onto the boardwalk. Wood bends under your weight and force, but you bend your legs just enough to prevent the reinforced surface from just breaking entirely.
Civilians all around you stare in shock as you stand up to your full height, a number of them holding ice cream cones and American-style funnel cake. One poor child almost drops her ice cream cone, but you manage to catch it before it falls onto the ground.
"Nothin' to see here, folks!" You point to everyone. "Love you Mitakihara! Good fuckin' night!" You hit the railing and, without skipping a beat, you roll over the edge. Your feet hit a beach that's laden with trash and plastic wrappers; not large enough to actually have a fun surf on, but there's enough for the boardwalk to sit comfortably on a solid foundation.
And right there, in the center of a flickering circle, hanging with its bottom "root" about three inches into a wooden pillar, is the grief seed. Takane's sitting right next to it, hunched over with her gauntlets unloaded and her hand on her chin. She grimaces. "It's been here for a while. Probably just sat here for a couple of days." She runs her hand across the edge of the circle. "It was slammed into this support pillar."
"Couple of days here. Incubators should have picked it up. Grief seeds aren't supposed to be undetected." You take a look at it. Sure enough, there are three cores to this grief seed; one misshapen, the other two standing right alongside it. It seems that one of the witches was forcibly absorbed by the other two.
The grief seed gleams. "Do you think this is going to be a hazard to the boardwalk?"
You nod. "Yeah, probably. There should be a..." You poke your head out from under the boardwalk. "...should be a fucking boat or-"
"There!" Takane points to a paddleboat just drifting alone. The people riding it have abandoned it wholesale to swim in the bay, and are in the process of being picked up by a deeply-annoyed lifeguard.
"Perfect." You grab the grief seed. You're careful to sloooowly pull it out of the boardwalk, and the thing flickers and blinks in your hand, as though the Walpurgis itself is annoyed at you.
"Yeah, yeah." You whip your spear across the water, right into the head of the dopey-looking dragon paddleboat. You motion for Takane to jump on your back.
She shakes her head and pulls out a pair of orange cartridges.
"Suit yourself." You pull, and the momentum carries you across the water. Your boots skate along the top, and midway through pulling yourself across, you transform. Your armor shimmers into existence in a spray of seawater and a burst of flame before you slam-dunk the grief seed into the boat.
This destroys the paddle crank; this boat will never ever paddle again.
It can still float, though. You slide through the water at high speed, the momentum from your landing splitting the water and causing the boat to skip across as you keep yourself balanced against its neck. Meanwhile, behind you, you hear Takane arrive with two thunderous gunshots; one keeps her just above the waves, the second sends her higher, at just the right angle to collide with the boat.
And just before she lands, the grief seed quivers, shakes...and cracks.
The labyrinth explodes in the middle of the water, and bright blue skies give way to a dark red Hellscape. The Mitakihara bridge vanishes from view, the cityscape behind it turning flat and distorted. The paddleboat slides across a new brick ground before a tower bursts from the earth stretching high into the sky before spiraling into the darkness over your head.
The tower itself is lined with holes, each stretching a seemingly infinite amount into the wall; way, way too deep for how shallow this tower seems to be.
From each hole comes a familiar, a flickering white ghost of a person. The ghost stands in front of you, staring gormlessly into space as hundreds and hundreds and thousands of these things just emerge from the holes in the wall. They stare into space, some of them at you, some of them towards the bridge, some of them into nowhere as they quiver and shake in the light breeze.
You walk up to one of the "people," close enough to their face to feel their breath...well, you would, if they had any. They don't seem to notice you even as you get close enough to touch them. Behind you, you hear Takane land in the labyrinth with a thud. She hits with enough force to shatter the brick under your feet as little sketchlines scatter into the air and dissolve into brick.
"This is a bizarre one," you mutter. "The familiars aren't attacking."
"They're, wait, they're what now?" Takane steps towards you.
"Witches aren't mindless or dumb. They're just weird. They have their own quirks n' shit. These familiars aren't just gunning for us." You keep an eye on the one closest to you. This one can't say the same, given that it's lacking eyes.
"Do you...do you think it's waiting for something? Like a signal?"
"Or the answer's in the hole behind it." You mutter.
[] Enter the hole.
[] Wait for whatever the familiars are waiting for.
[] Scale the tower.
Adhoc vote count started by TheOneMoiderah on Jun 4, 2019 at 9:14 AM, finished with 30 posts and 16 votes.
This is hint #2 that something is up with the Incubators. Given the earlier clues with a reanimated Oriko and the potential of a Law Of Cycles-like entity, we have to consider that the Incubators are slowly being wiped out.
Although that Coobs hasn't sounded the alarm makes things a bit murky. It could be a simple as Mikitahara and the other town being abandoned, either to fall back into the norm or to isolate the 'aberration' rest of the world. Although that kind of quarantine could very well be because of the Lovecraftian invasion.
[X] Wait for whatever the familiars are waiting for.
Not to put the ball in the witch's court, but it's a poorly bonded Walpurgis, that means that it's constituent witches will probably have their own domains in the labrynth. We don't know the nature of any of the witches, nor to whom those familiars belong to. I don't want to speculate too much, but I think it pays to be patient with these.
Who knows, we might get lucky and have another suicidal witch that we don't even have to fight. Attracting aggro might make our lives harder.
Edit: That, or one of the witches wants to separate. Maybe even all of them want to split.
Familiars usually die when the labyrinth collapses.
Usually.
When they escape a labyrinth while the witch is alive, that's a problem. It's also why there are still witches when the overall magical girl witch-out rate is so low in Mitakihara.
Sometimes, they just escape, and they last long enough to build up a labyrinth and grow into full-sized witches.
The chance of them escaping is still really, really low, but there are very few ways to completely and utterly wipe them all out, and Kyouko's kit really doesn't help her do that.
Only the ones that escape the labyrinth. So long as the witch is dead (ding dong) and the labyrinth closes with them inside, we don't have to worry about them.
Otherwise we would had to fight a small army of familiars after the Skadi fight, or that AO3 Spider.
