QM's Note: As always, the views of characters in stories may not line up with those of the author.
Bonus: Spring Raiment
Winner: Hallowed Haven
You've heard that Magical Girls get cheaper or different abilities based on what they wished for. Healing is the easiest example to point to: all MGs can heal, but those who wished to heal themselves or another will find it cheaper than nearly any other MG. Those who wished for strength might have cheaper personal enhancements. Girls wishing to escape may gain the ability to teleport. Nearly all magic will become more powerful and inexpensive as a Magical Girl grows more skilled regardless of what their wish was. Overall, every Magical Girl is a unique combatant and underestimating any of them could get you killed.
As long as they live, no Magical Girl can ever fuel their magic with anything other than Grief, and by extension, Grief Seeds. Some have tried to pull or purge Grief from their Soul Gems, but Kyubey has set up a truly monstrous little loop: as pain produces Grief, painful countermeasures to Grief will never work out in the long run. Short-term gains may be had, but long-term fatigue will cancel them over time.
The fact that you'll
gain extra energy from the safety zones you'll be offering and selling to others... yes, that's definitely not something you'll be advertising to the world.
(Advanced Ability Known: Hallowed Haven [Rank 3])
Similarly, you're not going to tell them about how your main source of protection would grow weaker away from major sources of Green or stronger within them. You'd prefer not to let anyone snipe the support,
thanks.
(Ability Known: Spring Raiment [Rank 5])
But now that you're unpacked and have the entire afternoon ahead of you, you've found that you don't actually know what to do. You placed Hallowed Haven on the apartment when you first got here, but you've slept and finished unpacking since then, so all the items on your checklist are already taken care of. Your pets have beds, food, water, and appropriate dropoff boxes set up, your fridge came pre-stocked with several ingredients, you don't feel that any furniture is needed beyond what you already have, and your monthly "window-shopping allowance" of 100$ won't last you long in a place where pizza slices are 3$ apiece. You could bring your living pets — three dogs, three cats, three songbirds, and two hawks — out on a walk, but normal people apparently need to keep ground animals on leashes and don't walk their birds at all. You still find that a little puzzling; how are animals supposed to get proper exercise, sunlight, and fresh air if they don't roam around outside now and then?
Seeing a few
human children on weird harness-leash fusions was even more jarring. You can see how it might be necessary to keep toddlers from running out into traffic during the slightest moment of distraction, but you're more used to the safe(ish) open spaces you grew up in. Children of your family learn not to poke thorns once they get pricked, which berries not to eat after they grow sick from them, which branches are unsteady once they break one and need their arms or necks
Regenerated. The city doesn't seem to have a middle ground between teaching them through painful mistakes and keeping them from
fatal mistakes. If a child falls off a bridge or steps into traffic, they'll be lucky to survive at all. For all that cities are supposedly glorified as concrete jungles, you don't think adults here would last one
week in a real
jungle. Some of the fatter ones you've seen, wasteful piles of lard riding atop motorized chairs, wouldn't even last that long in a
forest.
The mahogany grandfather clock at one corner of your room
dongs twice, startling you out of your disgusted thoughts. You've always had a tendency to drift away from conversations after a silence has dragged on long enough, usually because you're pursuing one thought until you grow bored of it. Your family has long since gotten used to the habit and some of them are
even worse, but now that you're going to be spending so much time around other people...
I guess that's a habit I'll actually have to break, huh?
One of the windows of your room looks out into a dumpster-lined alley, which is one of the reasons you'd picked it in the first place. If you climb out that way, with or without your pets following you, nobody passing by would have any reason to believe you hadn't come from the
other end of the L-shaped alley. It's a minor misdirection, but one you'll want to keep no matter what you do.
The question is
what you should do. With the impending publicity of magic on a ticking timer, you doubt Kyubey is going to bother memory-modding people who see it. That opens up a number of avenues which were previously closed to Magical Girls and colored mages alike, including healing. If a better way of making money exists than to cure chronic diseases, you can't think of it.
Contacting the New York Police Department and offering to help them officially deal with Witches might get you plenty of positive attention, but it'd also be a bit of a pointless gesture. Aside from using Hallowed Haven on their stations or jails or whatever, there isn't a whole lot you can do to help them against Magical Girls. Bringing them in against Witches would be suicide until you're much better at granting temporary Blessings. Similarly, contacting the New York Measures or another major newspaper and telling them of magic could give you a rather extreme, but quite easy, publicity boost.
You could track down a Witch or three, kill them, and wait for the inevitable confrontation with a local Magical Girl. Unless you do something blatantly magical, like using Nurture to make one of the trees of Central Park grow far above its neighbors, you can't think of any other way to get them to contact you.
Or you could just explore, get to know Central Park and the area surrounding it. Until you do, you're going to need to rely heavily on the Maps app of your new smartphone just to avoid getting lost. Well, maybe after you've explored, too. Local colors might be different, but the shapes are all the same...
Use preference voting for appearance and X for the action vote. The PC is 18.
[] Eyebrows
[] Backrest
[] Sakura
[] Earring
[] Sunset
[] Galaxy
[] Sky
[] Barrier
[] Head over to a local hospital and find out what you'd need to do to register as a healer. You expect (and look forward to) the media circus that will ensue when they realize you aren't joking and are perfectly willing to cut yourself to demonstrate.
[] Head over to the NYPD HQ (Or whatever they call it) and and offer to help them with magical law enforcement.
-[] Switch to Spring Raiment once you're there. The obvious display of magic should get their attention.
-[] Be upfront about your capabilities: You're an inexperienced support, so for now, the best you can do is ward their stations and jails against violence one by one.
-[] Bring your pets.
[] Head over to the New York Measure offices, ask for a private interview on a sensitive topic related to Mitakihara, and use Summer Raiment to "transform" once you're in private. Then, explain much of what you know about Witches and Magical Girls, including the grim parts and the effects of Grief on emotions.
-[] Include the lichbomb, the knowledge that Soul Gems are literal.
-[] Include the witchbomb, the revelation that MGs are born from Witches. These would kill a lot of girls in a short period of time. One of the other colored clans might have a plan for safely disseminating that information, but you don't.
[] Go hunting for Witches with your pets.
-[] Stay at around street level instead of using Blessing to help you jump from building to building.
[] Explore the surrounding area.
-[] Bring your pets along.
-[] Go dressed as a magical girl. (Spring Raiment)
[] Write-in
Appearance voting is open immediately. Action voting is locked for 3 hours.
The two are tracked separately; you don't need to repost your preference vote after posting a new X vote, nor do you need to repost your X vote after putting up a new preference vote.
