If it's female, give her glasses for a meganneko mega neko. A joke no one will probably get because we're in NYC.
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And now that I consider it further, I would place decent odds that, if we offer to make Havens for anyone who pays enough, someone we do that for is going to have Mob ties. They have the cash to pay for it, and more need than most to be concerned about violence happening around them. Aside from the obvious "Mafioso pays us to make his house safe" route, Havens would be useful for safehouses, businesses, or warehouses that might get raided by the cops.Violent gangs with magic, with that last bit being key. They deal with the regular kind of gang running protection rackets all the time. It's New York City. Cosa Nostra, aka the Mafia, is alive and well in NYC to this day.
Actually...I wouldn't be shocked if there's at least one MG faction with Mob connections.
Wouldn't be so sure about that. Central Park is a pretty common place for the homeless to camp out, from what I know. Having homeless shelters nearby would potentially cut down on the number of homeless people sleeping there.If we need a location that would benefit from a non-violence aura and would have a large number of people in at all time, how about youth hostels or homeless shelters? This is New York after all, the city must be boiling over with places like that, albeit not many close to central park.
Depends on what kind of return you're looking for. For the purposes of good publicity and establishing our credentials, turning a public building into a Haven would work nicely as advertising, allowing prospective customers to test it out for themselves. It also potentially gives us a bit of protection, since it makes it more likely that the local government will be keeping an eye on our safety, as they may want to hire us to turn other locations into Havens. Even if the mana return is minimal, those benefits might be considered worthwhile.Warding a hospital would still be a low return investment, and would take a long time. And, depending on how HH would improve, it may be less profitable to ward a hospital now.
@Alivaril, do we know how outdated versions of HH would interact with newer ones, or is HH's output improves because our ability to tap it improves?
Which reminds me, if money is a concern, how the hell is MC-chan living near Central Park? I could build a house with the money she'd be spending on rent.
@Alivaril, do we know how outdated versions of HH would interact with newer ones, or is HH's output improves because our ability to tap it improves?
Yeah...I've been wondering about that. Our never turning in filled Grief Seeds is going to be something Kyubey will notice, sooner or later. I suppose having MG allies might mask that, but they'll probably figure it out, too. They're helping us hunt, and are going to be around us a lot. Even if we're managing the "finances", they can still do math. Especially while the group is small.Unrelated, I'm having some doubts about our ability to pretend to be a magical girl. The simple fact is that we don't produce Grief. Kyubey won't be fooled for a second; he can track every Grief Seed that gets near us and he's no slouch at accounting. He might not tell the real magical girls, not until we start causing major problems or he decides he wants to see what we can do, but I don't know if he'll leave us alone for all they long. Even without his interference it probably won't take long for someone in one of the meguca gangs to do the math on their own territory's income, how much hunting we're doing, and the number of seeds we're giving them as protection money.
I wonder how much dollar-y money it'd take to pay off one of the meguca protection rackets. More importantly, I wonder how that compares to the amount of money we could obtain by casting regeneration for rich people. It'd be pretty nice if we could sidestep the whole hunting-to-maintain-cover thing.
What stability do you think we have right now? We don't even know yet that we'll be able to convince the meguca gangs to settle for protection money instead of conscription at swordpoint. Even then, not all stability is good stability; a stable bad situation is just a bad situation that you're going to have extra trouble breaking out of. A war that is on the verge of being won or lost is unstable; at any moment it could tip over into having been actually won or lost, and that's a heck of a lot better for the potential victor than stable trench warfare would be. The question, then, is whether the directions we can go with our instability are better or worse than the current situation. I believe that we stand to gain a significant amount from going public right now. As long as we don't botch it be being a creepy weirdo with healing powers rather than a healer with some other cool tricks, at least.It is my general opinion that radically changing the local understanding of physics, upending the lives of a bunch of people used to operating outside the law, and generally kicking off a revolution, is the oposite of stability. Do you want the first thing anyone thinks when they hear of you to be "The girl who went public"? Because it will be, forever.
Has it occurred to you that these are teenagers? Not known for making rational decisions? While if they actually thought about it they probably wouldn't be, but I doubt they'd think about it in those terms immediately. The more immediate reaction would be outrage that the snotnosed new girl is involving outsiders in Magical Girl business. Even if they don't get immediately violent over it (and to be fair, I don't think it too likely they will) it will still foster resentment and make it harder to negotiate with them.Their relevance is that the local magical girls probably aren't ready or willing to formally declare war on the City of New York.
You contradict yourself.Has it occurred to you that these are teenagers? Not known for making rational decisions? While if they actually thought about it they probably wouldn't be, but I doubt they'd think about it in those terms immediately. The more immediate reaction would be outrage that the snotnosed new girl is involving outsiders in Magical Girl business. Even if they don't get immediately violent over it (and to be fair, I don't think it too likely they will) it will still foster resentment and make it harder to negotiate with them.
Basically I'm expecting them to react about as well to the police getting involved in their business as RL gangsters, with the added wild card of being a bunch of emotionally unstable teenagers.
So you think that these unstable, violent, ultra-confident gangsters will do... what, exactly, in response to this? Leave us alone because we're such good people? Give any shits at all about how much money we have? No. They'll do exactly what they would normally, which is demand exactly as many grief seeds from us as we can provide without dying. If we have enough spare grief seeds to go around warding hospitals then they can clearly tax us more![X] 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.
-[X] Also offer to ward the hospitals against violence because that is generally a good thing to do, but also as discreet advertisement for Magical Girl home safety.
Agree.Not a fan of this subvote; the PC can only ward the volume of a two-bedroom apartment per day, and doing so uses all her mana. Fully warding even a single hospital would take weeks, and require just as long afterwards to give a full payback on investment. We should be saving our mana for better pursuits, like hunting witches, keeping a bare minimum in reserve for personal protection, and casting HH on the homes of MGs we meet.
To be fair, V, we would still probably be seen a "snitch" or some equivalent, which may have been what @Odysseus2099 was talking about. Even if they don't openly attack us, it would probably hurt our rep with other MGs. And it doesn't mean they wouldn't, for example, launch a smear campaign, or otherwise try to undermine us. That's about what I'd expect from girls who, no matter how old they are, are physically still highschool or middle school-aged. If they're still thinking like teens, ratting others out is probably not going to make us popular.If they think that they are so far above mundane law that they're willing to do IRL gangster shit in front of a police officer, then no amount of publicity we could possibly gather would help us in any way - they already believe that the police can't do anything to them, and the rest of the mundane world wouldn't be any greater concern. Getting pissy at us because we brought mundanes in on "magical girl business" falls into this category; that's the kind of thing you say when you're rejecting the idea that the government can demand that you follow its laws about protection rackets and so on and so forth.
"Go exploring" is code for "Random encounter with a magical girl". Especially if we bring our pets.