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Magical Girl Escalation Taylor (Worm/Nanoha)

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[X] Yes – Epoch will call in 8.1, and you'll promise to help the Adepts when things calm down a little. You will keep your word, and I will force the issue if you don't do so quickly enough on your own.

As mentioned before, we need more trained mages on Earth Bet, stat. And some of the Adepts may accept Devices, which Tim should soon be able to make, I think, if he can't yet. (Epoch could make for a great time-control Support, if the power basis transfers when the shard connection burns out.) Additionally, if some of the Adepts choose Gadgeteer templates, Tim could mentor them for a while and drastically increase the production capability we can access, which should snowball fast.

I know this would take away time we could spend on other things, and production capability Tim could spend on equipment for the Privateers, but this is very important, I think it's worth sacrificing some short-term capability for long-term effects.
 
Faraway-R said:
As you can surmise from my previous omakes (this one and that one) I already have an idea how magic might be disseminated. Adepts are a decent first step, now if only some people didn't nix scanning Vista back in the day... (stillslightlymiffedbutnohardfeelings)

Also, more specifically about Adepts. Keep in mind that while under leadership of Epoch they are mercenary slash villains... A number of their mages came from Protectorate members who figured out learning magic and spreading magic was more important than mere heroing. For them, magic was the ends, not the means.

More importantly, not only are they likely to be a semi-splinter group that is more interested in magic than in mercenary work... They are also a possible group that can and will spread magic because they believe spreading magic is better than not spreading it. And once they gain the possible means for it... Who knows where their final allegiance will fall.

Not to mention they can be an independent source of information on internal Protectorate workings. Even if we set up the meeting as a simple exchange of information, they might provide some insights.
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rofl. Very nice omake. Be hilarious to see this happen. Though given the last interlude I imagine Epoch is going to go into conniptions over our method. 16 years of effort to fly and launch a ki blast, and we just lucked into something that completely and utterly blows him away.
 
I mean, SW said that part of their issue is that where we use mathematic spells laid out in our mind, the Adepts are still just sort of shoving power and trying to shape it into a spell. Very impressive without something/someone to learn from, but its not unexpected. Even ignoring the expansion to our linker core.
 
I… can probably close this up, I think.

EDIT: Not sure why it's counting spell votes.
Adhoc vote count started by Hawkmoon on Aug 12, 2017 at 7:41 AM, finished with 255 posts and 69 votes.
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47 votes to 4 votes on "Achievement: Minions Get". Immortal Assimilation Engine will be so proud of us and excited for his new toys?

Its good for Taylor to have a new project and a lot of people to surround herself with as a distraction from Danny's plight, right? Hopefully they're friendly enough.
 
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Silently Watches said:
I… can probably close this up, I think.

EDIT: Not sure why it's counting spell votes.
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Probably because someone selected a wrong post number as a starting point. And yes, you could probably close the vote. 13 to 1 is a pretty good indication what the readers want:)
Adhoc vote count started by Hawkmoon on Aug 15, 2017 at 10:52 AM, finished with 90 posts and 57 votes.
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AAR: Meltdown
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    • After Action Report for Arc 7: Meltdown

    I'm going to try to focus from now on more on what you avoided than what you missed after the furor of last arc's AAR, but some choices offered prizes others didn't. Don't take it as a condemnation if I say what you could have gotten had you done something else.

    Location, Location, Location
    • Three choices: go to Kharkiv, go to the dummy warehouse in Philly, go with the Privateers. You decided to deal with the warehouse and the Dragonslayers.
    • Had you gone to the Endbringer fight, you had the chance to grab a second spell should you have actually fought Behemoth. There was also the chance to shoot him with Ragnarök, though how much good that would have done I'm keeping secret for now. :D Next fight, maybe.
    • Had you sent Samantha to the fight, she would have gotten a survival roll and needed to beat Behemoth's attack roll to survive. Considering Behemoth got an 82… But! It would have given me another survival roll to work with so Danny could have gotten more than 15, his difficulty check for surviving this fight. As I've said before, a Guardian Beast is technically expendable, or at least replaceable. Your father is (was?) not.
    • There was an event waiting for you if you stayed with the Privateers, but you'll find out what happened shortly into Arc 8. Mostly. What they did varied slightly whether you were present or not, though the end result is mostly the same. Mostly because you would have gotten an extra prize in addition to the spell point had you been there.

    Saint George
    • You decided to try long-range bombardment, and it worked. Oh boy, did it work. Besides the cartridges, the winning tactics were essentially what I had already planned.
    • I am disappointed with myself that I didn't think to quote Dresden Files. "The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault" indeed. :(
    • I'm not sure who came up with the whole "skydive to right above the warehouse" plan. I'm also not sure why anyone thought it was a good idea. It kind of defeats the purpose of attacking from a distance if all you're doing is moving back into midrange, and if you're going to open up with a surprise attack, it's probably better to just attack rather than setting up something elaborate that clues your targets in to the fact that something's about to go down.
    • Staying in melee could have gone badly or really well depending on if you wanted to go lethal. Default setting would have seen each engagement go longer, which would mean a chance to get tased the hell out. Lethal, on the other hand… Yikes. Blitz Action with a 10,000 degree plasma blade, and the Dragonslayers would no longer be a problem. Or anything less than medium well.
    • Sneaky Ninja, eh. I would have had flashbacks to the Tomb Raider remakes, I suppose. Not that that is a bad thing; I really enjoyed strolling casually through zones after all the enemies developed arrow-headshot syndrome. Again, whether or not to go lethal would have influenced the chance of being taken out, though it would be much less than hand-to-hand.
    • Armed with Saint's GPS data, you headed to their base, and Taylor/I made the unilateral decision not to mess with computer stuff you can't understand. If you had brought Tim, he would have understood more of what was going on, but he too would have thought it in bad taste to play around with the Dragonslayers' computers without giving their biggest victim a chance to see what they did to her.
    Motivations
    • In case you were wondering why Saint was so dead-set on going after the radio, it's because of a few different reasons.
    • First, the TSAB may look human, but they are still aliens with an alien culture. He, through Dragon, doesn't know enough about them to know which parts of their culture would come in conflict with real humanity. Even if they have the same priorities that Earthlings do, that doesn't necessarily argue in their favor. All one has to do is look at all the conquests in Earth's history to know that one group of humans discovering new land with another group humans already living there rarely goes well for the natives.
    • Second, Taylor's sole contact with these aliens is undeniably a military organization. Not only is she working with alien military, they already dispatched a strike team to Earth, and not just any strike team but one that their leaders describes as discreet. That means, in Saint's mind, there are covert ops soldiers on their way. They won't have any plans to place nice, either, because who sends diplomats with a strike team?
    • Third, this is a culture where AIs are commonplace and accepted, even indispensable. On the one hand, yes, that might mean that the TSAB has figured out where the kinks are in building artificial life and have made them completely safe to be around. On the other, there is also a distinct possibility that there is a central malicious AI that decided not to destroy mankind but rather to rule the world behind the scenes. An AI like this would surely do its best to help another of its kind rise up and take over its own world, which means the central AI and Dragon must never under any circumstances come into contact with each other.
    • Ironically, were this pre-StrikerS Saint would be close to right, though the puppetmaster was not an AI but three brains-in-a-jar.
    • Saint tried destroying the exploration/recovery ship in 6.13-14 to try to destroy Dragon and Perfect Storm, but once that failed, he decided the next best step was to ruin the sole line of communication between Calamity Witch and the TSAB. Hence why he ran for the trap Taylor set up. The next step would probably be to try to go down to the Agharti himself to find the "dangerous artifact", which he had plans to use as a bargaining chip to make the TSAB back off at worst or reverse-engineer and use as a weapon against the alien invaders at best.

    Meanwhile…
    • Behemoth's and Danny's rolls were whack, yo. I had a hard time deciding whether Danny's 4 (or the other low rolls @Always Late and @Faraway-R provided) would mean his death or not. As you can see, I ultimately decided 'no', but he's still in bad, bad shape.
    • So here's what happened. The Red Gauntlet is only mentioned in a Word of Wildbow, but they're a paramilitary group of Russian capes that oppose the Elitnaya Armiya, the government-backed Russian capes who spend most of their time hunting down and killing other capes, independents and their own members both. The Gauntlet's Tinkers were working with a number of scientists at the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology to create an anti-Endbringer weapon. What they came up with was a railgun-cannon that fired dimensional-shifted tank shells, the plan being to use dimensional shenanigans to get the shells past an Endbringer's outer layers and into what they assumed would be softer and squishier innards.
    • Keep in mind that until the canon Leviathan Brockton Bay fight, nobody knew the Endbringers kept getting denser and denser they further they went in.
    • Chevalier and Miss Militia told you basically what went wrong. Even though the shells themselves weren't a danger, Behemoth did NOT appreciate being shot at with a half-assed Sting. Too bad for everybody, between his super-high rolls and Danny's low rolls, his directed roar knocked a shell back towards the city and into the command center. Cue Danny's traumatic brain injury.
    • If you look back at those rolls, you'll notice there was an "Oh Shit" roll. That was to determine if there was a second payload the cannon could fire. Since that roll passed, I'll just keep the idea in the back of my head for maybe the next Endbringer fight. :evil: It's… certainly a "desperate measures" strategy for dealing with them.
    • Just so you know, had you failed the "Oh Shit" roll, his DC would have been 60, not 15. Higher chance for both him and Samantha to have died.
    • As I mentioned after the vote, had you gone to the fight yourself, you could have tried to talk the Gauntlet capes down from shooting the big gun. They would have gotten a roll to determine how willing they were willing to listen to an unknown American cape. Depending on how things went, Danny may or may not have gotten a survival roll.

    Acquaintances
    • You decided that you do want to stay in touch with the Adepts. Very well, but keep in mind what I said during that vote. You will speak with them soon, one way or another. Don't make me force the issue, because I will if you don't get a move on.
    • Had you chosen not to teach them, they would not have bothered you again, but at the same time you would have lost all access to those Linker Cores.

    Spells for Sale
    • You could learn one new spell because you did not fight in the Endbringer battle. You chose Frost Beam.
    • Looking at what's planned for next arc, I feel the need to point out two things that should be obvious BEFORE you come up with plans around this spell.
      1. This is the first spell in a skill branch.
      2. This is an ice spell. You have a fire-based Mana Conversion Affinity.
      Don't expect a spray-and-pray strategy to work out how you want it to, nor should you view this as an end-all-be-all game-changer.
    • None of the spells in your skill trees are worthless, and that includes Frost Beam. It's good at what it does, but it doesn't do everything.
     
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    • Well, it WAS her fault, she literally shot a fire beam into the building... but it would have been a nice quote there =p
     
    Oh, so we could've mitigated damage and potentially saved a 'half-assed' Sting from being used before it was truly ready.

    However, we essentially have the tools to free Dragon now, and she's the best chance to develop a countermeasure to the Endbringers without the TSAB's assistance. So acceptable losses I suppose.
     
    Silently Watches said:
    • There was an event waiting for you if you stayed with the Privateers, but you'll find out what happened shortly into Arc 8. Mostly. What they did varied slightly whether you were present or not, though the end result is mostly the same. Mostly because you would have gotten an extra prize had in addition to the spell point had you been there.
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    Well. That sounds ominous.
     
    LancerisDead said:
    Is 8.1 coming next week?
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    Unless I tell you otherwise, you can safely assume the next chapter will be the following week.
    kokuenDG said:
    Oh, so we could've mitigated damage and potentially saved a 'half-assed' Sting from being used before it was truly ready.
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    Keyword here being could.
    Always Late said:
    Well. That sounds ominous.
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    Me? Ominous? Why do my players think so poorly of me? :cry:
     
    Silently Watches said:
    ANNOUNCEMENT!

    Because I'm an idiot, I forget to include a very important section in the AAR. This has now been added.
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    *hmmms*
    Silently Watches said:
    Saint tried destroying the exploration/recovery ship in 6.13-14 to try to destroy Dragon and Perfect Storm, but once that failed, he decided the next best step was to ruin the sole line of communication between Calamity Witch and the TSAB. Hence why he ran for the trap Taylor set up. The next step would probably be to try to go down to the Agharti himself to find the "dangerous artifact", which he had plans to use as a bargaining chip to make the TSAB back off at worst or reverse-engineer and use as a weapon against the alien invaders at best.
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    Glad to see we got him then. Though, I have a suspicion we've not seen the last of him.
     
    I mean, the PRT/Guild assigned Saint Tinker 0 for the sole reason of being able to maintain the tinker-tech he steals, but he is a regular human otherwise, so he should just stay in police custody.
    I imagine that we/Dragon will interrogate them at some point.
     
    Silently Watches said:
    Armed with Saint's GPS data, you headed to their base, and Taylor/I made the unilateral decision not to mess with computer stuff you can't understand. If you had brought Tim, he would have understood more of what was going on, but he too would have thought it in bad taste to play around with the Dragonslayers' computers without giving their biggest victim a chance to see what they did to her.
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    Did we actually gain anything from going to the base now, that we wouldn't have gotten if we had waited? Or was the only net "gain" from that vote a potentially lower reputation with the PRT?
     
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