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Puella Magi Adfligo Systema

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boonerunner said:
Call me cynical, if you like, but I doubt that we're going to get many seeds from voluntary donations. Not enough to create a stockpile big enough to degrief everyone in the event of a catastrophe. And definitely not a supply big enough to support a dewitching project (further on down the line).
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This is probably true, but hopefully if/when people need it, the stockpile will have had a few months or years to build up. I'm not expecting lots of donations immediately; more a growing realization that you might as well donate, since you don't need them anymore.
 
The problem, the main one I see, is that guests will be at varying levels of grief spiral risk even given our presence. All it takes is one Witchout in paradise and the whole thing folds like a house of cards on fire. And that's as simple as someone whose problems can't be solved just by cleansing, which is a large proportion. People who are grief spiraling don't seek help.

Grief (stockpile, our powers, whatever) is a non-issue. The people are the issue. Be it personal issues, conflicts with other magical girls, long-term depressive mental states... A whole host of things we either can't really help with or would have to police.
 
Torgamous said:
Hitomi's parents were apparently able to get a place for the Mikis to stay more or less on a whim. We could get her involved.
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Definitely an option. We'd have to tell Hitomi about magical girls and scare her into not being one, but I'm fairly sure we were planning to do that anyway.

Call it step 5 instead of 2, something to do after the announcement. The stockpile isn't needed instantly after all.
SynchronizedWritersBlock said:
The problem, the main one I see, is that guests will be at varying levels of grief spiral risk even given our presence. All it takes is one Witchout in paradise and the whole thing folds like a house of cards on fire. And that's as simple as someone whose problems can't be solved just by cleansing, which is a large proportion. People who are grief spiraling don't seek help.

Grief (stockpile, our powers, whatever) is a non-issue. The people are the issue. Be it personal issues, conflicts with other magical girls, long-term depressive mental states... A whole host of things we either can't really help with or would have to police.
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Think Oriko can predict witch-spirals? Maybe assign a person to hold the other person's soul gem and keep a clear seed pressed to it for a few days in a row?
 
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SynchronizedWritersBlock said:
The problem, the main one I see, is that guests will be at varying levels of grief spiral risk even given our presence. All it takes is one Witchout in paradise and the whole thing folds like a house of cards on fire. And that's as simple as someone whose problems can't be solved just by cleansing, which is a large proportion. People who are grief spiraling don't seek help.
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Mm, this is why I think it's better to set it up as a communal storehouse. That means we have time to keep tabs on arriving magical girls, or task other magical girls to do so. Ideally, we can build a community of meguca, all watching out for each other. Let's be honest though; once we start getting a really big bunch of magical girls, 'hire therapists' is gonna shoot to the top of the to-do list anyway.

It's definitely a problem, yes, but I think it's a solvable one.
 
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Jackercracks said:
Think Oriko can predict witch-spirals?
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Yes, but her powers take a toll on her, and with that number of people to look out for, Oriko would never not be having a headache, and Homura and Sabrina would probably only get any restful sleep in timestop, since they'd always be getting called out to help with things and prevent witchouts.
 
Jackercracks said:
Call it step 5 instead of 2, something to do after the announcement. The stockpile isn't needed instantly after all.
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That'd work, yeah. I like the presentation angle of having the stockpile ready before we make the announcement though; it sends the message that this is an institution, not just a fragile, ad-hoc arrangement.

I mean it probably will be a fragile, ad-hoc arrangement, at least to begin with, but appearances are important, y'know?
Gadjo said:
Yes, but her powers take a toll on her, and with that number of people to look out for, Oriko would never not be having a headache, and Homura and Sabrina would probably only get any restful sleep in timestop, since they'd always be getting called out to help with things and prevent witchouts.
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With the influx of magical girls though, we might be able to recruit some of them for the job if they have a useful power. It has potential.
 
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As for money, the only person I'd be comfortable asking for startup cash from is Homura. Lotto number precog is a great idea though. We should obtain an arbitrary quantity of money no matter what plans we do or do not execute, so I can completely approve of step 1, at least.
 
Gadjo said:
Yes, but her powers take a toll on her, and with that number of people to look out for, Oriko would never not be having a headache, and Homura and Sabrina would probably only get any restful sleep in timestop, since they'd always be getting called out to help with things and prevent witchouts.
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Ideally we'd have them be self-policing after a certain point. There's no reason they can't after all, it's only natural they'd want to look out for their friends, and it's also only natural they'd want to keep a good thing going. Convincing a number to keep an eye on the rest would be totally doable. We'd only have to be brought in for extreme cases.
 
Gadjo said:
and Homura and Sabrina would probably only get any restful sleep in timestop, since they'd always be getting called out to help with things and prevent witchouts.
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I think you're overestimating the probable scale of our operation, and needing the presence of mind to seek us out should at least eliminate the worst spiral cases.
 
Long story short we won't be enacting any plan like this for some time. I think this is going in the "further that 2 weeks out" folder for time tables. We'll still be contacting new groups and setting up cleansing plans with them, though.
 
Gadjo said:
How do our powers break causality? We can make whatever we want within 100m, but all magic powers are bullshit.
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The creation of items that we don't understand is one way that we break causality. We can create something that (presumably) no one has ever created before (e.g. a healing gauntlet or a magic enhancing gauntlet). And then we can use it or reverse engineer it to figure out how it works. The order of these operations is wrong according to a conventional understanding of causality.

But the biggest violation of causality is our casual use of grief control. The normal chain of cause and effect transforms human girls into magical girls who use magic and accumulate grief. A fraction of that grief can be offloaded onto grief seeds to delay the inevitable, but (inevitably), the grief will accumulate until the magical girl transforms into a witch. However, our abilities allow us to shatter the normal relationship between cause and effect by being able to control both the cause (magic) and the effect (grief) simultaneously without cost and without limit. At the beginning of the quest, I was worried that there would be some hidden cost that we hadn't anticipated, but this does not seem to be the case. The kind of power we wield is goddess level, so I can only assume that it was the result of intervention from a goddess.

Madokami is the biggest example of causality violation. She absorbed the grief from all witches past, present, and future (including her own) and then abandoned normal causality so that she would be able to fight and destroy the resulting witch.

Homura is also an example of causality violation (as well as the basis behind Madoka's power), but she had a lot of trouble actually making any of her changes stick. All magical girls break causality to one extent or another in defiance of the normal laws of entropy (that's why the incubators want to collect energy from all of us). But some powers are more bullshit than others and ours is the most bullshit power I've ever heard of apart from Madokami's.
 
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boonerunner said:
The creation of items that we don't understand is one way that we break causality. We can create something that (presumably) no one has ever created before (e.g. a healing gauntlet or a magic enhancing gauntlet). And then we can use it or reverse engineer it to figure out how it works. The order of these operations is wrong according to a conventional understanding of causality.

But the biggest violation of causality is our casual use of grief control. The normal chain of cause and effect transforms human girls into magical girls who use magic and accumulate grief. A fraction of that grief can be offloaded onto grief seeds to delay the inevitable, but (inevitably), the grief will accumulate until the magical girl transforms into a witch. However, our abilities allow us to shatter the normal relationship between cause and effect by being able to control both the cause (magic) and the effect (grief) simultaneously without cost and without limit. At the beginning of the quest, I was worried that there would be some hidden cost that we hadn't anticipated, but this does not seem to be the case. The kind of power we wield is goddess level, so I can only assume that it was the result of intervention from a goddess.

Madokami is the biggest example of causality violation. She absorbed the grief from all witches past, present, and future (including her own) and then abandoned normal causality so that she would be able to fight and destroy the resulting witch.

Homura is also an example of causality violation (as well as the basis behind Madoka's power), but she had a lot of trouble actually making any of her changes stick. All magical girls break causality to one extent or another in defiance of the normal laws of entropy (that's why the incubators want to collect energy from all of us). But some powers are more bullshit than others and ours is the most bullshit power I've ever heard of apart from Madokami's.
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Our powers aren't so much breaking causality as they are just breaking the system, or giving us ridiculous abilities. The fact that we can prevent witching in a way no one else can is like saying that having the ability to generate food breaks causality. It violates physics, to be sure, but not causality. The idea that our powers have to be caused by a goddess has been suggested before, but that's still in the "total guess" department along with the Madowish theory.
 
boonerunner said:
The creation of items that we don't understand is one way that we break causality. We can create something that (presumably) no one has ever created before (e.g. a healing gauntlet or a magic enhancing gauntlet). And then we can use it or reverse engineer it to figure out how it works. The order of these operations is wrong according to a conventional understanding of causality.
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Do you think the first people who made campfires understood combustion, or that Homura has a full understanding of spacetime? Oriko's admitted that she doesn't understand her powers, this is not an unusual case.
boonerunner said:
But the biggest violation of causality is our casual use of grief control. The normal chain of cause and effect transforms human girls into magical girls who use magic and accumulate grief. A fraction of that grief can be offloaded onto grief seeds to delay the inevitable, but (inevitably), the grief will accumulate until the magical girl transforms into a witch. However, our abilities allow us to shatter the normal relationship between cause and effect by being able to control both the cause (magic) and the effect (grief) simultaneously without cost and without limit.
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I don't think it's without cost. We do accumulate grief using it, it's just that our power (that we directly wished for) lets us put the cost somewhere else. This isn't a violation of causality by any definition I've ever heard. It's probably not playing nice with thermodynamics, but that's explicitly what defines magic in this universe.
 
Involve Madoka and Sayaka in helping a lot of stray megucas?

Involve. Madoka. Megucas.

Homura says no.

FlatlineAskari said:
What do we care?
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As long as Akiko's catatonic, Rin (and her friends too, I guess) is stuck taking care of her. That sucks for her.
Jackercracks said:
You have to admit that sounds like more fun than quietly scienceing in the warehouse until we fix everything. We'd get access to a range of new powers to munchkin in aid of our ultimate goal as well.
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B-But... Warehouse-kun...
Gadjo said:
It's not like we'd be sitting in a corner the whole time. Our hero complex will see to that. I'm just saying that it sounds like a bit of a headache since we'll have to be policing such a large number of people, many having deep emotional scars, some having serious mental illnesses, and all having crazy superpowers that can be very unpredictable.
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...I'm afraid to say I'm not entirely joking here, but if we can unbreak Akiko just right, we can get her to help take care of this?
 
Gadjo said:
Long story short we won't be enacting any plan like this for some time. I think this is going in the "further that 2 weeks out" folder for time tables. We'll still be contacting new groups and setting up cleansing plans with them, though.
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I think we should do step 1 as soon as possible. Having access to arbitrary stacks of cash is just really useful regardless of how everything else goes and it might take a few days/a week for lotto money to arrive. That way once we want to get started on the rest we can get it done very quickly. And we can still do step 1 then wait 2 weeks for the rest if that's what people decide on.

Personally I'm in favour of setting the whole thing up asap, but even if other people are against opening meguca hotel soon it would still be good to do step 1 quickly.
 
Onmur said:
...I'm afraid to say I'm not entirely joking here, but if we can unbreak Akiko just right, we can get her to help take care of this?
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Guys!
Why haven't we thought of this?
We need to develop a grief therapy machine or therapy skill amplifier to use on ourselves!

It probably won't work, or will have horrible side effects since that would make things way too easy, but we should see if we can develop something like that.
Jackercracks said:
I think we should do step 1 as soon as possible. Having access to arbitrary stacks of cash is just really useful regardless of how everything else goes and it might take a few days/a week for lotto money to arrive. That way once we want to get started on the rest we can get it done very quickly. And we can still do step 1 then wait 2 weeks for the rest if that's what people decide on.
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Why the complicated ways of getting cash? Put on a grief disguise and run around crumpling up ATM's for cash, problem solved.
 
Gadjo said:
Why the complicated ways of getting cash? Put on a grief disguise and run around crumpling up ATM's for cash, problem solved.
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Hmmm, yes. That would do it. I get the feeling Mami would disapprove? Really? That's really all I've got to protest bank robbery? You'd think I would be able to think up better reasons against something like that.
 
Torgamous said:
I don't think it's without cost. We do accumulate grief using it, it's just that our power (that we directly wished for) lets us put the cost somewhere else. This isn't a violation of causality by any definition I've ever heard. It's probably not playing nice with thermodynamics, but that's explicitly what defines magic in this universe.
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The laws of thermodynamics (especially entropy) are basically a way of expressing what causality means in the context of physics. If you can violate the laws of thermodynamics, then you are violating causality. The fact that the cost of our power gives us more power is a fundamental violation of causality.

Akiko
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Muramasa said:
All of the NOPE.
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Akiko is currently comatose and broken, which is actually an improvement over her previous state of violent psychosis. So (from a certain point of view) she's actually making progress! But full rehabilitation will probably require the presence of Kato Setsuko, so we'd first have to find her (or her soul gem/grief seed) and rescue or resurrect her.
 
boonerunner said:
The laws of thermodynamics (especially entropy) are basically a way of expressing what causality means in the context of physics. If you can violate the laws of thermodynamics, then you are violating causality. The fact that the cost of our power gives us more power is a fundamental violation of causality.
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If violating the laws of physics automatically violates causality, then saying our powers violate causality is pretty meaningless, since every meguca does that.
 
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