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Puella Magi Adfligo Systema

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Meguca are for saving. Take the offer.

We were going to meet this girl sooner or later anyway, unless she's going to Witch before our operations expand to reach her.
 
By the way... We should talk about this with Mami?

You can't help the guilty squirm that's always at the back of your mind, that Mami isn't really fully well and you don't want to take advantage of her for your own selfish reasons, but... you've gone over that already with yourself, around and around and still-
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Let her know this matter bothers us, but,

You're here. And this is fine. It's not perfect, but it's wonderful. You smile at Mami, admiring how she manages to look effortlessly radiant, with her hair messy from sleep and illuminated by just the streetlight shining in through the window.
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... Not without telling her how wonderful she is. ;)
 
The incubator's offer seems reasonable- he's only offering it to us (so we suppose) so he can mindwipe everyone a little less. Then again, he could just be trying to play manipulative asshole again. I mean, he always is, but I don't think he has one that makes the offer not worth it? We should probably grill him for details though.
 
Let's see...

[] Ask KB about this girl's Grief Seed situation, details in general, phone number and other contact information.
-[] If she's not in great need of Seeds, say you'll contact her later, and ditch KB. If she's in need of cleansing, contact her now.
[] Go on to Warehouse-kun...

And I think KB's not worth more than two lines in the next vote, right?
 
All this talk of pants makes me want to make clothes out of Grief.

Firnagzen said:
Alright, then. You'll fall back on the same trick you used yesterday: a carefully balanced array of arrays of nanoscale cantilevers sensitive enough to feel the dance of photons. It's not sight; it's not wired into your visual cortex. It's more like someone drawing on your skin with a million tiny little pins, each one a photon twanging a tiny, tiny bar of Grief.

It's not much harder to shrink the arrays a little so you can see in the visual spectrum. Without active Grief, you don't have the carefully designed lensing arrays, but you make do with parallel constructs in the same way a long baseline radio telescope array might work. Besides, this gets you stereoscopic sight, which is useful.
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Firnagzen said:
There's a minor jam at the sink as you try to clean too many dishes at once, the clatter of colliding plates making you wince even from here.
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You know, if you were to ask most people which was more difficult out of 'spontaneously creating and using a mass of photon-scale levers out of solidified suffering to enable cooking while in a different room' and 'remembering that dishes occupy space', this is not the way round they would've guessed.
:p

BlackoutSampler said:
WE ARE NO MEAGER VILLAIN OF THE WEEK, WE ARE THE "FINAL BOSS"! OUR ATTACKS WILL BE SUITABLY DRAMATIC AS WELL AS SCALED TO MICHIRU'S LEVEL.
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"WITH MY FINAL BREATH I ASK YOU - EAT THE FRIED CHICKEN BEFORE IT GETS COLD" *expires*
 
Anyways, anyone mind that we ride a essentially blue-painted Grief Platform for our travel the rest of the day? It makes for a solid camouflage since the biggest reason we're drawing so much attention is that we're a big black splotch in the sky most of the time. If we keep it a dull sky-blue, the majority of people will who spot us will just shrug and go back to business once they lose track of us.

It would make for a good compermise if we don't immediately rush to the Stealth Magi.
 
BlackoutSampler said:
Anyways, anyone mind that we ride a essentially blue-painted Grief Platform for our travel the rest of the day? It makes for a solid camouflage since the biggest reason we're drawing so much attention is that we're a big black splotch in the sky most of the time. If we keep it a dull sky-blue, the majority of people will who spot us will just shrug and go back to business once they lose track of us.

It would make for a good compermise if we don't immediately rush to the Stealth Magi.
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Not just the platform. We'd need to hide the rest of our giant cloud of grief too.

I recommend dispersing it into particles smaller than the wavelength of light and seeing what happens - it's a decent first step towards a proper utility fog anyway.
 
Redshirt Army said:
Not just the platform. We'd need to hide the rest of our giant cloud of grief too.

I recommend dispersing it into particles smaller than the wavelength of light and seeing what happens - it's a decent first step towards a proper utility fog anyway.
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Or we can pile it all in the MOF with us and use it as dramatic billowing fog as we open the bay doors (all we need is a bright enough backlight and...)
 
Eh, don't hurry too much.

Now that KB's asking us to stealth, let's not bother trying to stealth until we meet up with the stealthguca.

We can agree to take measures, but we don't have to jump because KB says so.
 
I just feel we reached the end of Coob's Hands Off the Stupid Megurca Shenanagins Policy and could stand to give him enough slack to back off.

I mean he already decided that this is important enough to interrupt us once already, I don't want to see him decide to interrupt us during all of our free time over something so stupid. It is a good olive branch to give him after we get the info on the Stealth Magi.

Edit: Plus, I'd rather not just be contrary just because we don't like Coobs. That is a easy way for him to manipulate us into hanging ourselves. You advoid being manipulated, not by being actively contrary, but by verifying information of the manipulator before acting on what is right. and here, it is actually probably best to avoid mass mind wipes of the public, if only to cut down on traffic related incidents cause people were staring at the sky for a reason they don't remember.
 
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FeepingCreature said:
Just because Kyubey has no compunctions about being deceitful doesn't mean he has a compulsion to be.

This might be just what it appears.

Besides. Invisible Jet!

[edit] At some point, I really want to have a good talk with Kyubey. They gotta be making some sort of basic error of reason, because they're behaving remarkably stupid for an ostensibly-smart race.

I think what's going on is ... like, from our human perspective, the Madoka Magica universe is obviously a "managed" universe. (I don't want to say "a story" here, because that explanation only works from the outside.) But like ... if you're looking at the sort of universes yu get naturally, they all probably look sort of like ours - basic laws at a very low level, and high-level constructs emerging through spontaneous organization and evolutionary selection.

That's not the Madoka Magica universe - that one is the universe where souls are an ontologically basic object, and the laws of the universe are completely rewritable by little girls' hopes and dreams. That's not a universe, that's a running game of Nomic that somebody built a world on. You don't get that kind of universe naturally, or you shouldn't expect to, because minds are too complicated to expect them to pop up as basic objects. No, this is the kind of universe that you get if you have some sort of God, which doesn't necessarily have to mean "old man with a beard" but can range from "benevolent superintelligence" to "bored alien kid with too much computer capacity". Not to imply that this universe has a divine purpose, but somebody clearly set it up to specifically pay attention to conscious minds and treat them as basic objects. I don't know how you got from that to the witch system - clearly it can't be a physical necessity because Madoka's World completely bypassed it, without immediately collapsing into a puff of entropy.

Anyway, I think that the error the Kyubes are making is that they're stuck evaluating universal theories in order of complexity, so they think that somehow, this universe has to run on sane reductionist simple laws, and they can't think of the "alien kid" hypothesis because they simply don't have the imagination to create that scenario. They keep thinking that the universe has to have an impartial, manipulatable set of laws, and they lack the imaginative capacity or symbol-space to hit the hypothesis that the universe is deliberately caused by a sentient, conscious entity who cares about the lives of other sentient, conscious entities, who for some reason wants little girls to have the power to reshape reality, and they are not, as they should be, absolutely bloody terrified of the possibility of offending that entity.

Since they don't have stories, they consistently fail to deduce that the universe runs on storybook logic.

(It doesn't help that Madoka Magica runs on "dark and gritty" storybook logic. Thanks Gen.)
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Yo so I'm 100% in favor of Narrative-bombing Kyubey.

Also, yea, let's accept his offer with the caveat that it'll have to be another day. I see no reason to think Kyubey has an ulterior motive in this particular instance; he has actually been totally on the level at key moments in canon to build trust and rapport for later.
 
Holy wall of text that exceeds 150 words and then some, Batman. ^

You know what, can we keep KB around for a bit?

[X] Grab Kyuubey (with Grief) and fly to Warehouse-kun while you talk.
[X] Agree as long as KB helps you with some things. Ask for:
-[X] Details, including Grief Seed situation and contact information, about stealthguca, any nearby meguca in need of Seeds, and any nearby meguca capable of making Teleportation enchantments.
-[X] Help with your SCIENCE session.

[X] Once at Warehouse-kun, quickly test whether your Grief needs to be within 100m of your Gem, body, or both. Ask KB for info and help while you work.
-[X] Cut pieces of Mami's ribbon to test:
-[X] Channeling for Control Magic through Ribbon.
-[X] Channeling Grief Control through Ribbon. Attempt to use Ribbon to extend your range.
[X] Try and use Grief to feel your surroundings, hoping to be able to keep up a Grief cloud to know everything around you at all times, without problems.

Let's say this is an idea of a vote: Keep KB around, ask for info on relevant things, agree to meet stealthguca later, do SCIENCE!.

Thoughts?
 
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FeepingCreature said:
But like ... if you're looking at the sort of universes yu get naturally, they all probably look sort of like ours - basic laws at a very low level, and high-level constructs emerging through spontaneous organization and evolutionary selection.
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Mmm. I don't see how you could possibly know this.

Yes, if I woke up tomorrow and I discovered that my mind was ontologically basic as you say, then I would try politely asking the universe (which is already paying attention to my consciousness) if I could meet with the local system admin and talk about what was going on. That would just reek of, say, a rescue simulation scenario, or some other form of uploading.

But that's only because I have all of this experience of living in a universe which doesn't pay special attention to my consciousness. When I think about possible alternate universes, and sets of universes, I can only think about what it would take to instantiate them within the computational structure of our own universe - even with arbitrarily high amounts of computing power, it should still be easier to simulate a universe with low-level basic laws than it is to simulate a universe with high-level laws stapled over the lower-level laws.

From beyond a metaphorical "original position", I have no clue what kinds of universes are more likely than others. If our universe is "real", and not a simulation, I have no way of knowing what kinds of processes give rise to universes, and what kinds of laws of physics are more likely than others. Even if our universe is a simulation within a higher-level universe, I have no way of knowing for sure what kind of laws the higher-level universe obeys, and I have no way of knowing if that higher-level universe is "real" or itself a simulation, and so on and so forth.

So - outside of the domain of our universe - I don't see any reason why a universe with low-level basic laws and high-level emergent complexity is any more "likely" than a universe with high-level abstract laws, or a universe where every individual particle runs on its own individual laws subjugated to meta-laws, or a universe which is embedded in a game of Nomic, and so on and so forth.

FeepingCreature said:
That's not the Madoka Magica universe - that one is the universe where souls are an ontologically basic object, and the laws of the universe are completely rewritable by little girls' hopes and dreams. That's not a universe, that's a running game of Nomic that somebody built a world on. You don't get that kind of universe naturally, or you shouldn't expect to, because minds are too complicated to expect them to pop up as basic objects. No, this is the kind of universe that you get if you have some sort of God, which doesn't necessarily have to mean "old man with a beard" but can range from "benevolent superintelligence" to "bored alien kid with too much computer capacity". Not to imply that this universe has a divine purpose, but somebody clearly set it up to specifically pay attention to conscious minds and treat them as basic objects. I don't know how you got from that to the witch system - clearly it can't be a physical necessity because Madoka's World completely bypassed it, without immediately collapsing into a puff of entropy.
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Again, I don't know for sure that we have to postulate an intelligence at work; I don't even know if it's sensible to try.

We don't know for sure what kinds of processes can give rise to universes, and shape the laws of a universe. So arguing either way seems like trying to argue for intelligent design and irreducible complexity (or arguing for evolution and natural selection) in biology, when you've only ever seen one example of a living organism, never observed the process of reproduction, and never seen a new organism come into being.

For that matter, even if we could determine that some kinds of universes are more likely than others to form, and we could know for sure that the PMAS universe is "unlikely", I don't think we can draw conclusions from that. Asking "why am I in this universe, when a simpler universe is more likely?" seems very much like asking "why am I alive, when the conditions necessary to support life are so rare in this universe?" or "why am I me in particular, when I could have been born as someone else?" or so on.
 
Umm MAX!!PARANOIA mode: what if its a set up by QB to get us ganked by stealth Meguca?? I mean he made that new girl with illusions wary of us.
 
rkyeun said:
[X] Talk to Kyuubey
- [X] About?
-- [X] Grief tap, so that we can transmit excess grief to his society remotely.
--- [X] This means he won't have to schedule visits to collect it from us.
--- [X] This means we won't be dragging it along with us everywhere in huge masquerade-breaking clouds.
--- [X] In fact, why not make the process more efficient by just automatically draining all grief from soul gems. You can grant girl's wishes and manipulate their souls to make them happens, and you clearly have extradimensional grief taps built into your own bodies, so I know you can make them. And you take our souls and put them in gems, so I know you can make those too. Just fix all the soul gems to not accumulate grief and instead send it to you immediately. Sure, you gain some power from witching out, but that kills the girl, and then later another girl also comes back to kill the witch, and maybe the girl dies too. It's lose-lose for both us and you. You could have magical girls active indefinitely, continually compounding your grief collection rate, instead of all dying off as either girls or witches and then contributing nothing ever again. You're destroying your own long-term rate of income for short term gain, and preventing entropy forever is a very long-term goal. You won't make it like this. You could have so much more if we all lived forever. Instead of the livestock and slaughterhouse model - go with the blood bank and donor model. You'll find us a lot more compliant when you aren't setting us up to die.
- [X] Agree with its offer
-- [X] Give us the new girl's name and add her to our telepathic contacts list, we'll handle arrangements for meeting her when time permits.
[X] Head to Warehouse-kun for Science
- [X] Experiment on the ribbon
- [X] One more avenue of research
-- [X] Grief power plant. If we can generate electrical power safely and feed it back into the power grid without destroying or corrupting the power grid, we can get the electric company to cut us a check by spinning meters backwards. Then we don't have to steal from the Yakuza, even if they are jerks, and we have the money to do what we want, and it's clean energy since the only side effect is grief fed to incubators which overcomes entropy anyways! Incubators get grief. People get cheap power. You get a paycheck. Power company spends less on cost. Win-win-win-win! I suggest getting some big batteries or industrial capacitor banks, and then using grief on a microscopic level to forcibly rearrange the chemicals or electrons of a drained power storage device into a recharged state to use again. Or just a giant flywheel we spin up.
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Alright, a few things here. I feel you are making quite a few assumptions here. Like that Kyubey has a method of draining Grief from objects. He hasn't show any such ability, nor any reason to believe he has a method of doing so away from his body. The only things shown to be able to remove Grief from a Soul Gem were Grief Seeds (which was because they were Human Souls shattered and modified to hold copious amounts of Grief) and Grief Cubes (which were designed by Wraiths to prevent Human Emotion from trumping physics). Not only is the only time an Incubator being shown to be able to effect the Grief inside a Soul Gem dubiously canon (Kazumi Magica, which we just went though several updates detailing how dubious our knowledge of it is), Juubey was shown to not be able to truly effect the Grief, even though he was explicitly modified to do just that.

Second, your theory isn't taking into account the Witches contribution to the Incubator's Energy Harvesting Plan, as they are explicitly more interested in their contribution than the Puella Magi's side. In fact the whole first series was Kyubey being all eager for Madoka to Wish, not because she would make for a powerful Magical Girl, but that she would make for a powerful Witch. And the reason is because the Incubators believe Hope Cannot Surpass Despair, and they have all the reason to believe so due to the current system. Witches are Inherently Immortal, If we are to believe that Wally is Tart-chan, they can last for centuries gathering power. On top of that, even if a Witch does die, once it's Grief Seed is given enough Grief, It hatches to an even more powerful Witch. Turing every Greif Seed they get into a perpetual Engine. Which they get every time a Puella Magi cleanses themselves.

So they already have an exponential system, it is just it is a System based on getting as many Grief Seeds as possible, and repeatedly Hatching them into more and more powerful Witches to collect the massive amount of energy created at their Hatching.
 
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Yeah, I think there's a pretty decent chance that the girl in question is Kuroki-- bear in mind that Sayaka is also brand new, but has been pumping out enchantment trinkets en masse. It's certainly enough of a chance that we would be remiss not to investigate.

DB_Explorer said:
Umm MAX!!PARANOIA mode: what if its a set up by QB to get us ganked by stealth Meguca?? I mean he made that new girl with illusions wary of us.
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I'm not particularly worried about Kyubey leading us into an ambush, because the only magical girls that are capable of threatening us mano a mano (read: not getting instantly pulverized/vaporized) are those who are capable of catching us completely flat-footed and either stopping time or attacking us outside of our effective range. The fact that we're having this discussion now means that we're wary enough to not get caught completely flat-footed, solid-grief protections are trivial to whip up, and we are not even remotely as mean in combat as we're capable of being.
 
We should at least ask a name, maybe set aside SCIENCE time for this?
 
Always Happening said:
Yeah, I think there's a pretty decent chance that the girl in question is Kuroki-- bear in mind that Sayaka is also brand new, but has been pumping out enchantment trinkets en masse. It's certainly enough of a chance that we would be remiss not to investigate.
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I really doubt it's Kuroki, because enchantment is something that takes time, effort, and Seeds, while Kuroki is new and past her Witch out time.

I think she's supposed to be somewhat powerful, but the lack of Seeds should kill her before she gets anywhere near competent with enchantment. If she even knows or cares to practice enchantment.

I don't believe what Sayaka is doing is enchantment, per se. It seems to be an expression of her own powers; the gems she's making are only for her own use, while if she was making enchantments of her own magic, you'd expect those to be usable by anybody.
 
BlackoutSampler said:
Alright, a few things here. I feel you are making quite a few assumptions here. Like that Kyubey has a method of draining Grief from objects. He hasn't show any such ability, nor any reason to believe he has a method of doing so away from his body. The only things shown to be able to remove Grief from a Soul Gem were Grief Seeds (which was because they were Human Souls shattered and modified to hold copious amounts of Grief) and Grief Cubes (which were designed by Wraiths to prevent Human Emotion from trumping physics). Not only is the only time an Incubator being shown to be able to effect the Grief inside a Soul Gem dubiously canon (Kazumi Magica, which we just went though several updates detailing how dubious our knowledge of it is), Juubey was shown to not be able to truly effect the Grief, even though he was explicitly modified to do just that.

Second, your theory isn't taking into account the Witches contribution to the Incubator's Energy Harvesting Plan, as they are explicitly more interested in their contribution than the Puella Magi's side. In fact the whole first series was Kyubey being all eager for Madoka to Wish, not because she would make for a powerful Magical Girl, but that she would make for a powerful Witch. And the reason is because the Incubators believe Hope Cannot Surpass Despair, and they have all the reason to believe so due to the current system. Witches are Inherently Immortal, If we are to believe that Wally is Tart-chan, they can last for centuries gathering power. On top of that, even if a Witch does die, once it's Grief Seed is given enough Grief, It hatches to an even more powerful Witch. Turing ever Greif Seed they get into a perpetual Engine. Which they get every time a Puella Magi cleanses themselves.

So they already have an exponential system, it is just it is a System based on getting as many Grief Seeds as possible, and repeatedly Hatching them into more and more powerful Witches to collect the massive amount of energy created at their Hatching.
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Thank you for that explanation. I retract my vote.
 
The ribbon science we wanted to do is important and all, but it's not time sensitive. There's no reason that we can't do it later in the day. And frankly, I don't think that we can really test it without enough ribbon to reach outside our normal range, so we'll probably need Mami to work with us on it anyway.

Kyubey wanting to introduce us to someone seems suspicious as fuck, but I don't think we can afford to ignore this. It could be Kuroki, and even if it's not, it's still another magical girl that we'll want to help.

There's a bunch of ways that this could be a trap, certainly. The enchantment that Kyubey wants us to get could also be some sort of tracking or listening device that will let him spy on our activities in timestop or inside privacy fields. But it's definitely worth meeting the girl, at least. We could always just shove the enchantment in a sealed box and handle the visibility problem some other way. (We established in a past experiment that we could turn our grief invisible if we wanted, it would just feel witchy. Since regular humans can't feel that, that would solve the problem rather handily, wouldn't it?)


Onmur said:
I really doubt it's Kuroki, because enchantment is something that takes time, effort, and Seeds, while Kuroki is new and past her Witch out time.

I think she's supposed to be somewhat powerful, but the lack of Seeds should kill her before she gets anywhere near competent with enchantment. If she even knows or cares to practice enchantment.
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There are a lot of assumptions here. We don't actually know that much about Kuroki, beyond that her powers are "good for hiding" (we never did get around to asking Homura to clarify) and that Homura doesn't consider her particularly useful.


Firnagzen said:
"I wanted to get an early start," she defends half-heartedly, uncertainty flickering across her face. "Is- is that OK? I don't... the breakfast in bed is wonderful, Sabrina, and I don't want to waste if, and I'm looking forward to it, but I just need a little bit more time to cook. I- I'm sorry."

"I get it," you say with a reassuring smile as you tuck your chin on her shoulder. "I get it, Mami, you don't have to justify yourself. What are we cooking?"

"Ribollita," Mami says, biting her lip. "It's- it's alright? Really?"
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The breakfast in bed thing didn't seem to go over as well as I'd hoped. :(

Firnagzen said:
"Oh, by the way, Mami, can I get some ribbon from you?" you say as you reach for your bag, slinging it over your shoulder. You'd meant to do some testing yesterday, but you didn't have the time for it.
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We didn't share our idea with her? I thought that was part of the vote.
 
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