So the miniaturisation of the Grief is awesome. Interesting to see the attempt at connecting to Mami's magic. Also interesting to see Kyuubey try and make a joke, it's like it thinks it's people.
So, about how much grief can we load into the air before it starts becoming visible again, @Firnagzen? After all, this is a question of optical physics, and Sabrina knows all the mundane knowledge that everyone who posts to the thread knows!
What this means is that we don't need to give more grief to Kyuubey for a long while, because we don't have to worry about visibility and it's useful for us. Situational awareness and combat utility combined.
What does Kyuubey want? The million dollar question, and one that leaves you scrambling for answers. You can construct easy scenarios in which Kyuubey wins. What if it expects you to deny the offer, and the girl in question Witches out for a lack of Grief Seeds? It'd be an easy way to smear your name.
Or what if the girl is willing and ready and waiting to attack you? Any threat you can see or sense coming, you can overcome, but magical stealth strong enough to evade your Grief sense is one of the things that might threaten you. It'd be unprecedented, though, on many levels; that Kyuubey would set up such an ambush, and that something could evade your senses like that.
"What's her name?" you ask, tone guarded. "Would she happen to be Kuroki Matsuko, by any chance?"
"Kuroki Matsuko is too new a magical girl to have developed strong enchantment without guidance," Kyuubey's head tilts to the side as it speaks. "You are travelling to Asunaro, are you not?"
"I am," you agree. "Right, first of all, I'm going to come back to Kuroki, but before that, tell me more about this girl you want me to meet. What's her name, what is she like, what specifically does she do, is she low on Grief Seeds, where is she, that kind of thing."
"Her name is Hideyoshi Nao," Kyuubey says. "She isn't in any pressing need of Grief Seeds, though like most she'd be more comfortable with a larger buffer of Seeds. I believe you would consider her to be a pleasant, if shy girl."
Not in any need of Grief Seeds, so that defuses some of your paranoia: it'd have been well within what you imagine to be its remit to set you up for apparently rejecting a cry for help. You pull your phone from your pocket and check the time as you listen carefully, soaking in Kyuubey's words. Clock's a-ticking. You hold up a hand, and Kyuubey pauses obligingly, tail flicking.
"OK, so, I'm not done talking to you yet," you say, frowning at Kyuubey. "But I do have places to be. Would you like to follow me out to the industrial district? I'm going to experiment with my powers, and you can observe. If you help, I'll... work on making my Grief invisible."
You kind of assume that barring doing your experiments in an interdiction bubble, the Incubator will be watching, anyway.
"That's acceptable," Kyuubey says, standing and rearing up on its hind legs. You sigh, and pick it up by the scruff of its neck as you summon Grief to yourself. Undoubtedly, you could simply let it perch on your shoulder, but you don't like the little alien.
"Go on, about this Hideyoshi Nao?" you say as you spare a sliver of focus to build a Grief platform for yourself.
"She is in Kamaishi City," Kyuubey explains. "Further north along the coast. It would be a detour for you on the way to Asunaro, should you so choose."
"I see," you say as you hop onto the platform and sit down, putting Kyuubey down beside you. "Would she be in any trouble if I don't travel there within the day or so? I'm fairly busy today."
"She would not," Kyuubey says, turning a circle and tucking its tail up to form a fluffy little circle. "She is not involved in any particular conflict save against Witches, nor does she have any Grief Seed issues, as I already said."
"Hmm," you muse as you lift the platform off, vectoring eastward. You squint backwards at the mass of Grief following behind you, and experimentally send it upwards above you so that it's less visible from the ground. "Her powers?"
"Invisibility," Kyuubey answers. "She is able to make herself undetectable by any means utilising the electromagnetic spectrum, including radar and lidar."
"Huh," you say, switching to telepathy to be heard over the rushing wind. The air is cool and beautifully crisp this early in the morning, and you bretahe deep. "Do lasers just pass right through her?"
"Yes, they do," Kyuubey confirms.
"That's cool," you say. "Would she have any reason to come into conflict with myself, or my friends?"
"Unless you deviate significantly from your behaviour to date, no," Kyuubey says.
"Right. That's good," you say, frowning out over the cityscape. The industrial district's coming up fast. "Will she have moved on to a different location or something that'd put her beyond my reach if I don't go today?"
"No," Kyuubey responds.
"So there are no time-critical issues that might occur?" you ask, tilting the platform forward a little as you dive for the warehouse.
"There are," Kyuubey says. "If you should delay for long enough, she may die of old age."
You give the alien a baleful stare. Is it joking? It can't be joking, it doesn't know how to joke. Then again, it might, if only from reading joke books. The mental image is disconcerting, to say the least.
"We are approaching the ground rather quickly," Kyuubey helpfully reminds you.
You sigh in annoyance and pull up, coasting to a smooth halt over Warehouse-kun. "I know."
Putting one hand on the side of your flight platform, you vault over and drop the few meters to the ground. Other hand holding your sling bag in place, you land on the sandy ground with a scrape.
Kyuubey leaps after you, limbs spread like a squirrel that forgot it wasn't a flying squirrel. In defiance of any good sense, it lands on its feet beside you, unblinking red eyes staring up at you.
"So I gotta ask," you say as you disassemble the platform with a wave of your hand, reclaiming the Grief and compressing it into spheres you bring down to eye level, an orbiting solar system of spheres. And more to come, as you draw the main bulk of your Grief towards yourself. "Were you trying to make a joke there there?"
"Yes," Kyuubey responds. "Humour is useful for defusing tension."
You groan, palming your face.
"I'm aware that saying so frequently defeats the point of the joke," Kyuubey supplies. "But it had already failed, had it not?"
"I give up," you mutter, combing your hair back into some semblance of order with your fingers. "Now, first thing I want to test is the precise limits of my range. Are you capable of making precision distance measurements?"
"Certainly," Kyuubey says.
"Alrighty, then... let me see," you say, looking for something clean to sit down on. With the warehouse in the state it is, though, you can't see anything that isn't rusty or overgrown with weeds, so you instead craft a seat made out of Grief to perch on. Humming quietly to yourself, you detach your Soul Gem from your collar, and hold it at arm's length from yourself.
"Hokay. I'll be right here, and as you can see, I'm holding my Soul Gem out. I'd like to know whether my radius of control is centered on my body or my Soul Gem," you say. With a bit of Grief, you grab Kyuubey by the scruff of its neck, lifting it into the air. "Will you help me by making measurements?"
"Certainly," Kyuubey repeats, and with that, you send it rocketing out of sight, dangling from the Grief. It makes for a pleasantly comical sight, the little white alien fluffball simply zipping away as if on an invisible wire.
You halt your Grief right at the very edge of your sphere of influence. "Alright. That's the limit of my range, in the direction of my Soul Gem. I'm going to describe a circle now."
"Proceed," Kyuubey says. You do just that, swinging Kyuubey around in a wide circle. There are a few buildings away, and you guide the Incubator around the buildings - you are trying to get help from it, after all. Does no good to splatter it over the wall right this moment.
You complete the circle, and bring the Incubator back. "Well?"
"Your range is centred on your Soul Gem," it says. "The deviations from circularity of the path I travelled were not significant on a nanometer scale, allowing for vertical motion."
"Huh," you say. "Right. Good to know. Not unexpected, but good to know. Right. Next test, I'm going to see how finely I can disperse my Grief. That should be good right? Because I might still have my wings or my platform, but at least I don't have that following me around." You gesture at the giant pile of basketball-sized spheres sitting at the corner of the warehouse where you'd stacked them.
"Yes, that would be good," Kyuubey agrees.
You nod, and exhale, focusing on the spheres. All you want to do is to... dissolve it. You don't want Grief gas. You want tiny, tiny nanoparticles of Grief, as small as you can make them, so small they're invisible to the naked eye, so small that you can turn it into an invisible fog spread out over the entire volume of your control radius.
The spheres crumble. Not all of them. You aren't so foolish as to forget about the items you've stored away in there, and especially not right in front of Kyuubey - but you break up everything else, dividing them again and again into finer and finer pieces. Centimeters, then millimeters, then micrometers... nanometers.
You shouldn't be surprised at how you're able to render the pile of Grief spheres into dense, smoky purple fog. And it's dense by definition - you haven't spread it out. You correct that with a wave of your hand, setting it all billowing into invisibility as you set it all flowing away.
And with the dispersal comes awareness in almost impossible fidelity. You'd always been able to sense Grief with absolute precision, and this is no different. But you can feel everything around you with a billion questing fingers, the walls, the roofs, the weeds, the movement of the wind, the cars disturbing your fog of Grief particles, the...
You blush, and pull the Grief away from the human beings you sense within your sphere of awareness - the few workers still in the area.
Well then.
You stand, looking around to see... nothing, really. You don't see anything out of the ordinary, though you can vaguely feel the Grief all round you with 'just' your puella magi senses, a vague sensation you can't pin down. About what you'd expectrd.
"Well then," you say, cocking a challenging eyebrow at Kyuubey. "How's that?"
"Helpful," Kyuubey states, tail lashing as it stares around it. "Reducing your aerial shadow to just yourself and your conveyance reduces the likelihood of your being sighted to a approximately a quarter of its original probability."
"Great," you say, reaching into your pocket for the ribbon Mami had gifted you. "Now, I'm going to do one last test."
Kyuubeys gives you a look clearly meant to be inquisitive, but you don't deign to answer it - this is a test with Mami's powers. And it might be irrational, but you feel somehow possessive of that, whatever the result might be.
With a flick of your wrist, you unfurl the ribbon to its full length, and catch the free end with bits of Grief coalesced instantly out of seemingly thin air. You grin.
You could get used to having a utility fog.
You spend a moment to tie a small rock to the free end of the ribbon, before setting it sailing out and away from you. You don't need a continuous connection from yourself all the way out to extend your range, right? All you'd need, logically, is to have the ribbon extending out of the sphere of your control... which you accomplish with the rock as a counterweight and a quick swing.
There. Now you have the ribbon crossing the border of your zone of control, lying on the roof of what you suspect is a factory. And so all you have to do is to try and channel your magic into it, right?
You exhale, and you push. You visualize your magic flowing down the ribbon, brilliant fire connected by Mami's magic, and carefully, carefully, you slide a tiny marble of Grief along the ribbon until it exits your sphere of control, still intact. Still under control.
"Sabrina?" Mami's voice sounds inside your mind.
You jerk, reacting to the urgency in her tone, and you release the magic isntantly. She sounds almost strangled, voice hitched. "Mami? What's wrong?"
"Are- did you do something? Something felt- really weird," Mami says.
Crap.
"Um, I did, I'm sorry, Mami," you say, glaring at Kyuubey. You know it's listening in. "Are you OK?"
Voting opens
[] What do you say to Mami?
[] One more thing before you need to go to Kasamino
- [] Go to school and find Mami - maybe she could excuse herself to go to the nurse?
- [] Try again, this time with Mami fore-warned
[] Go to Kasamino early
- [] To do...
[] Write-in (word count limit: 150 words)
[ ] Apologize to Mami - you wanted to see if her ribbons could conduct your magic. You should have forewarned her.
-[ ] Ask if she's feeling alright. If she is, ask if she'd be okay with testing it together in the afternoon.
[ ] Ask QB how his honesty policy interacts with jokes and figures of speech - would a magical girl die of old age, if she survived long enough? Wouldn't the aging stop at some point?
[ ] Practice maintaining your utility fog, seeing how much effort it takes and how much it impedes your concentration.
-[ ] Keep practicing it during the flight to Kazamino.
[ ] Greet Kyouko and Yuma. Ask for an honest appraisal of how noticeable/disturbing your new trick is to other magical girls senses.
-[ ] Ask for thoughts on Sayaka from them. Discuss payment and logistics.
-[ ] Mention that Mami's hosting visitors tonight and probably tommorow. First full training session Wednesday?
Actually, that Ribbon Science has reminded me of something interesting.While MECA GURRAN ZILLA LAGEN wasn't formed from both our magics, We did sorta do a combination attack using her ribbons to form the "main cannon".
We can probably combine our magics to form larger Greif shenanigans, or even speed up the creation of our larger attacks by building them together. (E.G. we run our magic along Mami's to form the Trio Fanalie Cannons faster [or the rapid fire model we were discussing earlier with her], or she can "framework" MECHA GURRAN ZILLA LAGEN and we can fill in the blanks with Greif so we can make it in combat instead of just for fun)
That said, such teamwork will obviously require Mami's consent/cooperation to pull off, and probably a level of choreography on par with the Soujus. So, rank up that Social Link to BEYOND MAXIMUM!
AND ON A NON-MAMI NOTE, we now have the ability of forming "menacing Kanji" out of thin air. We should do this next time we meet Sayaka, she looks like a JoJo fan.
Hm. So magical girls will notice if someone messes with their magic even if they're far away. Good to know.
Kyuubey is kinda useful, if unpleasant and worrying, to have around for science stuff. Also him joking is pretty weird, but the joke wasn't bad for someone who has no understanding of humour.
That's fanon, actually. We use the word "lich" to describe an MG, but the metaphor is not exact. Their bodies are still normal human bodies (even if they are enhanced by magic). The oldest magical girl that Nadia knows is 53. Note that Nadia had to look at her birth certificate to confirm Catherine Hamilton's age, so she probably is using magic to reduce the effects of aging. But she probably is not immortal and would (eventually) die from old age.
