High-speed chase, remember - blinding her for even a second or two is a major win. She has to slow down to heal, she could crash into something even in the second or two it takes her to restore her sight, she can't aim while she's blind and we'll have brief moment in which we can move safely. Even the simple distraction of bringing up healing magic means she's not doing something else with her attention, like paying attention to how she's being herded or returning fire.
That probably works. Once. Twice, with extra distractions.

We need to wait for reinforcements before engaging. Then use the blinding trick, once we got people to cover for us in case this is a trap, so we don't get ganked.

Hey, you know, if we really need to distract someone(s) in a fight without injuring people, we can use a bit of grief to produce something akin to a microwave area denial weapon's effect.
Problem is that, if you're trying to not hurt people as collateral, you're probably not hurting a meguca enough to actually stop her for more than a few seconds.

And this particular meguca seems to have anti magic. That limits how useful any magic effect is, specially if they need to be maintained.

@Vebyast
chibi crew-served gun
You've still got a suggestion for Mami to take 3-5 minutes making a Chibi mid chase.
 
Okay, the best way to deal with this is to combine our Grief Fog into a number of decoy MOFs to give her many targets to shoot at.

Also, once we get within Grief Control range, we should immediately snatch her Soul Gem. We cannot risk her getting away. If we want to question her, we can just revive her at a more convenient time and place as we desire.

[] Pursue
-[] Form some small grief marbles well outside of your MOF, and shoot some dazzling, low-intensity lasers at her. Enough to blind, not to burn.
-[] Telepathy everyone about your situation. Advise most of them to remain on their search patterns--this might be a distraction, or not the thief.
-[] Fly low, using buildings as cover where possible.
-[] Create a bunch of decoy MOFs out of your Griief Fog. They don't have to be perfect matches, just convincing decoys from a distance. Fly them and your own MOF in evasive patterns while maintaining the chase. If you have the Grief to spare, make more of the Grief Fog dense enough to act as a smoke screen of sorts to make it even harder for her to aim at you.
-[] As soon as you come into range, yank her soul gem and take it past the 100-meter limit.
 
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Any consideration that Mami might want to chase on foot?

She'll probably be more comfortable doing her own jumping around than sitting with us. Nobody really likes bunkering in our MoF when there's a fight going on.
 
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Is she going to stop using her eyes to see after that?
As with any magic, meguca can sense something happening. Before it happens.

The first one will be a surprise; the second time she'll counter. Cover her eyes while getting out of dodge, making the effect negligible; antimagic our light source; just avoid places where we can get her with Grief light; antimagic us when she feels the magic build up, since we'll be open to attack...
 
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You've still got a suggestion for Mami to take 3-5 minutes making a Chibi mid chase.
I didn't think it took that long. In fact, I distinctly remember Mami throwing one out while we were momentarily distracted?
Problem is that, if you're trying to not hurt people as collateral, you're probably not hurting a meguca enough to actually stop her for more than a few seconds.
Hurt != Distract. The ability to turn off pain doesn't appear to be particularly wide-spread, nor as effective as when Sayaka does it in canon. And modern less-lethal weapons can cause a lot of pain with very little real damage. Burns hurt so much that pain management strategies for major burns include induced comas. Heating someone's skin up to 110F cranks almost literally every heat-sensing neuron in the entire body to maximum usually without even matching the damage of a sunburn.
The first one will be a surprise; the second time she'll counter. Cover her eyes while getting out of dodge, making the effect negligible; antimagic our light source; just avoid places where we can get her with Grief light...
Can't dodge, we have an area of effect of "most of the street", zero servo latency, and likely near-perfect target localization. We can keep the laser up continuously, or just pulse it at random intervals around a hertz, so any "covering her eyes" she could do would leave her blind anyway. We don't have any emitters for her to shoot down, since we'd be lasing or microwaving from individual grief particles in our utility fog. And she wouldn't be able to hit our emitters in the first place, since she'd be A) blind and B) trying to hit a tiny black sphere of grief on a black sky.

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antimagic us when she feels the magic build up, since we'll be open to attack...
...eh? 100 meter radius, we're going to have multiple buildings between us when we shoot. And there's no "magic building up", Prima Luce is pure-physics and dazzler-intensity shots or microwave emitters would be the same.
 
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Any consideration that Mami might want to chase on foot?

She'll probably be more comfortable doing her own jumping around than sitting with us. Nobody really likes bunkering in our MoF when there's a fight going on.
When things are serious, practicality trumps personal preference. Besides, are you seriously suggesting that Mami wouldn't want to be by Sabrina's side?
 
I didn't think it took that long. In fact, I distinctly remember Mami throwing one out while we were momentarily distracted?
She made one once and it took her minutes.

And modern less-lethal weapons can cause a lot of pain with very little real damage. Burns hurt so much that pain management strategies for major burns include induced comas. Heating someone's skin up to 110F cranks almost literally every heat-sensing neuron in the entire body to maximum usually without even matching the damage of a sunburn.

Can't dodge, we have an area of effect of "most of the street" and an electronically-steered phased array. We can keep the laser up continuously, or just pulse it at random intervals around a hertz, so any "covering her eyes" she could do would leave her totally blind her anyway. We don't have any emitters for her to shoot down, since we'd be lasing or microwaving from individual grief particles in our utility fog. And she wouldn't be able to hit our emitters anyway, since she's be blind and attempting to hit a black sphere of grief on a black sky.
I am really concerned about a few things here.

One is your description of how much damage we can do with Grief light, followed by implying we'd shoot in the streets. There's people there.

She can dodge. We're not gonna throw lasers willy nilly in the city, at strenghts high enough to impair a magical girl.

I am also concerned that your post seems overly optimistic about how useful our gizmos might be. Consider the opponent is a magical girl, one (or several) whose capabilities we do not know. If she simply closes her eyes and snipes us by instinct the second time we try to blind her, I wouldn't be surprised. I know Mami's not an average guca, but she certainly would.

We're not that good, not that agile in combat. Almost literally everyone else reacts faster than us, with more precision than us, with better magical instinct than us. We usually win because we've got Mami at our side.

I expect this to not be easy. I expect this meguca to either be a random who attacked us out of fear, or to be very strong, to probably have back up, and probably have attacked us because she's got some sort of plan cooked.

attempting to hit a black sphere of grief on a black sky.
Magic. She can focus her attack where the magic comes from. She won't need to see for that.

EDIT: I'm not trying to bring down discussion about possible vectors of attack. I want people to consider the fight from the other side. How can our opponents foil our attempts and win.

I also want to maximize the use we'll get out of our esoteric attacks. Just like we did with Kirika and her Anti Magic back then, blinding our opponents is best done when we're ready to pounce and win, then and there.
 
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Onmur, Prima Luce doesn't have any noticable magical signature beyond normal grief marbles; it's pure physics. She'd be much better served trying to hit the MOF, since it's a bigger target and the signature it emits, if any, would be indistinguishable from a grief marble -- which is why I suggested we drop Mami off and make decoys.

As far as collateral goes, that's the whole reason we're focused on non-lethal weapons. Worst case scenario is a couple of people get bit by the Ouchy Beam and have a bad day. It's not at an intensity or a frequency that will hurt them permenantly or even for the next few hours. We're just trying to knock Forgetbeam off her game so we can swoop in and capture her (probably via gemming). If we were really trying to subdue her at range with no thought of collateral, we'd use 'lethal' lasers, since those would shrek her body and render her unable to move until we deign to heal her, instead of just blitzing her cranium and making it hard to think. With Soul Gems being shiny and transparent I can't imagine a (visible spectrum) laser would easily destroy it.
 
One is your description of how much damage we can do with Grief light, followed by implying we'd shoot in the streets. There's people there.
There's people there that would be blinking big purple spots out of their eyes for a while. Above, I posted the effects of hitting someone with a heavy weapons-grade laser. Did you notice that the radius for flash-blindness was 500 meters while the radius for permanent damage was only 50? Did you notice that I was describing a laser with as much energy in it as a ton of TNT? Flash-bangs can fuck up your hearing if you're unlucky, and they're happy to start fires, but they're actually very safe for vision.

If she can move fast enough to aim-dodge, she's fast enough that we can't chase her. If she can't move fast enough to lose us, she can't move fast enough to dodge.
If she simply closes her eyes and snipes us by instinct the second time we try to blind her, I wouldn't be surprised. I know Mami's not an average guca, but she certainly would.
I think that you're massively overestimating the average meguca. Sayaka against Kyouko, turning on her invisibility - Kyouko was able to get a general sense of what was about to happen, but when she tried to go on the offensive, she had to wait for Sayaka to approach and then attack the general area that she thought Sayaka was in. We're going to be three or five hundred meters away, conducting violent evasive maneuvers, making no sound, with multiple active grief decoys that look exactly like us and emit the same signature on grief senses. Mami might be able to make that shot. Anyone else might as well not even try. You think that Kazumi or Kirika could make that shot? Or any of the meguca we fought in our other engagements?

I disagree completely with your idea that we're not that agile in combat. You remember how Sabrina used to carry around a pile of spheres? Maneuvering them around buildings and such fast enough to keep up with moving vehicles, the mobile oppression fortress, combat-speed roof-hopping, and wing-powered flight? MOF can do all of those things too. Limited slightly more, since it's carrying squishy passengers, but since any change of change of course we'd do with the MOF would necessarily be replicated if we were following the trajectory by wall-hopping or roof-hopping, it's likely that the MOF would actually have better agility while remaining inside the same acceleration bounds.

Magic. She can focus her attack where the magic comes from. She won't need to see for that.
Our grief doesn't have a magical signature. It has a grief signature. The attacks we're using are nonmagical, so the only signature is from the grief that we're using to produce the physics. And grief only produces localizeable signatures when it's active or hax, neither of which is used for Prima Luce or similarly pure-physics attacks. On top of that, why would we only be producing one grief signature for her to conveniently shoot at? Just turn some of the fog active and she'll have nothing to shoot at with her magical or grief senses except an opaque sphere 100m in radius.
 
There's people there that would be blinking big purple spots out of their eyes for a while. Above, I posted the effects of hitting someone with a heavy weapons-grade laser. Did you notice that the radius for flash-blindness was 500 meters while the radius for permanent damage was only 50? Did you notice that I was describing a laser with as much energy in it as a ton of TNT? Flash-bangs can fuck up your hearing if you're unlucky, and they're happy to start fires, but they're actually very safe for vision.

If she can move fast enough to aim-dodge, she's fast enough that we can't chase her. If she can't move fast enough to lose us, she can't move fast enough to dodge.

I think that you're massively overestimating the average meguca. Sayaka against Kyouko, turning on her invisibility - Kyouko was able to get a general sense of what was about to happen, but when she tried to go on the offensive, she had to wait for Sayaka to approach and then attack the general area that she thought Sayaka was in. We're going to be three or five hundred meters away, conducting violent evasive maneuvers, making no sound, with multiple active grief decoys that look exactly like us and emit the same signature on grief senses. Mami might be able to make that shot. Anyone else might as well not even try. You think that Kazumi or Kirika could make that shot? Or any of the meguca we fought in our other engagements?

I disagree completely with your idea that we're not that agile in combat. You remember how Sabrina used to carry around a pile of spheres? Maneuvering them around buildings and such fast enough to keep up with moving vehicles, the mobile oppression fortress, combat-speed roof-hopping, and wing-powered flight? MOF can do all of those things too. Limited slightly more, since it's carrying squishy passengers, but since any change of change of course we'd do with the MOF would necessarily be replicated if we were following the trajectory by wall-hopping or roof-hopping, it's likely that the MOF would actually have better agility while remaining inside the same acceleration bounds.


Our grief doesn't have a magical signature. It has a grief signature. The attacks we're using are nonmagical, so the only signature is from the grief that we're using to produce the physics. And grief only produces localizeable signatures when it's active or hax, neither of which is used for Prima Luce or similarly pure-physics attacks. On top of that, why would we only be producing one grief signature for her to conveniently shoot at? Just turn some of the fog active and she'll have nothing to shoot at with her magical or grief senses except an opaque sphere 100m in radius.
I only skimmed your quotes up there. I'm busy with my own homework.

To try and be concise, I expect us to close in. Unless we close in enough that she's in our sensing range, she'll get away. No way we'll be 300-500m away during this.

Sabrina always did wonders with random solid Grief control. When it comes down to a fight, she can help in multiple engagements at once, but gets outskilled in plenty of areas, because she hasn't had the time and practice to really get those preternatural senses most meguca have.

I do not expect this meguca to be your average meguca. Not at all, why would you go in even considering that? I expect her to be experienced, to have a plan, and possibly back up. If she's the thief, she was at the very least patient enough to wait and attack at the right time. The fact we're getting attacked now could mean our situation is a lot worse than it appears to be.

Meguca sense things. High end is Mami shooting a meguca before she was even visible. That's straight up magical prescience. If our opponent right now is not on that level, we won't even need magic gizmos to win. Mami is right there.
 
Onmur, that's precisely our point. Either we distract her with flashing lights and acute burning sensations while we rush in and drop Mami on top of her, or she's skilled enough to escape anyway.

I also don't know why you assume she's at Mami's tier of skill, considering Mami Motherfucking Tomoe is internationally known. One might suspect we'd have heard of her exploits while we were living in Mitakihara, right next door, with such a badass on our doorstep. But even assuming we didn't and she is, we still have Mami Motherfucking Tomoe with us, which means Lazerteam is going to have to contend with Mami Motherfucking Tomoe, the girl who beat Homura in her own witch barrier, AND the Mother of All Distractions.

E: Oh, and she has to do that before Sayaka and Saki arrive, both of whom are pretty badass in their own right, even if they don't compare to Magical Seal Team Six.
 
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f our opponent right now is not on that level, we won't even need magic gizmos to win. Mami is right there.
Are you seriously saying that we should just hand the entire fight off to Mami without even trying to contribute? What the fuck is wrong with using our magic gizmos to make her life easier!? Yeah, Mami could do it herself. Doesn't fucking mean we don't try to help.
To try and be concise, I expect us to close in. Unless we close in enough that she's in our sensing range, she'll get away. No way we'll be 300-500m away during this.
Fine! Then we'll be 150 meters away, well within grief sensing range, presenting multiple threats that're violently-evading one-centimeter matte-black blobs against a night sky, and she'll be blind the entire time! Oh, and that's not even counting the part where anything she manages to hit will be immediately replaced, because she's only hitting emitters while we are behind three buildings, because our grief radius is spherical and 30 degrees above the horizon gives us more than enough clearance to shoot at her over the tops of the buildings we're hiding behind. Remind me again how you expect her to hit anything useful?

You're saying with one breath that she's not on Mami's level and then with the next that we should expect her to do things that would put Mami to shame. No.

edit: Seriously, that'd be a solid performance by Mami with her eyes open in broad daylight - shooting actively-evading insects at 150m is probably on par with shooting bullets out of the air, not even joking - and you're expecting this random girl off the street to do it while fucking blind?
 
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Are you seriously saying that we should just hand the entire fight off to Mami without even trying to contribute? What the fuck is wrong with using our magic gizmos to make her life easier!? Yeah, Mami could do it herself. Doesn't fucking mean we don't try to help.

Fine! Then we'll be 150 meters away, well within grief sensing range, presenting multiple threats that're violently-evading one-centimeter matte-black blobs against a night sky, and she'll be blind the entire time! Oh, and that's not even counting the part where anything she manages to hit will be immediately replaced, because she's only hitting emitters while we are behind three buildings, because our grief radius is spherical and 30 degrees above the horizon gives us more than enough clearance to shoot at her over the tops of the buildings we're hiding behind. Remind me again how you expect her to hit anything useful?

You're saying with one breath that she's not on Mami's level and then with the next that we should expect her to do things that would put Mami to shame. No.
I'm saying these gizmos will contribute, but nearly as I feel you feel they will.

In the end, it's an annoyance to an experienced meguca. She'll deal.

You're giving an impression of how the chase will go that I feel is way, way too confident in our abilities, and demeaning of our opponent.

(Tangentially, I don't expect her to be at Mami's level. But some of her skills could be comparable. Since she's sniping us before we even spotted her, it wouldn't surprise me if she couldn't make up for our attempts to blind her.)
 
Has it occurred to anyone that maybe she found us because we were leisurely flying around in the air? Maybe it's not as dark in the city as we think or maybe she's been out long enough for her eyes to adjust. Or, you know, I've heard of weirder magic bullshit than full-colour eagle-eye night vision.
 
Veb, please amplify your relaxed state. I know Onmur's being a dork right now, but he's being a calm dork. Shouting only makes you look foolish, and the only thing looking like a volatile fool will get you is threadbanned. Or the presidency.

I'm saying these gizmos will contribute, but nearly as I feel you feel they will.

In the end, it's an annoyance to an experienced meguca. She'll deal.

You're giving an impression of how the chase will go that I feel is way, way too confident in our abilities, and demeaning of our opponent.
She may deal, but that doesn't make it not worthwhile to do, if only to show solidarity and make things a bit easier for the Mumi. The easier Mami has it, the better chance she has of subduing the hostile 'Guca before Sayaka even gets here, which means we can keep Sayaka and Saki safer, and possibly pass off interrogation to them. It also keeps Mami safer - if there's an ambush, a wide-beam blinding pulser is going to make that quite a bit harder to pull off, especially since Mami's already badass enough to stand a chance in a 1v4 ambush situation.

(Tangentially, I don't expect her to be at Mami's level. But some of her skills could be comparable. Since she's sniping us before we even spotted her, it wouldn't surprise me if she couldn't make up for our attempts to blind her.)[/QUOTE]
Actually, we know her skill at shooting isn't comparable, because she was aiming at a 2 meter or less target in open sky, which wasn't dodging at all, and missed. Mami wouldn't have done that, I'm certain. Most human snipers could hit those odds, even factoring in active camouflage.

As for making up for our attempts to blind her, as has been pointed out before, that will cost her some rather valuable concentration at this time. Remember, she's up against the perfect Blitzkreig - even if we only blind her for half a second, she's already lost immediate track of two hostiles and has to find them again (assuming magic, that's another quarter second), re-evaluate their paths and the relation of those to her plan (another quarter second), and from there continue trying to escape the two magical girls seeking her out (not to mention the two she doesn't know about coming in at an oblique angle).

There's really no reason at all not to do it at least once. The worst case scenario is that it just doesn't work because she has some really neato sunglasses and Intant Aloe Vera Just Add Sunshine.
 
Actually, we know her skill at shooting isn't comparable, because she was aiming at a 2 meter or less target in open sky, which wasn't dodging at all, and missed.
She only missed because of a panicked split second dodge on Sabrina's part-
And that's why you notice when Mami stiffens and-

"Dive!"

Panic screams through you. The platform drops, snatching at your stomach.

Just in time.

A crimson beam scorches above your head.
 
[x] Standing vote: Keep your team and allies updated
[x] Standing vote: Keep an eye out for traps or enemy reinforcements

[X] Notify everyone
-[x] Ask for small reinforcement - Sayaka, Saki - and coordinate pincer.
-[x] Note possibility of decoy, trap, or enemy team
-[x] Describe assailant, ask for information

[x] Hail your opponent. Identify yourself, ask her to stop, find out what she wants, etc.

[x] Pursuit.
-[x] Survival - MOF+Fog should enable nap-of-the-earth flying. Maintain distance in case it's a trap. Decoy MOFs, play with the intensity of the utility fog. Grab any metal scrap you fly over and forge a non-magical shield.
-[x] Track - hose her down with trackable ribbon fragments, fast-setup grief sensors, magic sense, mark one eyeball, Mami probably has some tricks or is just that good, etc
-[x] Harass - Flash-blind with lasers, microwave and coherent-acoustic emitters to distract, tangle bullets (mami rifle or grief launching), etc
-[x] Set up - Take an opportunity (dazzled, stunned, she goes inside and we can fly right over her) to get front and push the chase in another direction. Don't let her lead you around by the nose.

Chibis out, since apparently those take longer than I thought they did. Remove some redundancies. Move the hail up closer to the front in case this is just someone thinking we're a witch.
 
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[X]Vebyast

I was gonna make a vote, but Veb has said most of the changes I would want to make.

That said, there is something very important to add here, tactics wise, when it comes to fighting antimagic: Antimagic can disrupt our control of solid grief structures, but it doesn't appear to disrupt the structures themselves. So it may be worth considering that nets, walls, and other macro-scale structures could come in quite useful here.

More than that, we have a lot of grief with with to make such structures and if our control over any particular structure fails we can make something to carry or manipulate it.

Conversely, I'm rather worried at this point about environmental contamination: Every blast that hits our fog will make us lose control over that section of it. At which point, it is presumably subject to air currents and the possibility of falling behind in the middle of a chase scene.
 
I'm not sure we've actually lost control of our grief. We've lost perception, but the choice of "numb but still there" makes me think more than our control is mostly unimpaired and we're mostly just going to be clumsy with it.
 
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