Puella Magi Adfligo Systema
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- Location
- The Surface Of A Hostile Planet
Well, for the Murasaki Shrine Maidens in particular, I think we should probably go in person anyhow, since as you mention we have an appointment with Kagoshima, and we'll literally need to fly over Kyoto to get there. Plus, they have a reputation for being kind and helping others in need, so we can probably get a list of other people who need our help from them.
That said, I absolutely agree that we need more delegation - Japan alone has 684 cities. There's basically zero chance of reaching that many groups in any reasonable timeframe without massive delegation.
Maybe it's just because I'm feeling peeved after having to deal with Adobe Creative Cloud, but I'm not really feeling the appeal of "Cleansing as a Service".
Yes, Clear Seeds require more buy-in, both from the final user and from Sabrina, but I'm incredibly uncomfortable with asking girls to put their faith in their future wellbeing into "dude, trust me, I'll provide this free service in perpetuity".
I think we've all been burned by free apps that promised that and then pivoted to monetization and selling data. So, yeah, I'm very much in favour of continuing to provide Clear Seeds.
What I could get behind is setting up a "nominal toll" of a grief seed, in exchange for a Clear Seed. (To be waived for people in dire need, of course.) That way our overall grief seed stockpile doesn't shrink over time, while still allowing for delegation. It also very transparently shows that we're only charging for "operating costs". Combined with building up a decent stockpile, which I think the upcoming witch purge of Mitakihara will accomplish, and I think we'll be fine on the delegation from.
The Phoenixian
The Glacier Witch
- Location
- My own little world
As far as Murasaki, goes my worry with visiting them is that I expect the bulk of time won't be the travel — we can book it when we really want — it will be the visit.
-------------------------------
RE: seeds:
For what it's worth, I'm not envisioning this as "fee for a service " temporarily or in otherwise, in any way, shape or form. The point here wouldn't be "pay us and we'll set you up with our services" it wouldn't even be "pay two seeds — partially used are perfectly fine, preferable even — and get one seed with four to eight to times the cleansing" it would be "we'd strongly prefer if you can give us what we need to replace our stock, and anything beyond that will allow us to expand the operation faster and help bounce back from anything going wrong."
Basically, the seed-swap offer we initially came up with in Sendai, but better.
Part of the point here is that, at every step, they get out more than they put in. Even if we just up and die at the worst possible moment, they're still in a better position than they were just before the last meeting, let alone when they started, because they've had, and still have, that much more time to hunt witches if all else fails.
I'll also note I framed that argument as "pay what you want, so we can expand" because, well, that's exactly what this is designed for: Rapid expansion. So that we can help people as fast as we can organize. The nominal toll would be enough to keep things stable, or slowly expand if clear seeds were a frequent possibility (I'll get to why they aren't) but the point of doing it this way is that we don't need to spend as much time acquiring grief seeds, and can focus on processing and delivering them. One of which can be delegated and grow with an organization, and the other which (usually) cannot. Not unless we find a lot of trustworthy grief controllers who we're willing to give clear seeds to.
As far as clear seeds fitting into the equation, this shouldn't be about whether we continue to offer clear seeds and if I gave that impression then I wrote something wrong. The problem is that I don't think that offer will be universally accepted.
I think the biggest problem with clear seeds this argument misses is that, quite simply, not everyone trusts clear seeds. For a lot of groups, like the Ishinomaki or the Hirano groups, it's a giant target on their backs that they don't want to deal with. For that matter, even Sendai was partially pushed into accepting by the fact that each team knew they other had taken the offer. Tokyo similarly has its own problems with them which we've speculated about, but not seen in detail yet.
The point with offering partially cleared seeds, then, is that they're a massive buffer, and so they fill a space between "clear seeds as nuclear reactors" and "direct cleansing." This is a niche that I expect is going to fit a lot of people's needs far better than the other two options will. It's just a question on where the balance lies between "enough extra cleanses to be meaningful" and "not so valuable as to be unsafe."
I don't foresee any reason to forego offering clear seeds every time, even if that means delegates going out with spares on them, but a system that includes partially emptied seeds means we'll be able to help people we otherwise wouldn't, and do so with less risk of having another Asunaro incident every few days. (Because reputation won't stop everyone, just the ones with more smarts than arrogance, and teenagers are known for their arrogance.)
Addendum: I can't see and glaring flaws in this post, but it's a little late and I know how blind I can be when I'm tired.
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Angrygenius
Professional Insomniac
- Location
- Florida
- Pronouns
- Him/He
This just reminds me of the fact that people live in different timezones. I read this, read the 'Last edited: Today at 9:45 AM' on the side, and instantly wondered what the hell you were talking about.
Also, on the topic of the system: I won't be getting into this discussion, as it involves decisions and discussions made years before I got on here, and I have neither the time nor the patience to look back all the way for that.
But I will put my own two cents in before I leave, and to quote an old El Paso Tacos commercial: "Why not both"?
I think something to consider is that trust and reputation requires time to develop. Right now I don't think we are at the point that we can delegate bringing new groups in to work with us. They are going to need to meet with us in person. I don't see anyway around that right now. Maybe after a month or so in-story time we might get to where we can delegate initial meetings, but we aren't there now.
- Location
- a Minecraft Rollercoaster
Well we already have 1 contact in the US, and I suspect once we get Tokyo on board we can at least start rapidly pivoting to the rest of Japan before quest end, if the Tokyo mega-group and leadership proves trustworthy. I suspect that any Tokyo leadership problems/conspiracies can be unraveled using diplomacy, because OOC, Firn will want to prevent another She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named flustercuck, and IC because Madoka Wished it so.
- Location
- The Surface Of A Hostile Planet
I'm totally fine with providing partially-cleansed seeds if a group requests such, but whenever possible I'd strongly prefer to provide a Clear Seed, since the difference in effort for Sabrina between a partial and total cleanse is extremely marginal, a Clear Seed provides significantly more security for a much longer period of time than a partially cleared seed, and logistically it's actually easier for us to provide a single Clear Seed to a group than it is to provide 3-4 partially cleared seeds (especially if we then need to repeat the delivery a few months later).
So I suppose the main difference here is in our metal models of how willing people will be to accept Clear Seeds - my intuition tells me that as our reputation increases, more and more testimonials come out confirming they really work, and more and more groups accept the offer (thus reducing the risk to any one of them), people will very quickly become willing to accept Clear Seeds.
So I suppose the main difference here is in our metal models of how willing people will be to accept Clear Seeds - my intuition tells me that as our reputation increases, more and more testimonials come out confirming they really work, and more and more groups accept the offer (thus reducing the risk to any one of them), people will very quickly become willing to accept Clear Seeds.
TJSomething
That's... that's impossible!
I just realized that, in character, every day of our time is the subjective equivalent of an entire year for the other girls, just by percentage of our lifespan that has passed. And time feeling like it passes faster is just a thing that happens as you get older in real life. Which means that, for completely mundane reasons, just a few hours could feel really long to Sabrina.
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AionVal
(Verified Figment)
- Location
- Beyond The Veil
We do know one magical hacker meguca. She made our fake ID and birth records and such.
Maybe get her to design a program for this? Might even create an AI to help with our plan to bring the Pax Magica to the world.
- Location
- Illinois
So this is about Tokyo, which is tomorrow IC, not now...
First off: giant collation of Tokyo-relevant material.
So, to be clear for everyone new here, the standing theory is that one of Meiji's members witched six months ago, they said as much at a meeting, Toshimichi kicked them out of it when everything went to shit because of the witchbomb and then mindwiped everyone else, and now Meiji is out to stick it to the establishment because -- at best guess -- their opinion is that Toshimichi (Or, hell! Maybe even the council in general) caused their friend's witchout via the static border system that Tokyo has and then swept it under the rug.
I think the odds that isn't the case are, like, nil. It fits far too well. And even supposing it isn't what happened, Meiji's friend is almost certainly still a witch because "getting killed" typically means a bodykill, which typically results in a witchout over time.
Now, the basic vanilla plan for Tokyo was, we'd go meet Toshimichi privately, and then we'd have a meeting with the council. And we'd sort of try to manage to inject cleansing into Tokyo without getting horribly entangled in Tokyo. Hitomi and Madoka had a bunch of words for us regarding that which we should rehash with them in the aftermath of Iowa because our political position is going to have shifted a hell of a lot after this, and we got a bunch of warnings from various people inside and outside Tokyo that Tokyo is a repressed tinderbox and etcetera, the vast majority of which I have quoted above -- but the basic plan was "Look/See via talking with Toshimichi and the Council."
I wanna do one thing differently in that sequence. I wanna go talk with Meiji before we talk with Toshimichi or the Council.
Why? As usual when it comes to Kai, a whole bunch of reasons.
We know the council is gridlocked and we know Meiji is voting to outright reject any help we might offer. We can guess that Meiji are probably primary antagonists in whatever Plot Firn has brewed up for Tokyo. We know that Meiji probably has had someone important to them witch and we've seen how people who've dealt with that can act and what they can want in Akiko, who didn't give a damn about anything we had to offer and then was all over the offer of clearing her girlfriend's grief seed.
To summarize: I think we can flip some of the primary antagonists of "Tokyo Arc" if we just go approach them before we show up at the council/Toshimichi, treat them with respect and basically pursue the dewitching angle in addition to our usual. Off the top of my head I'd run a vote that would look something like...
[] Establish that you're not here about your offer to the council.
-[] Establish that you're here about what happened six months ago, and that the impression you're under is that their missing member isn't dead dead.
--[] You don't have a completely clear picture of who did what at the time, but you don't feel you really need one. They want their friend back, among other things. You want them to be in a better situation, you want their friend to stop being subjected to torture, you want them to stop being in a position where they want to be an obstacle to you, and you'd like their help with any/all of the above and anything else they'd care to help you with. The question is whether they'd be interested in what you can offer.
---[] Negotiations: we're offering dewitching, seed-clearing, and in the extreme case eventually going to QB-land and freeing the imprisoned souls there. We're offering protection, patronage, the usual. And if they want out of the council, we'd need to hear about what they'd be interested in but it could be on the table. In return we're asking they not actively try to make things worse for anyone, etcetera: the usual.
----[] Refinements:
-----[] If we want to justify our dewitching: "So, the thing is, trying to turn a grief seed back into a soul gem without first emptying it of grief is insane. You'd be poking at the soul of someone not just drowning in their own grief but so far underwater they have literally turned into a witch and praying that it wouldn't end badly. Maybe it could be done if you could inject a weight of magic greater than the weight of the grief in the seed, but by my measurement -- comparing grief by volumes -- a grief seed contains grief equivalent to hundreds of thousands of soul gem cleansings. This is why I have clear seeds responding to infusions of hope-magic and everyone else has conglomerate witches: they can't dream of emptying a fraction of a seed and I can clear one in minutes."
-----[] If there's any call to justify our ability to protect them just namedrop Iowa and describe the alliance Fukushima has entered into with you.
----[] See where negotiations go, what they're willing to give for what they'd like to get, try to pick up on anything they want that wasn't already clear to us, etcetera. Listen, learn. We aren't sure we can reach a satisfying deal with them but we'd like to try.
... The big reason I want to do this before meeting Toshimichi and the council is that after we've met Meiji at the council they're already going to be locked into expecting us to be going to speak with them primarily because they're being an obstacle to us. They'll already be expecting that, don't get me wrong, but doing it after the council meeting, where by all indications Toshimichi will be pretty much on our side? It will form mental associations that will be hard to get them to do away with... to say nothing of how much time we might be able to save if we could get Meiji to not vote against us at the council, presumably.
I mean, there's a whole bunch else I could say... but that's the gist of it, and I don't think I've ever heard this particular suggestion from anyone else before, so before going super into specifics I'ma just put this down where everyone can think about it first.
First off: giant collation of Tokyo-relevant material.
So, to be clear for everyone new here, the standing theory is that one of Meiji's members witched six months ago, they said as much at a meeting, Toshimichi kicked them out of it when everything went to shit because of the witchbomb and then mindwiped everyone else, and now Meiji is out to stick it to the establishment because -- at best guess -- their opinion is that Toshimichi (Or, hell! Maybe even the council in general) caused their friend's witchout via the static border system that Tokyo has and then swept it under the rug.
I think the odds that isn't the case are, like, nil. It fits far too well. And even supposing it isn't what happened, Meiji's friend is almost certainly still a witch because "getting killed" typically means a bodykill, which typically results in a witchout over time.
Now, the basic vanilla plan for Tokyo was, we'd go meet Toshimichi privately, and then we'd have a meeting with the council. And we'd sort of try to manage to inject cleansing into Tokyo without getting horribly entangled in Tokyo. Hitomi and Madoka had a bunch of words for us regarding that which we should rehash with them in the aftermath of Iowa because our political position is going to have shifted a hell of a lot after this, and we got a bunch of warnings from various people inside and outside Tokyo that Tokyo is a repressed tinderbox and etcetera, the vast majority of which I have quoted above -- but the basic plan was "Look/See via talking with Toshimichi and the Council."
I wanna do one thing differently in that sequence. I wanna go talk with Meiji before we talk with Toshimichi or the Council.
Why? As usual when it comes to Kai, a whole bunch of reasons.
We know the council is gridlocked and we know Meiji is voting to outright reject any help we might offer. We can guess that Meiji are probably primary antagonists in whatever Plot Firn has brewed up for Tokyo. We know that Meiji probably has had someone important to them witch and we've seen how people who've dealt with that can act and what they can want in Akiko, who didn't give a damn about anything we had to offer and then was all over the offer of clearing her girlfriend's grief seed.
To summarize: I think we can flip some of the primary antagonists of "Tokyo Arc" if we just go approach them before we show up at the council/Toshimichi, treat them with respect and basically pursue the dewitching angle in addition to our usual. Off the top of my head I'd run a vote that would look something like...
[] Establish that you're not here about your offer to the council.
-[] Establish that you're here about what happened six months ago, and that the impression you're under is that their missing member isn't dead dead.
--[] You don't have a completely clear picture of who did what at the time, but you don't feel you really need one. They want their friend back, among other things. You want them to be in a better situation, you want their friend to stop being subjected to torture, you want them to stop being in a position where they want to be an obstacle to you, and you'd like their help with any/all of the above and anything else they'd care to help you with. The question is whether they'd be interested in what you can offer.
---[] Negotiations: we're offering dewitching, seed-clearing, and in the extreme case eventually going to QB-land and freeing the imprisoned souls there. We're offering protection, patronage, the usual. And if they want out of the council, we'd need to hear about what they'd be interested in but it could be on the table. In return we're asking they not actively try to make things worse for anyone, etcetera: the usual.
----[] Refinements:
-----[] If we want to justify our dewitching: "So, the thing is, trying to turn a grief seed back into a soul gem without first emptying it of grief is insane. You'd be poking at the soul of someone not just drowning in their own grief but so far underwater they have literally turned into a witch and praying that it wouldn't end badly. Maybe it could be done if you could inject a weight of magic greater than the weight of the grief in the seed, but by my measurement -- comparing grief by volumes -- a grief seed contains grief equivalent to hundreds of thousands of soul gem cleansings. This is why I have clear seeds responding to infusions of hope-magic and everyone else has conglomerate witches: they can't dream of emptying a fraction of a seed and I can clear one in minutes."
-----[] If there's any call to justify our ability to protect them just namedrop Iowa and describe the alliance Fukushima has entered into with you.
----[] See where negotiations go, what they're willing to give for what they'd like to get, try to pick up on anything they want that wasn't already clear to us, etcetera. Listen, learn. We aren't sure we can reach a satisfying deal with them but we'd like to try.
... The big reason I want to do this before meeting Toshimichi and the council is that after we've met Meiji at the council they're already going to be locked into expecting us to be going to speak with them primarily because they're being an obstacle to us. They'll already be expecting that, don't get me wrong, but doing it after the council meeting, where by all indications Toshimichi will be pretty much on our side? It will form mental associations that will be hard to get them to do away with... to say nothing of how much time we might be able to save if we could get Meiji to not vote against us at the council, presumably.
I mean, there's a whole bunch else I could say... but that's the gist of it, and I don't think I've ever heard this particular suggestion from anyone else before, so before going super into specifics I'ma just put this down where everyone can think about it first.
Angrygenius
Professional Insomniac
- Location
- Florida
- Pronouns
- Him/He
Wow. Way to think ahead.
I agree, we may want to speak with the Meiji group before our council meeting. However, we also want to keep it secret, as I'm sure the rest of the groups in Tokyo may become suspicious of us talking with the local rebellious mecuga group, and Toshimichi will definitely be suspicious of us and might attempt to mind wipe us if we show that we know too much.
I'm nearly certain such an attempt would fail and possibly backfire horribly due to the very nature of the mind of Sabrina
Good kitty *pats head and gives fish sticks*
- Location
- Illinois
Agonized noises of frustration over Iowa
Ahead is the only bloody place I can think right now @_@
Angrygenius
Professional Insomniac
- Location
- Florida
- Pronouns
- Him/He
I know, my friend, I know.
My only hope is that justice will be swift, clean, and
- Location
- The Surface Of A Hostile Planet
That never happened. At no point did we discuss dewitching Akiko's girlfriends seed with her, we don't even know if she has it.
JIMI94
Birdman with a cauldron on it's head
- Location
- The Garden of Earthly Delights
Sounds good. I do want to hear what they have to say, and since they are likely to be prickly about it, we are gonna have to baby them a bit. The Tokyo council head should be able to understand.
Edit: Yeah I was wondering whether that happened or not. If we can confirm a way to dewitch a magical girl, and Akiko is still non-verbal, asking her if she has her friends seed so we could bring her back would probably cause her to start talking again (amongst other very explosive responses).
There has gotta be a way to speed that process up, and I'm thinking it either involves a whole lotta meguca (inefficient), or figuring out what we need to do to replace grief/clear seeds in the cleansing process. We should probably check up on the one gal in custody after a week to see where she is at (or sooner if that seems too long), if nothing else than to see how long it takes by noting the rough percentage it seems to be filled.
Another thing would be when we find a bodyless soulgem, to try to fill one with hope (presuming it wouldn't take as long) to see if that allows them to reform their body (or allows them to manifest a body or whatever). Also we should try filling our own soulgem with hope, to see how it feels (or trying to put some into a volunteer's, if it has to be from one to another).
Edit: Yeah I was wondering whether that happened or not. If we can confirm a way to dewitch a magical girl, and Akiko is still non-verbal, asking her if she has her friends seed so we could bring her back would probably cause her to start talking again (amongst other very explosive responses).
There has gotta be a way to speed that process up, and I'm thinking it either involves a whole lotta meguca (inefficient), or figuring out what we need to do to replace grief/clear seeds in the cleansing process. We should probably check up on the one gal in custody after a week to see where she is at (or sooner if that seems too long), if nothing else than to see how long it takes by noting the rough percentage it seems to be filled.
Another thing would be when we find a bodyless soulgem, to try to fill one with hope (presuming it wouldn't take as long) to see if that allows them to reform their body (or allows them to manifest a body or whatever). Also we should try filling our own soulgem with hope, to see how it feels (or trying to put some into a volunteer's, if it has to be from one to another).
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Angrygenius
Professional Insomniac
- Location
- Florida
- Pronouns
- Him/He
Oh right. That was that insane chick from Asunaro, right?
- Location
- The Surface Of A Hostile Planet
As one of the primary crafters of the plan, I can more or less sum up the reasoning behind talking to the Chiyoda group before talking to the seditious elements (the Meiji and Sumida groups), since this exact argument did in fact come up at that time.
The main thrust is that we don't actually want to destabilize Tokyo, and if an alliance as powerful as ours goes around making backroom deals with people that Tochimichi full well knows want her kicked out, she'll be forced to treat us as an existential threat, since those are exactly the actions of someone who's trying to overthrow her in a coup.
The Phoenixian
The Glacier Witch
- Location
- My own little world
Problem with meeting Meiji in secret is that if we get caught doing it, it's even worse for us than if if we had done so openly.
If, for instance, Kyuubey sees us visit he need only drop that at the worst time possible to blow our plans out of the water. This seems reasonably probable — we know he checks in during emotional spikes, and a conversation between us and a bitter group is likely to involve such, — and that's discounting the possibility of someone else in town keeping an eye on the Meiji group and/or visitors in general.
- Location
- Illinois
Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnoooooo, but we absolutely did clear it and she absolutely did have it. It was really recently, though, compared to most of the Akiko stuff -- should've been the last cleansing trip.
Either that or it was some other seed.
*five minutes later*
Fuck
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JIMI94
Birdman with a cauldron on it's head
- Location
- The Garden of Earthly Delights
Ugh that's also true. Its probably easier to deal with one recalcitrant faction even if we have to whoop them then having to deal with an entire alliance that's PO'ed at us, whether that would be them being passive aggressive and recalcitrant at every turn, actively attacking us, or just being harder to cleanup after even if we kick them all to the curb.
Still, all bets are off once we have wraith cubes and can dewitch: most alliances are gonna break down when they can go to the nearest Tomoe Workstm wraith cube machine or go to a grief doctor to get their GF's extra bad everything day cleared out.
The head of Tokyo council's days as a major power broker are numbered no matter what, she just doesn't know it yet.
Still, all bets are off once we have wraith cubes and can dewitch: most alliances are gonna break down when they can go to the nearest Tomoe Workstm wraith cube machine or go to a grief doctor to get their GF's extra bad everything day cleared out.
The head of Tokyo council's days as a major power broker are numbered no matter what, she just doesn't know it yet.
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- Location
- Illinois
I mean I'm realigning right now and none of that is remotely what we want. We want to meet Toshimichi and sound her out, we want to go listen to the council and figure out who's who and what they sound like, and then... *intense mumbling*
JIMI94
Birdman with a cauldron on it's head
- Location
- The Garden of Earthly Delights
@Kaizuki We really need to get our science on, since busting the main issues of how to make reproducible grief clearing devices is paramount (and preferably a way to make them that other grief manipulators or even just oridinary meguca can emulate, even if they require an enchanted item from us plus some practice to get them the last mile to do so).
- Location
- Illinois
Paramount? Yes. Urgent? Not relative to a whole lot of other paramount stuff.
It's climbing the list, yeah, but it's just not-- it doesn't exactly match "make sure we defeat all existential threats".