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Puella Magi Adfligo Systema

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Wyrd said:
Just to note: We found one approach to making infinite Grief didn't work. That doesn't mean we can't manufacture it in vast quantities some other way, should we decide there is a need for that. Asking Kyuubey what it does with the Grief girls give it is rather important for knowing if we even want to try intentionally manufacturing it.
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Yea at this point we know that magic generates grief

And Witches (presumably) get their grief from eating people, (but this is an assumption)

We don't actually know much about it

Actually, we don't know much about magic in general.

And by "don't know much" I mean we only know the general outlines that were given from material cannon to PMAS. We don't know the specifics that the GM is using. Ie We know that magical girls turn into Witches but . . . You know that sandstorm Witch that we fought recently that was "all familiars?" How does *that* manage to happen? Like, is her body just distributed in a bunch of separate pieces, and killing enough is simply damaging enough of her to count as "death" and thus a Grief Seed drop? But can some of those pieces remain and grow back up like standard Familiars?

Anyway, yea I'm still of the opinion that Kuybey should be interrogated. The question is *when*

Edit:

And the specifics likely matter with de-witching. Let's use Hildegrade for this thought-experiment. So, Witches do depend on the personality of their progenitor when they build themselves up, so we can assume that *something* of Hildegrade resembles her MG, albeit extremely warped. But we don't know exactly how much, and if that can be translated back into a personality/soul. Because if we *can* dewitch but no memories are retained, did we really save that person or did we just make a new one? And we don't know if Hildegrade was born straight from a MG or if she grew up from a familiar. If the later, do we dewitch *all* the copies? If we do, we have to worry about a bunch of identical copies of an individual just kinda existing.

But, thinking about it, a lot of these questions are "counting your chickens before they hatch." In actuality, we probably shouldn't worry about the potential complications of dewitching before we can actually do it. I still think it's good to acknowledge them, but with the understanding that they don't really effect our plans all that much.
 
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Arum60 said:
Because if we *can* dewitch but no memories are retained, did we really save that person or did we just make a new one?
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Kazumi 13 would suggest that gets you a new person.
Arum60 said:
And we don't know if Hildegrade was born straight from a MG or if she grew up from a familiar. If the later, do we dewitch *all* the copies? If we do, we have to worry about a bunch of identical copies of an individual just kinda existing.
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I would argue that retaining a given individual's uniqueness is not a sufficient good to justify leaving a Witch in a state of literally inhuman suffering just to spare the individual needing to deal with having a fork of themselves running around.

That said, fusion magics may well open up options for those forks to merge if they so choose. Given Niko's wish, that might be a subject best pursued by a different research team.
 
Sayaka knows about Witches and has a copy of Umika's mind-reading power, so it should be easy to find out if they retain their memories by inviting her to our next SCIENCE! session. Which we should do anyway, because I still feel like the fact that her power jewels are basically miniature Soul Gems is a key piece of the puzzle, and I want to see if she can copy powers from a Clear Seed.
 
DataSnake said:
Sayaka knows about Witches and has a copy of Umika's mind-reading power, so it should be easy to find out if they retain their memories by inviting her to our next SCIENCE! session. Which we should do anyway, because I still feel like the fact that her power jewels are basically miniature Soul Gems is a key piece of the puzzle, and I want to see if she can copy powers from a Clear Seed.
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Also because she explicitly wants to be involved in our de-witching research, and it would be really rude to snub her like that.
 
Nerevar said:
I would argue that retaining a given individual's uniqueness is not a sufficient good to justify leaving a Witch in a state of literally inhuman suffering just to spare the individual needing to deal with having a fork of themselves running around.
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I agree

Plus, one can argue that a strict definition of the "self" doesn't really exist, or at the very least will become extremely vague as technology increases. Say, doing "ship o' Theseus" style enhancements and mind uploading. So why should we worry too much about it now?

Nerevar said:
Also because she explicitly wants to be involved in our de-witching research, and it would be really rude to snub her like that.
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Fair! On the Science! list she should go!
 
Lopezelpesado said:
I mean, manipulating grief causes our soulgem to darken, which then we can pull out for more grief... So we already have infinite grief sort of.
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We've tried that and found it didn't generate enough Grief to bribe Kyuubey. There are still lots of ways to make Grief that we haven't tried, including literally trying to make our Grief produce more Grief, using our control over it, rather than trying the previous experiment of using a mathematical model to say we already had an infinite amount. A system which drains all Grief directly to the incubators at the moment it is generated would enable mass production of meguca to generate a constant, renewable flow of magic, generating lots and lots of energy. For one thing, that would allow Madoka to make a wish, giving her the kinds of power that in canon turned her immediately into a Witch without the horrible result of Witching, so she would be constantly generating nearly the same amount of Grief just over more time.

Arum60 said:
Yea at this point we know that magic generates grief

And Witches (presumably) get their grief from eating people, (but this is an assumption)

We don't actually know much about it

Actually, we don't know much about magic in general.

And by "don't know much" I mean we only know the general outlines that were given from material cannon to PMAS. We don't know the specifics that the GM is using. Ie We know that magical girls turn into Witches but . . . You know that sandstorm Witch that we fought recently that was "all familiars?" How does *that* manage to happen? Like, is her body just distributed in a bunch of separate pieces, and killing enough is simply damaging enough of her to count as "death" and thus a Grief Seed drop? But can some of those pieces remain and grow back up like standard Familiars?

Anyway, yea I'm still of the opinion that Kuybey should be interrogated. The question is *when*

Edit:

And the specifics likely matter with de-witching. Let's use Hildegrade for this thought-experiment. So, Witches do depend on the personality of their progenitor when they build themselves up, so we can assume that *something* of Hildegrade resembles her MG, albeit extremely warped. But we don't know exactly how much, and if that can be translated back into a personality/soul. Because if we *can* dewitch but no memories are retained, did we really save that person or did we just make a new one? And we don't know if Hildegrade was born straight from a MG or if she grew up from a familiar. If the later, do we dewitch *all* the copies? If we do, we have to worry about a bunch of identical copies of an individual just kinda existing.

But, thinking about it, a lot of these questions are "counting your chickens before they hatch." In actuality, we probably shouldn't worry about the potential complications of dewitching before we can actually do it. I still think it's good to acknowledge them, but with the understanding that they don't really effect our plans all that much.
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There's a reason we've done so many Science! sessions and still the thread, most definitely including me, believes that we've done nowhere near to enough of it. As important as helping the girls around us is, and despite the added workforce letting us expand our investigations, it is Science! that is most likely to lead us to something that can be applied globally, a new, vastly better system.

Arum60 said:
But, thinking about it, a lot of these questions are "counting your chickens before they hatch." In actuality, we probably shouldn't worry about the potential complications of dewitching before we can actually do it. I still think it's good to acknowledge them, but with the understanding that they don't really effect our plans all th
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This is a problem I try to bring up regularly, that we have to keep our future planned experiments fluid, as there's no telling how many of them the next session will render moot. If Familiars grown into Witches can be de-Witched at all, then they definitely should be, regardless of other concerns about individual rights of people not to have other versions of themselves exist. Creating Familiar based Witches for that purpose is where I'd draw the line for going too far.

If Familiar born Witches can't be de-Witched, then we have a source we can use to manufacture Clear Seeds without the moral implications of leaving people in eternal suffering, so long as we don't go around letting Familiars murder people just so we can harvest their neo Witches for making more Clear Seeds.

DataSnake said:
Sayaka knows about Witches and has a copy of Umika's mind-reading power, so it should be easy to find out if they retain their memories by inviting her to our next SCIENCE! session. Which we should do anyway, because I still feel like the fact that her power jewels are basically miniature Soul Gems is a key piece of the puzzle, and I want to see if she can copy powers from a Clear Seed.
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I have not seen even one post, so far as I can recall, of somebody opposing getting more people in on our research. The biggest hurdle to Sayaka participating is that, unlike Niko, she still attends school, and we've had a tendency to prioritize other things when we had the full Mitakihara cast available. Too much to do, not enough time.
 
Wyrd said:
There's a reason we've done so many Science! sessions and still the thread, most definitely including me, believes that we've done nowhere near to enough of it. As important as helping the girls around us is, and despite the added workforce letting us expand our investigations, it is Science! that is most likely to lead us to something that can be applied globally, a new, vastly better system.
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It doesn't help that we didn't understand the trances during our early science sessions, and as a result ended up wasting a lot of time on what we thought were quick tests. That led to us incorrectly interpreting the repeated instances of our alarm going off after only a few tests as a meta nudge telling us to stop screwing around and get back to the story.

That's led to us being sort of conditioned to see science as a waste of time, and thus to deprioritize it.
Wyrd said:
This is a problem I try to bring up regularly, that we have to keep our future planned experiments fluid, as there's no telling how many of them the next session will render moot. If Familiars grown into Witches can be de-Witched at all, then they definitely should be, regardless of other concerns about individual rights of people not to have other versions of themselves exist. Creating Familiar based Witches for that purpose is where I'd draw the line for going too far.

If Familiar born Witches can't be de-Witched, then we have a source we can use to manufacture Clear Seeds without the moral implications of leaving people in eternal suffering, so long as we don't go around letting Familiars murder people just so we can harvest their neo Witches for making more Clear Seeds.
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Another thing we STILL haven't checked is if we can artificially mature a Familiar into a Witch by feeding it Grief. I was rather hoping this hunt would have us finding a lone Familiar we could quickly test that on, since if that did work, we would be able to cut out the "murder four or five people" step of Familiar farming. And whether it worked or not, it would eliminate at least some incorrect hypotheses about how Witches and Familiars work.
 
Wyrd said:
There's a reason we've done so many Science! sessions and still the thread, most definitely including me, believes that we've done nowhere near to enough of it. As important as helping the girls around us is, and despite the added workforce letting us expand our investigations, it is Science! that is most likely to lead us to something that can be applied globally, a new, vastly better system.
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Nerevar said:
That's led to us being sort of conditioned to see science as a waste of time, and thus to deprioritize it.
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Ok, so it seems like we really should schedule some more Science! then. So, we probably should do it sooner rather than later.

Maybe schedule it at the end of this day?
 
DataSnake said:
Not much of a hurdle with her cloning power. I mean, she was in school all morning despite accompanying us on the Witch hunt.
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It still takes part of her focus away from school, which Mami disapproves of. She also needs to keep the various power gems distributed so the body more likely to need a power is the one that has the appropriate gem. So, while yes, she can do both, I'm not sure we could convince Mami that would be acceptable since, if I recall correctly, she only grudgingly gave in on Sayaka spitting her focus today because we were preparing for the Soujous, who we knew were coming soon.
 
BethofDeath said:
...okay, where is that from? Because if it's from *The Different Story*, I haven't read that yet. It's still on my shelf waiting for me to revel in such awesauce.
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Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie: Rebellion Manga
Nerevar said:
Another thing we STILL haven't checked is if we can artificially mature a Familiar into a Witch by feeding it Grief. I was rather hoping this hunt would have us finding a lone Familiar we could quickly test that on, since if that did work, we would be able to cut out the "murder four or five people" step of Familiar farming. And whether it worked or not, it would eliminate at least some incorrect hypotheses about how Witches and Familiars work.
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i mean, it should work based on my understanding of the PMMM mmagic system.
Arum60 said:
Ok, so it seems like we really should schedule some more Science! then. So, we probably should do it sooner rather than later.

Maybe schedule it at the end of this day?
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i have one made a while back.
Mokyu said:
so we're all set, but we'll have to change the morning science to morning enchantment, also, we should invite Niko to meet the new group, so that she has an excuse to meet up with Mami, and so that we can shedule a date for science, we can probably squeeze Homura and Sayaka after Madoka's lunch so that we can talk about witchbombimg Kyoko.

so, my new schedule is:

Check up on Sayaka to see how she's hanging.
Go to the Kure mansion for the antimagic restraints for the Souju's.
Finish up the Souju situation.
Have the lunch meeting with Madoka about what happened at Tokyo.
Talk to Homura and Sayaka during timestop about witchbombing Kyoko, and into give her the choice to witchbomb Yuma.
Bake a cake with Mami and let it prepared for tommorow.
Have the dinner with Shin Momoe.
Check up the Souju's before going to bed.
Wake up early, and spend the morning on practicing enchanting.
Finish up decorating the cake.
Schedule a science date with Niko and invite her to meet up with the new group and to have dinner with Mami to catch up.

if everything goes acording to plan, we have a pretty tight day planned.
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Arum60 said:
Ok, so it seems like we really should schedule some more Science! then. So, we probably should do it sooner rather than later.

Maybe schedule it at the end of this day?
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Sayaka told us we need to give Mami and Kyoko some alone time together. Doing science when that's happening seems like the obvious thing to do, especially since so many of the things we'd like to test tie into the Witchbomb.

Since we have to deliver the Soul Gems to Niko anyway, that would seem to be a very good time to talk shop more generally. If we can convince Mami to stick around and watch Kyoko and Yuma's backs while the hunt continues, that would kill two birds with one stone.

Though, I absolutely don't want to risk not having the talk we scheduled with Madoka at lunch. I feel like that is sufficiently close that I don't want to leave Mitakihara until after we've had that talk, whether we want to try to cram some science time in or not. Might be good to pass on the request for a meeting to Hitomi and the check in with Homura about the building at lunch as well, and only leave after.
Mokyu said:
i mean, it should work based on my understanding of the PMMM mmagic system.
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The point of testing things is to determine if our understanding of them is correct.
 
(by the way i'm NOT joking, this is an exelent way for both to test Sayaka's cloning limit, as well as to build things more efficiently)
 
Mokyu said:
(by the way i'm NOT joking, this is an exelent way for both to test Sayaka's cloning limit, as well as to build things more efficiently)
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Thinking about it, there's a lot of powers that we aren't abusing enough of.

Like what you've said before, Homura's timestop is definitely one of them. Like, we could use it for all sorts of shenanigans. The only real limit for it is that some things require time to pass for them to work.

And our Grief-constructs can do all sorts of things. Not sure what the limits are exactly, but from what I can tell it's "imagining things into existence." Which means that as long as we generally know how to do something, or have a concept of something, then we can do it. And if we don't then we get nonsense like a hallucinating AI. There's also additional restrictions of the construct and it's products not working outside of our range.

Which means that we probably should test it a bit more for the Hildegrade/DeWitching project (from my memory we haven't actually tried a "dewitch" construct yet. I suspect that it won't work, but it's worth trying). Plus, on the off chance it actually succeeds we *do* have a spare body on hand that we can attach her to. And we can always have the technique-copy girl duplicate anything useful.

If we're looking for generally useful constructs, namely ones that can make us a bunch of $$$, then here's a few ideas (as the Science! list has disappeared, please let me know if we've done any of these):

1) A construct that takes in any item, stores its information, and then makes copies of said item. Preferably it should use materials that you input into it as to use less magic making the material from nothing.

2) A construct that draws in/stores Grief.

3) Get technique-copier (sorry I can never remember her name) to copy a Barrier that we make. Ideally, this will result in us plopping semi-permanent pocket dimensions wherever we want

4) From what I remember, enchantments need to be powered by magic from time to time to remain stable. So a "magic battery" would be good

5) A construct that undos what we just did. This could be very useful if some Science! goes horribly wrong. Imagine an undo button or control-z

To be frank, our Greif-Constructs, especially in combination with technique-copy girl, is a power with utility on par with our soul gem cleansing.

And I'd say that the combo with her may be even more potent- after all, we don't know the precise limits of what we can make. How many physical laws can we violate? Say, a time-travel construct or a delete construct.

Ie This has been established, but we are very overpowered. Whoever thought of Sabrina's Wish all those years ago did a good job.
 
Arum60 said:
Ie This has been established, but we are very overpowered. Whoever thought of Sabrina's Wish all those years ago did a good job.
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That's more a factor of the quest's designed intent. Firn has informed us that while our power set would have been different from a different wish, we would have had a similar overall level of power if we'd wished for a cake.

We've seen omakes where Sabrina made different wishes and got different power set.

We saw a bittersweet one where a Sabrina who wished for immortality had a chat with Madokami after that Sabrina had "won", dismantling the stars and gotten the universe running on magic and ensured no one had to Witch out to make it happen. It's gotten sadder and sadder to see Sabrina walking alone, with nobody but Kyubey at her side in that world, and choosing not to accept Madokami's offer to come with her to the afterlife where her friends had already gone on ahead to. As Sabrina has developed into a person with connections to others and emotional needs of her own throughout the quest, that outcome has felt more and more like a bad end.

We also saw a cautionary tale where Sabrina got instead of a Grief Control radius, instead got a smaller radius inside of which she was Omnipotent. That Sabrina fucked up, killed herself, and blew up Mitakihara by screwing around with Anti-matter without taking appropriate precautions. Firn explicitly stated that one was a warning to us, and is a big reason I am as emphatic as I am about making sure we take those appropriate precautions when messing with our powers.
 
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Nerevar said:
We also saw a cautionary tale where Sabrina got instead of a Grief Control radius, instead got a smaller radius inside of which she was Omnipotent. That Sabrina fucked up, killed herself, and blew up Mitakihara by screwing around with Anti-matter without taking appropriate precautions. Firn explicitly stated that one was a warning to us, and is a big reason I am as emphatic as I am about making sure we take those appropriate precautions when messing with our powers.
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Haven't heard of that one

Can you link it?
 
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