- Location
- Lasha Tumbai
Puella Magi Imperatrix Mundi, or: Wherein Half Of Japan Tries To Kill You
Echo
Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before
- Location
- "echolocation" dur hur hur
Ah yeah, I forgot to mention that part! Yes, the causality breaking time shenanigans caused by her future wish and/or her Witch are, in fact, why Asami has a very high resistance to certain kinds of magic. Her immunity to Harriet's Witch's Kiss is one of the obvious examples; the other is that, while she would have been excluded from the effects regardless, Asami alone had an unfiltered awareness of all the changes caused by Minami's wish. Even Minami herself was intentionally influenced in a "make it easier to live in the world you wished for" way, but due to the temporal proximity of Asami contracting and this being a highly atypical timeline, the String Witch's acausal influence left Asami aware of how reality had been altered.
PMIM is a Weird Timeline(tm), in that Momoko's death and everything associated with it is something Homura hasn't encountered in any previous loop. The String Witch likes that kind of timeline, and enjoys the show.
That said, it's also not the canon timeline, or even close to it. The Madoka you may meet once Homura loops in will not have the karmic potential needed for apotheosis. From a meta perspective the key point is that events in Mitakihara are only relevant to the quest if voters want them to be; the justification for this involves me waving my hands and saying something about being a branch timeline that's sufficiently divergent as to not be pulled into the cross-timeline singularity that is Madokami rewriting history, because canon Homura never encountered a timeline anything like PMIM's.
Nope, not yet. But the gist of her wish was already determined before the quest started, along with most of the shenanigans involving her Witch.
My expectation is that Asami will, if nothing else motivates her in the meantime, make her wish fairly soon once Yui is dealing with fighting actual competitors rather than desperate underdogs and homeless refugees.
Hestia&theCourt
Turns out we're plural too.
- Location
- In transition
- Pronouns
- She/Her
...oh. Oh dear.
So what I'm getting from this is that once Asami figures out that Bowser withheld memories from her, she's gonna be super pissed, and her Witch probably already is.
EDIT: This is in no way a bad thing, mind, I've just gotta reevaluate how everything's gonna work if I write more in that universe.
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redzonejoe
Vaguely Pastafarian
- Location
- Canada
See, that would be obvious though, and echo already went 'kinda sorta' to that, so I wanted my guess to get whacky in comparison.
That would be pretty neat!
As is, string witch is pretty cool. Good explanation echo, 10/10 does not disappoint.
Dear Lord.
That's almost as confusing as "I wish that instead of the wish I am currently making, I made a different wish, with said different wish being me wishing that instead of making that wish I made this wish."
And I specifically went out of my way to figure out the most confusing and parodixical wish I could!
That is bullshit. I love it.
Echo
Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before
- Location
- "echolocation" dur hur hur
Honestly, I have no idea how it would go.
From the way you presented things, I feel like Bowser and the String Witch would be mutually OCPs for each other, and it's entirely possible for both to react with something along the lines of "well that's weird, but hey let's see what happens next". It is, however, pretty certain that both would be aware of the other pretty much immediately.
If you do want to write a sequel to the omake, I wouldn't fault you for just declaring "eh, it's an AU" and letting the Giant Mundivorous Space Urchin effectively take the place of the String Witch. When doing a "transplant entity X to setting Y" crossover, there's definitely something to be said for letting the introduced element displace anything that filled a similar role, to avoid redundancy and better focus on how it interacts with the context it's now in.
Like, if you dumped the Incubators into a classic magical girl setting, you either need to replace all the local magical girls with meguca or accept that "bunnycats vs. generic magical fairies powered by friendship" is going to quickly subsume most other plotlines.
It's possible, but if so any evidence of that has been overwritten far beyond even what happens with Homura's time loops--a retroactive wish like that would make her become someone who would make a similar yet different wish, which might in turn change her circumstances so that she instead made yet another wish that changed... --and so on, until the Asami seen in PMIM is reached as a fixed point of the process, someone who's never limited by anything fundamental to her personality, making her entire life a very peculiar sort of self-contained time loop.
It's an entertaining idea and fits well enough, but also doesn't really add anything from an in-character perspective. So... feel free to headcanon it at will, I guess, secure in the knowledge that I'll at least never contradict it in canon?
- Location
- Florida
The String Witch not existing but due to the nature of Akami's Wish and personal magic existing anyway is seriously cool shit. This whole post was really fascinating.
- Location
- Canada
The current timeline retroactively splits in two, and each version of you makes a wish that impacts the other version. Paradox resolved to my personal satisfaction, but I'm uncertain as to what sort of wish magic that would produce.
- Location
- Plato's Cave
So what would happen if Asami got to the point where a hypothetical girl of equal or lesser magic reserves would go Witch? Would she just....not, or would something weird happen, or something else entirely?
Motile Mollusc
Bitten by a radioactive were-tilde
- Location
- Here
" 'You can't eat 3 times your body weight in ice cream in one sitting' is a limitation, right?"
-clearly the most important implication of this Wish.
Periodic bar fights when one of them gets drunk enough to suggest that a swarm of atemporal magical beings defined by 'Fuck destiny and predictability with a rusty spork' might be an intended outcome of 'Man, the inevitable heat death of the universe sucks. Let's find a solution.'?
Echo
Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before
- Location
- "echolocation" dur hur hur
Her own magic would push back to prevent her from witching out from low MP, and her mindset would prevent her from reaching the tipping point of absolute hopelessness required for a spontaneous witch out. More contrived situations or external influence would likewise be blocked by her wish magic, with varying degrees of backlash.
So basically, she'd just sit there stewing in frustrated unhappiness at 99%+ corruption until someone tossed a Grief Seed at her. If you were hoping for something like "summon a miniature clone of the String Witch as her Stand" then sorry to disappoint.
In practice, though, being at high corruption is Not Fun At All and she'd try pretty damn hard to never reach that point.
Noumero
Omit Needless Words
Fascinating. This kind of interesting characterization tied to creative, rigorously explored magical powers is exactly why I love this quest.
Anthropic principle guarantees that she would never find herself in such a situation. Any timeline in which Asami's Soul Gem is in a state such that she's supposed to witch out is an inconsistent one, and therefore a nonexistent one, and therefore one in which no observers could exist. Quantum immortality of a sort. (Or, looking at this from anoher angle: If Asami is ever in a situation such that she's supposed to witch out, her wish magic would destroy that timeline.)
Note that this isn't real quantum immortality — the most likely alternative to Asami witching out is Asami's Soul Gem getting destroyed. If there's a potential future situation in which Asami is extremely likely to witch out — be that a losing fight, a traumatic development, or a deliberate attempt to induce such a situation — she's very likely to die prior to entering this situation instead.
A pity. We could've used her inability to witch out as an outcome pump to instantly win everything.
Hestia&theCourt
Turns out we're plural too.
- Location
- In transition
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Honestly, I have no idea how it would go.
From the way you presented things, I feel like Bowser and the String Witch would be mutually OCPs for each other, and it's entirely possible for both to react with something along the lines of "well that's weird, but hey let's see what happens next". It is, however, pretty certain that both would be aware of the other pretty much immediately.
If you do want to write a sequel to the omake, I wouldn't fault you for just declaring "eh, it's an AU" and letting the Giant Mundivorous Space Urchin effectively take the place of the String Witch. When doing a "transplant entity X to setting Y" crossover, there's definitely something to be said for letting the introduced element displace anything that filled a similar role, to avoid redundancy and better focus on how it interacts with the context it's now in.
Like, if you dumped the Incubators into a classic magical girl setting, you either need to replace all the local magical girls with meguca or accept that "bunnycats vs. generic magical fairies powered by friendship" is going to quickly subsume most other plotlines.
Well, that certainly would be easier than trying to justify how the heck Bowser managed to miss the world's biggest time paradox with Asami, so I'll probably do that. One way or another, though, I suspect Asami's going to be transcendentally pissed when she finds out Bowser's inhibiting her memories; the kind of person who makes this kind of wish is the kind of person who's going to absolutely hate being hit with the metaphorical forget-me stick. What a dysfunctional partnership.
I actually figured at sufficiently high corruption the String Witch might start manifesting threads in this timeline, but it is and is not her so it just does its own thing madly, kept from mutual interference by their wishes.Her own magic would push back to prevent her from witching out from low MP, and her mindset would prevent her from reaching the tipping point of absolute hopelessness required for a spontaneous witch out. More contrived situations or external influence would likewise be blocked by her wish magic, with varying degrees of backlash.
So basically, she'd just sit there stewing in frustrated unhappiness at 99%+ corruption until someone tossed a Grief Seed at her. If you were hoping for something like "summon a miniature clone of the String Witch as her Stand" then sorry to disappoint.
In practice, though, being at high corruption is Not Fun At All and she'd try pretty damn hard to never reach that point.
Its like the interference pattern thing, theres two holes, you can only pass through one, but you interfere with yourself.
- Location
- Can't read map
Mariko: Asami! WTF!?
Yui: What is it? Let me see!
*puts chair behind Mariko, then jumps on it to try read grimoire above Maiko's shoulde*
Yui: Ugh... Reading those runes hurts my eyes. How can you read anything out of this scribbles?
Mariko: Forget that... So... Asami has witch following her...
Yui: Say no more! Just point the way! No witch can stand in front of my wand of friendship and live!
Mariko: ... and... actually... we never told you origin of witches, didn't we? Which would explain why it might be impossible to kill this witch.
*** *** ***
TL DR: There might be some dancing on subject once Maiko starts explaining to Yui what is going on with Asami. Might even witch bomb her, if she hasn't already.
So hurry up contracting Asami to say Hi! to new 'friend'?
Or delay contract to not join that friend as equal.
Yui: What is it? Let me see!
*puts chair behind Mariko, then jumps on it to try read grimoire above Maiko's shoulde*
Yui: Ugh... Reading those runes hurts my eyes. How can you read anything out of this scribbles?
Mariko: Forget that... So... Asami has witch following her...
Yui: Say no more! Just point the way! No witch can stand in front of my wand of friendship and live!
Mariko: ... and... actually... we never told you origin of witches, didn't we? Which would explain why it might be impossible to kill this witch.
*** *** ***
TL DR: There might be some dancing on subject once Maiko starts explaining to Yui what is going on with Asami. Might even witch bomb her, if she hasn't already.
So hurry up contracting Asami to say Hi! to new 'friend'?
Or delay contract to not join that friend as equal.
Echo
Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before
- Location
- "echolocation" dur hur hur
Oh yeah, definitely. The severity of Meguca!Asami's wish magic reacting to stuff depends heavily on how she feels about the idea, and memory suppression is the kind of thing that triggers very nearly the nastiest sort of backlash. Losing out only to, like, detailed precognition or outright mind control.
...speaking of which, dropping meguca!Asami in Worm would be pretty funny. Would Ziz just, like, spontaneously combust? Probably.
One of these days I should have Maiko explain to someone her theory about how the lack of free will is an illusion and that the future is deterministic precisely because souls function based on freely-made choices.
Or, in the simplest case, it's merely the case that Asami's confidence in her inability to witch out is finite and that she'd rather smash her own gem than find out the hard way that she was wrong.
Alas, no. Asami herself would be pretty unhappy about that kind of approach. Her wish is motivated by a desire to make meaningful choices personally even if that means failing on her own terms, so a "press button to win" technique would tread perilously close to rejecting the intent of her wish, which means no more wish magic. ...which, given that her wish magic is part of what would prevent her from witching out, probably stumbles right back into the anthropic principle.
This actually sorta ties into the fact that Asami's character concept originated as, essentially, an expy of a character from an original story I messed around with ideas for but never got anywhere with.
In that setting--a vaguely JRPG-influenced magitek fantasy world--a form of 'fate magic' was widely known and used, primarily in the form of forcing "prophecies" that effectively constrained the future in various ways. Sweeping absolute prophecies on concrete matters were too difficult to create, so instead prophets would construct overlapping combinations of specific exclusions and vague symbolism, both of which they then kept absolutely secret to prevent their enemies from finding the wording used and thereby determining loopholes through which they could force their own prophecies. In this manner, "prophets" worked as something like metaphysical lawyers, kept on retainer by the rich and powerful to shape the future to their liking.
At some point, a small group of mages found an alternate method of using fate magic and quickly took over what was, effectively, one of two world superpowers, which lasted for several decades until they were brought down by a combination of internal sabotage (a boy with a very deep grudge joining up and using their own techniques to undermine everything) and external rebellion (an orphan girl spending the better part of a decade developing a method of countering all fate magic, then travelling the country engaging in guerrilla warfare and general rabble-rousing). The latter, of course, was the inspiration for Asami.
The core technique of the antagonists worked something like a one-shot retroactive outcome pump, constrained by the mage's experiences. Forget where you left something? Pick a place you haven't checked, spend a bit of magic to turn "it could be there" into "it is definitely there", and you're good to go. Need a distraction while you do something sneaky? Well, bar fights get nasty sometimes, spend a little magic and it turns out that that one started shortly before you arrived--just make sure not to look too closely before you use the magic, because if you glance through the window first and it's calm inside the bar, you can't invalidate that.
The more implausible a desired state was given basic logic and the direct experiences of the mage involved, the harder it became to twist the universe into the desired shape and the more magic the mage would have to spend to do so... which was ultimately the cause of their downfall, because it incentivized a culture of information compartmentalization and keeping blinders on for the sake of not limiting their future options, so by the time they realized they had opponents using fate magic against them it was too late.
No, see, each wish is that that the other wish happened instead. But due to the nature of the two wishes, that means that said wish immediately cancels out in favor of the other wish, and so on, in an infinite loop. The only thing that stops it from doing something horrible is that neither wish grants anything tangible because I'm pretty sure prospective Puella Magi can't do 'and' wishes to do something repeatedly for each loop around the cycle.
As for wish magic, either none because you don't become a Puella Magi until your wish is granted and infinite loops don't ever finish, or the ability to clone things and decide afterwards which one was real.
With the caveat that since it's derived from a pair of identical wishes, if a magical girl clone witches out, it ceases being a clone and becomes it's own separate entity. So you can have a Puella magi and multiple Witches of her running around and, given how most Witches are, probably trying to kill her specifically.
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Echo
Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before
- Location
- "echolocation" dur hur hur
Maiko believes, but has not yet proven, that magic is not capable of computing anything not computable by physical processes.
(All the causal shenanigans being discussed, incidentally, shouldn't allow any computation that can't already be performed using physical processes combined with closed timelike curves and appropriate quantum bullshit. Maiko is somewhat bothered by the fact that this can be done by a wish yet she can't determine even a theoretical mechanism for accomplishing the same with magic otherwise. Nor, for that matter, do the Incubators seem to possess technology allowing such things.)
I have no idea what that is!
To be fair, my knowledge of tabletop gaming extends to reading Order of the Stick and various Worm/Exalted crossovers.
That's fair, a lot of people who've read the Nobilis books don't know what it is either.I have no idea what that is!
HymnOfRagnarok
Let's Rock
....The String Witch is one of the best witches I've ever read about, and the description of Asami's powers is just delightful. It's the best kind of absurdity, and pretty much protagonist power as viewed from the outside. Except in addition to Plot Armor, Asami's packing a Plot Hammer to smash all obstacles.
This is just lovely.
This is just lovely.
Aoinfinity
Unlimited Blue Works
- Location
- a blue Infinity
To be fair, at least one Magister of the Wild doesn't know to his own satisfaction either...That's fair, a lot of people who've read the Nobilis books don't know what it is either.
-Actual Play logs of Chancel Amyra, Chapter 1actual play said:
...but the short version is that they're a godlike being with no origin in reality, obsessed with being free from all restraint. In the setting of Nobilis, they are one of several types of being that make possible the Platonic concepts that allow reality to exist.
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