NitroFumetsu
Blaze of Glory
The ideal (most useful for her) definition of 'better' would be anyone who can do SOMETHING better than she can. That would be basically everyone.
Subsumption (PMMM Faux-Quest) (Witch MC)
Nolrai
weak to fangs
- Location
- Porltand
You're applying the law twice! Though your loose a little bit of power from the diffraction/geometry change, that's effectively a constant fairly small ratio, and then the distance works the same as if you were outside.
Though line-of-sight issues would be a problem unless they bend around the hole or the entrance corresponds to the whole outside edge of the barrier.
Nottheunmaker
Altman be praised
- Location
- USG Ishimura
Remember how Tira was kinda nervous about handing her phone over to Sayaka? I mostly thought she was just one of those types that didn't like strangers touching their stuff. Then I was doing a bit of rereading, and I happened across this.
So. Maybe there's something in that phone Tira isn't ready to share yet.
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- Location
- Here
That sounds rather like one of the Rumors in Magia Record to me. Hadn't been playing it when that chapter released.
Ok, first
...
Is the Sayaka Beeeam!! Canon for this story? Is that the ??? on Ashys Character Sheet!?
I think it could happen as a hobby project by bored, subsumed magical girls. They have to keep themself busy somehow!
I now imagen every magical girl in Kazamino glaring at Kyouko because all the very young magical girls imitate her.
hillo315
Intact but Tactless
- Location
- Somewhere. Somewhere else.
Setting aside the difference between intelligence, sentience, and sapience, witches are encouraged to be evil in order to punish their shortcomings and cancel out their good deeds. They are better than magical girls who choose to be evil, especially one who exploits witches to make everything worse.
Possible. Or maybe Tira is just particularly sentimental or thrifty. Even if she can easily afford a new phone, breaking the perfectly functional one she already has would be a huge waste.
Grief seeds work perfectly because they are like soul gems. In theory, an ideal gem cleaner would need to accept and hold emotions as easily as a human can, so good luck figuring out a method that doesn't involve playing around with souls. The only example I can think of is grief cubes, but those only existed once witching stopped being a problem in the first place.
My thoughts exactly. If it's a side project, it should be done when there is nothing else to do. And if there is nothing to do, it's probably because there are more magical girls than are actually needed at any given time.
That can happen if Kyoko decides to stop being a crotchety hermit. And it does have a fair chance of happening, considering she befriends or allies with at least one other magical girl in every timeline I remember.
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I don't think that's right. The problem is that you have to use the small signal that gets through the entrance to cover the entire sphere of directions. You can either get a beam that drops off normally, but can only be received from angles where you could see through the entrance to the transmitter, or a sphere that drops off as the inverse of the square of the distance from the barrier entrance.
That only means it's a plausible development on magic research (much like Mami went from ribbons to muskets)
That's for electromagnetic waves, which could be considered only a worst case as we don't know the properties of how this "magic radio" signal would propagate (much like MG telepathy)
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I'm mainly curious about Jubey because it can "move" the Grief in Soul Gems. We know Witches can absorb free-floating Grief, as indicated by Confrontation 1. So I wonder if a subsumed Jubey could "move" the Grief inside of a Gem in such a way that Ashy can absorb it without subsuming the magical girl.
Nolrai
weak to fangs
- Location
- Porltand
Yes, that's the geometry change I meant, that is a fairly small but distance independent drop off in power, should be about an order of magnitude or so, maybe two, actually now that I consider more carefully...I am not sure we have enough information to put any limits on this issue.
The reason I said you were applying the rule twice, is that you squared the distance and then compared it to a distance! A simple dimensional analysis shows that _cant_ be right, because your result would depend on what units you used. The inverse square law applies _outside_ the barrier too!
hillo315
Intact but Tactless
- Location
- Somewhere. Somewhere else.
The aforementioned signals in Magia Record were carried by electromagnetic waves from a radio tower. So either the radio waves were assisted with magic, that specific frequency has special magical properties, the waves passing through the entrance are sufficient, witch barriers blatantly ignore physics in that regard, or we just don't understand witch barriers as well as we think we do. It makes more sense if witch barriers occupy real physical space and are invisible from outside but still let certain kinds of radiation through, but otherwise you might need to handwave it with extradimensional/quantum weirdness or something.
In any case, yes, I suppose there should be less worry about physics getting in the way when the waves are magical in nature to begin with.
Speaking of which, I'm starting to wonder if this is influenced by the same property that causes Ashy's barrier eat other barriers. In theory, witches I'd expect to not actively bother anyone who doesn't enter the barrier (such as Gertrud and Rebecca) still apparently go out of their way to kill humans in a city with high grief saturation, and yet Ashy does not need to do this at all. I suspect her barrier is trapping grief inside for maximum efficiency.
My second hypothesis is that witches use less energy in a state of inactivity, such that Ashy can rest to recharge. My third hypothesis is that fighting magical girls all the time tires out witches to the point of needing to feed frequently.
None of these ideas have to be true, but they might be. I just think Ashy's curse has been suspiciously easy to satisfy so far, even before Sayaka and Tira came along.
Jubey does limited grief manipulation and Ashy does all the cleansing through Jubey? The idea hinges on Ashy being able to absorb grief through Jubey, but I can see that working.
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I would like to avoid this scenario. We still haven't confirmed that we have a soul*. Nor have we confirmed whether our soul will be utterly destroyed in any scenario coinciding with its release. It is yet possible that we could go to Hell, and I do not want it to be too cold.
*Apologies, we have at least two souls, and they were delicious, but specifically a soul of our own. ... unless we can Subsume afterlives?
So if we cover the entire sky with witches, we would block all solar ionising radiation to cure cancer, and be the greatest hero ever? Best plan!
- Location
- USA
I've been reading this story and been enjoying it a lot! I was wondering if Mami's Witch and Charlotte actually came back. They weren't subsumed so it's possible they didn't come along for the time travel fun time.
(1) Yup.
(2) Yup.
(3) IIRC there's some indication that timelines continue after Homura leaves, which makes the most sense in a multi-timeline model. Irrevocable stasis is indistinguishable from death.
(4) That's how time travel works, yes. Morality is somewhat different in the presence of time travel, and gut feeling is not a good guide. Really, gut feeling is a pretty poor guide to morality in general, except in immediate, small-scale interactions. (Assuming you want a consistent, coherent, uniform moral system, anyway.)
(5) Probably, yeah.
(6) What would that even mean?
(7) Depends how you look at it, but probably not.
(8) Yes.
(9) If they shared a soul, then they share a soul; the same soul being associated with two individuals occupying the same time and timeline seems no stranger than two individuals occupying different timelines.
(10) Probably; otherwise you wouldn't get variations between timelines. If it weren't for that I'd say it doesn't matter; there's no real difference between jumping between identical timelines and a branching timeline model.
(11) What would that mean?
(12) Possibly, but you (arguably) do that every day; it's a morally neutral action.
Sure. But those were science questions, not philosophy questions (except the moral ones, I guess). I was wondering what philosophical questions Tira and Sayaka's souls @Nuew was referring to.
We weren't exactly paying attention to the distance, there. And even if we were, there's no indication that Ashtaroth is better at eyeballing distances than the average person. We have enough information to reasonably believe that getting too far away from the barrier will cause a subsumed girl to keel over, and "100 meters" is probably the right order of magnitude (we'd have noticed if it wasn't), but it necessarily comes with significant error bars. We probably got a more precise figure from Kyubey when we found out about the range limit, but we don't know whether subsumption affected that, or whether distance from the barrier is the same as distance from the gem.
It's just an unjustifiably precise number. Ashtaroth is being careless with her figures.
Ashtaroth has intimate relationships with multiple females outside her species. She's obviously Kirk.
A book club.
If you need a quick-and-easy cipher to hide information from casual inspection (no alphabetic substitution will hold up to anyone who's actually trying), it's probably easiest to just do a Vigenère cipher with your favorite word as the key.
@Skelm is correct. This is easily seen by considering total flux, which should be the same through any sphere containing the entrance portal (ignoring absorption by atmosphere and objects). It's not a constant factor drop-off, and is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the entrance portal.
The dimensional analysis works out fine: received power is directly proportional to broadcast power, cross-sectional area of receiver, and cross-sectional area of the entrance portal, and inversely proportional to the squares of the distances between transmitter and portal and portal and receiver. (Note: if you're concerned about the entrance portal—or other surface reradiating the radio signal—possibly being bigger on the inside, this is accounted for by the area in question being the external area.)
If you assume instead that radio waves in some realspace volume corresponding to the barrier can cross over to the barrier (and vice versa), then the power would decrease by a factor equal to the ratio between realspace volume and barrier volume (times a constant, because not all of the power crosses over), which should be pretty big (several orders of magnitude), unless barriers overlap a lot more realspace than seems likely. I don't understand how light works well enough to say whether it would also redshift it.
That would make cellphones in barriers make more sense, and everything else less. If you want to handwave it, just go with magic. Quantum effects are irrelevant here, and "extradimensional" is very rarely used well.
6 refers to a single-timeline with aborted timelines being destroyed. It is a question of whether the one that went back in time lost their own history of the time preceding the point they went back to and inherited a replacement, probably... . That would be a little P-zombie, but people can get zombie hackles from that sort of stuff.
11 references the idea that there was an extant world that you jumped into from the one that you already occupied. This world suddenly had an intruder jumping into it. Did that world have an established timeline that you then altered by invading?
11 references the idea that there was an extant world that you jumped into from the one that you already occupied. This world suddenly had an intruder jumping into it. Did that world have an established timeline that you then altered by invading?
I would argue that it is only morally neutral from a familiarity perspective. It would be more accurate to test its morality based upon its products. If a world created is good, then it is good, if the world is bad, then the act is bad, and P.M.M.M. worlds tend to appear bad unless one factors entropy and trusts that The Incubators won't extinct existence.
I am not convinced that The Scientific Method had much involvement. The topic is largely related to soul/experience/world replacement, modification, or erasure, they may have been posed as queries of fact, but the intent was more to ponder the implications than to provide answers. It is also intended to be viewed from an in-character perspective(likely from misinterpreting Nuew's post), the characters in question not possessing the setting-knowledge required to answer them. That said, I do genuinely and sincerely apologise for failing to convey that intent and thank you for the efforts you went to as a result.
[expression of great mirth]
- Location
- Somewhere up the tree
I will say with certainty that they have replaced their past selves. Due to homuras magic sending ones soul back in time to inhabit their body in the past
The larger concern is whether or not their current bodies are their *original* bodies. Because depending on the answer there is non zero possibility that sayakas parents will find her empty, dead body laying in bed
And boy that would throw a wrench into things
The larger concern is whether or not their current bodies are their *original* bodies. Because depending on the answer there is non zero possibility that sayakas parents will find her empty, dead body laying in bed
And boy that would throw a wrench into things
I don't know about Nuew, but I have some related to how Homura time travel's work, though not exactly with the act of time traveling itself.
Dunno about this story, but there's a non canon manga where Madoka grabas Homura the moment she activates her shield and get's transported to the past with her, and just like her ends up merging/replacing that timeline's version of herself.
Presumably, that's wat happened here with Ashtaroth here. Now, if there are other versions of Sayaka and Tira running around, does that meant they don't count as their own persons for the purpose of Homuras magic? Is not really about whether or not being merged with Ash prevent's that, what if the real Sayaka and Tira are actually dead and they're just a part of Ashy pretending to be them?
It's not just fighting with magical girls that could drain the Witches Grief, there are also their own obsessions. Gertrud loves roses so much that she fills her Barrier with them but then had to feed them, Rebecca never sleeps, etc.
A Witch might be able to absorb enough free-floating Grief if she stays inactive but their Witchstincts won't let them. We saw that with Ashy after the Saar fight, she can't not subsume something if she gets the opportunity.
To be honest, I only thought of that because Jubeys black hole impression when he "cleans" Soul Gems reminded me of Ashy.
Technically, three. Well, maybe two and a half? I'm not sure in what condition Saars soul is, with her being a Witch.
Ashy isn't a good enough with her fists to be Kirk. Dude could take everything short of a bipedal dino in a fistfight.
Still waiting for the vote on who will be club president of the Witch club.
Math was never something I was very good at so I will just ask. How would that be affected by Tira and Sayaka being inside of the Canvas? The signal would then have to pass through two portals, one into the Barrier and one into the Canvas.
I don't think they have replaced their past selves. I think Sayaka and Tira stopped having individual souls and are just parts of Ashy that think they are independent. We got a description of the subsumption process after the Saar fight (it even mentions souls!) and well...
- Location
- Somewhere up the tree
Its not a matter of homuras magic not seeing them them different people. Its just how it works
Homuras magi travels through contact. If you are touching her. Then her magic affects you as well
If you touch someone else, then that person is affected as well
We were touching homura as well as sayaka And Tara when she activated her jump.
I am not the best at this, but I believe that mathematics can largely be replaces with geometry for this, at least if one doesn't care for exact numbers. Basically (well it is a sphere instead of a circle, so everything is worse) imagine the signal at a certain range as a circle. The signal has to spread out over the entire surface of the circle, and the circle's circumference will increase as its radius increases, thus the signal will not lose so much total strength, but because it is spread out over an ever-growing area, at any given point, it will become weaker. When it hits a barrier, it stops, but if there is a hole it can go through that, but only the bits that reach the hole go through. At this point, things get a bit odd and we assume that it spreads out around the hole, so it gets a new source, producing a new ever-growing-circle, that has a total signal strength of only the signal that went through the hole. The proportion of total signal that went through the hole is the proportion of the total circle that covers the hole, and if you are picturing this as a single gaping wound, across the whole of the surface of the Canvas? That is tiny.
Now, we have a new source. Instead of our big radio-tower, we are looking at the tiny amount of signal coming through the hole, but we start drawing our circles around that hole to see how the signal effectively weakens by spreading itself thin. Then we hit the edge of the barrier, get a new tiny hole, and start over again with just the tiny fraction of the former signal that reached that hole. So then there is a new virtual-radio-tower producing what is effectively a new radio broadcast, but doing so with a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the original radio-tower.
In short: Very badly. Imagine Canvas as a thick-walled dark circle, and the hole in canvas as a bright patch on the circle. Now you reach Barrier, and need to draw a new circle to reach the hole into the outside, but have to make the walls of the circle really thin because you can only draw the circle using as many pixels as were in the bright patch of the Canvas-circle. Again, there is a dark circle with a bright patch for the hole. Then you get to the outside and make a new circle, and again have to draw the whole circle using only as many pixels as were in the previous bright patch at the hole. The circle is large enough to reach whatever is supposed to receive it, and how thin the circle's wall is at that point is how strong the signal is. You had better have started with *really* thick walls.
Or am I completely off on this? Random internet people are not experts afterall!
Flairina
Least Omnipotent Goddess
- Location
- The next infinity over
(Forgot to reply to this last time.) Not sure you mean by "self-based fate manipulation", but we already know why Kirika had control of herself as a witch, or at least why her witch continued to serve Oriko even as Latria --- because of Kirika's wish.
...that probably requires elaboration for those who haven't read Sadness Prayer, and I'd actually like to have this written down somewhere just so I can keep it straight myself, so to clarify: Kirika didn't originally remember why she made her wish, or who Oriko even was, to the point that she actually attacked the other girl when they met again. After spending time with Oriko however, Kirika's personality changed (in accordance with her wish) to be "suitable" for Oriko, and match what she needed: someone who could kill without remorse (and thus murder Madoka), eagerly followed Oriko's every order, and affirmed her every decision. Once Mami cracked Kirika's soul gem, she couldn't serve Oriko as a magical girl anymore --- but since she'd remembered her wish by then, and realized that it constantly shaped her to be what Oriko needed, Kirika figured out that it could turn her into a witch at will, since that way she could continue to be Oriko's hand. This turns out to be true --- even after becoming Latria, she fights for Oriko's cause. The justification Oriko internally gives for this is that Kirika didn't "break", but turned herself into a witch deliberately through her wish, and thus Latria's instincts couldn't take control of her. It seems equally valid however to interpret it simply as Kirika's wish continuing to affect her as a witch, shaping Latria's will and actions to be useful to Oriko even in "death".
It's actually really sad, if you think about it. Kirika basically unintentionally brainwashed herself into... well, not exactly slavery, but something that certainly toes the line of it, no matter how genuinely Oriko cares about her. Apparently they were happy in the "afterlife" at least, but... yeah, they're both really messed up.
(Note that the above directly contradicts the earlier Oriko Magica: Noisy Citrine storyline, where Kirika did remember her wish after making it, but still couldn't gather up the nerve to just go and talk to Oriko. Since Sadness Prayer's version is much more fleshed out and in keeping with the original tone of Madoka Magica however, and also explains some crucial inconsistencies in the original Oriko Magica manga, it's what I'm considering canon for the purposes of this story.)
It would work better for larger cities like Kamihama, as apparently the telepathy network doesn't necessarily stretch over the entire thing (though, they're working without Kyubey there, so there's potentially extenuating circumstances) and there's way too many magical girls around for a "trickle-down" network to be particularly viable.
Also, interestingly enough, I don't believe Kyubey has ever actually said anything about the secrecy of magic being paramount. Or... even important, for that matter. I mean, clearly there's some reason humanity doesn't know about the magical girl system even after thousands of years of it being around, but most of the magical girls we see in canon just seem to have decided that secrecy is the natural magical girl way to do things. Kyubey doesn't really seem to care when someone uninvolved finds out, like Kyoko's father did, nor does he seem to do anything about it. In Tart Magica, this is even more obvious --- while Kyubey wants the 100 years war to end, it's only because Isabeau is blocking his ability to get energy from anywhere in France. The fact that witches are running rampant across the countryside, visible to all, or that the most important and well known figures in the ongoing war are magical girls, who demonstrate said magic to entire armies of people, doesn't seem to factor into anything. I guess it all just got assumed to be myth or legend later? That or Kyubey did some serious mass mind wiping off screen, but it seems a bit odd to assume that when we're given absolutely no indication he has the means or inclination to do so.
I suppose that's possible, but going over Symmetry Diamond again, I think I now understand --- Sasa prefaced her wish by listing how there were people who looked better than her, were more popular than her, or who had more money than her, defining all of these qualities as making them "better" than her. Thus, anyone who has any of these things is controllable by Sasa's magic. However, since her magic still works on witches...
...yeah, this is basically it. Sasa's umbrella for what qualifies as being "better" than her is so wide that her magic probably works on any entity superior to her in literally any quality. As such, she can essentially just brainwash anyone and anything she wants. Good to have that cleared up.
...ooh. Nope, afraid I just forgot that I'd already referenced that the rumor spoken of in this chapter was initially spread through text messages way back when, and so didn't make that explicit here. Chapter has been edited slightly to make that less confusing. I also edited the quoted chapter slightly to make Kyubey sound a little more... Kyubey-ish.
If you believe hard enough, it just might be. ...but don't count on it.Is the Sayaka Beeeam!! Canon for this story? Is that the ??? on Ashys Character Sheet!?
She's more of a crotchety hobo than a hermit --- she goes out and about in whatever city she's in fairly often, she's just, ya know, homeless. Unless you count living out of hotel rooms and probably the occasional rooftop as having a home.
On the topic of Rebecca/Rebekka, her face in the anime...
...wow, that looks a lot like the center of Ashtaroth's barrier symbol. And also how Novella looks when subsuming something. And like Ashtaroth's head in general, up until recently. Hmm...
Excellent question! We have several promising candidates lined up, including:
- Ashtaroth, of course. Excellent with books and paperwork, being part book herself. Willing to compromise, and comes with at least two helpers (possibly more by the time of the election) to assist her in her duties. Somewhat easily distracted, but if she gets the chance, she's bound to continue growing the club, bringing in new members whether by intention or not.
- Patricia, the class representative witch. Exceptionally good at directing those around her, as seen with her familiars, and her typing gives her a natural leg up over the competition (despite not actually having any legs). However, her nature as an onlooker may make her prone to passivity. She'd do best paired with a good vice president to keep her on track.
- Oriko Mikuni, the seer of the modern age. Class president at her school and top of her classes, she certainly has the pedigree. She's quite driven, with big plans in the works, and a take charge attitude that 10 out of 10 Kirikas say they would follow anywhere. Not actually a witch yet, but with the way she keeps hallucinating her younger self and seems to be slowly spiraling into madness, it's probably not far off.
- Monique, the
datingself-aware witch, who- hey, wait a second...
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Karyis
procrastinating as we speak
- Location
- Texas
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Just throwing this out there, but on the Sasa's magic controlling witches thing, could it be because witches are the end result of magical girls, and are therefore the "better"/adult form of them, as per Kyuubey's explanation in the original show's reveal? Admittedly, I haven't played MagiReco and don't know the details, but it's the first thing that popped into my head while reading the discussion.
Appletank
Acquire Cheese
I vaguely remember it being a thing that the Incubators edit memories to hide magic unless requested not to (or to screw with someone) sometime after Tart.
Oh well, maybe it's something Sayaka can develop, like the platforms as shields trick Ashy used in the Homura fight.
Huh, getting subsumed by Ashy changed Sayakas and Tiras' life but they don't have to worry about ever becoming homeless.
Hmm, Ashy being easily distracted can be solved by her helpers keeping her on track, Tira seems to be good at that; or wit the right vice president. Maybe Charlotte? If she can get focused on work instead of cheese and sweets.
Patricia... I don't think she has the skills needed to keep the club together. The club members are a rather diverse bunch.
Oriko is sadly out of the running by still being a kohai. Maybe if she sets up Latria as a puppet president...
Anyway, I think Candeloro would make a good vice president. She would give the club a nice atmosphere and would make sure everyone stays until the work is done... and probably even after that.