Well, looks like I chose the perfect story to branch out into reading PMMM stuff. Even with only generic knowledge of the series (and the main twist), it's been easy to follow and highly entertaining. Also because fics where the MC really has to struggle to survive are much more interesting to me, since having to grasp any straws available to survive often creates a need to explore the deeper mechanics and background events of the universe.
It's been a blast, and thanks for the read!
This is a wonderful read! Was hooked by the idea and then had a lot if fun going through the story. I wonder if that call initiated a sequence of events. I also wonder, if they share this timeliness with that Homura, or if the timeliness connection is not linear and they got another one. Probably the same one, but still.
Finally finished reading through this 'quest'. I think what I like most is how the characters interact with each other, and how they respond to the increasingly absurd situation they find themselves in. Everyone has their own assumptions and their own ways of thinking, which may cause conflicts with others. And due to these conflicts and the inherent nature of the PMMM world, the situation just gets crazier over time.
I also really like seeing the evolution of Ashtaroth and her barrier as new powers, witches, and barriers get added. Its always exciting seeing how things change whenever something/someone new gets added. One day, Ash might have a fully functioning society in her barrier, though its bizarreness would probably put even Mitikihara to shame.
Huh, lots of new people reading this lately. I'm glad you're all enjoying the fic so far! ヾ(≧▽≦*)o I too quite like stories where the protagonist is constantly struggling to survive and/or improve (as noted a bit below, it's essentially one of the central themes of many of my stories), and I'm happy the character interactions/barrier evolutions are keeping your interest. Ashtaroth still has a long way to go in both regards, so I hope you'll all stick around to witness it!
Interesting… either Charlotte's Magical Girl hasn't given in to grief yet in this timeline, or she time traveled back with them. If the second, I'm assuming the only reason Sayaka (and probably Tira) have duplicates is because they aren't technically themselves, but rather parts of Ashtaroth. In that case Saar is probably back too.
Like, "back" in the sense that there's a Saar from this timeline, or that Saar from the previous timeline come back separate from Ash?
The first one. It would be more accurate to say that Saar hasn't been replaced with her future counterpart, which is what seems to have happened with Ashtaroth. Of course, Flairina could just be trolling us and Charlotte's grief seed is just somewhere other than the hospital.
Hey, trolling is only if I'm
deliberately leading you in the wrong direction! Leaving something open to interpretation can hardly be qualified as such, right?
Btw, what happens to the grief seeds Bunnycat collects?
Because if every MG can kill dozens of witches over their carrier, and all witches come from MGs, doesn't mean the witches get killed over and over again?
So presumably, after the bunnycat collects power from them it then deploys them at random. So may be that the bunny cat simply hadn't dropped it there yet.
presumably it farms energy from them somehow, but we're never explicitly told what they're used for IIRC
That she was a Grief Seed means someone beat Nagisa after her transformation, used her Grief Seed to clear their Soul Gem, then gave the full Grief Seed to Kyubey, who then dropped the Grief Seed near the hospital to motivate Sayaka and Madoka into making a Wish.
I'd wager Kyubey does have a method of getting
something from grief seeds, given that once Madokami resets the way the world works, collecting used-up "grief cubes" (which are basically just less efficient grief seeds so far as I can tell) is apparently Kyubey's main source of entropy-combating energy. As such, even if he
is replanting them, he's probably still not holding onto every grief seed he's ever collected solely for that purpose.
(After all, why would he ever need more than a few on hand at a time...)
If I understand my Puella Magi lore correctly, all Magical Girls become Witches, but not all Witches came from Magical Girls. Some of them used to be familiars who ate a lot of humans, and became powerful enough to graduate to Witch-hood.
There's probably also a few Magical Girls who kinda just die on their first outing- no training/experience with the utter nonsense that are Witch barriers means mistakes, which can be deadly. After all, Kuubi's primary objective is the witching out of Magical Girls, so while the removal of Witches is *nice*, as long as the contractee has the potential, I'm not sure they care about any long-term survival. Well, long-term for Magical Girls anyhow. I think the expected survival time is counted in months?
I don't recall it ever being explicitly stated in canon, and the survival time varies pretty drastically, but on average the time is probably pretty close to the low end, yes. The system that PMMM magical girls operate in deliberately isn't built for sustainability — eventually, you're either going to meet that witch you can't beat, get locked out of the grief seeds you need for survival by other magical girls, or simply have a bad day you can't recover from. The latter is oftentimes either compounded or directly caused by the effects of a wish that gave the wisher what they asked for, but not what they actually
wanted, and/or just the stress of being a magical girl in general. Tira exemplifies this latter circumstance in a lot of ways when she's first introduced, such that if she hadn't encountered Ash...
Well. I've hardly been coy about the canon "character" she's based on.
The following possible future has had segments translated from [Witchspeak] for ease of reading.
Candeloro: [Do you all like my new hat?]
Tira: "Do you ever wonder what Candeloro is saying, Sayaka?"
Sayaka: "I actually wonder what Oktavia says sometimes too."
Smol Oktavia: [These new boots are so wonderful!] *she's on Sayaka's head, and no, it wasn't her idea. Well, technically it was her idea, but you know what I'm alluding to anyhow.*
Ashtaroth complains that she's feeling left out because she doesn't still have
her accessory, only for her smaller cohorts to point out she's basically permanently borrowing theirs anyways, without even having asked their permission, so maybe she should just
shut up.
Having reread the update, I wonder if Ashtaroth could subsume the Kyu before Sayaka does onto him as she did onto those Pyotr when she ran off into Charlotte's barrier. Girl really needs a stress ball.
Sadly, Kyubey terminals aren't terribly durable, so a "stress ball" in that vein likely wouldn't last very long. Unless Ashtaroth could make another, of course... ✪ ω ✪
Yeah, but you write fics about your SI living those stories, not about your SI writing SI fics. It's the difference between having Ashy as the Protagonist and it being the Witch of Subsumption.
You just wait — some day, far off in the future, I'm gonna zoom out the perspective on this story, and you'll find out it was actually being written by the Witch of Literature all along.
More importantly, remind me what you tend to do to your protagonists again, Flairina?
Just because "Being
Meguca Flairina is suffering." may as well be my motto at this point doesn't mean you need to rub it in. ^^;
she was just going to do it accidently, like she did Sayaka?
Exact-! Wait, no, er...
<...I refuse to answer on the grounds that I may incriminate myself?>
wait, does that mean Nagisa is still a meguca? if so pog, and we should go add her to our collection so we have both the Witch and MG variants
I like that your first reaction to that theory isn't "Oh, lucky her, we should prevent her from witching out again!", but "Oh, lucky her, we should prevent her from witching out again... by adding her to the ranks of the Dramatis Personae, of course!"
(Not that you're necessarily wrong — this collection is looking
quite incomplete as things stand.)
The 'hear him out' option is redundant since we can just interrogate him after eating him. Worst case scenario is that doing so cuts bunnycat off from his external hard drives, but at least that'll give us useful information about how they work.
No, worst case scenario is that it self-destructs before Ashtaroth subsumes it.
Others include:
Subsuming it gives nothing.
Subsuming it just gives an informationless body.
It escapes.
Not to mention what the Clarke-Tech civilisation will do if it considers it an unacceptable security-breach. You're running the risk of permanently alienating the Incubators in every timeline, because they may be able to detect that Ashtaroth has subsumed one of them.
Good try, Kyubey in a top hat, but your logic and reason will not deter us!
Onward! To ill-conceived decisions!
Amusingly on-point avatar aside, they
are very valid points/possibilities. That's the thing with Kyubey — even when you want so desperately to wipe that permanent :3 off his face, he's definitely someone you prefer "on your side" (so much as he's on anyone's side other than his own) than not, as he's perfectly capable of marshaling a rather
considerable amount of influence against anything he sees as an issue. In this case, are the potential downsides of making an enemy of him worth the potential — and only
potential — rewards of acting on your immediate impulses?
...well, then again, this
is Ashtaroth we're talking about here, so I suppose it doesn't really matter.
Were all the previous chapters edited recently?
Not all of them (yet), but I
am currently doing a full edit pass on the fic as I slowly go back through it. I don't intend to change anything too major, but Emergence as a whole definitely needed some refining, and Confrontation at the very least needs the hyphen vs emdash (- vs —) punctuation standardized. I've been trying to get around to that for like two years now, ever since I was told I was using the former wrong, so I'd really like to manage it this time.
Lets try to see what Kyubey could have learned from observing the conversation we just had. Assuming he was observing everything that happened after the barrier started moving away, and that he can't 'hear' Ashtaroth, the conversation would look like this:
...
Its pretty jarring at times and has sudden cutaways from one topic to another, with no apparent reason for them. Even so there are quite a few things Kyubey could gleam from this.
Sayaka has a 'Knight sense', Both Sayaka and Tira speak to the witch as an intellectual equal, and can hear it talk to them, this Sayaka hates Kyubey, the trio believe they have time travelled, Tira refers to a meeting involving Hitomi that never happened, Homura either pulled them through time or brought them to an alternate universe, and Ash seems to be against finding Homura.
Kyubey also may or may not have scouted out the rest of the barrier. If he has he should also know that Saar's barrier is present without Saar herself, and Charlotte is also present.
Notably, there's no mention that Ash has subsumption powers, though Kyubey can probably see the link between Ash and her companions, and might suspect something like that as a result.
He also doesn't know what Candeloro is, other than a novel witch, though if he's seen her familiars he might be able to tell.
A good summary of what he could have overheard, to be sure. But then again, if Kyubey
was eavesdropping on all that, I think Ashtaroth should more concerned about why he's suddenly initiated contact...
But, but Mami is one of said witch-related entities!?
Mami: "I'm what?! *Tetris theme starts playing*
Okay I admittedly don't trust her on that, but I think that's the fandom in general - any sort of sapient witch quest has the default assumptions lean pretty strongly towards intelligent = ‼friend‼
A wonderful perspective to have — if only it was shared by more in-universe characters.
Trauma can harm ability to form memories, granted, but forgetting someone rather important in just two days raises questions like "What else has she already forgotten forever?" and "How long until she forgets today?"
Basically, I read it as sign of dementia.
Oh. Well, not to crack down on theorizing, but I didn't mean it that way. ^^; Though that
would be pretty damn horrifying... and is actually pretty similar to something I speculate could apply to Shemesh, were he to become an independent witch him/herself. But
that's highly unlikely to happen anyways, for a number of different reasons. 🌏
B-but, I thought she merely wished to be upper-class ? Implying she wasn't one before ?
Being a meguca must have sounded sooo romantic, tho.
She saw it as a way to definitively prove herself better than others... only to end up having it thrown in her face that she very definitively
wasn't.
Having it as an explicit theme/nature does raise the attention such details get. It'd probably have passed without a mention with regular characters; heck lot of protagonists don't even get to show internal-only thoughts!
Yeah, I like my writing style, but it can cause some issues in that regard sometimes. I've edited that section slightly again; hopefully I won't need to do so a third time.
...In that case, what happens to the unattended familiars, dumped all over Mitakihara? I suppose there will be lots of sweet witches soon in that case.... Good thing there's Mami to take care of tha-wait, nevermind.
Collect them all and set up a sweet-selling company? I'm sure there's an use or two for mundane power, if only to buy things that aren't sweets.
Thankfully, the Pyotr are not exactly amazing hunters, and the Polina don't tend to go off on their own very often. Though with so many familiars now residing in the barrier, I imagine at least a few may have already slipped away without notice...
