I did notice that Soular and Westar weren't mentioned.
It should be noted, however, that this interlude was not intended to be exhaustive. If Soular and Westar are in the jail, then Onogoro is going to be making a decision about how to behave towards them, and they will likely be reacting to that decision unless, like Katib, the decision is basically just "weld the cell door shut."
I really hope they didn't get too much information. Last thing we need is to relocate Naru and her mom to Usagi's house to get her away from potential attacks from invisible magic terrorists.
Me too. Good news is, Samui
knows that information is sensitive, and I strongly suspect she kept it restricted to a handful of individuals nearly all of whom are yokai. This is why Naru goes around in a weird mask, under Disguise Pen influence, or potentially both all the time during MCAT operations.
Technically, however playing chess with hexagons falls outside of the standard rules. Katib is probably too limited to try that
Maybe when she's older and has had more time to experiment and get comfortable with herself.[/quote]
It does sound like they have a standard playbook
To be fair, they're being presented with similar situations:
"Some of our wizard-enforcers have been captured by a mostly-muggle organization, we need to break in and disrupt them so we can wipe this all out smoothly and quickly."
So reacting with broadly similar strategies ("use mind control on the enemy's mostly-muggle forces to turn their sheer numbers of poorly magic-protected soldiers from a strength into a weakness, bust our guys out of jail, and have them help us carry out secondary objectives") makes a fair amount of sense.
MCAT's obvious problem is that they lack the ability to field as many magical combat units as Onogoro, and the source of the problem is that this isn't something that can be solved by throwing money at it. They've probably already heavily tapped their preexisting recruiting sources and don't know where to find more. At least not easily.
Technically any Joe Smo who's willing to join could just get Awakened, but without the kind of time that just hasn't passed since the founding of the organization Joe Smo will only be an elementalist with minimal magical training. Long-term this isn't a problem, but it is one right now because they need more people now. They can also recruit youkai, but not every youkai wants to fight or would even necessarily be all that good at it, I doubt QiQi would be all that stellar of a recruit for instance.
They can also recruit preexisting mages, but those have the problems of being loyal to Onogoro and lot of the time and possibly being spies. Ki adepts are also an option, but they aren't that common and are at least mildly secretive. Of these sources I bet that they've already tapped most of the low hanging fruit, so are their any other groups they could recruit from?
Their solutions to this problem seem to align with what Torgamous suggested, or some of it:
1) They are sourcing enchanted weapons usable by mundane soldiers from the United States, along with British 'advisors' who appear willing to enter combat under the right circumstances.
2) They are doing things with captured Onogoro supplies of protective talismans and magical weaponry.
3) They are exploring means of producing usable equipment at scale via the Shinto priesthood, who seem less than firmly aligned with Onogoro and capable of making magic that works.
Very interesting, lets see what these guys are gonna fuck around with next. I will say that I'm somewhat disappointed that we now won't ever see how Chypre and Coffret would have reacted to seeing Ahma.
That may actually appear as a Halloween apocrypha this year (if not this year, perhaps another). She was on the encounter table when the Heartcatch girls went to Tokyo, and had a d3 roll turned up differently they would have met her.
We should bring Jupiter's anti-teleport spell. I remember at least one of Nightmare's employees being able to teleport.
I believe that in the original snipped in the turn results post, Cure Dream specifically requested Sailor Jupiter's presence, which wouldn't be surprising since the one time we crossed over with them before, Jupes made a
very impressive showing right in front of them.
The Ambrosian Spellblades were able to handle their own Precure Villains decades ago, so MCAT should at least be able to handle things on that level eventually.
Honestly, MCAT could probably handle any
one group of Pretty Cure villains right now; it's having to deal with half a dozen while also fighting Onogoro and the Dark Kingdom that's kind of overwhelming.
So, uh... Anyone want to tell them?
Edit: Also, hadn't realized the commander MCAT took out in the first round of real combat with their main force was a High Lord. That alone is probably going to be devastating for Onogoro's Afrer Action Performance Reviews. Sure, he probably has an heir to take his seat on their council, but we've still pierced their ivory tower, and trading the life of a High Lord for the rescue (if they succeed in escaping MCAT HQ) of a lord of lesser station isn't a good bargain no matter how they look at things.
Lord Ogura isn't dead, he's "just" wandering the Aokigahara suicide forest as a sort of living shadow until someone gives the goddess of Mount Fuji a convincing reason to restore him to normal and release him into the custody of one side or the other of the conflict.
