Durandal(French, explicitly gotten off the EU) should probably be included if you're including Nehustan, they're both complete relics. Gungnir is also an edge case because Symphogear syncretises it with the Lance of Longinus.
That said, as I've mentioned before, the procurement question is specific to this continuity, because canon actually answers most of the non-Japanese ones(and Shenshoujing which we see getting stolen on-screen). Europe and Israel are the Nazi's, the Mesmotopian ones are America during the Iraq War.
True, though there is at least one plausible answer to the question "how did powerful magical relics captured by the Nazis somehow make their way to Japan." Since we know that:
1) A sizeable group of actual Nazi expats did make their way to Japan, including quite possibly the most highly placed practicing magician in the Third Reich,
2) Many if not all of these expatriates were methodically tracked down and killed over the next couple of years up through late 1947, and
3) While Onogoro would be most likely to have secured their possessions, it is entirely plausible that some of those possessions passed into someone else's hands, or passed out of Onogoro's hands in an unrelated incident at some point between 1948 and 1991.
...
You're right that the question "how did Dr. Sakurai get her hands on any given artifact" remains valid, but as in canon she has/had connections to a faction within the Japanese government that has a lot of money and connections to throw around, so there are plausible explanations for how she might get ahold of these things. This is especially true if the artifacts in question are broken or otherwise defunct, in which case there might well not be many magicians or magical beings with an incentive to keep ahold of them.
Quite true! We see plenty of human-on-human, yokai-on-human, and yokai-on-yokai violence, and also human-on-yokai violence whenever the humans can punch up hard enough to make it hurt!
Will we? Given our long list of other priorities I doubt we will go looking for them.
Sure if MCAT asks for help hitting a specific target we will happily tag along. However much as with the precure villains we aren't going to fight their war for them.
Will we? Given our long list of other priorities I doubt we will go looking for them.
Sure if MCAT asks for help hitting a specific target we will happily tag along. However much as with the precure villains we aren't going to fight their war for them.
Same difference. Sure we might not be actively planning attacks, but we will probably be there. A lot. It's less the Senshi planning their own ops for the war and more us being a powerful set of hero units MCAT can and will request.
Will we? Given our long list of other priorities I doubt we will go looking for them.
Sure if MCAT asks for help hitting a specific target we will happily tag along. However much as with the precure villains we aren't going to fight their war for them.
Also doesn't help that a big part of this attack was a plan to capture us. Onogoro is one of the only enemies we have that had shown a real credible ability to harm us. Even Endymion getting punched full in the face didn't do anything like that.
Also doesn't help that a big part of this attack was a plan to capture us. Onogoro is one of the only enemies we have that had shown a real credible ability to harm us. Even Endymion getting punched full in the face didn't do anything like that.
I mean Onogoro has to pull out a super special trick to become a threat to the Senshi and even then said trick isn't being as effective as it should because it isn't optimized for them. If it weren't for the Godbinding, Onogoro wouldn't be a direct threat to the Senshi. It'd be an indirect threat, because of how it can go after friends and family.
"There's also the high bar set by the initial raid," Homari added. "One thing they keep emphasizing on the news is MCAT's raid was entirely "bloodless": no deaths or grievous injuries for MCAT officers, arrested combatants, or civilians, and that's even after the surprise attack of the demon house. The Ministry may be able to commit the forces to retake the Night Market, but to the average magical citizen, any deaths of civilians or non-MCAT soldiers will suddenly be seen as an undue escalation."
I mean Onogoro has to pull out a super special trick to become a threat to the Senshi and even then said trick isn't being as effective as it should because it isn't optimized for them. If it weren't for the Godbinding, Onogoro wouldn't be a direct threat to the Senshi. It'd be an indirect threat, because of how it can go after friends and family.
There is nothing stopping them from using the godbinding ritual again. Thus they are still a threat after this battle. Technically they could attack the Crystal Millennium building for example.
From what I can find this is Irish, well, Celtic. Specifically the arm of the god Nuadha, or at least kind of an eponymic thing referring to his silver arm
From what I can find this is Irish, well, Celtic. Specifically the arm of the god Nuadha, or at least kind of an eponymic thing referring to his silver arm
Sorry, true. I got mixed up because in-universe it's associated with Enki(?) and Enki is in reality a Mesopotamian mythical deity, but you're right. Underlying point remains, though, that the guide rule for Symphogears is "we get the artifacts where we can."
Note that in-character Dr. Sakurai seems not to have an alternative to Harpe readily available for Chris when it turns out Harpe isn't working out for Chris very well. This suggests that however Dr. Sakurai got her hands on Harpe, it may be a case of "I took what I could get" and not "I picked this out of a large selection of alternatives" or "I chose this to be best for a certain purpose."
I agree that we have enough on our plates that we probably won't be planning attacks on Onogoro ourselves, but that doesn't mean that we will be leaving things entirely to MCAT. I think that MCAT will basically be the ones planning it out, and that they'll occasionally ask for our help with stuff like the Night Market assault.
I agree that we have enough on our plates that we probably won't be planning attacks on Onogoro ourselves, but that doesn't mean that we will be leaving things entirely to MCAT. I think that MCAT will basically be the ones planning it out, and that they'll occasionally ask for our help with stuff like the Night Market assault.
MCAT will probably consider it a good thing that we won't be the one's making most of the plans on how to fight the Japanese civil war. Looks bad if another group is doing it, but it doesn't look bad if it's just allies of the Japanese government assisting.
I don't think "decadence" is a useful tool for understanding human societies. Onogoro has evolved into a social system that concentrates almost exclusively on (1) maintaining the Masquerade, (2) maintaining an internal stratified class system beneficial to its nobility, and (3) subjugating the yokai, using very powerful magical tools to offset their individually great strengths and abilities.
And they are still pretty damn good at all three of those, or were until numerous powerful magical groups they had literally no warning of started poking holes in the Masquerade and the public government became willing to throw billions of yen at anyone who could make those Masquerade-breaching enemies go away.
Yeah, it's not exactly fair to call Onogoro incompetent for failing to react properly to the emergence of the Senshi and the Cures. We're an Outside Context Problem, and as the late great Iain M. Banks put it,
Iain M. Banks said:
An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.
On the other hand, it is entirely possible that Pandora did, on occasion, have sex. Which I would casually estimate as being roughly 300% likely to result in conception if she did, given the whole "All-Mother" thing.
Thinking about it, after these people are released we will actually have enough people to be reasonably be considered a country. Vatican city, an actual country, has about 700 people currently after all.
We shouldn't just say 'We're an OCP, they can't be expected to handle us' here though. Because there are many, many other magical factions, who are dealing with the exact same rise of OCPs. The Dark Kingdom's invasion is of the entire earth, and most magical communities are putting up a fight-maybe a losing one, but a fight. A precure faction is generally not a major loss of control. Cures, after all, appear and staunch the bleeding.
No, Onogoro's major faults are threefold. First, they were ignorant, badly so, of the growing threats in their backyard. Despite a very sensative network of magical detectors, they never picked up on a certain Cure Moonlight's activities. Compare to the British, who while stretched to their limits by the Dark Kingdom are probably picking up and dropping off Cure Continental at school. Secondly, they're diplomatically toxic, unable or unwilling to recruit help. Most other nations are someone you can work with, an authority figure a teenager might trust, or just willing to un-bend their necks. See the British again, who successfully made the Precure and Senshi work with them. Thirdly, they've built a society with a major fault-line running through it, exploitation so sharp and so obvious that anyone who doesn't like them has a clear and obvious level to pull upon. Which also meant that MCAT could be set up quickly, pulling directly on that fissure.
And even after they found out about said growing threats, they consider them far less important than threats (merely perceived or otherwise) to their power (the Senshi, MCAT) etc.
Yeah, Onogoro's incompetence becomes a lot less excusable when most of the other governments in the world are doing far better. Basically everyone else who isn't also dumb enough to try fighting their precures is more aware of what's going on, is dealing with it better, and is capable of working with allies.
Honestly, the only government that is doing worse is China, and that's only because they are fighting against a smaller group of defenders. Even then, you could argue that the Ministry is doing worse than 'Murder our only magical forces' China
Honestly, the only government that is doing worse is China, and that's only because they are fighting against a smaller group of defenders. Even then, you could argue that the Ministry is doing worse than 'Murder our only magical forces' China
Though I seem to recall that Brazil is having issues and then there was one African government that sent out arrest warrents for thier local Cures or something?
As Sailor Moon's first outraged sentence begins to pick up full and proper momentum, a frantic reversal of the spell that accidentally summoned her banishes her back to the most available alternative, along the path of least mystical resistance: the place she had originally intended to go anyway, a hundred or so meters and three stories above the site of the attack on the east gate.
However, Sailor Moon now has one very alarmed ritualist in fancy robes flailing frantically to try to get away from her practically unbreakable grip. For the moment, this occupies her attention.
[X] Have Mars ask MCAT command where to bring the ritualist for interrogation, then bring him there.
"Mars?"
<Oh, Moon! Good to hear from you!>
"Yeah, something funny happened, hey, stop kicking me in the shins, it's very rude and it's not going to help."
<...I'm sorry, what?>
"Oh, sorry Mars, it's just, there's this guy, you know the ritual that keeps trying to grab us, well, it grabbed me and instead of getting wrapped up the next thing I knew I was in this basement or something in a circle with these chanting guys and I grabbed the guy and then the next thing I knew I was back here on the rooftop only he was here with me. I was talking to the guy, stop that, see, look, now you're still stuck on top of a five-story building and I've still got your robe, would you like your robe back, hey get back here, okay, got him again, sorry Mars, he wiggled out of his robe and I wasn't expecting that."
<I think… I think I understand what's happening. So, uh, what are you going to do?>
"Well, I don't know. I was thinking of just throwing him at… uh, where did the panda bear go?"
<I wasn't there that day, remember? It was, uh…> "WHAT?"
"Hey, stop interrupting! It's very rude, and you're being much more difficult than the panda bear and I threw him to Mount Haku, I'm pretty sure it was Mount Haku, so if you'll just stop wiggling you can have your robe back and we can get down off this rooftop and get you somewhere safe. Or Mount Haku. Would you like to go to Mount Haku, Mister Magic Man?"
"..."
"......"
"............"
"...Please do not throw me to a mountain three hundred kilometers away, Lady Moon."
<Moon? Is everything okay?>
"Absolutely! I'm going to let go of Mister Magic Man, and he's going to get his robe back and put it back on and stay put and not try any funny business and I'll finish my conversation with you, Sailor Mars, and nobody will get thrown to Mount Haku tonight!"
<Okay, um, how can I help?>
"Well, I think this guy might know a lot about the ritual, and I was hoping MCAT could hold him, and I thought of just dropping him off in the jail because I know the way, I was there to try and heal Soular and then again when I dropped you off Monday, but I decided I should probably ask where they want him."
<Right, I'll check…>
***
So you drop the magician off by teleporting to Rei's communicator. She said it wasn't the command center- they don't want to let an unknown wizard in there until they're sure he's under control. But there are three yokai and a tough-looking man you don't recognize waiting for you. They put a pair of funny-looking handcuffs on the ritualist and tell you they'll keep an eye on him, and that's good enough for you.
So you teleport Rei back to the command center because it's faster than walking. Some people jump, but most don't even seem to notice you. Your first impulse is to say hello- these are allies, friends- but you know everyone's very busy and there's not much time.
…You may be the hero Sailor Moon, but you've done a lot of teleports lately and you just… need a minute. You've gotten so mixed up about which way is up and which way is clockwise and which way is ana-kata that if you were a cartoon character you'd probably have swirly eyes by this point.
And Rei's glad to see you, you can tell.
She's filling you in on what's happening, telling you thinks like what Minako's up to and how Makoto just called saying she needs to catch her breath for just a minute after it sounds like she chased the entire Onogoro army away from the east gate by herself.
Then Captain Sano comes over to you, walking fast. "Sailor Moon! Hello!"
You remember being introduced to him earlier this evening, before Onogoro attacked. There's some intricacies you didn't understand, but he seems to be in charge of the soldiers?
"Oh, hi, Captain Sano! What's going on? Do you need something?"
Sano winces. "Well. We've got wounded- including Adapter Sakurai, who's at the central aid station. And Kazanari and his yokai are having trouble at the west gate, and I'm worried about the north, too. Their reinforcements can't be moving fast, but it can't be much longer before they arrive, and their assault forces may have been… pushed underground, whatever that means, but somehow I don't think we've seen the last of them…" He shakes his head.
"Let me talk to Sailor Mars about what we can do." You give him your best cheerful resolute smile, and it seems to make him feel a little better. People always appreciate that for some reason.
Your heart is not as happy as your smile. If nothing else, you're going to pay 'Adapter Sakurai'- you have no idea why MCAT's taken to calling the girls in the singing Symphogear suits that- a visit. If she got hurt fighting while you've been juggling so many other things… you can't accept that.
And someone comes over, walking even faster than the captain did, with such an obvious sense of urgency that he ignores you entirely to tell Captain Sano-
"The British patrol's called in again. There is trouble, and they…"
Director Samui neither likes nor especially trusts Sir Frederick Evans. He reminds her of an Empty Face, and her people have had long centuries to learn far more than they would wish about the ruthlessness, prejudice, cruelty, and treachery of the Empty Faces. But she is also acquainted with Dame Clarabelle Clerk, a member of the same warrior order, and a more sympathetic figure in her eyes. If the same power gives orders to Evans as to Clerk, she reasons, then she can at least depend upon the former not to betray MCAT in its hour of need. And whatever she may hold against Evans, she has no reason to think him incompetent.
Evans, is supposedly trying to tear secrets from an Empty Face's mind the way the Empty Faces are infamous for doing to others. And now he thinks there's something worth warning Samui of. So when he recommends that Samui send a strong patrol to directly check on what's happening in the prison block, instead of just calling on the phone, she does so.
She first thinks of sending one of the yokai-heavy units- Hana's team has been doing well, for example… But that might be just what Onogoro expects and has prepared for. Just as the Empty Faces are old enemies of her kind, so the yokai are old enemies of theirs. If she had the equivalent of Onogoro's samurai, she'd send those... but apart from a couple of Akaishi Mountain Warden fighters, she has none. And she sent them to Kanon Town as part of the group who are supposed to help make sure the rest of the detachment sent there, the more suspicious probable-double-agent types,don't get up to anything nasty. So much for that.
Fortunately, she does have at least one unit of solid classically trained combat mages she can rely on not to be secret Onogoro agents: the British security advisors. The foreigners helped with warding and defenses earlier in the week, and now on the night of battle, they've proven to be a hard-hitting and useful fighting team. One that's at least managed to run an Empty Face off before. Samui suspects, or at least hopes, their inscrutable occidental magic is as foreign and unfamiliar to Onogoro as it is to her.
This evening their numbers have been rounded out with some of the few English-speaking yokai, so Samui feels confident that they're strong enough to at least check the prison and escape if there's trouble. She sends them in, with Dame Clarabelle.
***
Julie Mills shrugs slightly, trying to get her body armor to seat more comfortably. The man at the entry desk to the prison area explains something, slowly, as if being very patient, in Japanese. Which Mills, for all intents and purposes, does not speak- her smattering is nowhere near enough. Fortunately, he's explaining it to Dame Clarabelle, who does speak Japanese.
And then Dame Clarabelle gives Mills a significant look and a very, very solemn nod. "We've got to believe him. Got to."
That settles Mills' suspicions. Her background is moderately distinguished by the standards of Q Division security section leaders. Which means she's had a rotation through the security detachment for the embassy from the Court of St. James to the Court of, in her case, Winter.
When she's on her guard, she generally knows a hypnotic compulsion when she feels it, and she thinks she feels it. And she certainly knows the signs of a man who's given into it.
She may have no idea what he's saying, but this luckless fellow is, to put none too fine a point on it, captivated.A-mazed. Spellbound.
By the knights' own account, they always hear such compulsions, consciously, like an annoying nagging little whine that can't get past the sheer strength of what Clarent's touch pierces their soul with.
The thought of that piercing power, of steel that is both literal and metaphor pinning the mind in place like a butterfly to a board, has always seemed a bit uncanny to one Ms. Julie Mills, magician and professional paranoiac though she may be. But she knows to respect those of her colleagues who've been knighted; it's supposed to be an honor and it's not given out lightly. And she knows how to make use of the… fringe benefits… of the knights' status even when she herself lacks them and has no intention of acquiring them.
Anglo-Japanese Patrol
d100 + 18 (Julie Mills Martial) + 15 (Typical Force Intrigue) + 10 (The Un-Paddle) + 5 (Those Infernal Devices) + 5 (Yokai Senses) + 5 (Specialist Security Training) + 5 (Knight of the Round Table)
Vs
Empty Face Team Two
d100 + 17 (Team Leader Martial) + 20 (Typical Empty Face Intrigue) + 20 (Karappo no Kao) + 10 (Brainjacked MCAT Wardens)
83+63 = 146
Vs
19+67 = 86
Major MCAT Success!
Dame Clarabelle's gifts aren't all Clarent's doing, either, as she demonstrates. The small and very typical cardboard box on the guard's desk abruptly comes to life, unleashing a swarm of tissues that fly up and around his mouth, gagging him from across the room. Then the three-ring binder in front of the hypnotized guard flies open, so that more robust tendrils of paper can snake out from it to grab him and hold him steady.
Mills, meanwhile, thinks what would I do if I were up against… and immediately lets her Organizer drop on its lanyard so she has a free hand to snag the Un-Paddle from her hip. A flash of violet light fills the room. An abruptly visible Japanese man in nondescript civilian clothing gasps in alarm and turns to run. A husky dog-devil tackles him almost immediately, after which the British team take turns hitting the probable Empty Face with stun-spells until he stops twitching.
Dame Clarabelle turns to Mills. "Do you think we should keep pushing?"
Mills nods. "Yes, but-" over her shoulder to her team- "they must have heard some of that. Keep your flashbangs ready, everyone."
Mills, for her own part, puts the Un-Paddle back on the magically adhesive holder that kept it attached to her gear before. She was already on the brink of drawing her weapon and readying her defenses in case it dropped into the pot at any second. Now she does so. Automatic in her right hand, personal thaumaturgical assistant still lanyarded to her left wrist. She taps a couple of memorized buttons without looking, and the little gizmo raises a broad bubble of wards around her body and a taut buckler-disc around itself, to compound with barrier spells wrought upon Mills' body armor.
Fighting like this has been as close to Division standard for close-quarters combat magic as there's been, at least in the past few years since the modified Psion Organizers started coming down the pipeline. Even if there are still plenty whose standard is some other way- like Dame Clarabelle, or for that matter a lot of the knights- it works damn well for Mills.
The advance is lively, but the sense of caution is livelier. Mills doesn't know exactly how many prisoners MCAT's taken. But she knows far more of them are here than she'd have wanted to see under the Annex. And no building MCAT has is as well set-up for this kind of work as the Annex.
Mills takes point; she's the one trained to use the Un-Paddle. They round a corner and the purple flash flushes no ambushes, but reveals the fallen body of some poor devil. He's of a long-nosed breed she's seen around the place but can't recall the name of, and he looks chewed up- curse and knife-work, not gunfire or beasts.
Dame Clarabelle is whispering into the radio in Japanese. Mills can't really make it out but hopes it's something along the lines of "an Onogoro commando has broken into your jail and killed or hypnotized your guards, start panicking now kindly please."
There are nervous voices up ahead. She, again, can't make out the words, but the tone, despite the echoes… If she were whipping a lot of magicians who mostly haven't worked together and some of whom only sort of know how to fight into one group in a hurry, she can imagine hearing a lot of voices like that. Right.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that they overwhelmed the sentry-post fast enough that while the people inside the cell blocks know something's gone wrong, they don't know what.
Mills looks around, thinking about her odds. In a low voice, she speaks to the men and yokai who have gathered around her almost instinctively.
"All right. Apple, and you there, fox, you two can veil us, right?"
The kitsune, with a certain understandable dignity and a thick Japanese accent, asks "His name is 'Apple,' and you want us to be invisible?"
"Yes and yes."
"I can do my half."
Apple grins. "And I can do mine."
Conceding her technical vocabulary to the limited English of her allies, because she can afford no misunderstandings. Mills tries to word the battle plan carefully. "Right. We veil- we become invisible. We go farther. We hold a string. Stay together. I say 'go.' We drop the string. We throw flashbangs. We empty one magazine. We run back to the desk."
The yokai look amused, but nod. Her men look even more amused. The only one who doesn't seem to quite get the joke is Dame Clarabelle, who's tilting her head slightly as if listening to something the rest of them can't hear. If it was a compulsion she'd warn them, so Mills decides to let the matter rest.
Tactics while invisible are… difficult. There's a fairly limited range of options for people who haven't worked together closely for long, and a length of twine or the like is one of the least-bad choices. Mills leads the team forward- can't have any of her invisible comrades in front of her when the Un-Paddle goes off again- and holsters her pistol so she has a hand for the artifact in question.
Onward, onward; this corridor is wide like some of the ones to the cells under the Annex, meant to accommodate things much larger than a man, if only when stunned and on an outsized dolly. Down a spiraling ramp that will likely come in handy on the way back.
Cross-corridor, hmm, tug the team that way… peek around a corner… ah. This must be an assembly area. And it looks like a few of the Onogoro mages are trying to chivvy a mixed group, many of them in prison jumpsuits. There's arguments about something- a shortage of proper kit, maybe? Mills tugs the cord and the team slips forward. She hisses, "Lots of them. Around that corner. Get ready… GO!"
They drop the cords, grab and toss the flashbangs, and duck back around the corner as the cries of alarm sound and are drowned out in the deafening crashes. The yokai, who've been carrying heavy battle rifles, do most of the shooting. Some of the confused enemy go down in sprays of blood, but the rest throw themselves flat and start tossing magic back the other way.
Soon, crackling counterspells are tearing the veils off Mills' team, and Mills has to shove the dog-yokai half-aside because she's got a barrier field around herself and he doesn't. More and more of the gunshots, runic or not, are bouncing off shields as the enemy reacts to the surprise.
And from behind the prone mages, a mob of not-quite-human figures screaming a high-pitched "CHOIIIII" start charging forward. They're waving torches and pitchforks and where the hell did they get those. And unless they're tougher than they look Mills thinks her team can put them all down, but the magazines have to be running low and lo, discretion is the part of valor, especially when you're probably outnumbered five or ten to one.
So she shouts a very simple order.
"RUN!"
They work their way backwards up the spiral ramp, bouncing a mix of grenades down and around the angles, and if anything was following them too closely they never see it. At the top they stop, catching their breath and wishing vainly for more grenades.
And then the kitsune grins evilly and fishes something out of the bag at his waist, tossing the little fist-sized rock down the ramp to land with a floor-shaking BOOM as it turns into some kind of squat, ugly statue the size of a compact car. Whch promptly starts to tip on the uneven floor…
BOOM BOOM BOOM…
…and roll down the ramp…
boom boom boom…
…and Mills truly regrets, for a moment, that she can't see the reactions of whoever's assembled at the bottom of the stairs.
"Choi choi choi CHOOOI…""chooi…"
Panting for breath, Mills turns to the fox-man. "Do you think they liked that?"
"I don't know. I very much did, Ms. Mills."
And he gives her a smile that honestly does make him look like a predatory spirit, and Mills does her level best to match it. The bastard's got charm, he does.
***
But it's a minute later that the ominous chanting in- Arabic!?- comes up the ramp, and there's a tremendous billow of something hateful and mind-numbing. For a moment Mills thinks this is the end and it'll get them all. But Dame Clarabelle, true to form, completely ignores the fear and mind fog and conjures up a whirling ring of something complex and polylingual. It looks like a classic Seal of Solomon that's hit the books for a few years, and the enemy curse really, really hates it.
The team falls back, thinking they'd better get a bit more distance on any more conjured menaces coming up the ramp rather than parking right at the top. And then… things get difficult.
There's a lot of them down there. Even if they do all have to come out this way, as wide as the corridor is, there's only about room for three of hers to stand if they're to have any room for maneuver at all. And the jailbreakers have more than enough mages to start rotating, casting a spell and then ducking out of the line of fire while they rest and let someone else take over. No amount of kit, however good, can make up for that indefinitely.
Dame Clarabelle is shouting something into the radio in Japanese, hopefully along the lines of "the bastards are staging a mass jailbreak, they're coming up the ramp, help, help, send reinforcements!"
Mills, meanwhile, crouches down as best she can and lets fly with a few more wardbreaker shots from her pistol. One misses; two hit someone who clearly knows how to shield as well as she does. With the Organizer running its little program, her barrier will reinforce itself automatically. Theirs should take an effort of will to replenish unless they have particularly good kit, which it doesn't seem like most of them do, seeing as how they're still in prison jumpsuits with a few odd necklaces and wands and suchlike.
But that's not enough of an advantage to make this comfortable for her. Not even when she's got the enemy stuck in a bottleneck this narrow. She draws in a sharp hiss of breath in alarm as she bats aside a ghostly throwing knife with the buckler.
And then she hears Dame Clarabelle, talking English again. Call must be over. "There must be dozens of them in there!"
Mills squeezes off a couple of wardbreaker shots- she's sure one connected, but it didn't drop the bastard. "No, really?"
"I have an idea!"
"What, grenades? We tried that, remember?"
"No, a better idea."
"I don't think we have any more rocks to throw!"
"Make a wish!"
"Damnation to the Ministry of Onogoro!" Mills snarls. She barely manages to yank an enemy mage's electric arc into the focus of the buckler shield emitted by her Organizer, where it dissipates without harming her.
Meanwhile, what the hell is Dame Clarabelle up to? "CLERK! What are you doing!?"
Mills is, more and more, noticing and regretting the distinct lack of hundreds of feet of paper ropes tying these bastards up, and that would be very helpful right now, damn it! She feels a spike of fear as a wave of crackling magical corrosion envelops her. Desperately, she bypasses her Organizer, blows the main bubble shield up to take the attacking curse with it, and lurches against the corridor wall. That, she hopes, will buy her a second for the Organizer, which with charming single-mindedness is starting to recast the bubble shield automatically.
She takes a brilliant searing yellow firebolt to the chest before that can happen. Luckily for Mills, the bolt is hot enough to burn through kevlar, but not hot enough to pierce a dwarf-forged trauma plate. Damn the heat on her chest hurts, though. Damn damn damn, hopefully the padding keeps that from leaving burns down her front. Damn damn DAMN.
Mills' shield comes back up. Fighting back the pain, she looks to her left and right along the wide corridor. One of her men has been knocked sprawling by something, and she doesn't know what, but he's getting back up and still seems to have fight in him. The dog-yokai, though, is shivering and clutching at what looks disturbingly like an Oblivion curse-mark- she knows those well enough-
Mills screams and dumps a full magazine of wardbreakers in the general direction of the enemy, and they dutifully stay suppressed for a bit. Just a bit.
Damn damn damn! They can hold like this, but not for much longer before one of the local boys on the other side gets good and proper lucky. And what is Dame Clarabelle doing damn it?
"CLERK!"
"Look, I'm sorry, that wish was too broad, I can't get it to work, but something like that- got it! Just a moment, I'll need to coax this one."
"HURRY!"
***
Among the many strange events surrounding Sailor Moon's visit to several Q Division facilities- events Mills herself played some part in- there was the matter of the self-propelled paper crane infestation that broke out in the hospital where Dame Judith… debatably advisably decided to administer soma tea to the Senshi leader.
How the single paper crane the questionably-human Sailor Moon actually folded with her own two hands multiplied into a thousand, Mills does not know. But she's glad Dame Clarabelle, resident mistress par excellence upon all matters papery, was able to coax them all out of the hospital's ventilation ducts and down off the shelving in the days immediately after.
Surprisingly, the mass of little cranes kept landing on her fingertips and deciding, perhaps because they felt safe and happy, to re-coalesce.
And so, while Mills and two of her men grit their teeth and try to shield against at least five of the liberated Onogoro detainees tossing fireballs and the like down the corridor at them, Dame Clarabelle leans back in a small alcove by a doorway. She pulls out, from one of the pouches in her combat gear, a little square sheet of paper. Paper that has a peculiar rainbow sheen to it, something like lamination, something like enamel. She refolds the origami construct along the lines its maker gave it in another turning of the moon, taps it on the head, and whispers "I wish the Karappo no Kao would have a frightful lot of trouble in that jail they're in."
The crane takes flight, though its iridescent wings blur like a hummingbird's. In a topology-defying twist, it unfolds and refolds into two of itself, then four, then eight, then more, then a thousand and perhaps more than that. They pick up speed around the corner and down the hall. Mills and the other British are bowled over from behind by a sudden aerial river of shimmery rainbow origami cranes.
Cries of anger, confusion, and strangely, "kikiki" and "choi," soon echo back up the hall, Mills can only assume, as she pushes herself back to her feet, that the opposing force is even less happy to make the things' acquaintance than she's been. Which suits her well enough.
Too much to hope for that it'll put a stop to this mess, with so many of them down there. But if it keeps the bastards quiet for a minute or six, she'll call that good enough.
Font got a bit messed up after they took down the first Empty Face and seems to have defaulted to all "English font".
That aside, sounds like the Jailbreak's been suppressed. That said…
If she had the equivalent of Onogoro's samurai, she'd send those... but apart from a couple of Akaishi Mountain Warden fighters, she has none. And she sent them to Kanon Town as part of the group who are supposed to help make sure the rest of the detachment sent there, the more suspicious probable-double-agent types, don't get up to anything nasty.
So the jailbreak is boxed in, not being able to get past the chokepoint exiting the prison. They might need some help actually suppressing things but the crisis it could have cause is very much smothered.
Also the little wishing crane basically being a minor magical artifact just because Sailor Moon make it while drunk is surprisingly funny and useful.
They're bottled up, but the most experienced tactician present on the spot (Mills) doesn't they can hold them at the chokepoint without reinforcements.
There almost have to be, say, several dozen mages in the jailbreak force, at least, and Mills' patrol is probably a single digit number of actual beings. Given the ability of large groups of mages to pull off Big Nasty Spells like whatever drove the Anglo-Japanese patrol off the top of the ramp, that kind of numbers disparity is a problem even before Team Good Guys starts actually taking hits and injuries, which they are.
Now, maybe the paper crane wish will stop the jailbreak attempt decisively rather than merely temporarily inconveniencing them and/or giving them new problems to worry about. But if it doesn't, they're still going to be a problem in Round 4.
Her background is moderately distinguished by the standards of Q Division security section leaders. Which means she's had a rotation through the security detachment for the embassy from the Court of St. James to the Court of, in her case, Winter.
Usagi: The Court of Winter? What's that like? Julie Mills: In theory, it's a chance to hone your magical skills, in exchange for being mindful of the rules and choosing your words VERY carefully. In practice... well, I call myself a professional paranoiac as a mark of pride because of that stint.
