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[Twinwolf]

(Ah, my mistake. I forgot about the maintenance, as opposed to casting new ones. Thank you for the correction.)

[Devastator]

(Well.. casting more is not unreasonable.  But if you do so, I'd like it to be intentional.

Also, you might be able to skimp on how real they look, but I'd make sure they make sounds.  Music and joy witch and all.  An illusion of music would probably be a very cheap way to draw fire.  Moving it around, you might be able to get the witch to do friendly-fire.  Plus it could help with the stairway.)

[syvarris]

(Does Tooru feel she'll be in range if she drops off of the staircase and/or stops singing? That knowledge would help me figure out what to do.)

No.  The witch is still distant, and is incoming.  Neither jumping off the staircase, nor ceasing her song, will bring her closer, but maintaining her song and staying on top will bring her a little closer.  It's hard for Tooru to tell if it would help; the witch seems to be coming closer much faster than her staircase is moving forward, and she is very exposed on top of the staircase.  Even if she does get within range a few seconds faster, if she can't capitalize on that advantage, it's a lot of danger for no direct benefit.

Twin, I highly recommend that you change the wording of your action. Change "continue to create illusions" to "continue to maintain illusions". This shouldn't cost much in terms of effectiveness because you already have plenty of decoys, will vastly reduce the soul cost because maintaining is cheaper than activation, and will allow you to use a Primary power because maintenance is secondary.

I try to interpret actions favorably, so in this case the  two statements are identical.  Mina can significantly screw with her illusions, and as long as they're roughly the same stuff, doing similar things, she won't have to pay the casting cost again.  She could remove a significant portion of the illusions to make the maintenance cheaper--like making them sound-only--and that would make the maintenance cheaper, but she wouldn't be able to go the opposite direction and make them more expensive again.  Also, she would have to make her illusions significantly simpler in some fashion for them to be notably cheaper; summoning illusions of multiple people moving around in different areas is near the limit of major cost.


Edit: Currently waiting on KingMurdoc, since Tooru's action is very important and KM hasn't posted about it since asking that above question.

[Chevaleresse]

Tooru stops singing, then waits on the bridge long enough for the first attack to be launched. Dodge using mobility, and continue to move defensively until I think I have a sure shot with the strongest mana bolt barrage I can get for Cheap using talismans.

[Devastator]

(Well.. good luck.  And I hope that objects created through Duet with Reality remain around after the power stops.  Such as the stairs Tooru's standing on..)

[Chevaleresse]

((I figured the gradual build would lead to a faster (but still gradual) fade.))

[Devastator]

(Yeah.. but when it stops, it's over.  No way to do it again, and we might never get a shot at the witch again.)

[Egan_BW]

((This isn't what you getting a shot at the witch looks like. This is what the witch getting a shot at you looks like.))

[Chevaleresse]

(Yeah.. but when it stops, it's over.  No way to do it again, and we might never get a shot at the witch again.)

(I prefer life.)

[Devastator]

(Aye.  Good luck.)

[syvarris]

((Ergh.  I hate making posts saying I'm late, and making excuses, but I know I'll have a harder time updating if I don't make any promises.  So, I am going to go to sleep, and I will write the update after I wake up.  A part of me is tempted to force myself to stay awake longer and write it out, but beyond that screwing my sleep schedule up even further, it will result in far less writing quality.  My brain feels slow, like syrup or something.  I'm sorry for the delay.))

[Nakéen]

((Take the time you need to get in the good frame of mind to write. Also, I have personally found that speaking about a game makes it easier to recover motivation. Worldbuilding, speaking about characters, etc... Anyway, good luck syvarris!))

[syvarris]

...  I tried, didn't I?  I wanted to help people..  I wanted to help save lives.  I wanted to be a good person, like my father.

  But.. I can't do it.  I worked for it.  I'm not strong enough, fast enough, good enough.. I failed.  I made some mistakes too.

..  Why should I live?  Nobody likes me.  My friends just put up with me.  The other girls.. they won't help me, they fight me at every turn.  Because I'm a bad person.

Why bother with it?  Why bother with them.  I should just give up.. I fought so hard and got so little.

But I won't go witch.  I'll just go away.

Hold on for now.

Asha let out a sigh of relief. She couldn't believe it worked, magical powers didn't stop impressing her everyday. "Mina! Oh thank god it worked... How are you feeling?" There was no immediate answer, and Asha quickly understood why upon looking at her surroundings. Even in that state, she was fighting.

Then before she knew it, an explosion struck the top of the icehill. And- "Alida!"

Asha messily started running toward the direction she thought Alida fell, trying to sense her presence. Then she noticed Aleksandra's abnormal state. She hesitated, pausing a second. <Aleksandra?>

Alida. I must hurry. I can talk to Aleksandra while I look for Alida. Asha resumed her search for Alida's body, simultaneously trying to get an answer from Aleksandra via telepathy. Their link was likely clear thanks to the Memento, and maybe she could use that link to help Aleksandra in some way. <Aleksandra snap out of it! I- I know you are scared, no, terrified, but you are not alone! Listen to my voice, I know you can do it. What happened was an accident! There is something only you can do! Aim true, and shoot that witch!>

Asha said to the other girls via telepathy:
<I asked Aleksandra to provide support fire, I'm now on my way to help Alida! Mina, Tooru, be careful!>

Send encouragements/orders to Aleksandra: use your gun to shoot at the Witch!
Search for Alida, and hopefully get there in time. Use Soothe if I can reach her body...

Where? Where?... Alida, where are you?...

Asha shouts for Aleksandra to use her gun to shoot at the witch, then rushes off around the corner without watching what the Russian girl does.  She stops for a moment, looking around the ash plains for Alida's location, and is confused for a moment when she spots the girl, entirely whole, jumping and waving her hands in the air while floating about two feet above the ground.  Then she spots Alida's real body, laying in a small crater filled with bones, a fair distance away from the illusory Alida.  Asha sprints to her wounded friend, sliding to a stop and dropping to her knees when she reaches the girl, grimacing when she sees the horrible state Alida's body is in.  She squeezes her eyes shut, doing her best to not pay the girl's injuries any mind, and drapes herself protectively over Alida while she uses her magic.

The state of Alida's soul isn't encouraging; while it still possesses much of the intricate beauty that all the magical girls' souls possess, it's faded and rotten, degraded and dying.  It's difficult for Asha to search through it and locate which broken strands of Alida's soul represent her horrible injuries, and once found, she's sad to realize how minor they are.  She's used her powers enough to realize how limited they are in repairing the true damage her friends are suffering, and as she lets her magic flow into the wounded girl, patching the small flaws that she can, she feels a little sick, seeing how little she's doing to help.  And then she opens her eyes, Alida turning to look up at her, and sees the girl fully healed, no trace of the blood or burns left.  Asha smiles a little at that, trying not to think of what she was seeing moments ago.

A pair of loud gunshots come off from behind Asha, and she turns as Alida sits up to look at them.  Aleksandra is about halfway between the two of them and the mansion wall, aiming her rifle clumsily at the distant witch, which is evidently very large.  She's still distant, too distant to make out any details beyond her harsh brightness, but she's already proportionately taller than any of the surrounding walls

((Projection is a primary... and also getting pretty expensive, worth noting. It's a good thing Mina's been keeping pretty light on soul use up until now... I hope this one gives a multi-use seed or something, we're all gonna be pretty low. If you have alternate suggestions or ways to make this better I am open to suggestion.))

<Don't give up! We can do this!> Mina shouted over the telepathic link, but besides that kept her focus after trying to get to cover.

Alright, first up, get on the move and find some cover to make it harder to be found. Second up - continue to maintain illusions to distract, confuse, and divert fire. That should be easier with sight, now. As suggested, they'll drop once hit and revealed as illusions to save on power. If Alida is in sensory range, make sure to tell Asha a safe-ish route to her. If it's possible to do that too, try and find a safer way to reach the witch - once she goes down, everything else does.

_{^{((Mina's sixth sense has about a ten foot radius around her soul gem.  The exact amount varies a little in-universe depending on her concentration, and a lot narratively depending on narrative needs, but it's never going to show her anything that's significantly out of melee range.))}}

You get up slowly, feeling awkward in your own body, which moments ago was outright dead.  Asha shouts at Aleksandra to shoot, and then rushes off, the girl running off after her at a much slower pace.  You watch her go for a couple seconds, before she disappears around the corner of the mansion.  You hope Asha can protect her.

Looking around, you're not sure about what place to take cover.  You're sort-of already in cover, the ice hill created by Tooru's song is tall enough that you can't see the witch directly, only the light that's brightening up everything aside from the mansion, but you don't think that will last.  Asha, Aleksandra, and Alida are to your right, so you don't want to go over there--lest all four of you get hit at once--and looking up, there's a ton of the flying skeletons circling overhead, so you're don't feel safe hiding among the mansion's ruins.  That leaves the building far to your left, which requires you to sprint across open ground first.  You take a deep breath, get down into a sprinter's position, and then launch yourself forward.

[Joy]

You pass into the light moments later, but don't turn to look at the witch, focusing on moving as fast as possible, staying hard to hit.  Halfway there, you feel more than hear the explosion as one of your illusionary copies of Tooru, not far ahead of you, gets hit with one of the witch's explosive bolts.  You cover your eyes and change course to sprint through the lingering ash cloud, letting the illusion dissipate as you do.  You come out of the ash seconds later, uncovering your eyes to correct your course.  Seconds later, you slide to a stop behind the wall, staying low and scrambling over to the other side in case the witch throws a bolt at your cover.  After a few harrowing seconds spent cowering and waiting for an explosion, you decide to risk peeking out from behind cover.

The witch is much closer now, and clearly massive.  You have to squint to keep from hurting your eyes, and  you can only barely make out her outline--a jagged, alien, angel.  She's all hard angles, sharp edges and corners, without any depth or variation.  She looks more like someone cut a hole in the sky than an actual animate monster.  She looks wrong, entirely out of place.

Tooru stops singing, then waits on the bridge long enough for the first attack to be launched. Dodge using mobility, and continue to move defensively until I think I have a sure shot with the strongest mana bolt barrage I can get for Cheap using talismans.

You stop your song, and slide partway down the icehill toward the frozen pier, trying to get the bulk of the ice hill between you and the witch.  As the ice stops expanding, suddenly becoming much more slippery and harder to navigate, it occurs to you that you've steadily been rising higher, and are worryingly high already.  The skeletal familiars are circling about two stories above the ground, twice as high as any of the walls, and you're a fair bit above them.  You struggle for a moment to halt your slide, not wanting to get too close to the height of the familiars, and then just wait and listen for the sound of the witch's attack.

You don't have to wait long; there's a loud explosion off to your right, and when you look over, you see a Mina--you're not sure if it's she's real, there's a couple other illusory Minas running around--rush into the ash cloud thrown up by the explosion.  You hope nobody actually got hurt by that attack.

You don't hesitate long after the attack, quickly scrambling back to your feet and rushing up the side of the hill as fast as you can.  You quickly get high enough to see the witch, and are immediately stunned by how much closer she is--she's enormous for one, easily larger than any of the ruined buildings surrounding you, and you're not even sure if she's over the flowers, or within the circle of bare ash and ruined buildings yet.  You can't se any depth to her body, it's just a giant, sharply defined angelic shape, all angular edges and hard corners.  Her wings are hard lines following a basic curve on top, with sharp, dagger-like 'feather' shapes below, her hands and feet terminate in long jagged sword shapes, fingers and pointed toes, and her head is an indistinct elongated pentagon.

You grip two talismans in your right hand, desperately trying to figure out how far away she is, so you can aim properly, and then you finally start to make out some texture.  There's a thin barely-visible patchwork of lines over her entire body, like a wireframe held in front of a painfully bright light, and then you start to make out color between the lines, and it hits you: she's a stained glass window, floating in midair, her entire body a shifting framework of lightly-colored glass plates, constantly shifting, changing shapes, and rearranging.  You couldn't see any depth before because she has no depth!  She's certainly coming closer, the glass sections becoming larger and easier to make out, but her individual body parts only change in shape, not distance.  Her wings are flapping up and down, her height raising and lowering as if she really were flying with them, but when they're low enough to meet her arms, they meld with them as if she were just a silhouette, glass exchanging between her wings and arms before they separate.  She draws her right arm back, and it seems to shrink slightly, glass sections flowing into the rest of her body, and suddenly you realize she's about to throw another attack!

[Joy]

You launch the two talismans in your hand immediately, throwing them towards her head, still unsure how far away the witch is.  Then you duck and dodge backwards, hiding behind the bulk of the ice hill.  You cover your head and hope her attack wasn't directed towards you.  You hear her scream, the sound nearly indistinguishable from the last scream, aside from the volume, but don't hear any explosions, from your attacks or from hers.  You don't peek back up quite yet, though.


((Next update on the 31st.  My sleep schedule is out of whack, so the update schedule / writing quality will likely suffer as well.))

Spoiler: Alida Larsen (Devastator) (click to show/hide)

Soul Gem: Glowing with a fading light.
   ^{Form and location: Medallion, pinned to her left breast.}

Age: 14
Hair Color: Salt-stained blonde.
Health: Fine!
Inventory: A magically-lengthened club, tied to her arm with one of Asha's ribbons.

Totem: A fishing club.

Stats:
   Bravery:  Talented~
   Joy:  Skilled!
   Innocence:  Amateur...
   Purity:  Amateur...
   Mercy:  Skilled!
   Creativity:  Cursed ;-;
   Love:  Cursed ;-;

Abilities:
   Mobility Lvl2
   Close Combat Lvl3+1
   Totem Manipulation Lvl2

   Berzerker Lvl3 Active; Crippled! (Cheap discount to power use)
   Painless Lvl2 Active; Cheap cost per turn!
   Effigy Lvl1

Spoiler: Asha Tia (Nakéen) (click to show/hide)

Soul Gem: Glowing with a warm light.
   ^{Form and location: Ring, worn on her left ring finger.}

Age: 13
Hair color: Ashen
Health: Wet, ashy, and with a bunch of glass and gashes in her right hand.  Has a fair bit of living clay on her, mostly her clothes and right arm.
Inventory: A short rusty metal shiv, broken off from a longer piece.

Totem: A Ribbon. The one her late sister wore.

Stats:
   Bravery:  Skilled!
   Joy:  Cursed ;-;
   Innocence:  Cursed ;-;
   Purity:  Amateur...
   Mercy:  Talented~
   Creativity:  Amateur...
   Love:  Skilled!

Abilities:
   Mobility: Level 3
   Close Combat: Level 2 
   Totem Manipulation: Level 1 (+1)

   Heal and Steel: Level 2 (Active; Next attack rolls on Mercy)
   Soothe: Level 3
   Flagellation: Level 3

   Memento: Level 1 (Given to Aleksandra) 

Spoiler: Mina Ross (TwinWolf) (click to show/hide)

Soul Gem: Glowing with a dull light.
   ^{Form and location: Ring, worn on her right index finger.}

Age: 14.
Hair Color:  Bright green.
Health: Fine!
Inventory: A halberd, which is not really long enough to be helpful here.

Totem: A halberd.

Stats:
   Bravery:  Amateur...
   Joy:  Skilled!
   Innocence:  Amateur...
   Purity:  Skilled!
   Mercy: Cursed ;-;
   Creativity:  Talented~
   Love:  Cursed ;-;     

Abilities:
   Mobility: Level 2
   Close-Combat: Level 2 (+1)
   Regeneration: Level 2

   Sixth Sense: Level 3
   Semblance: Level 2
   Projection: Level 2 (Active; maintaining a bunch of Alida and Tooru illusions; maintenance cost 1/6th Major)

Spoiler: Tamazaki Tooru (KingMurdoc) (click to show/hide)

Soul Gem: Glowing with a shadowed light.
   ^{Form and location: Necklace, worn around her... neck...}

Age: 13
Hair Color:  Bright scarlet.
Health: Has a bunch of shallow cuts across her back, and she's a little cold, to boot!
Inventory: Two paper talismans, ready for throwing.

Totem: Ofuda talismans, primarily thrown as manabolts.

Stats:
   Bravery:  Cursed ;-;
   Joy:  Talented~
   Innocence:  Skilled!
   Purity:  Amateur...
   Mercy:  Cursed ;-;
   Creativity:  Amateur...
   Love:  Skilled!
   
Abilities:
   Mobility II
   Mana Bolt III (+I)
   Regeneration I
   Totem Manipulation II

   Invigorating Passion I
   Outburst II
   Duet with Reality II (Active; Cheap maintenance.)

Spoiler: Aleksandra "Sasha" Chernov (RandomGenericUsername) (click to show/hide)

Ward: Glowing with a foolish light!

Age: 12
Hair Color: Black.
Health: Awake, but very cold and wet, and probably a little traumatized.
Inventory: A cute blue ribbon tied into her hair.  She's wearing Alida's coat, now soaked with water, and wielding her grandfather's AK-47.

Stats:
   Bravery:  Skilled!
   Joy:  Skilled!
   Innocence:  Talented~
   Purity:  Amateur...
   Mercy:  Cursed ;-;
   Creativity:  Cursed ;-;
   Love:  Amateur...

[syvarris]

BONUS!

Spoiler: Longish thing about Sixth Sense which I wrote while procrastinating (click to show/hide)

Mina's sixth sense is really, really robust.  I didn't put thaaat much thought into it when I added it, mostly I just thought about its practical applications, and even there I was largely stealing its mechanics from another source.  In PS, at L3, it's powerful enough that Mina could dissect things down to a cellular level if she really tried, though that's more an incidental consequence of it being arbitrarily good true sight.

Anyway, it has some notable implications that she would have seen.  Humans, and other animals, and basically everything not explicitly magical, works mostly as currently-understood science says it works.  Magical girls mostly follow this.  But there's bits that just don't make sense.  If Mina looked at a silverware set hard enough, she could see what metals it was forged from, whatever impurities the metal had, possibly even flaws in the atomic arrangement of the metal if she reaaally looked.  But if she looks at her halberd, it's not made of atoms.  Though she's likely never done this, if she looked at what it's made of on the most basic level she can, it's the equivalent of seeing a grayish mass with a post-it note stuck on the side, saying "METAL".  Bits of her own body, and the other magical girls, follow this; she's got living, functioning cells inside her, which are real things on an atomic level, but then she's got only semi-real masses of "MUSCLE", "BLOOD", and "FLESH" inside her too, which on a macro level functions basically identically, but is very definitely not the same stuff.  Though I do not track this, the older magical girls (Asha) would have more of that stuff in them, and the more-frequently wounded girls (Alida) would have significantly more.  The fact that some of her matter isn't entirely real, and that the amount varies between the girls, would probably be apparent to Mina even if she didn't specifically study it.

I know I meant to state this in the past, but I might not of, but Mina absolutely would have noticed that Pumsy is entirely made out of similar unreal stuff.  He has no organs, beyond what is visible on the surface.  He does not have muscles.  He is literally just a few varieties of "FLUFF" on the outside, a random mess of "MEAT" on the inside, and a sundry jumble of other materials to make up his claws, eyes, skin, and all that fun stuff.  He has a stomach, of sorts, it's really just a cavity in the middle of his torso "MEAT", but he doesn't have lungs.  When he talks, sound just appears in his mouth.  His eyes seem functional, but he has no nerves to connect them to anything, or even a brain to be connected.  He doesn't even have bones, his meat just provides enough structure to maintain his shape, despite its physical properties definitely not being enough to do that.

So yeah.  Mina's sense is stupid good in a useless area, and Pumsy is something very strange.

[Devastator]

Do I still have the rubber ribbon?  I'd like to try that attack I was talking about.

Spoiler: MG biology notes (click to show/hide)

Wouldn't it be the case that all of Alida's body is magic stuff, given that I'm using an effigy-created body twice over?  Or does it sort of un-regen, with the magical body creating a number of regular cells?