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Spirit Cascade
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>That depends on how well the general public would recognize we look like magic.
Disguising yourself might not be important. It's a known side effect of Suppression, though most put into suppression haven't come out. You'll be noticeable to some degree. Still, people dye their hair all the time, and you can just as easily play it off as a personal choice.
I don't want to rely on, "Might not be important," and think a chalk-white foreigner is too much, especially since we actually are magic with Stellar charm. More importantly, even if the person we're talking to isn't weirded out by it we're still strange enough folks would gawk and/or take pics and post them online, which is problematic. Maybe what we want to look like is one of the trendy, subculture-following young ladies who look strange because they want to look strange... and are therefore usually ignored by everybody who isn't part of the subculture and fandom. That at least has potential as a hilarious way of hiding in plain sight. Is, 'elegant gothic lolita,' still popular?
>Learning our old codename is trivial. >Whoever or whatever cause our old hero-identity represented, it's very likely not the same cause we're representing now. >The only real reason to use a Japanese name is as an obvious use-name.
We don't know right now, and Annette isn't right here to ask at the moment. It might be close enough to be worth using, or far enough to be worth defining ourself in opposition. The same cause will also work differently with different allies and methodology, it may not have been the cause that was the problem previously: If our cause was previously peace, love and the end of poverty, for instance, that may have had severe conflicts with us being on the Heaven Court team. Y'know, the power fluctuations mysteriously happening whenever they assassinated folks, starved people, bombed stuff, and other similarly violent asshole type things.
If you want to give the guy we're talking to an obviously fake-name like that there's no reason to go as far as a last name, or call ourself anything more complicated than, "Aya." Yes, I know that folks in Japan tend to refer to people formally by their family names instead of personal names, but making up an entire alias for talking to Japanese people is too much like building a second identity for talking to Japanese people. That is bad for having a consistent persona to go with our cause and how we represent it.
Even if we are Icelandic there's gotta be something we can use that'll work fine though, just going by the fact that, "Lily Iridium," would work beautifully if it weren't our actual name. Considering how Icelandic names tend to be, we pretty much have proof we're not that... although what our name is remains difficult to pin down. "Iridium," is a name made up by an Englishman in the 19th century out of the name of a Greek goddess, so assuming we have the same nationalities in our world as this one my best guess is that, "Lily Iridium," is some kind of Anglosphere made-up name. If that's the case, how about, "Violet Spectra?"
>I'm probably snipping at terminology here, but legend feels too much like the purview of the cultural hero, while we're shooting to be more the boss, or the crusader. Something tied to a knit unit.
Frankly, insisting on just a tight-knit unit is severely limiting. Let's explain this by example, for cause of, "Peace, love and the end of poverty." To make significant achievements along those lines we would get further with volunteers and donations, in addition to having just more fanatical followers, so a full scale legend like Che Guevara or Ghandi had would be useful and appropriate. That would also have pretty damn high prospects for overall advancement, and lots of followers of both the lightly involved and more intensely (fanatically) involved kinds when we're successful, perhaps millions.
Other causes would have other ways to exemplify them, other forms of outreach and peripheral involvement, other forms of core organization and different difficulties of course. If we were to become NRA-chan for instance, trying to sling a bandolier of grenades and a loaded automatic weapon on every shoulder, that would... would... damnit, I need at least two more shots of the hard stuff before I try to think that one through.
>Scouting the local groups is a step in this- see what ideas people are already fighting for, and if any of them are compatible, or something we can build from.
I have a small quibble with that, in terms of the fact that as a magical girl we should really be fighting on behalf of humanity against its enemies. Right now that's Heaven Court and selfish people who are at war with them because they want the power to threaten, destroy and oppress others. I fully expect my cause proposal would bother a bunch of the rebels for good and noble reasons worth fighting for. I concede that we should at least know what the factions are and how many kill lists each potential choice lands us on before we commit to anything.
>1989 I was assuming a world where north America blew up rather earlier than that, when the loss of the US military's and/or universities would have been more of a setback. But yeah. >Honestly, the biggest potential roadblock is if development decentralized and continued in parallel enough that you get a mess of non-compatible standards, sort of like the power grids.
Did you know that the Soviet Union had their own computing industry and personal computers too? Nobody remembers because they were far enough behind that when the Iron Curtain fell nobody used the stuff anymore except for a few legacy installations. Remember, in 'internet time' five years old is positively fossilized, and it used to be the case that a computer that's five years old would have a tenth the RAM and storage space and something like a hundredth the FLOPS and INTOPS speeds as a current model at the same market tier. That brand-new, same-tier upgrade would have a lower raw sticker price compared to when the old one was new too. Also, consider how the enduring usage of 'Wintel' computing for many, many years was due to the fact that both the hardware and the software was much, much cheaper than Mac, and their large user-base meant that lots of third-party companies made and sold software that increased the value of those systems. The cheapness of that hardware would eventually intersect with the Free Software/Open Source software movements to create Linux, and Apache, and most of the other software the internet currently runs on because it is available for free.
Over time most folks around the world standardized on Wintel/PC computers and the American internet not because it was the greatest, but because it was internationally-available, the cheapest, with the most software and the fastest upgrades. Thanks to economy of scale in manufacturing and software development, selling the most means being able to be the cheapest, the patterns in market and technological development drive monopolies in hardware and software at the cheapest scales. Contrary attempts at enforcing parochial standards would ultimately fail: Either the governing body behind them would give up and give in, or the country with the incompatible standard would fall behind in the development and affordability curves because of economy of scale and interoperability issues. It all adds up to one internet, absolutely in a world with various premium computing and networking options available too, but just one internet.
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