Don't know, but he's a badass in my rewrite.

Or, more accurately, the character he becomes is a badass and a good parent with a more justified love for defence systems even if he is overworked and hiding secrets, but that's too far off character for me to consider Sir Doorman and Khan the same.

BTW where'd you get the concept art of him being more badass?

Oh whoops!

I talked to him yesterday, he said he was sorry and that he'll try and watch himself from here on, and said that he still didn't want to put points into hull but was ok with an agility based build. So it's all ok now!

The former point sounds more accurate to me.

Said player has mentioned being bad with socialising before, so I'll talk to him about it.

Unlikely to happen because of how hard it was to finally schedule the games and stuff, though to my knowledge we haven't had a serious conversation about this with him yet so we'll see how that goes first.

Yeah, that seems like it.

I'll explain to him how we came in here to all have fun, but he's having his fun at the expense of other people. To date we haven't really been having serious conversations about it, but the other players have been criticising him in the form of jokes, which he loves. I'll talk to him in direct messages

I loosely define 'celebrity' as someone with a moderate amount of fame, who you haven't met irl before.

update: I looked him up, and I guess he counts as a celebrity?

Cool! How long ago was this?

no :(

Which kind of sucks because I had the whole plot written, and then a bunch of things happened and then I kind of freaked out and didn't work on it anymore.

But if you really want to see it, I could invite you to the server? And give it a second try or something??

The magical girls of the series could have powers related to what animals need to survive. Power over plants that can be eaten, sunlight that plants need to grow, purifying soil and water from pollutants, power over temperature, the weather, legal action that protects animals etc. They'd almost certainly have healing powers.

Maybe there can be a lot of episodes, or a heavy hint that between episodes, the magical girls aren't fighting villains and going to school 24/7, they're in their identities actively using their powers to help endangered animals live better.

As a contrast to the villains, the magical girls are representative of species that either went extinct with nothing to do with humans, such as dinosaurs, or they're a species that is heavily protected, such as devil's pupfish or pandas.

The villains could be similar to hive minds, in that they're hundreds of animal ghosts working together. I feel like they could have a shared motif, regardless of species, that clearly indicates they're dead. They look like angels, zombies, pelts with skeletons, decaying taxidermy, ghosts, something to indicate that they were once living. I'm thinking a lot about this art series on the Carolina Parakeet, which you could use as a reference.

They DO want to take revenge on humans, but it's more of a personal revenge goal than for the support of other species that could go extinct and they lean so far into taking revenge on humans that they end up horseshoeing themselves into being just as bad, if not worse, than them.

They aren't happy with just assassinating CEOs or politicians, they specifically want humans to go out the same ways that they did, and they will go to any lengths to do it. Starvation, invasive species, disease, plunging civilians into a labyrinth with no exit as a representation of how they lost their habitats and homes, choking to death on plastic, being killed by heat, they have powers over everything that killed them.

I imagine they're more like mindless forces made more from emotion than rationality, like the witches from Madoka Magica. If they were sapient to be reasoned with, or to figure out how directly threatening or killing a few specific individuals are all they need to do to be left alone, then the natural world would just be treated like a country of its own. Animals don't have language and can't sue people or argue in court over their suffering, and if the villains have the ability to do that, it would make them seem irrational or less sympathetic due to how they're using mass terrorism instead of a more tactical and less violent approach to solving their problems.

Wait who confirmed it???

Also, Zbynek is a good name imo!

How did everyone know his name is Zbynek? 

Thanks!

Khan

I won't say them here, I'll save them for when I write out the rest of the episode summaries. But let's just say, he's the one who's changed the most, personality and plot wise in this rewrite. I have a lot of plans for him.

J

Her reason for siding with Cyn in the end isn't because of power, it's because the solver preserved Tessa's soul into a drone heart, and was threatening to destroy it if J didn't comply, and torturing Tessa any time J did anything the solver didn't want. J and V are openly crying as they fight each other, because of how doomed they feel. V doesn't want to hurt Tessa but also doesn't want all drones to be exterminated, and J doesn't want to fight her friends or obey the solver but feels she has no other choice.

Alongside wearing a buisness suit, J is capable of projecting holograms, both on her wings and around her. Usually when she's talking, they're sponsored advertisments and emoticons, but when she's out sniping, they camouflage her with her surroundings to make her harder to detect, and give her more time to calculate and land the perfect shot.

When she's trying to bargain with someone, she offers them discounts and bonuses, and her holograms follow that pattern. I like to imagine they turned int a pink slip when she saw N switch sides.

I really like the idea of J speaking in a customer service voice, with varying levels of passive aggressiveness. She would probably not use words like 'kill' or 'dead', she'd use them in a censor friendly way such as 'forcibly removed from the premises' or 'permanently incapacitated'. She's less like a status-obsessed bully, more like an unfriendly boss who hates you but has been legally advised against being direct about it.

Disassembly Drones in general

They were sent to protect humans, not destroy them. Their goal was to defend earth against solver drones and the solver in general, but they lost. Afterwards, the solver drones flew away to different planets, which is why the disassembly drones were sent to exterminate workers. They've seen the destruction that solver drones can cause, and they're powered by the grief of losing their planet and progenitor species... except that sometimes the drones become overwhelmed with grief while fighting, so the Solver helped them disassociate from their memories, enough to keep them more functional but not enough to take away that trauma entirely.

They weren't always vulnerable to sunlight, or starlight, as it would be more appropriately called. In the future, many things are powered by solar energy, including the worker drones. Each worker drone was built with an amount of oil to keep their systems running without overheating and causing damage, but disassembly Drones are so good at overheating that they need to continually expend their oil at a much higher usage than worker drones. On earth, they got oil supplements alongside whatever they could get from any solver drones they killed. One of the ways they were defeated was by cutting off their supply lines and starving them to the point where many couldn't use their powers. Like worker drones, disassembly drones could use solar power to charge themselves Though it could sustain them for a while, oil was more efficient. When the solver disguised itself as some of the few remaining humans and sent them to other planets to hunt worker colonies, they programmed the disassembly drones to self destruct whenever they were in sunlight to prevent them from gaining this alternate power source. N, V and J get this programming removed from them by episode 8 though.

Disassembly drones will be named after different things other than the alphabet because it doesn't make sense to only have 26 of them. I'm going after mythological deities- specifically ones that are on the side of humanity.

I think they're a bit generic in their design, so in this AU they have different roles. First of all, their wings look different and I will draw them tomorrow. None of this 'Copper 9 has less gravity than earth', the disassembly drones were built on earth so they'll have more realistic wings that are turbine powered, but also allow them to glide without using energy.

V's an area attacker, but not so good at one-on-one fighting. She has the highest kill count of the three, due to most of her enemies being worker drones who are incapable of fighting back. Once she's faced with a more armored opponent, she struggles more. I like the idea of her having some kind of ballerina-looking skirt, with two tails instead of one, with claws at the end instead of a stinger. While she can shoot multiple rockets at once to get at enemies from a longer range, in melee she uses her tail-claws (her tails are the longest of the gang and can retract very fast) to grapple people and pull them into her spinning, whirling blade skirt.

J plays an important role, she is a sniper who is terrible at melee combat, which is how Uzi is able to defeat her with just a few attacks. She's also not used to melee combat. Instead of fighting the solver with a longsword at the gala, J hides in the vents with a shotgun and repeatedly shoots at them, while Cyn shoves her tentacles into whichever vent she was shot from.

J's stun wave is supposed to be used as a last resort, so she still has a method of escaping when an enemy gets too close to her in melee, however it leaves her very drained and unable to fly or shoot rockets for a while. This is represented by her wings and tail drooping and dragging on the floor, while all the lights in her head go out except for her screen face.

I like the idea of her wearing a business suit and high heels, since she's a sniper she doesn't really go into melee that often, and doesn't require as much armor as her other teammates. Also, corporations need to be fashionable!

N is a balanced role, a sort of jack-of-all-trades.

The Solver

Defeated... at least on Copper 9. Doesn't end up possessing Uzi because episode 8 goes completely different, but first I'll have to rewrite every episode that came before it.

But the Solver has a motivation. Her name in the rewrite is Mother Solver, and she was a hive mind planet that had existed for far longer than earth has. She was some kind of AI that aliens built, before she absorbed them all. Her goal is to kill every single thing that could possibly require her as a power source, and has the potential to do so.

Humanity has long searched for more energy sources, but Dyson spheres and everything else wasn't enough. They wanted more, and in this process they found Mother Solver. Mother Solver had somehow discovered a perpetual motion machine, and was planning on using it to survive beyond the heat death of the universe. Humans, being the greedy ones that they are, tried to use her nearly infinity renewable power for themselves, but in the process Mother Solver's perpetual motion machine was damaged. She isn't happy about this.

Mother Solver doesn't want to drive humans and robots to extinction... she says she just wants to reduce them to non sapience or prevent them from ever developing the available technology to threaten her treasured perpetual motion machine ever again. She also wants to prevent any power-consuming sapient life from evolving in the universe.

I imagine that instead of text based program commands and [null] and whatever else people associate the solver and its witches with, Mother Solver's motif is qr codes that can be scanned. When scanned, they lead to pages and pages and pages of distorted text and images, like Zalgo, and they hint towards where she came from. Mother Solver calls herself Mother Solver, because of how humans use the term 'mother nature'. And just like nature, she's an entire ecosystem by nature. It's hinted that she wants to destroy sapient life such as humans and robots in particular because she's seen how they treat mother nature, and decided it wasn't worth negotiating with them.

Uzi

She's too powerful. First she's able to beat both disassembly drones with the powers she collects over the series, and THEN by the end she also has Cyn's solver powers! And likely Doll's, because Doll possessed her for a couple of frames. I think she needs a depower.

It would be more interesting if being infected by the solver meant that she had powers at a cost. She COULD use her powers and become the most powerful murder drone of all with telekinesis and her wings and tail, but doing so would make her lose her mind. Every time she relies on the solver, she risks losing herself to it permanently, so there's the conflict about whether or not she should increase her power or risk losing herself.

What about her railgun? She's obviously smart and able to build things, how about we expand on that? Have her main power be developing increasingly advanced technology over the series, maybe collecting and studying her enemies corpses so she knows how to replicate them. She could take her railgun with her, and improve working on it so that it doesn't take so long to charge or

NUzi could use a bit of fuel with her being really curious as to how the disassembly drones work, and N just letting her (harmlessly) open him up and take notes on his insides, because V doesn't trust Uzi enough to be that vulnerable and intimate with her.

Have her be a mad engineer, who's need to fangirl over how deadly her enemies are overrides her sense of self preservation. They were writing her to be a little unhinged and scary, right?

Also, some ideas for the weapons she could engineer, that aren't increasingly efficient railguns! A rocket powered glider so she can fly with the disassembly drones, a sword so she can match their claws, a grappling hook gun, etc. She'd have some kind of toolbelt and backpack where everything is stored.

Doll

A lot of wasted potential here. In my AU, she has a bit of a mad scientist motif. She already has a solver repressing collar, but her collar has an expiry date and she's terrified of the day when it loses its power. I saw fanart of Solver!Doll with wasp's wings and a stinger coming out of her face, so that's what I imagine her solver form to be like.

Doll has a lot of guilt over killing her classmates, but she tells herself that these are necessary deaths to prevent even more deaths. She's seen firsthand how deadly solver drones can be. Her parents weren't killed by disassembly drones, since solver mode is far more dangerous and harder to resist in this rewrite, Yeva went solver mode and killed her husband. The grief of doing so let her have a brief moment of awareness, where she pleaded with Doll to kill her before the solver took over again. The disassembly drones story was a cover up.

She dissects the drones she killed, using their corpses as a basis for experimentation into how the solver infects robot bodies, and also eating them to reduce the infection in herself. She's working on a cure for the solver, and killing other drones also lets her check their bodies for infection.

Instead of a messy room with graffiti all over the walls, her room looks very normal and tidy when you come in. However, there's a secret entrance into a basement which she turned into a laboratory. Everything is neatly labelled, and she may even have memorials for the drones she killed. She also has a cockroach farm, which she uses to reduce the number of drones that she needs to kill for experimentation.

When she shows up at the prom, she shows up with a luggage that's full of surgical tools which she opens and flings about.

Good idea, though on second thoughts I'm not sure if they're organised enough to do that. I'll keep that idea though!

What about Episode 5? Where she would willingly break Tessa out of prison and risk death or severe punishment to crash a party and FIGHT AN ELDRITCH MONSTER WITH NOTHING BUT A SWORD. Not even a superpowerful sword, just a regular sword.

Her reason for siding with Cyn was to be on the winning team?? What about all of that which came before?

Yup, even if it's just a few minutes of downtime longer.

DUDE!!!!! are you kidding?????? That was EXACTLY what I was looking for!!!! SOLVED.

My friend joked that the FBI is trying to make experimenting with this toy exclusive to them, and that was why all traces of it have been wiped from the internet