>I wonder, would the body certifying such records argue that dropping
>the spirit of a heavy cruiser embodied in the form of a young witch
>doesn't count since they didn't drop the actual, physical warship?Almost certainly. Those guys are such rules lawyers.
>The Strike Witches canon plays very loose with how witches
>learn any magic, shielding in particular (Yoshika, for example, just
>seems to innately know how toss up shields in her very first combat,)
>but the way things have been portrayed in the UF version of this world
>it seems like a skill/spell that can be learned, so I hope Mogami can
>pick it up before her next life or death escapade. Even Eila learned
>that you can't always dodge your way out of trouble.
In my head (which is, after all, where all this is happening :), her lack of a shield in this engagement is at least partly related to the fact that her test rig has no armor. Magic, after all, can be a very literal thing.
>So this reference is explained in the Annotations, but I couldn't help
>but chuckle at an organization called MOE turning up in something
>Strike Witches related. Was this happy coincidence, or
>intentional convergence?
Sort of both. I thought of the Office of Strategic Sorcery first, and when I was thinking about the witchly equivalent to SOE, my first thought was that its initials could be the same as well, but I didn't want to use "sorcery" or "sorcerous" twice in the same capacity, and when I went looking for synonyms I realized what "Magical Operations Executive" would end up spelling, at which point I pretty much had to go with it. :)
(As an aside, like SOE, it's meant to be pronounced with the letters independent: "em-oh-ee".)
>So I'm deeply amused that the fairies, and only the fairies, seem to
>have any idea what is going on here, and they seem to regard it
>as perfectly normal, to the point of being a bit annoyed that it took
>Mogami this long to trip over it.
Let's just say it can be frustrating being a poorly understood metamagical phenomenon. :)
(Also, as an aside, the fairies' dress and demeanor here is mostly a nod to the way they turn up a lot in Kancolle fan works, particularly the DAMCON fairies, but the bosun, in particular, is also a callback to the karma dwarves from my old pal Seann's Shadowrun campaign I was in back in high school. :)
>>The blonde in white and blue had a whole squadron of miniature helpers with
>>her, evidently deployed from cards like old-fashioned spirit summonings.
>
>Are these a variation on the spell cards the Scarlets use, or
>something physically similar but magically distinct?
They're similar disciplines in that they use cards and are largely considered obsolete in the 20th century, but have different roots. In D&D terms, think of spell cards as belonging mostly to the Evocation school of sorcery, while spirit summons are Conjuration.
>>"Tracking, huh?" said Gryphon. "I know someone who's pretty good at that."
>>
>
>I can make some wild guesses, but I'm really not sure who G's speaking
>of here. Are we supposed to know and I'm just having a dense moment,
>or is this hinting at things to be seen later?
Geoff gave it away, but if he hadn't, my answer would've been "sort of both". :)
--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.