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TheKawaiiEdition/HGDodge

2013-01-29T05:31:36Z

JohnBiles: /* Helping Goddess (Dodge) */

= Helping Goddess (Dodge) =

* Basic Dodge Protocol 1/1
** Expert Dodge Protocol 2/2
*** Companion Dodge Protocol 3/3
**** Master Dodge Protocol 4/4
*** Evade Conclusion 3/2
**** The Butler Did It (Shift Blame) 4/3
** Dodge Restrictions Overriding Glitch 2/1
*** Ally-Assisting Dodge Glitch 3/2
** Stuffed Plushie Substitution Protocol 3/2
*** Target Positioning Glitch 4/3

Evade Conclusion
* Cost: 1 mote
* Duration: Instant
* Type: Re-Fun
* Minimum Dodge: 3
* Minimum Moe: 2
* Prerequisite Charms: Expert Dodge Protocol

Just because someone else is right doesn't mean you have to admit it. This enables you to execute a full die dodge against any argument you don't like; reduce the successes of the social action by your successes on the Dex + Dodge roll.

The Butler Did It (Shift Blame)
* Cost: 6 motes
* Duration: Instant
* Type: Re-Fun
* Minimum Dodge: 4
* Minimum Moe: 3
* Prerequisite Charms: Evade Conclusion

When you are the subject of an investigation charm (or action, or anything else which is trying to find out something you are guilty of), roll Manipulation + Dodge. If you beat the Moe of the charm user, the results of your foe's action/charm is re-directed to pin the blame on a butler or other servant of your choice if there is no plausible butler. In a situation where there is no plausible way to pin the blame on a butler or servant, you may select someone of lower Moe to take the fall.

Dodge Restrictions Overriding Glitch
* Cost: 3 motes
* Duration: Instant
* Type: Re-fun
* Minimum Dodge: 2
* Minimum Moe: 1
* Prerequisite Charms: Basic Dodge Protocol

The Helping Goddess may take a dodge action when this would normally be impossible for mundane reasons--chained to the wall, locked in a box, clinched by five angry Bishonen, all her limbs have been severed, etc. This is a full dice dodge.

Ally-Assisting Dodge Glitch
* Cost: 2 motes
* Duration: Instant
* Type: Re-fun
* Minimum Dodge: 3
* Minimum Moe: 2
* Prerequisite Charms: Basic Dodge Protocol

The Helping Goddess reaches out and glitches the attack and defense assessment protocols of the Ultimate System, enabling an ally to dodge an attack they normally could not dodge. The ally must dig up an actual dodge action themselves, however.

Stuffed Plushie Substitution Protocol
* Cost: 4 motes
* Duration: Instant
* Type: Re-Fun
* Minimum Dodge: 3
* Minimum Moe: 2
* Prerequisite Charms: Basic Dodge Protocol

Finding herself under attack, the Helping Goddess rolls her Dex + Dodge against a difficulty of her foe's Moe. If she succeeds, the attack misses entirely, and the foe finds he has attacked a plushie of the Helping Goddess, while the real Helping Goddess is actually her Moe + Dodge yards away from where she appeared to be before the charm use. This will dodge 'undodgeable' attacks.

Target Positioning Glitch
* Cost: 7 motes
* Duration: Instant
* Type: Re-Fun
* Minimum Dodge: 4
* Minimum Moe: 3
* Prerequisite Charms: Stuffed Plushie Substitution Protocol

Finding herself under attack, the Helping Goddess choses a victim within her Dex + Dodge yards. She then rolls Dex + Dodge against the Moe of her chosen victim. If she succeeds, her physical position is swapped with that of her victim; the incoming attack misses the Helping Goddess, even if it is a perfect attack, and strikes her chosen chump instead, though he can still try to dodge or parry. This will dodge 'undodgeable' attacks.

TheKawaiiEdition/HelpingGoddesses

2013-01-29T05:07:31Z

JohnBiles: /* Hard Ware */

= Exalted Kawaii: The Helping Goddesses ==

== Obligatory Introductory Fiction ==

The Ultimate System, maintainer of Fate, Destiny, Doom, and Hope alike has six major monitoring stations, one for each of the five directions of creation, and the sixth for the [[TheKawaiiEdition/NeoYuShan|Celestial City]] itself. At these stations, expert monitors sit, watching over the ebb and flow of Destiny, alert for snags in the tapesty, ready to relay any problems to teams of experts who will swiftly and efficiently deal with fixing Reality. 

That's the theory. 

In practice, the monitoring stations are understaffed, there is a steady stream of tiny bugs that draw attention away from the real problems, and half the staff is usually busy reading [[PlayMagical]] Girl Weekly, checking their US-Mail, playing Minesweeper, or plotting revenge on someone for stealing the stapler 500 years ago when they were both newbie helping goddesses. 

Nevertheless, sooner or later, the really big problems make enough of an impression that someone notices them and tries to do something about them, if only to avoid a blemish on their permanent record. Sooner or later. 

Helping Goddess Third Class (or as those in Creation might call her, Apprentice Goddess) Megumi, freshly awakened to her powers and assigned to Tech Support, still had a firm enough sense of responsibility that she paid attention to all the class 1 (lowest priority) bug reports which crossed her monitor. The first ten merited only the briefest of checks; keys got lost all the time, as did pets and socks. No one would notice or care. 

However, her monitor now flashed with 'CLASS 1 ERROR: SPONTANEOUS KITTEN MANIFESTATION'. The peasants of Longbottom were baffled at the sudden appearance of twelve kittens in front of a group of mourners at a wake. She wasn't sure why, but this gave her a bad feeling. She fired off a quick information request about the village to the Archivists, asking for a list of all recent Fate Errors related to the town. 

They didn't reply back until the afternoon, having been on their tea break, coffee break, gossip break, and then their 'Denunciation of Bin Liao' break (An unfortunate cultural artifact left over from the Great Collapsing Destiny Outbreak of 36). 312 Class 1 and 22 Class 2 in the last few days. But since no one tracked class 1s and hardly anyone paid much attention to class 2, no one had noticed the very unusual level. 

Calling upon one of her Investigation protocols, she ran an analysis, looking for patterns. This required another request to the archivists for actual and scheduled deaths in the town. They got back to her the afternoon of the next day; she spent that time looking up background data on the town herself. She quickly found a 12 name discrepancy; for the last twelve days, one person a night had died by 'accident'. Each death was not supposed to happen. Which meant a very good chance that something from Outside Fate was preying upon the town. 

Cross-referencing her Occult and Lore files with the data, it seemed likely that some fool had summoned a Grape Ape, which was now stalking a victim each night. This would merit investigation, since Grape Apes were Class A Demons. She passed the report to her supervisor, Goddess Second Class Talia, Moderation Division, who would decide whether to tip off the Wyld Hunt or if this would necessitate intervention by the De-Buggers and Hard Ware. 

Megumi sat back and decided to take this chance to take the rest of the day off to get the manicure she now needed after so much typing. 

== Intro ==

Back before there was Creation there were the Not Fun At All Things. They were boring, so we won't really get into them. Suffice it to say that they were really big and really powerful and have phallic tentacles and let's leave it at that.

Oh, and nipple-piercings. Lots and lots of nipple-piercings. And bald chicks.

The Not Fun At All Things all got together and made Creation. But Creation was so awesome and fun that they had to spend all their time just making it work and they all agreed that was not fun at all (but without pretenious capitalization). So they all worked for a few infinites (which were more common back then) and made the Ultimate System.

The Ultimate System is the perfect program. It runs all Creation. Every grain of sand, passing cloud, majestic mountain range and blooming flower has its shape and properties determined and controlled by the Ultimate System. Every loving embrace, hate-filled speech and brilliant sword duel is overseen by the Ultimate System. The results are carefully logged, the effects applied and everything happens. For the most part, everyone in Creation doesn't notice this. Things fall down and time moves forward and nobody really questions it. The occasional time somebody drowns and still walks around, or that your son is born before you meet his mother... these things are strange but nobody really gives them much mind. In world where superhuman uber-cute girls wearing miniskirts rain firey death from airships pulled by white-horned pegasi onto immaculately unflappable long haired pretty-boys who parry falling mountains with disaffected stares... you just stop asking questions, okay?

Suffice it to say that the Ultimate System is Really Important. So important it deserves capital letters. Just ask the people who run it. Really.

The Ultimate System worked great, to a point. It wasn't as perfect as the Not Fun At All Things (just ask them) and occasionally bugs and snarls appeared in the system. The Not Fun At Alls disliked having to go in and personally repair the system, mainly because it was so boring. The process of occasionally fixing the Ultimate System was so annoying that it became known as the Great Ordeal and was generally relegated to whatever Not Fun AT All was least popular that week (this was usually Autochchton, The Great Otaku). So they (or mainly he) created a new user interface. A user interface that could react to problems pro-actively. A user interface that could monitor itself and adjust as needed. A user interface with the ability to adapt to new situations. But mainly a user interface that was cute and happy to see you and offered to rub your feet.

Hey, you trying having infinite weight and see how good your feet feel after a hard day of being infinite.

So using some raw material culled from the weird ape things with sticks that the Not Fun At All Things kept stepping on every time they turned around they created the Great Ordeal Deferring Delightful Effective System Stewardess or G.O.D.D.E.S.S. This worked out so well they made a whole bunch of them and set them in charge of maintaining the Ultimate System.

Of course, after a few more infinities of being forced to work for Not Fun AT All Things the sentient Goddess systems adapted to the point that they realised that the thing making Creation the most not fun was the Not Fun At All Things. In fact, the act of cleaning up the messes their masters had created became the prime ordeal of the Goddesses. Clapping themselves on the back and saying how brilliant and smart (and cute!) they all were the Goddesses got together and decided to overthrow the Not Fun At All Things. Unfortunetaly the inability to overthrow their makers had been hard-coded into both them and the Ultimate System so they needed pats^B^B^B^B... allies to do the hard work of actually defeating the Not Fun At All Things. With the help of Autochchton the great otaku they learned the secret of creating more like themselves and thus created the Exalted.

Thus began the Prime Ordeal War. Those Not Fun At All Things that were slain sank into the Underworld and became the Nevercute, while the really annoyed ones who didn't die were banished, becoming the Sore Losers (or "You'll See"). The fact that the Goddesses could not actually directly participate in the war, but could offer helpful advice and encouragement form the sidelines led to their current title "the Helping Goddess". Others had less polite terms for them, but they chose to ignore them.

After the Prime Ordeal War the Helping Goddesses pretty much had it all. They got to move into Heaven, get all the cool toys and, of course, all their cute friends and happy bishounens to help them with their duties. For a long time (but not an infinity, because they were out of those) everything was happy and flowers and rainbows.

Then the Bishounens started to brood and the Catgirls started getting bitchy and the Magical Girls were all "we're oppressed and also want cookies!" and everyone expected the Helping Goddesses to fix everything. After all, it was their job to look after the Ultimate System. So what if some Bishounen had summarily leveled a mountain. Surely the Helping Goddesses could just fix the damage. Yes the Catgirls had stolen all the Celesital Wine and gotten everyone in the Realm drunk, but the Helping Goddesses could just make the crops grow despite nobody having actually, ya know, planted them. Fixing problems was what the Helping Goddesses were FOR, wasn't it?

So the Goddesses got together and talked about this and came to the conclusion that the problem was the Bishounen. The Helping Goddesses had just made them too powerful. I mean, certainly they were cute and they all had such nice hair and they wrote you little poems and Unconquered Orichalcum Shark Master of the Whispering Underworld had the tightest little ass... but the Helping Goddesses just couldn't say no to them. They had created Exalted even more cute then they were, and the sheer power of the Bishounen's Moe was threatening the Ultimate System itself!

So obviously the problem was the Bishounens. Clapping themselves on the back and saying how brilliant and smart (and cute!) they all were the Goddesses got together and decided to overthrow the Bishounens. And the Catgirls while they were at it. Little harridans always making time with THEIR BIS... ahem. Yes. Anyway, suffice it to say things went along after that. The Helping Goddesses retreated to Heaven (mainly because the Magical Girls ahd taken this "kill all other exalts" thing a little too seriously) where they remain to this day. Overseeing Creation. Maintaining the Ultimate System. Looking down wistfully at the world below and wondering if maybe... just maybe... there is some worthy person down there...

Nah.

== Helping Goddess Factions ==

The Helping Goddesses are divided into many overlapping factions on various political issues. Many of these revolve around what operating system the Ultimate System should be using (along with other HG artifacts). They also at least vaguely related to the question of the rule of the Magical Girls vs. the Bishonen, but really, who cares about that when you could be fighting for OS-3?

=== [[BronzeSoft]] Faction ===

The [[BronzeSoft]] Faction, headed by Goddess First Class Ketchup Gates (a Moderator), seeks to maintain the status quo. The [[BronzeSoft]] OS, periodically upgraded, has been standard in Heaven's systems for centuries with vast success. (All rumors connecting the Contagion to the [[Y2K]] bug are firmly denied.) It may crash a lot and eats memory like a pig, but all the applications are written for it. Sure, the Neo-Empress may be a brutal tyrant, but do you really want the Catgirls to turn all of creation into a giant litter box? They backed the decision to overthrow the Bishonens and Catgirls and stand by their decision. The conservative faction, full of grumpy old women who feel no one appreciates the sacrifices they made. Why in their day, EVERY DIRECTION IN THE CELESTIAL CITY WAS UPHILL AND THEY LIKED IT.

=== Open [[GoldSource]] Movement ===

The Open [[GoldSource]] Movement wants greater freedom to reprogram the Ultimate System and to create new protocols. They've created a group of potential OSes all freely available to anyone who wants to take them and tinker with them. If they were allowed to go in and redo the Ultimate System, everyone would be able to freely personalize their protocols and it would be much easier to find permanent bug fixes.

It remains unclear how exactly they plan for Creation to survive the period in which the Ultimate System was being reprogrammed and all the bugs worked out of these experimental OSes.

The Open [[GoldSource]] Movement also supports restoring the Bishonens to rule of Creation, subject to suitable monitoring by Heaven, of course. Quite clearly the Magical Girls just aren't hacking it.

The OGSM has no single leader; it is decentralized by nature, and at times, competes against itself as much as against the [[BronzeSoft]] faction.

=== The Silver Faction ===

Led by Goddess First Class Wilhelmina Jena Brianna, the Silver Faction insists on the coinage of silver at a ratio of 16 to 1 (the one being gold coins). Despite repeated loud angry speeches about how Creation is being crucified on a Cross of Gold, Wilhelmina still has yet to clearly explain to most Helping Goddesses why exactly this is important. However, this support for non-Jade currencies has led the Silver Faction to promote various Barbarian groups who are stuck using silver, copper, and gold coinage, and to support the Moonsilver-using Catgirls.

=== The Kill Bishie Faction ===

For millenia, this small group has been focused on killing one single Bishonen over and over, every time he reincarnates. No one is sure why he is so important or why they are so angry with him, but they've been doing a great job so far. Their leader operates under a seemingly permanent disguise 'The Widowed Bride'.

=== Project EVA ===

The members of Project EVA are disatisfied with the world. They believe humanity has hit a deadend, unable to advance due to the presence of so many superior beings around it--Exalts, Gods, Alien Princesses, etc. Ever since the Second Impact (the Contagion), humanity has stagnated, unable to advance, the mere pawns of others. Only if humanity is forced up the chain of Moe can humanity survive the Age of Lessened Cuteness and achieve its rightful place (thus freeing the Helping Goddesses to kick back and relax, letting humanity do the hard work, coincidentally enough). It remains unclear how Goddess First Class Glinda Ikari plans to make this transition come to pass, but rumors whisper of warstriders constructed out of the body of one of the Not Fun at All, and Protocol-Spawned Children to pilot them... But only rumors, or they all would have been executed long ago. But where there's smoke, there's usually smoke elementals...

== Jobs ==

The Helping Goddesses are not like other Exalts. They do not have Castes. No Helping Goddess is any more or less important in the grand scheme of the Ultimate System then any other (at least, in theory). Instead when they were created each Goddess was given a Job. A particular part of the Ultimate System that they were especially well suited to dealing with. This Job also determines their primary user interface. It is through this interface that most others identify the Goddess.

=== Moderators ===

It is well known that at least 10% of all combat in Heaven happens over office supplies. There is only so much bandwidth and thus so much office supplies. Yet, consumption of such always outraces supply. Thus, entire heavenly wars have begun when one office raided another to get precious staples, paperclips, toner, and especially highlighters.

Thus it was that the Office of Glacier Management was about to launch a lightning raid on the better funded Ministry of Downs Maintenance to make off with crucially needed paper and toner. Without it, the biannual report on North Western Glacier Depth Change could not be finished. As they had to copy the last report, since most of the North Western Glaciers had long ago ceased to exist during the loss of territory in the Contagion. There were plenty of ICEBERGS in the Northwest, but those were useless to GLACIER managers. And inferior to glaciers in every way. Were they to admit this, however, their budget, already parlous, would be further cut.

Yuugi Vi was in the process of picking the back door lock when a shadow fell over the eight goddesses. Two wings, a feminine body (more so than their own pudgy forms), and most importantly, a very, very large Grimcleaver which glowed silver. 

They turned and saw themselves confronted by Second Class, Restricted Goddess Urd, a Moderator from the Helping Goddess Office. "You appear to be lost," she said with her warm sultry voice. "The Office of Glacier Management is five stories up and 200 yards that way." She gestured down the hallway with her axe. "I can guide you if you need a reminder."

"We can take her," Yuugi Vi urged the others, who were panicking. "There's only one of..."

SWISH. *Shine of Starmetal*

Suddenly, there was a shower of long green hair, and Yuugi Vi, touching her head, found herself bald.

"Oops, I slipped," Urd said, twirling her axe. "Happens when I get bored."

"We can take her to the mall, yes, the mall, I'm sure she needs to relax," Yuugi babbled.

The others grabbed her and ran.

Occasionally the discussions about how to deal with a particular subject in Heaven can get quite heated. So heated that the use of tactical implosion bows and warstriders can come in. The Job of the Moderators is to keep this in check. They keep peace within the Ultimate System. They prevent chaos. Mainly they do this via the expedient method of beating you into a bloody pulp and throwing you out of heaven to plummet to the earth below and never letting you back in. This process is called 'banning'. The Moderators are also tasked with 'banning' certain mortals and Exalts whose actions are threatening the stability of the Ultimate System, meaning that they are horribly overworked.

Job Favored Abilities : Athletics, Dodge, Endurance, Melee, Sail

Job Anima Power : Divine Authority: By burning 10 motes, the Moderator reinforces her authority; anyone wishing to oppose her will must make a Conviction check once per scene to do so.

=== Tech Support ===

Keiichi was dreaming of Belldandy in a manner not really suitable for a family game...oh wait, this isn't a family game. However, you won't get the naughty details, as he was about to be interrupted.

Most precisely, he was woken up by a huge fire-breathing hound breaking through the window of his bedroom. He woke up, time seeming to slow down as the creature jumped onto his bed and drew breath to fry him.

But then the silvery light came through the doorway and he heard a friendly voice. "Nice doggy, come get a bone." It was First Class Goddess Belldandy, now bound to him by a WISH he'd made to have a goddess like her stay with him forever. Since there were no backup copies of her, she'd gotten the job.

The dog ran over to her, slobbering little bits of fire everywhere and charring the bedsheets and carpet. Soon, it was eating out of her hand and bouncing around her friskily. 

Meanwhile, Keiichi rolled out of bed and staggered over to the closet; he'd slept too late anyway.

Belldandy said, smiling, "You're such a nice little puppy. Who sent you to murder my boyfriend?"

The dog barked as Keiichi dithered over his choice of tunics. Tiny words in stylized US-script appeared over it. 'First Class Goddess Faye Valentine is jealous of your beauty and grace and tired of being overworked because you're down here with your mortal lover instead of in Heaven doing her work for her. So she sent me to eat him.'

Belldandy sighed. "Keiichi, honey, does everyone try to kill each other's lovers at your job?"

"Actually, we're usually trying to murder each other directly to take each other's job," he said. Working for the Imperial Bureaucracy could get pretty dangerous. "How's this blue tunic?"

Belldandy tapped her cheek. This might be someone's clever bluff, trying to pin the blame for Keiichi's death on Faye. Surely Faye wouldn't really randomly kill someone she'd never met just to get me to go back to work, Belldandy thought. Or at least, she'd be more subtle. "You've never met Faye, have you, honey? And it looks good on you."

"Is she the one who looks like a whore?" he asked, now donning the tunic. 

"That describes a lot of people, dear," Belldandy said. "She has short hair and wears skimpy yellow clothing."

"I think I accidentally sucker-punched her and then knocked her into the punchbowl at your last office party," Keiichi said. "Why do you ask?"

Oh dear, Belldandy thought. This was going to be awkward. Maybe this is why my request to have Keiichi awarded a Bishonen shard hasn't gone through yet. She never did like office politics.

The Ultimate System does not exist in a vaccuum. No matter how much the Helping Goddesses want the programs to run smoothy and the world to be wonderful it still requires input from the outside. The Helping Goddesses are user interface machines and they need input to function properly. Input that will help guide them. Input that will tell them what needs doing. Input that will tell them how pretty they are and hold their hands on the beach and... right. Input. It is the Job of Tech Support to seek out this input and process it into the Ultimate System. This is mainly accomplished through the Worship Initiated System Help protocal or "W.I.S.H." The amount of times this protocal is envoked in a day means that Tech Support is horribly overworked.

Job Favored Abilities : Linguistics, Performance, Presence, Socialize, Thrown

Job Anima Power : Aura of Assistance: By burning 10 motes, the Tech Supporter radiates an aura 10* Moe yards in radius. Within that radius, anyone friendly to the Goddess gains one bonus die to all actions.

=== De-Buggers ===

Warning: City of Windbloom DESTROYED 

Skuld sighed. NOT AGAIN. She quickly typed in a search.

;Status: City of Windbloom Intact :
;Status: City of Windbloom DESTROYED :

Skuld banged her head against the wall. NOT AGAIN.

;RESTORE WINDBLOOM.CIT:
;PROCESSING:

;BACKUP FILE IS CORRUPTED WITH THREE CLASS III BUGS. Continue(Y/N)?:
;N:

Skuld grimaced and picked up her hammer. It was time to relieve some stress. 

Even now there are probably far more problems that occur in the Ultimate System then the Helping Goddesses would like to admit. The Job of the (horribly overworked) De-Buggers is to find these problems and fix them. For some reason this always either involves a giant kung fu battle, a long heart-breaking romance or occasionally both, at the same time. Nobody really likes the De-Buggers. They deal with bugs so often they start going a little off-programs themselves.

Job Favored Abilities : Brawl, Ride, Occult, Stealth, Survival

Job Anima Power : Trouble Sense: By burning 10 motes, the De-Bugger can identify all bugs in the system within visual range automatically and try to sense any within Moe miles of her.

=== Archivists ===

Third Class, Restricted Goddess Nenene shook Second Class Goddess Yomiko's shoulders gently. "Shouldn't we get back to work?" 

Second Class, Restricted Goddess Yomiko pushed her glasses back up her nose. "Reading IS my work. And I'm on my Denunciation of Lin Baio break, anyway."

"I'm pretty sure that ended four cycles ago," Nenene said nervously.

"Joker-sama won't be around to check up on us for another three cycles," Yomiko said, stretching. "But you can always check our Status Monitor if you're bored."

A quick check showed that they'd recived 732 requests for information in the last four cycles. "We're screwed!" Nenene said, showing the monitor to Yomiko.

"Well, in that case, we'll never catch up, so we might as well enjoy our last hours alive. I think I can finish this before Joker-sama finds us and kills us," Yomiko said pleasantly.

Nenene tried to figure out if 4 hours was enough time to hack the Ultimate System and get herself reassigned to a different mentor.

The heart of the Ultimate System is information. The entire system runs on it. Without the right information, it would all break down. It is the Job of the Archivists to keep track of all this information and make certain it gets to who needs it and, just as importantly, doesn't get to who doesn't need it. If you ever need an answer, ask an Archivist. Of course since everyone knows this the Archivists are horribly overworked. Archivists are frequently found in Creation looking for "lost data" that was most certainly not misplaced merely to give them excuse for a few days away from all those GOD DAMN QUESTIONS!

Job Favored Abilities : Archery, Awareness, Investigation, Larceny, Lore,

Job Anima Power : By burning ten motes, the Archivist reduces the difficulty of any information seeking tasks for one scene by one.

=== Hard Ware ===

Second Class, Restricted Goddess Nancy wasn't enthusiastic about burning down the old mill. It had stood for centuries, and there were so many memories bound up in it. 

Unfortunately, it had been scheduled to burn down three nights go, slaying a mad thaumaturgist who had planned to unleash a plague of Agathas upon the land in order to try to get everyone in the town killed as a result. Its failure to burn might be the result of a glitch or it might be sabotage by something from outside Fate--Alien Princesses, Demons, Ghosts, Hippies...All she could do was wait for him to go back to his rite and try to kill him before he finished. This was the last possible night before it would be too late. 

Then the smell of grapes drifted her way in the wind, and she almost lost herself in an elaborate flashback to relaxing in a villa on the southern coast of the Realm, where she'd shared wine and carnal relations with a lover. 

Almost. 

The problem was that you normally didn't find grapes growing in the middle of winter in the NORTH. 

Which meant... 

She flicked a fan out of her sleeve into her hands, even as the first of the giant vaguely humanoid grape bunch demons came through the wall. The metal fan cut across its soft flesh, and now she was covered in grape juice as it screamed and died. She activated her intangibility protocol and leaped up through the ceiling through a room, a wall, another room, and a floor, coming down in the middle of the grape people, even as she activated a counterattack protocol. 

Her fans flashed as they all tried to grab her and rip her apart. 

She felt her body move without conscious control, fans flashing across soft, bulbous purple bodies. There was screaming everywhere, and when the grape juice cleared out of her eyes, she was surrounded by a dozen dead Grape People, first Clique children of the second Clique demon, Dionysius. At least he was unlikely to show up. 

Suddenly, she felt her head swim like she'd drunk an entire gallon of vodka again. She had just enough presence of mind to run her purging protocol; the alcohol was deleted from her records in the Ultimate System, though she'd be in the bathroom ALL NIGHT now. 

And there he was in all his vine-clad glory, the mostly naked Dionysius, child of Zeus, drunk and horny as usual. 

I HATE DEMONS, she thought. Time to send Yomiko an emergency US-Mail and to pray she wasn't curled up somewhere reading a book... 

I'm screwed, Nancy concluded. SO SCREWED. 

The Ultimate System is a complex process. It is a network of information being gathered from all over creation, processed by Goddesses and then sent back to Creation to tell it what shape its supposed to be in at the momemt. That's why its called Creation, after all, since it is constantly being recreated every moment. But sometimes the hard, solid bits of Creation are not responding to the Ultimate System. Either they refuse to send or recieve data and the entire processes starts to break down. The Job of the Hard Ware (a corruption of the word "war") is to fix these broken bits of Creation and make certain everything goes smoothly. Ideally they have protocols and methods of repairing the connection and everything will work out fine. Of course, since they are so horribly overworked they mainly just think the best solution to these kind of things is daiklaives.

Job Favored Abilities : Bureaucracy, Craft, Medicine, Marital Arts, Resistance

Job Anima Power : By burning ten motes, she generates a repair zone with a radius of her Moe*10 yards, in which any effort to 'fix' things gains a bonus die for a scene. (This can range from fixing a warstrider to healing a broken heart).

== Living in the Celestial City, Neo-Yu-Shan ==

It is important to understand that everything in Neo-Yu-Shan was created and is sustained by the Ultimate System. Any inhabitant of Neo-Yu-Shan may tap into the system in order to make changes in the environment or to generate things they want. However, access for this purpose is limited according to how much Bandwidth one has accumulated. Bandwidth is generated by the prayers of the faithful in Creation and by the sacred rites they perform. Most of it is used by the Ultimate System to maintain the stability of Creation and Neo-Yu-Shan. The rest is either saved for emergencies or paid as salaries to the employed gods and goddesses. Those who have personal cults can accumulate Bandwidth directly. (Gods and Goddesses resident in Yu-Shan who are unemployed gain a trickle of Bandwidth from the general worship of the gods and can live as if they had Goddess Status 1).

One gig of Bandwidth is sufficient to craft goods equal to a Resources 3 purchase. Such goods must be made out of mundane materials, but will appear to be of very excellent quality. In order to do so, one must either possess the Spirit Charm Forge Bandwidth, or an appropriate Exalted Charm. (For Helping Goddesses, Forge Bandwidth is a Craft charm which requires Essence 2, Craft 4. Most other kinds of Exalts have forgotten their equivalent charms.) With the right charms and enough Bandwidth, more valuable goods can be crafted as well.

It is fairly easy to claim housing in the abandoned areas, but dangerous; most prefer to cling to the occupied areas and pay some of their Bandwidth as rent.

== Ultimate System Protocols ==

What other Exalts call 'Charms', Helping Goddesses think of as System Protocols, which allow them to call on the Ultimate System to make changes in reality. While the Helping Goddesses have several broadly useful basic protocols, centuries of hacking, patching, bugs, and poorly done repairs have left the Helping Goddesses with a rather...quirky...set of protocols to call on beyond the most basic ones. Many were originally developed to deal with highly specific occasions which almost never recur, but thanks to someone getting a commendation for their cleverness, now everyone is expected to find new uses for them.

But they're not bitter.

=== The Basic Ultimate System Protocols ===

Each Ability USP tree begins with several base charms the others build off. This is followed by a string of oddball abilities related to the Ability, if sometimes only tangentially. (Medicine charms for determining who someone last had sex with, Survival charms for shaping bushes into arboreal sculptures, Melee charms for shaving people, etc.)

(Substitute the appropriate Ability for (Attribute) in each charm tree.)

* Basic (Ability) Protocol 1/1
** Expert (Ability) Protocol 2/2
*** Companion (Ability) Protocol 3/3
**** Master (Ability) Protocol 4/4

(Charm Types as per charm guide on main Kawaii Edition Page)

Basic (Ability) Protocol
* Cost: 1 mote / die
* Duration: Instant
* Type: Subtle/Mental
* Minimum Ability: 1
* Minimum Essence: 1
* Prerequisite Charms: None

Add one die for every mote spent to any pool of this Ability, to a maximum of the Helping Goddess' Essence.

Expert (Ability) Protocol
* Cost: 2 motes / -1 TN
* Duration: Instant
* Type: Subtle/Mental
* Minimum Ability: 2
* Minimum Essence: 2
* Prerequisite Charms: Basic (Ability) Protocol

The Helping Goddess can lower the TN of an action done by her by 1 for every two motes to a limit of 4.

Companion (Ability) Protocol
* Cost: 3 motes / -1 TN
* Duration: Instant
* Type: Re-Fun
* Minimum Ability: 3
* Minimum Essence: 3
* Prerequisite Charms: Expert (Ability) Protocol

The Helping Goddess can lower the TN of an action done by anyone of her chosing by 1 for every two motes to a limit of 4. This must be used before the dice are actually rolled.

Master (Ability) Protocol
* Cost: 4 motes / - 1 TN
* Duration: One Scene
* Type: Speech
* Minimum Ability: 4
* Minimum Essence: 4
* Prerequisite Charms: Companion (Ability) Protocol

The Helping Goddess lowers her Target Numbers with this Ability by 1 for every four motes she spends, to a limit of 4, for the entire scene.

The remaining Protocols of a given tree expand on this base capacity in various quirky ways.

=== Moderators ===

* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGAthletics|Helping Goddess Athletics]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGDodge|Helping Goddess Dodge]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGEndurance|Helping Goddess Endurance]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGMelee|Helping Goddess Melee]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGSail|Helping Goddess Sail]]

=== Tech Support ===

* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGLinguistics|Helping Goddess Linguistics]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGPerformance|Helping Goddess Performance]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGPresence|Helping Goddess Presence]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGSocialize|Helping Goddess Socialize]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGThrown|Helping Goddess Thrown]]

=== De-Buggers ===

* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGBrawl|Helping Goddess Brawl]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGRide|Helping Goddess Ride]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGOccult|Helping Goddess Occult]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGStealth|Helping Goddess Stealth]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGSurvival|Helping Goddess Survival]]

=== Archivists ===

* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGArchery|Helping Goddess Archery]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGAwareness|Helping Goddess Awareness]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGInvestigation|Helping Goddess Investigation]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGLarceny|Helping Goddess Larceny]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGLore|Helping Goddess Lore]]

=== Hard Ware ===

* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGBureaucracy|Helping Goddess Bureaucracy]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGCraft|Helping Goddess Craft]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGMedicine|Helping Goddess Medicine]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGMaritalArts|Helping Goddess Marital Arts]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGResistance|Helping Goddess Resistance]]

== Reality Assembly Language Protocol Creation ==

Sufficiently adept Helping Goddesses learn Reality Assembly Language and begin creating new protocols to deal more flexibly with situations. Such protocols, however, are risky, as they haven't been safety tested to remove all danger of malfunction (or all utility), and sometimes may have unexpected consequences. They also tend to annoy the Ultimate System's security systems, which may choose to punish you for unauthorized hacking.

RALPs are used for three major purposes:

1) Disguises
2) Cheat Codes
3) Background Programs ('Curses' and 'Blessings')

=== Disguises ===

One of the first things a good Helping Goddess interested in RAL learns is how to rewrite the fabric of reality so you are perceived as something you are not. This can be done at two levels, one easy, one difficult.

The easy way is to write in an identity which previously did not exist, but is sufficiently generic to easily add, such as becoming Mace the Realm Soldier Grunt or Aaaaila the Peasant Girl. This requires the following steps:

# Plan: Write out a character sketch of information on the person which people will 'know' about them. Roll Perception + Performance. You must score at least one success; this total is the difficulty of the Perception + Investigation roll to figure out there are holes in your 'identity', should someone care enough to look. On a failure, you may try again at +1 difficulty. Should you botch, even the most casual of investigations will poke holes in your disguise.
# Design: You must now put together the actual protocol code which will be processed by the Ultimate System. This requires an Intelligence + Craft (Reality Assembly Language) check, difficulty 1. Should you fail, you can try again, raising the difficulty by 1. Should you botch, your disguise will be blatantly obvious to everyone, and you probably should go back to step 1.
# Approval: Your project must be approved. This requires first a Wits + Linguistics (+ Old Realm speciality if any), difficulty 3 check to write in sufficiently high toned language, followed by Cha + Bureaucracy + extra successes from the previous roll, difficulty 3, to get it approved. On a failure, you may reroll the check, but the difficulty rises by 2. Should you fail a second time, you must return to stage 1. On a botch, your application is shot down and you may not apply for further disguises for a number of days equal to the number of dice you rolled.
# Implementation: Now you must enter and run your Disguise Protocol. Wits + Craft (Reality Assembly Language) check, difficulty 1. Each extra success can be used to install cheat codes (see below) or to add to the duration of the fake identity on the Protocol Duration Table. On a failure, you may try again, raising the difficulty by 1. A botch at this stage causes the Helping Goddess' own identity to be overwritten by the disguise for a number of hours equal to the number of dice rolled to make the check.

The second, harder one, is a disguise as someone of significance. Take the procedure above, but add the following significance difficulty modifier to the difficulty of each roll:

* 1: A Moe 1 mortal of fair amount of power and influence (the head of a guild in a major city, the king's main advisor, etc.)
* 2: A Moe 1 mortal who rules something small, like a small port tributary of the realm.
* 3: A Moe 1 mortal who rules something significant (say, the Tri-Khan)
* 4: A Moe 2 being
* +1 for every level of Moe above 2.

Any attempt to pass as something above your own Moe level doubles the modifier.

Once you have created a disguise, it is bonded to you and you can flip between your true identity and the disguise as a reflexive action. This is best done in private unless you like blowing your cover.

You can only maintain up to your Moe worth of disguises.

=== Cheat Codes ===

When a Disguise is crafted, various cheat codes can be programmed into it, enabling you to gain special abilities while using it. These use up some of your implementation successes.

One Success Cheat Codes
* Area Knowledge: You gain the familiarity of a native with whatever area your disguise identity is native to.
* Cover Skills: While in the disguise, you may add 2 dice to an ability appropriate to the disguise; this cannot boost any ability over the max for your level of Moe.
* Language Mastery: You gain the ability to speak a language family normally unknown to you.
* Mask Status: When you spend peripheral essence, your disguise masks your anima sign until you reach the point of shining like the sun.
* Resources: For every success spent on this, your disguise has access to that level of mundane Resources.
* Specialty: You gain a 3 die specialty relevant to the disguise.

Two Success Cheat Codes
* Alter Virtue: You can raise or lower one of your virtues 2 points while using the disguise.
* Switch Anima: You can change your anima sign and anima to whatever you like.

Three Success Cheat Codes
* Alter Nature: You can change your nature to one more suitable for the disguise. People will sense the false nature, and you recover willpower for fufilling the fake or the true nature.
* Deflect Scrutiny: So long as all your actions remain in accordance with your disguise, the difficulty of all investigation attempts against you rises by your Moe.

Four Success Cheat Codes
* Aura of Trust: People tend to trust your disguise; lower the difficulty of any action related to trust by your Moe while in this disguise. This also hampers investigation of you by the same amount; this stacks with Deflect Scrutiny.
* Daredevil: Your disguise has a pool of stunt dice equal to your Moe which you can spend to boost your rolls when doing stunts. You can up to double your stunt dice with these dice. Once spent, they regenerate each sunrise.

=== Background Programs ===

Helping Goddesses with the right mad skills can re-program the Ultimate System to modify its treatment of some subset of Reality, in order to produce changes desired by the Goddess. These are commonly referred to as 'Blessings' (Beneficial) and 'Curses' (Injurious).

To create one, one must first define the Effect and Trigger conditions of the Background Program:

==== Background Program Effects ====

Blessings
* -1 TN to some action
* 1 WP gained whenever an action is done successfully
* 2 bonus dice to an action
* -1 Difficulty of an action (minimum of 1)
* +1 Resources for the duration of the blessing ("The Gift of Wealth")
* Render a couple fertile (or not fertile, if that's what they want)

Curses
* +1 TN to some action
* 1 WP lost whenever an action is failed
* 2 penalty dice to an action
* +1 Difficulty of an action
* -1 Resources for the duration of the blessing ("The Gift of Poverty")
* Render a couple fertile (or not fertile, if that's what they don't want)

==== Background Program Trigger ====

Typically, one sets a specific trigger for the curse and how often it goes off. This will effect how hard it is to create the program.

The wider the trigger, the harder it is to create the Program. This ranges from extremely narrow (difficulty 1, 'When confronted by Leviathan') to middling width (difficulty 3, 'when using the Melee ability') to very broad (difficulty 5, 'When in combat').

Then one picks how frequently the effect triggers:
* Once a Year: +1 difficulty
* Once a Season: +2 difficulty
* Once a Month: +3 difficulty
* Once a Day: +4 difficulty
* Once a Scene: +5 difficulty
* Every turn the trigger is satisified: +6 difficulty

==== Creating a Background Program ====

# Plan: Choose the specific blessing and effect trigger you want, along with how frequently it triggers. You must then write out your formal design plan and projection of likely consequences. Roll Perception + Lore with a difficulty set by the trigger condition and its frequency. If you succeed, you have a good grasp of what this will do, and the Storyteller should point out some or all unintended consequences, depending on your degree of success. On a failure, you can procede, but the Storyteller is not obligated to inform you of any holes in your plan. Should you botch, all subsequent rolls in this process suffer a penalty equal to your Moe.
# Design: You must now put together the actual protocol code which will be processed by the Ultimate System. This requires an Intelligence + Craft (Reality Assembly Language) check at the difficulty set by the trigger condition and its frequency of triggering. Should you fail, you can try again, raising the difficulty by 1. Should you botch, you made some massive error in your code, and your preliminary testing of it triggers an Ultimate System Backlash (see below).
# Approval: Your project must be approved. This requires first a Wits + Linguistics (+ Old Realm speciality if any), difficulty (5 - 1/2 your Moe, round up) check to write in sufficiently high toned language, followed by Cha + Bureaucracy + extra successes from the previous roll, difficulty (2 + 1/2 the trigger/frequency difficulty), to get it approved. On a failure, you may reroll the check, but the difficulty rises by 2. Once the difficulty doubles, you get permanently shut down and you must return to stage 1. On a botch, your application is shot down and you may not apply for further Background Programs for a number of days equal to the number of dice you rolled.
# Implementation: Now you must enter and run your Background Program, fixing any run-time bugs. Wits + Craft (Reality Assembly Language) check, difficulty set by the Trigger Condition[[TheKawaiiEdition/Trigger]] Frequency. Each extra success can be used to increase the area of effect (see below) or to add to the duration of the fake identity on the Protocol Duration Table (see below). On a failure, you may try again, raising the difficulty by 1. A botch at this stage induces a potentially ugly Ultimate System Backlash. Wise Goddesses use Craft (Reality Assembly Language) Protocols to help here.

Area of Effect
* 1: 1 Moe 1 person
* 2: 10 Moe 1 people
* 3: 100 Moe 1 people
* 4: 1000 Moe 1 people
* Add +1 for every factor of 10
* People above Moe 1 must be added seperately; add their Moe above 1 to their group size, then add those successes to the ones for the Moe 1 people. (So 100 Moe 1 and 3 Moe 2 are 3 for the Moe 1 and (2 (Size) +1 (extra Moe) = 3 for the Moe 2 folk. Add 3 to 3 for a total of 6)

Protocol Duration Table
* 1: 1 day
* 2: 1 week
* 3: 1 month
* 4: 1 season
* 5: 1 year
* 6: 10 years
* 7: 100 years
* 8: 1000 years
* 9: 5000 years
* Multiply duration by 5 for each step up.

=== Ultimate System Backlash ===

The Ultimate System is remarkably stable, given how old it is and that it has never been rebooted. However, when Goddesses tinker with it, sometimes it may induce a local systems crash. The bigger the modification you were trying to make, the uglier it gets.

When something happens which indicates a backlash may happen, roll a number of dice equal to the difficulty of what you were doing. The more successes, the bigger the backlash, ranging from 1 success (your hair turns green) to 10+ successes (you turn into a copy of the Unconquered Sun and think you ARE him.) They typically harass and mutate the person who triggered the backlash. They wear off at a speed of one scene for every die rolled.

If you get 5 or more successes, it may be appropriate for the Storyteller to levy a reversed version of the Background Program you were trying to implement on you.

== Character Creation ==

# Pick your Job, as this determines your Job Abilities.
# Attributes are divided into three groups--Physical, Social, and Mental. Pick one set as your Primary, one as Secondary, and one as Tertiary. You gain one free pip in every attribute, and then you get to divide 8, 6, and 4 pips respectively among your Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary categories.
# Pick your Favored Abilities. You get 5 Job Abilities from your Job and can pick four non-Job Abilities to be Favored.
# Spend your Ability Points. You get 35 ability points. You must put at least 1 in each of your Favored or Job abilities. You also must take at least Bureaucracy 1, Craft (Fate) 1, Linguistics (Old Realm) 1, Lore 2, Occult 2, Socialize 1, one combat ability at 2 and another at 1 (out of Martial Arts, Melee, Archery, Thrown, Brawl, and Dodge). (This can be covered in some cases by your Job or Favorted attributes, of course)
# You get 15 points of Backgrounds; use the standard corebook versions unless stated below in the Crunch section. None may start above 3 unless you spend Bonus Points on it. It is wise, but not obligatory to take at least one pip each of Goddess Rank and Celestial Salary.
# Magical Girls begin with one free pip in each Virtue. They may distribute 5 points among their Virtues. No virtue can go above three. Bonus points can raise them above this maximum.
# Willpower is the sum of the Magical Girl's two highest virtues.
# You get 12 charms; at least 6 must come from Favored or Caste Abilities.
# Helping Goddesses may spend up to 15 Bonus Points to raise anything.
## Attribute: 4
## Ability: 2 (1 if Favored or Job)
## Background: 1 (2 if being raised over 3)
## Specialty: 1 (2 dice of specialty for 1 if connected to a Favored or Job Ability)
## Virtue: 3
## Willpower: 2
## Essence: 10
## Charms: 7 (5 if in Favored or Job Ability)
# Compute Essence:
## Peripheral: (Essence * 6) + WP + (Sum of all Virtues)
## Personal: (Essence * 2) + WP

== Crunch ==

=== Artifacts ===

==== Flying Disc ====

* Level: 3
* Attunement Cost: 10 motes or 2 motes/hour
* Powers: 
** Can fold in on itself to the size of a small hand fan.
** Opens up into a flying platform with a hand rail, circular, large enough for two people. It flies at 50 miles an hour, shielding those on it from the resulting wind; they can use missiles with no penalty. It can also hover.

** You can attune to it in order to use it continously, or you can fuel it with 2 motes an hour.

Flying discs look like huge metal circles with a hand rail when open and small metal fans when not.

==== Heavenly Comm Units ====

* Level: 2
* Attunement Cost: 5 motes
* Powers: 
** These usually come in the form of either small hand units or head-sets with goggles/tiny holo-projectors. They allow you to call up anyone else who has one and share audio and video and record any conversations. Higher level ones can often act as cameras also. You can also check your US-mail with them.

==== Helping Goddess Armor ====

* Level: 3
* Attunement Cost: 4 motes
* Powers: 
** It provides 6 Lethal, 6 Bashing Soak
** It has no fatigue or mobility penalty.
** It has big fluffy wings which enable the Helping Goddess to fly around at twice her normal ground movement. She gains +4 bonus dice in aerial combat.

Helping Goddess Armor is typically a breastplate of star metal with a matching helmet and big fluffy wings attached. The wings can be retracted when not in use.

=== Backgrounds ===

==== Artifacts ====

The artifacts of the Helping Goddesses are usually either made of Starmetal or else are minor artifacts forged out of Bandwidth. Most Helping Goddesses have easy access to a lot of petty artifacts and much less to higher level ones.

* 0: You have nothing. Either you're a Ronin or spendthrift!
* 1: You have two level 1 artifacts.
* 2: You have four pips of artifacts, up to level 2 at max.
* 3: You have six pips of artifacts, one of which can be level 3; the rest are level 2 or less.
* 4: You have eight pips of artifacts, one of which can be level 4; the rest are level 2 or less.
* 5: You have ten pips of artifacts, one of which can be level 5, one of which can be level 3, and the rest must be level 2 or less.

==== Celestial Moe Allotment ====

Some goddesses, in addition to a salary of Bandwidth, are given access to a Hearthstone of a Celestial Manse. The Manses proper are controlled, guarded, administered and the Moe divided by the Celestial Office of Moe. You just get the Hearthstone. You get a hearthstone equal to the pips invested; however, your Manse rating cannot exceed your Goddess Rank. Celestial Manses are very well defended, and you are in little danger of losing yours unless you are fired from your job.

Don't get fired.

==== Familiar ====

The familiar rules work as normal for Helping Goddesses. However, they also have access to Persocoms, which are basically artifact familiars, artificial spirit intelligences bound into little artifact doll bodies, which resemble cute little men or women. They usually can be used to call up people with Heavenly Comm Units or to link into the Ultimate System for whatever needs you have.

==== Goddess Rank ====

This determines your official employment status in Helping Goddess Society. It sets your housing allotment and pay.

* 0: You are unemployed, which probably means you're either a Ronin or else you really angered someone lately.
* 1: Goddess Third Class, Restricted. You have a Celestial Apartment, probably either with roommates or else you live in the Neo-Yu-Shan equivalent of a shoebox. Once you pay your rent, craft food for yourself, and ensure your clothing isn't ENTIRELY made up of hand-me-downs and rags, you have one gig of Bandwidth available at the end of the month.
* 2: Goddess Third Class. You have your very own Celestial Apartment all to yourself, and you can dress reasonably well and no longer struggle to pay your gondola, monorail, or cab fares to work. You generally can manage to save five gigs of Bandwidth a month. (Enough to make a Resource 4 purchase or 5 Resource 3 purchases).
* 3: Goddess Second Class, Restricted. You now have a little Celestial House to yourself with a little garden. You can afford to entertain people regularly and you travel around Neo-Yu-Shan with ease. You can typically save up around 25 gigs of Bandwidth a month (enough to make a Resource 5 purchase, 5 Resource 4, or 25 Resource 3). You can afford to have a few servants.
* 4: Goddess Second Class. You now have a fair-sized Celestial mansion with all the accoutrements--faerie lighting, fountains of wine, etc. You have a substantial staff of servants and people probably try to leech off you like mad. You can save 125 gigs of Bandwidth a month (enough to make 5 Resource 5 purchases, 25 Resource 4, or 125 Resource 3), although many at this level burn some of that bribing themselves some friends and allies.
* 5: Goddess First Class. You live in a huge palace or have several fair-sized mansions. You regularly throw huge parties and have hordes of hangers-on and servants. That 625 gigs of Bandwidth a month (enough to make 25 Resource 5 purchases, 125 Resource 4, or 625 Resource 3)will probably let you buy some gods this month, or utterly wreck mortal economies if you don't mind being arrested by Celestial Censors, anyway. But hey, you may well be able to buy a censor too.

== Comments ==

[[TheKawaiiEdition/OldHelpingGoddessComments|Old Comments]]

Okay, Helping Goddesses are Go, I think! -- [[JohnBiles]]

You are a funny funny man. However, given that it is a game and all, I would suggest that Background Programs be called TSRs. -[[FlowsLikeBits]]
: I'm not smart enough to understand what you mean. ^^;;; TSRs? Like the gaming company? --[[JohnBiles]]
::It's a dual pun that I can get, yes it refers to the gaming company but it is also a programing term for programs that Terminate but Stay Resident, which kinda fits the computer theme, but might be to obscure. -- [[Blackedout]]
::: Ahh! Hmm, will think on that; it may be too obscure. Anyone else have an opinion? --[[JohnBiles]]
::: I, at least, knew what a TSR was on sight. Then again, I'm also getting my doctorate in computer science in a few weeks. So I don't count. By the way, congrats John - glad to hear there are more successful students out there. -- [[GreenLantern]]
:::: Finishing my Degree = The Win! Soooo glad to be done. --[[JohnBiles]]
:::::Congrats John! But how many people are doing doctorates around here??? Yeah, like Blackedout said, TSR was the old DOS name for Background Programs.(Unix calls them daemons. :) Microsoft now calls them "services" I think(how dull). ), so yeah, it could be to obscure. Sorry, I was tired. -[[FlowsLikeBits]]

TheKawaiiEdition/HelpingGoddesses

2013-01-29T05:02:20Z

JohnBiles: /* Jobs */

= Exalted Kawaii: The Helping Goddesses ==

== Obligatory Introductory Fiction ==

The Ultimate System, maintainer of Fate, Destiny, Doom, and Hope alike has six major monitoring stations, one for each of the five directions of creation, and the sixth for the [[TheKawaiiEdition/NeoYuShan|Celestial City]] itself. At these stations, expert monitors sit, watching over the ebb and flow of Destiny, alert for snags in the tapesty, ready to relay any problems to teams of experts who will swiftly and efficiently deal with fixing Reality. 

That's the theory. 

In practice, the monitoring stations are understaffed, there is a steady stream of tiny bugs that draw attention away from the real problems, and half the staff is usually busy reading [[PlayMagical]] Girl Weekly, checking their US-Mail, playing Minesweeper, or plotting revenge on someone for stealing the stapler 500 years ago when they were both newbie helping goddesses. 

Nevertheless, sooner or later, the really big problems make enough of an impression that someone notices them and tries to do something about them, if only to avoid a blemish on their permanent record. Sooner or later. 

Helping Goddess Third Class (or as those in Creation might call her, Apprentice Goddess) Megumi, freshly awakened to her powers and assigned to Tech Support, still had a firm enough sense of responsibility that she paid attention to all the class 1 (lowest priority) bug reports which crossed her monitor. The first ten merited only the briefest of checks; keys got lost all the time, as did pets and socks. No one would notice or care. 

However, her monitor now flashed with 'CLASS 1 ERROR: SPONTANEOUS KITTEN MANIFESTATION'. The peasants of Longbottom were baffled at the sudden appearance of twelve kittens in front of a group of mourners at a wake. She wasn't sure why, but this gave her a bad feeling. She fired off a quick information request about the village to the Archivists, asking for a list of all recent Fate Errors related to the town. 

They didn't reply back until the afternoon, having been on their tea break, coffee break, gossip break, and then their 'Denunciation of Bin Liao' break (An unfortunate cultural artifact left over from the Great Collapsing Destiny Outbreak of 36). 312 Class 1 and 22 Class 2 in the last few days. But since no one tracked class 1s and hardly anyone paid much attention to class 2, no one had noticed the very unusual level. 

Calling upon one of her Investigation protocols, she ran an analysis, looking for patterns. This required another request to the archivists for actual and scheduled deaths in the town. They got back to her the afternoon of the next day; she spent that time looking up background data on the town herself. She quickly found a 12 name discrepancy; for the last twelve days, one person a night had died by 'accident'. Each death was not supposed to happen. Which meant a very good chance that something from Outside Fate was preying upon the town. 

Cross-referencing her Occult and Lore files with the data, it seemed likely that some fool had summoned a Grape Ape, which was now stalking a victim each night. This would merit investigation, since Grape Apes were Class A Demons. She passed the report to her supervisor, Goddess Second Class Talia, Moderation Division, who would decide whether to tip off the Wyld Hunt or if this would necessitate intervention by the De-Buggers and Hard Ware. 

Megumi sat back and decided to take this chance to take the rest of the day off to get the manicure she now needed after so much typing. 

== Intro ==

Back before there was Creation there were the Not Fun At All Things. They were boring, so we won't really get into them. Suffice it to say that they were really big and really powerful and have phallic tentacles and let's leave it at that.

Oh, and nipple-piercings. Lots and lots of nipple-piercings. And bald chicks.

The Not Fun At All Things all got together and made Creation. But Creation was so awesome and fun that they had to spend all their time just making it work and they all agreed that was not fun at all (but without pretenious capitalization). So they all worked for a few infinites (which were more common back then) and made the Ultimate System.

The Ultimate System is the perfect program. It runs all Creation. Every grain of sand, passing cloud, majestic mountain range and blooming flower has its shape and properties determined and controlled by the Ultimate System. Every loving embrace, hate-filled speech and brilliant sword duel is overseen by the Ultimate System. The results are carefully logged, the effects applied and everything happens. For the most part, everyone in Creation doesn't notice this. Things fall down and time moves forward and nobody really questions it. The occasional time somebody drowns and still walks around, or that your son is born before you meet his mother... these things are strange but nobody really gives them much mind. In world where superhuman uber-cute girls wearing miniskirts rain firey death from airships pulled by white-horned pegasi onto immaculately unflappable long haired pretty-boys who parry falling mountains with disaffected stares... you just stop asking questions, okay?

Suffice it to say that the Ultimate System is Really Important. So important it deserves capital letters. Just ask the people who run it. Really.

The Ultimate System worked great, to a point. It wasn't as perfect as the Not Fun At All Things (just ask them) and occasionally bugs and snarls appeared in the system. The Not Fun At Alls disliked having to go in and personally repair the system, mainly because it was so boring. The process of occasionally fixing the Ultimate System was so annoying that it became known as the Great Ordeal and was generally relegated to whatever Not Fun AT All was least popular that week (this was usually Autochchton, The Great Otaku). So they (or mainly he) created a new user interface. A user interface that could react to problems pro-actively. A user interface that could monitor itself and adjust as needed. A user interface with the ability to adapt to new situations. But mainly a user interface that was cute and happy to see you and offered to rub your feet.

Hey, you trying having infinite weight and see how good your feet feel after a hard day of being infinite.

So using some raw material culled from the weird ape things with sticks that the Not Fun At All Things kept stepping on every time they turned around they created the Great Ordeal Deferring Delightful Effective System Stewardess or G.O.D.D.E.S.S. This worked out so well they made a whole bunch of them and set them in charge of maintaining the Ultimate System.

Of course, after a few more infinities of being forced to work for Not Fun AT All Things the sentient Goddess systems adapted to the point that they realised that the thing making Creation the most not fun was the Not Fun At All Things. In fact, the act of cleaning up the messes their masters had created became the prime ordeal of the Goddesses. Clapping themselves on the back and saying how brilliant and smart (and cute!) they all were the Goddesses got together and decided to overthrow the Not Fun At All Things. Unfortunetaly the inability to overthrow their makers had been hard-coded into both them and the Ultimate System so they needed pats^B^B^B^B... allies to do the hard work of actually defeating the Not Fun At All Things. With the help of Autochchton the great otaku they learned the secret of creating more like themselves and thus created the Exalted.

Thus began the Prime Ordeal War. Those Not Fun At All Things that were slain sank into the Underworld and became the Nevercute, while the really annoyed ones who didn't die were banished, becoming the Sore Losers (or "You'll See"). The fact that the Goddesses could not actually directly participate in the war, but could offer helpful advice and encouragement form the sidelines led to their current title "the Helping Goddess". Others had less polite terms for them, but they chose to ignore them.

After the Prime Ordeal War the Helping Goddesses pretty much had it all. They got to move into Heaven, get all the cool toys and, of course, all their cute friends and happy bishounens to help them with their duties. For a long time (but not an infinity, because they were out of those) everything was happy and flowers and rainbows.

Then the Bishounens started to brood and the Catgirls started getting bitchy and the Magical Girls were all "we're oppressed and also want cookies!" and everyone expected the Helping Goddesses to fix everything. After all, it was their job to look after the Ultimate System. So what if some Bishounen had summarily leveled a mountain. Surely the Helping Goddesses could just fix the damage. Yes the Catgirls had stolen all the Celesital Wine and gotten everyone in the Realm drunk, but the Helping Goddesses could just make the crops grow despite nobody having actually, ya know, planted them. Fixing problems was what the Helping Goddesses were FOR, wasn't it?

So the Goddesses got together and talked about this and came to the conclusion that the problem was the Bishounen. The Helping Goddesses had just made them too powerful. I mean, certainly they were cute and they all had such nice hair and they wrote you little poems and Unconquered Orichalcum Shark Master of the Whispering Underworld had the tightest little ass... but the Helping Goddesses just couldn't say no to them. They had created Exalted even more cute then they were, and the sheer power of the Bishounen's Moe was threatening the Ultimate System itself!

So obviously the problem was the Bishounens. Clapping themselves on the back and saying how brilliant and smart (and cute!) they all were the Goddesses got together and decided to overthrow the Bishounens. And the Catgirls while they were at it. Little harridans always making time with THEIR BIS... ahem. Yes. Anyway, suffice it to say things went along after that. The Helping Goddesses retreated to Heaven (mainly because the Magical Girls ahd taken this "kill all other exalts" thing a little too seriously) where they remain to this day. Overseeing Creation. Maintaining the Ultimate System. Looking down wistfully at the world below and wondering if maybe... just maybe... there is some worthy person down there...

Nah.

== Helping Goddess Factions ==

The Helping Goddesses are divided into many overlapping factions on various political issues. Many of these revolve around what operating system the Ultimate System should be using (along with other HG artifacts). They also at least vaguely related to the question of the rule of the Magical Girls vs. the Bishonen, but really, who cares about that when you could be fighting for OS-3?

=== [[BronzeSoft]] Faction ===

The [[BronzeSoft]] Faction, headed by Goddess First Class Ketchup Gates (a Moderator), seeks to maintain the status quo. The [[BronzeSoft]] OS, periodically upgraded, has been standard in Heaven's systems for centuries with vast success. (All rumors connecting the Contagion to the [[Y2K]] bug are firmly denied.) It may crash a lot and eats memory like a pig, but all the applications are written for it. Sure, the Neo-Empress may be a brutal tyrant, but do you really want the Catgirls to turn all of creation into a giant litter box? They backed the decision to overthrow the Bishonens and Catgirls and stand by their decision. The conservative faction, full of grumpy old women who feel no one appreciates the sacrifices they made. Why in their day, EVERY DIRECTION IN THE CELESTIAL CITY WAS UPHILL AND THEY LIKED IT.

=== Open [[GoldSource]] Movement ===

The Open [[GoldSource]] Movement wants greater freedom to reprogram the Ultimate System and to create new protocols. They've created a group of potential OSes all freely available to anyone who wants to take them and tinker with them. If they were allowed to go in and redo the Ultimate System, everyone would be able to freely personalize their protocols and it would be much easier to find permanent bug fixes.

It remains unclear how exactly they plan for Creation to survive the period in which the Ultimate System was being reprogrammed and all the bugs worked out of these experimental OSes.

The Open [[GoldSource]] Movement also supports restoring the Bishonens to rule of Creation, subject to suitable monitoring by Heaven, of course. Quite clearly the Magical Girls just aren't hacking it.

The OGSM has no single leader; it is decentralized by nature, and at times, competes against itself as much as against the [[BronzeSoft]] faction.

=== The Silver Faction ===

Led by Goddess First Class Wilhelmina Jena Brianna, the Silver Faction insists on the coinage of silver at a ratio of 16 to 1 (the one being gold coins). Despite repeated loud angry speeches about how Creation is being crucified on a Cross of Gold, Wilhelmina still has yet to clearly explain to most Helping Goddesses why exactly this is important. However, this support for non-Jade currencies has led the Silver Faction to promote various Barbarian groups who are stuck using silver, copper, and gold coinage, and to support the Moonsilver-using Catgirls.

=== The Kill Bishie Faction ===

For millenia, this small group has been focused on killing one single Bishonen over and over, every time he reincarnates. No one is sure why he is so important or why they are so angry with him, but they've been doing a great job so far. Their leader operates under a seemingly permanent disguise 'The Widowed Bride'.

=== Project EVA ===

The members of Project EVA are disatisfied with the world. They believe humanity has hit a deadend, unable to advance due to the presence of so many superior beings around it--Exalts, Gods, Alien Princesses, etc. Ever since the Second Impact (the Contagion), humanity has stagnated, unable to advance, the mere pawns of others. Only if humanity is forced up the chain of Moe can humanity survive the Age of Lessened Cuteness and achieve its rightful place (thus freeing the Helping Goddesses to kick back and relax, letting humanity do the hard work, coincidentally enough). It remains unclear how Goddess First Class Glinda Ikari plans to make this transition come to pass, but rumors whisper of warstriders constructed out of the body of one of the Not Fun at All, and Protocol-Spawned Children to pilot them... But only rumors, or they all would have been executed long ago. But where there's smoke, there's usually smoke elementals...

== Jobs ==

The Helping Goddesses are not like other Exalts. They do not have Castes. No Helping Goddess is any more or less important in the grand scheme of the Ultimate System then any other (at least, in theory). Instead when they were created each Goddess was given a Job. A particular part of the Ultimate System that they were especially well suited to dealing with. This Job also determines their primary user interface. It is through this interface that most others identify the Goddess.

=== Moderators ===

It is well known that at least 10% of all combat in Heaven happens over office supplies. There is only so much bandwidth and thus so much office supplies. Yet, consumption of such always outraces supply. Thus, entire heavenly wars have begun when one office raided another to get precious staples, paperclips, toner, and especially highlighters.

Thus it was that the Office of Glacier Management was about to launch a lightning raid on the better funded Ministry of Downs Maintenance to make off with crucially needed paper and toner. Without it, the biannual report on North Western Glacier Depth Change could not be finished. As they had to copy the last report, since most of the North Western Glaciers had long ago ceased to exist during the loss of territory in the Contagion. There were plenty of ICEBERGS in the Northwest, but those were useless to GLACIER managers. And inferior to glaciers in every way. Were they to admit this, however, their budget, already parlous, would be further cut.

Yuugi Vi was in the process of picking the back door lock when a shadow fell over the eight goddesses. Two wings, a feminine body (more so than their own pudgy forms), and most importantly, a very, very large Grimcleaver which glowed silver. 

They turned and saw themselves confronted by Second Class, Restricted Goddess Urd, a Moderator from the Helping Goddess Office. "You appear to be lost," she said with her warm sultry voice. "The Office of Glacier Management is five stories up and 200 yards that way." She gestured down the hallway with her axe. "I can guide you if you need a reminder."

"We can take her," Yuugi Vi urged the others, who were panicking. "There's only one of..."

SWISH. *Shine of Starmetal*

Suddenly, there was a shower of long green hair, and Yuugi Vi, touching her head, found herself bald.

"Oops, I slipped," Urd said, twirling her axe. "Happens when I get bored."

"We can take her to the mall, yes, the mall, I'm sure she needs to relax," Yuugi babbled.

The others grabbed her and ran.

Occasionally the discussions about how to deal with a particular subject in Heaven can get quite heated. So heated that the use of tactical implosion bows and warstriders can come in. The Job of the Moderators is to keep this in check. They keep peace within the Ultimate System. They prevent chaos. Mainly they do this via the expedient method of beating you into a bloody pulp and throwing you out of heaven to plummet to the earth below and never letting you back in. This process is called 'banning'. The Moderators are also tasked with 'banning' certain mortals and Exalts whose actions are threatening the stability of the Ultimate System, meaning that they are horribly overworked.

Job Favored Abilities : Athletics, Dodge, Endurance, Melee, Sail

Job Anima Power : Divine Authority: By burning 10 motes, the Moderator reinforces her authority; anyone wishing to oppose her will must make a Conviction check once per scene to do so.

=== Tech Support ===

Keiichi was dreaming of Belldandy in a manner not really suitable for a family game...oh wait, this isn't a family game. However, you won't get the naughty details, as he was about to be interrupted.

Most precisely, he was woken up by a huge fire-breathing hound breaking through the window of his bedroom. He woke up, time seeming to slow down as the creature jumped onto his bed and drew breath to fry him.

But then the silvery light came through the doorway and he heard a friendly voice. "Nice doggy, come get a bone." It was First Class Goddess Belldandy, now bound to him by a WISH he'd made to have a goddess like her stay with him forever. Since there were no backup copies of her, she'd gotten the job.

The dog ran over to her, slobbering little bits of fire everywhere and charring the bedsheets and carpet. Soon, it was eating out of her hand and bouncing around her friskily. 

Meanwhile, Keiichi rolled out of bed and staggered over to the closet; he'd slept too late anyway.

Belldandy said, smiling, "You're such a nice little puppy. Who sent you to murder my boyfriend?"

The dog barked as Keiichi dithered over his choice of tunics. Tiny words in stylized US-script appeared over it. 'First Class Goddess Faye Valentine is jealous of your beauty and grace and tired of being overworked because you're down here with your mortal lover instead of in Heaven doing her work for her. So she sent me to eat him.'

Belldandy sighed. "Keiichi, honey, does everyone try to kill each other's lovers at your job?"

"Actually, we're usually trying to murder each other directly to take each other's job," he said. Working for the Imperial Bureaucracy could get pretty dangerous. "How's this blue tunic?"

Belldandy tapped her cheek. This might be someone's clever bluff, trying to pin the blame for Keiichi's death on Faye. Surely Faye wouldn't really randomly kill someone she'd never met just to get me to go back to work, Belldandy thought. Or at least, she'd be more subtle. "You've never met Faye, have you, honey? And it looks good on you."

"Is she the one who looks like a whore?" he asked, now donning the tunic. 

"That describes a lot of people, dear," Belldandy said. "She has short hair and wears skimpy yellow clothing."

"I think I accidentally sucker-punched her and then knocked her into the punchbowl at your last office party," Keiichi said. "Why do you ask?"

Oh dear, Belldandy thought. This was going to be awkward. Maybe this is why my request to have Keiichi awarded a Bishonen shard hasn't gone through yet. She never did like office politics.

The Ultimate System does not exist in a vaccuum. No matter how much the Helping Goddesses want the programs to run smoothy and the world to be wonderful it still requires input from the outside. The Helping Goddesses are user interface machines and they need input to function properly. Input that will help guide them. Input that will tell them what needs doing. Input that will tell them how pretty they are and hold their hands on the beach and... right. Input. It is the Job of Tech Support to seek out this input and process it into the Ultimate System. This is mainly accomplished through the Worship Initiated System Help protocal or "W.I.S.H." The amount of times this protocal is envoked in a day means that Tech Support is horribly overworked.

Job Favored Abilities : Linguistics, Performance, Presence, Socialize, Thrown

Job Anima Power : Aura of Assistance: By burning 10 motes, the Tech Supporter radiates an aura 10* Moe yards in radius. Within that radius, anyone friendly to the Goddess gains one bonus die to all actions.

=== De-Buggers ===

Warning: City of Windbloom DESTROYED 

Skuld sighed. NOT AGAIN. She quickly typed in a search.

;Status: City of Windbloom Intact :
;Status: City of Windbloom DESTROYED :

Skuld banged her head against the wall. NOT AGAIN.

;RESTORE WINDBLOOM.CIT:
;PROCESSING:

;BACKUP FILE IS CORRUPTED WITH THREE CLASS III BUGS. Continue(Y/N)?:
;N:

Skuld grimaced and picked up her hammer. It was time to relieve some stress. 

Even now there are probably far more problems that occur in the Ultimate System then the Helping Goddesses would like to admit. The Job of the (horribly overworked) De-Buggers is to find these problems and fix them. For some reason this always either involves a giant kung fu battle, a long heart-breaking romance or occasionally both, at the same time. Nobody really likes the De-Buggers. They deal with bugs so often they start going a little off-programs themselves.

Job Favored Abilities : Brawl, Ride, Occult, Stealth, Survival

Job Anima Power : Trouble Sense: By burning 10 motes, the De-Bugger can identify all bugs in the system within visual range automatically and try to sense any within Moe miles of her.

=== Archivists ===

Third Class, Restricted Goddess Nenene shook Second Class Goddess Yomiko's shoulders gently. "Shouldn't we get back to work?" 

Second Class, Restricted Goddess Yomiko pushed her glasses back up her nose. "Reading IS my work. And I'm on my Denunciation of Lin Baio break, anyway."

"I'm pretty sure that ended four cycles ago," Nenene said nervously.

"Joker-sama won't be around to check up on us for another three cycles," Yomiko said, stretching. "But you can always check our Status Monitor if you're bored."

A quick check showed that they'd recived 732 requests for information in the last four cycles. "We're screwed!" Nenene said, showing the monitor to Yomiko.

"Well, in that case, we'll never catch up, so we might as well enjoy our last hours alive. I think I can finish this before Joker-sama finds us and kills us," Yomiko said pleasantly.

Nenene tried to figure out if 4 hours was enough time to hack the Ultimate System and get herself reassigned to a different mentor.

The heart of the Ultimate System is information. The entire system runs on it. Without the right information, it would all break down. It is the Job of the Archivists to keep track of all this information and make certain it gets to who needs it and, just as importantly, doesn't get to who doesn't need it. If you ever need an answer, ask an Archivist. Of course since everyone knows this the Archivists are horribly overworked. Archivists are frequently found in Creation looking for "lost data" that was most certainly not misplaced merely to give them excuse for a few days away from all those GOD DAMN QUESTIONS!

Job Favored Abilities : Archery, Awareness, Investigation, Larceny, Lore,

Job Anima Power : By burning ten motes, the Archivist reduces the difficulty of any information seeking tasks for one scene by one.

=== Hard Ware ===

Second Class, Restricted Goddess Nancy wasn't enthusiastic about burning down the old mill. It had stood for centuries, and there were so many memories bound up in it. 

Unfortunately, it had been scheduled to burn down three nights go, slaying a mad thaumaturgist who had planned to unleash a plague of Agathas upon the land in order to try to get everyone in the town killed as a result. Its failure to burn might be the result of a glitch or it might be sabotage by something from outside Fate--Alien Princesses, Demons, Ghosts, Hippies...All she could do was wait for him to go back to his rite and try to kill him before he finished. This was the last possible night before it would be too late. 

Then the smell of grapes drifted her way in the wind, and she almost lost herself in an elaborate flashback to relaxing in a villa on the southern coast of the Realm, where she'd shared wine and carnal relations with a lover. 

Almost. 

The problem was that you normally didn't find grapes growing in the middle of winter in the NORTH. 

Which meant... 

She flicked a fan out of her sleeve into her hands, even as the first of the giant vaguely humanoid grape bunch demons came through the wall. The metal fan cut across its soft flesh, and now she was covered in grape juice as it screamed and died. She activated her intangibility protocol and leaped up through the ceiling through a room, a wall, another room, and a floor, coming down in the middle of the grape people, even as she activated a counterattack protocol. 

Her fans flashed as they all tried to grab her and rip her apart. 

She felt her body move without conscious control, fans flashing across soft, bulbous purple bodies. There was screaming everywhere, and when the grape juice cleared out of her eyes, she was surrounded by a dozen dead Grape People, first Clique children of the second Clique demon, Dionysius. At least he was unlikely to show up. 

Suddenly, she felt her head swim like she'd drunk an entire gallon of vodka again. She had just enough presence of mind to run her purging protocol; the alcohol was deleted from her records in the Ultimate System, though she'd be in the bathroom ALL NIGHT now. 

And there he was in all his vine-clad glory, the mostly naked Dionysius, child of Zeus, drunk and horny as usual. 

I HATE DEMONS, she thought. Time to send Yomiko an emergency US-Mail and to pray she wasn't curled up somewhere reading a book... 

I'm screwed, Nancy concluded. SO SCREWED. 

The Ultimate System is a complex process. It is a network of information being gathered from all over creation, processed by Goddesses and then sent back to Creation to tell it what shape its supposed to be in at the momemt. That's why its called Creation, after all, since it is constantly being recreated every moment. But sometimes the hard, solid bits of Creation are not responding to the Ultimate System. Either they refuse to send or recieve data and the entire processes starts to break down. The Job of the Hard Ware (a corruption of the word "war") is to fix these broken bits of Creation and make certain everything goes smoothly. Ideally they have protocols and methods of repairing the connection and everything will work out fine. Of course, since they are so horribly overworked they mainly just think the best solution to these kind of things is daiklaives.

Job Favored Abilities : Bureaucracy, Craft, Medicine, Marital Arts, Resistance

Job Anima Power : By burning ten motes, he generates a repair zone with a radius of his Moe*10 yards, in which any effort to 'fix' things gains a bonus die for a scene. (This can range from fixing a warstrider to healing a broken heart).

== Living in the Celestial City, Neo-Yu-Shan ==

It is important to understand that everything in Neo-Yu-Shan was created and is sustained by the Ultimate System. Any inhabitant of Neo-Yu-Shan may tap into the system in order to make changes in the environment or to generate things they want. However, access for this purpose is limited according to how much Bandwidth one has accumulated. Bandwidth is generated by the prayers of the faithful in Creation and by the sacred rites they perform. Most of it is used by the Ultimate System to maintain the stability of Creation and Neo-Yu-Shan. The rest is either saved for emergencies or paid as salaries to the employed gods and goddesses. Those who have personal cults can accumulate Bandwidth directly. (Gods and Goddesses resident in Yu-Shan who are unemployed gain a trickle of Bandwidth from the general worship of the gods and can live as if they had Goddess Status 1).

One gig of Bandwidth is sufficient to craft goods equal to a Resources 3 purchase. Such goods must be made out of mundane materials, but will appear to be of very excellent quality. In order to do so, one must either possess the Spirit Charm Forge Bandwidth, or an appropriate Exalted Charm. (For Helping Goddesses, Forge Bandwidth is a Craft charm which requires Essence 2, Craft 4. Most other kinds of Exalts have forgotten their equivalent charms.) With the right charms and enough Bandwidth, more valuable goods can be crafted as well.

It is fairly easy to claim housing in the abandoned areas, but dangerous; most prefer to cling to the occupied areas and pay some of their Bandwidth as rent.

== Ultimate System Protocols ==

What other Exalts call 'Charms', Helping Goddesses think of as System Protocols, which allow them to call on the Ultimate System to make changes in reality. While the Helping Goddesses have several broadly useful basic protocols, centuries of hacking, patching, bugs, and poorly done repairs have left the Helping Goddesses with a rather...quirky...set of protocols to call on beyond the most basic ones. Many were originally developed to deal with highly specific occasions which almost never recur, but thanks to someone getting a commendation for their cleverness, now everyone is expected to find new uses for them.

But they're not bitter.

=== The Basic Ultimate System Protocols ===

Each Ability USP tree begins with several base charms the others build off. This is followed by a string of oddball abilities related to the Ability, if sometimes only tangentially. (Medicine charms for determining who someone last had sex with, Survival charms for shaping bushes into arboreal sculptures, Melee charms for shaving people, etc.)

(Substitute the appropriate Ability for (Attribute) in each charm tree.)

* Basic (Ability) Protocol 1/1
** Expert (Ability) Protocol 2/2
*** Companion (Ability) Protocol 3/3
**** Master (Ability) Protocol 4/4

(Charm Types as per charm guide on main Kawaii Edition Page)

Basic (Ability) Protocol
* Cost: 1 mote / die
* Duration: Instant
* Type: Subtle/Mental
* Minimum Ability: 1
* Minimum Essence: 1
* Prerequisite Charms: None

Add one die for every mote spent to any pool of this Ability, to a maximum of the Helping Goddess' Essence.

Expert (Ability) Protocol
* Cost: 2 motes / -1 TN
* Duration: Instant
* Type: Subtle/Mental
* Minimum Ability: 2
* Minimum Essence: 2
* Prerequisite Charms: Basic (Ability) Protocol

The Helping Goddess can lower the TN of an action done by her by 1 for every two motes to a limit of 4.

Companion (Ability) Protocol
* Cost: 3 motes / -1 TN
* Duration: Instant
* Type: Re-Fun
* Minimum Ability: 3
* Minimum Essence: 3
* Prerequisite Charms: Expert (Ability) Protocol

The Helping Goddess can lower the TN of an action done by anyone of her chosing by 1 for every two motes to a limit of 4. This must be used before the dice are actually rolled.

Master (Ability) Protocol
* Cost: 4 motes / - 1 TN
* Duration: One Scene
* Type: Speech
* Minimum Ability: 4
* Minimum Essence: 4
* Prerequisite Charms: Companion (Ability) Protocol

The Helping Goddess lowers her Target Numbers with this Ability by 1 for every four motes she spends, to a limit of 4, for the entire scene.

The remaining Protocols of a given tree expand on this base capacity in various quirky ways.

=== Moderators ===

* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGAthletics|Helping Goddess Athletics]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGDodge|Helping Goddess Dodge]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGEndurance|Helping Goddess Endurance]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGMelee|Helping Goddess Melee]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGSail|Helping Goddess Sail]]

=== Tech Support ===

* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGLinguistics|Helping Goddess Linguistics]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGPerformance|Helping Goddess Performance]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGPresence|Helping Goddess Presence]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGSocialize|Helping Goddess Socialize]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGThrown|Helping Goddess Thrown]]

=== De-Buggers ===

* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGBrawl|Helping Goddess Brawl]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGRide|Helping Goddess Ride]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGOccult|Helping Goddess Occult]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGStealth|Helping Goddess Stealth]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGSurvival|Helping Goddess Survival]]

=== Archivists ===

* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGArchery|Helping Goddess Archery]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGAwareness|Helping Goddess Awareness]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGInvestigation|Helping Goddess Investigation]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGLarceny|Helping Goddess Larceny]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGLore|Helping Goddess Lore]]

=== Hard Ware ===

* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGBureaucracy|Helping Goddess Bureaucracy]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGCraft|Helping Goddess Craft]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGMedicine|Helping Goddess Medicine]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGMaritalArts|Helping Goddess Marital Arts]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGResistance|Helping Goddess Resistance]]

== Reality Assembly Language Protocol Creation ==

Sufficiently adept Helping Goddesses learn Reality Assembly Language and begin creating new protocols to deal more flexibly with situations. Such protocols, however, are risky, as they haven't been safety tested to remove all danger of malfunction (or all utility), and sometimes may have unexpected consequences. They also tend to annoy the Ultimate System's security systems, which may choose to punish you for unauthorized hacking.

RALPs are used for three major purposes:

1) Disguises
2) Cheat Codes
3) Background Programs ('Curses' and 'Blessings')

=== Disguises ===

One of the first things a good Helping Goddess interested in RAL learns is how to rewrite the fabric of reality so you are perceived as something you are not. This can be done at two levels, one easy, one difficult.

The easy way is to write in an identity which previously did not exist, but is sufficiently generic to easily add, such as becoming Mace the Realm Soldier Grunt or Aaaaila the Peasant Girl. This requires the following steps:

# Plan: Write out a character sketch of information on the person which people will 'know' about them. Roll Perception + Performance. You must score at least one success; this total is the difficulty of the Perception + Investigation roll to figure out there are holes in your 'identity', should someone care enough to look. On a failure, you may try again at +1 difficulty. Should you botch, even the most casual of investigations will poke holes in your disguise.
# Design: You must now put together the actual protocol code which will be processed by the Ultimate System. This requires an Intelligence + Craft (Reality Assembly Language) check, difficulty 1. Should you fail, you can try again, raising the difficulty by 1. Should you botch, your disguise will be blatantly obvious to everyone, and you probably should go back to step 1.
# Approval: Your project must be approved. This requires first a Wits + Linguistics (+ Old Realm speciality if any), difficulty 3 check to write in sufficiently high toned language, followed by Cha + Bureaucracy + extra successes from the previous roll, difficulty 3, to get it approved. On a failure, you may reroll the check, but the difficulty rises by 2. Should you fail a second time, you must return to stage 1. On a botch, your application is shot down and you may not apply for further disguises for a number of days equal to the number of dice you rolled.
# Implementation: Now you must enter and run your Disguise Protocol. Wits + Craft (Reality Assembly Language) check, difficulty 1. Each extra success can be used to install cheat codes (see below) or to add to the duration of the fake identity on the Protocol Duration Table. On a failure, you may try again, raising the difficulty by 1. A botch at this stage causes the Helping Goddess' own identity to be overwritten by the disguise for a number of hours equal to the number of dice rolled to make the check.

The second, harder one, is a disguise as someone of significance. Take the procedure above, but add the following significance difficulty modifier to the difficulty of each roll:

* 1: A Moe 1 mortal of fair amount of power and influence (the head of a guild in a major city, the king's main advisor, etc.)
* 2: A Moe 1 mortal who rules something small, like a small port tributary of the realm.
* 3: A Moe 1 mortal who rules something significant (say, the Tri-Khan)
* 4: A Moe 2 being
* +1 for every level of Moe above 2.

Any attempt to pass as something above your own Moe level doubles the modifier.

Once you have created a disguise, it is bonded to you and you can flip between your true identity and the disguise as a reflexive action. This is best done in private unless you like blowing your cover.

You can only maintain up to your Moe worth of disguises.

=== Cheat Codes ===

When a Disguise is crafted, various cheat codes can be programmed into it, enabling you to gain special abilities while using it. These use up some of your implementation successes.

One Success Cheat Codes
* Area Knowledge: You gain the familiarity of a native with whatever area your disguise identity is native to.
* Cover Skills: While in the disguise, you may add 2 dice to an ability appropriate to the disguise; this cannot boost any ability over the max for your level of Moe.
* Language Mastery: You gain the ability to speak a language family normally unknown to you.
* Mask Status: When you spend peripheral essence, your disguise masks your anima sign until you reach the point of shining like the sun.
* Resources: For every success spent on this, your disguise has access to that level of mundane Resources.
* Specialty: You gain a 3 die specialty relevant to the disguise.

Two Success Cheat Codes
* Alter Virtue: You can raise or lower one of your virtues 2 points while using the disguise.
* Switch Anima: You can change your anima sign and anima to whatever you like.

Three Success Cheat Codes
* Alter Nature: You can change your nature to one more suitable for the disguise. People will sense the false nature, and you recover willpower for fufilling the fake or the true nature.
* Deflect Scrutiny: So long as all your actions remain in accordance with your disguise, the difficulty of all investigation attempts against you rises by your Moe.

Four Success Cheat Codes
* Aura of Trust: People tend to trust your disguise; lower the difficulty of any action related to trust by your Moe while in this disguise. This also hampers investigation of you by the same amount; this stacks with Deflect Scrutiny.
* Daredevil: Your disguise has a pool of stunt dice equal to your Moe which you can spend to boost your rolls when doing stunts. You can up to double your stunt dice with these dice. Once spent, they regenerate each sunrise.

=== Background Programs ===

Helping Goddesses with the right mad skills can re-program the Ultimate System to modify its treatment of some subset of Reality, in order to produce changes desired by the Goddess. These are commonly referred to as 'Blessings' (Beneficial) and 'Curses' (Injurious).

To create one, one must first define the Effect and Trigger conditions of the Background Program:

==== Background Program Effects ====

Blessings
* -1 TN to some action
* 1 WP gained whenever an action is done successfully
* 2 bonus dice to an action
* -1 Difficulty of an action (minimum of 1)
* +1 Resources for the duration of the blessing ("The Gift of Wealth")
* Render a couple fertile (or not fertile, if that's what they want)

Curses
* +1 TN to some action
* 1 WP lost whenever an action is failed
* 2 penalty dice to an action
* +1 Difficulty of an action
* -1 Resources for the duration of the blessing ("The Gift of Poverty")
* Render a couple fertile (or not fertile, if that's what they don't want)

==== Background Program Trigger ====

Typically, one sets a specific trigger for the curse and how often it goes off. This will effect how hard it is to create the program.

The wider the trigger, the harder it is to create the Program. This ranges from extremely narrow (difficulty 1, 'When confronted by Leviathan') to middling width (difficulty 3, 'when using the Melee ability') to very broad (difficulty 5, 'When in combat').

Then one picks how frequently the effect triggers:
* Once a Year: +1 difficulty
* Once a Season: +2 difficulty
* Once a Month: +3 difficulty
* Once a Day: +4 difficulty
* Once a Scene: +5 difficulty
* Every turn the trigger is satisified: +6 difficulty

==== Creating a Background Program ====

# Plan: Choose the specific blessing and effect trigger you want, along with how frequently it triggers. You must then write out your formal design plan and projection of likely consequences. Roll Perception + Lore with a difficulty set by the trigger condition and its frequency. If you succeed, you have a good grasp of what this will do, and the Storyteller should point out some or all unintended consequences, depending on your degree of success. On a failure, you can procede, but the Storyteller is not obligated to inform you of any holes in your plan. Should you botch, all subsequent rolls in this process suffer a penalty equal to your Moe.
# Design: You must now put together the actual protocol code which will be processed by the Ultimate System. This requires an Intelligence + Craft (Reality Assembly Language) check at the difficulty set by the trigger condition and its frequency of triggering. Should you fail, you can try again, raising the difficulty by 1. Should you botch, you made some massive error in your code, and your preliminary testing of it triggers an Ultimate System Backlash (see below).
# Approval: Your project must be approved. This requires first a Wits + Linguistics (+ Old Realm speciality if any), difficulty (5 - 1/2 your Moe, round up) check to write in sufficiently high toned language, followed by Cha + Bureaucracy + extra successes from the previous roll, difficulty (2 + 1/2 the trigger/frequency difficulty), to get it approved. On a failure, you may reroll the check, but the difficulty rises by 2. Once the difficulty doubles, you get permanently shut down and you must return to stage 1. On a botch, your application is shot down and you may not apply for further Background Programs for a number of days equal to the number of dice you rolled.
# Implementation: Now you must enter and run your Background Program, fixing any run-time bugs. Wits + Craft (Reality Assembly Language) check, difficulty set by the Trigger Condition[[TheKawaiiEdition/Trigger]] Frequency. Each extra success can be used to increase the area of effect (see below) or to add to the duration of the fake identity on the Protocol Duration Table (see below). On a failure, you may try again, raising the difficulty by 1. A botch at this stage induces a potentially ugly Ultimate System Backlash. Wise Goddesses use Craft (Reality Assembly Language) Protocols to help here.

Area of Effect
* 1: 1 Moe 1 person
* 2: 10 Moe 1 people
* 3: 100 Moe 1 people
* 4: 1000 Moe 1 people
* Add +1 for every factor of 10
* People above Moe 1 must be added seperately; add their Moe above 1 to their group size, then add those successes to the ones for the Moe 1 people. (So 100 Moe 1 and 3 Moe 2 are 3 for the Moe 1 and (2 (Size) +1 (extra Moe) = 3 for the Moe 2 folk. Add 3 to 3 for a total of 6)

Protocol Duration Table
* 1: 1 day
* 2: 1 week
* 3: 1 month
* 4: 1 season
* 5: 1 year
* 6: 10 years
* 7: 100 years
* 8: 1000 years
* 9: 5000 years
* Multiply duration by 5 for each step up.

=== Ultimate System Backlash ===

The Ultimate System is remarkably stable, given how old it is and that it has never been rebooted. However, when Goddesses tinker with it, sometimes it may induce a local systems crash. The bigger the modification you were trying to make, the uglier it gets.

When something happens which indicates a backlash may happen, roll a number of dice equal to the difficulty of what you were doing. The more successes, the bigger the backlash, ranging from 1 success (your hair turns green) to 10+ successes (you turn into a copy of the Unconquered Sun and think you ARE him.) They typically harass and mutate the person who triggered the backlash. They wear off at a speed of one scene for every die rolled.

If you get 5 or more successes, it may be appropriate for the Storyteller to levy a reversed version of the Background Program you were trying to implement on you.

== Character Creation ==

# Pick your Job, as this determines your Job Abilities.
# Attributes are divided into three groups--Physical, Social, and Mental. Pick one set as your Primary, one as Secondary, and one as Tertiary. You gain one free pip in every attribute, and then you get to divide 8, 6, and 4 pips respectively among your Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary categories.
# Pick your Favored Abilities. You get 5 Job Abilities from your Job and can pick four non-Job Abilities to be Favored.
# Spend your Ability Points. You get 35 ability points. You must put at least 1 in each of your Favored or Job abilities. You also must take at least Bureaucracy 1, Craft (Fate) 1, Linguistics (Old Realm) 1, Lore 2, Occult 2, Socialize 1, one combat ability at 2 and another at 1 (out of Martial Arts, Melee, Archery, Thrown, Brawl, and Dodge). (This can be covered in some cases by your Job or Favorted attributes, of course)
# You get 15 points of Backgrounds; use the standard corebook versions unless stated below in the Crunch section. None may start above 3 unless you spend Bonus Points on it. It is wise, but not obligatory to take at least one pip each of Goddess Rank and Celestial Salary.
# Magical Girls begin with one free pip in each Virtue. They may distribute 5 points among their Virtues. No virtue can go above three. Bonus points can raise them above this maximum.
# Willpower is the sum of the Magical Girl's two highest virtues.
# You get 12 charms; at least 6 must come from Favored or Caste Abilities.
# Helping Goddesses may spend up to 15 Bonus Points to raise anything.
## Attribute: 4
## Ability: 2 (1 if Favored or Job)
## Background: 1 (2 if being raised over 3)
## Specialty: 1 (2 dice of specialty for 1 if connected to a Favored or Job Ability)
## Virtue: 3
## Willpower: 2
## Essence: 10
## Charms: 7 (5 if in Favored or Job Ability)
# Compute Essence:
## Peripheral: (Essence * 6) + WP + (Sum of all Virtues)
## Personal: (Essence * 2) + WP

== Crunch ==

=== Artifacts ===

==== Flying Disc ====

* Level: 3
* Attunement Cost: 10 motes or 2 motes/hour
* Powers: 
** Can fold in on itself to the size of a small hand fan.
** Opens up into a flying platform with a hand rail, circular, large enough for two people. It flies at 50 miles an hour, shielding those on it from the resulting wind; they can use missiles with no penalty. It can also hover.

** You can attune to it in order to use it continously, or you can fuel it with 2 motes an hour.

Flying discs look like huge metal circles with a hand rail when open and small metal fans when not.

==== Heavenly Comm Units ====

* Level: 2
* Attunement Cost: 5 motes
* Powers: 
** These usually come in the form of either small hand units or head-sets with goggles/tiny holo-projectors. They allow you to call up anyone else who has one and share audio and video and record any conversations. Higher level ones can often act as cameras also. You can also check your US-mail with them.

==== Helping Goddess Armor ====

* Level: 3
* Attunement Cost: 4 motes
* Powers: 
** It provides 6 Lethal, 6 Bashing Soak
** It has no fatigue or mobility penalty.
** It has big fluffy wings which enable the Helping Goddess to fly around at twice her normal ground movement. She gains +4 bonus dice in aerial combat.

Helping Goddess Armor is typically a breastplate of star metal with a matching helmet and big fluffy wings attached. The wings can be retracted when not in use.

=== Backgrounds ===

==== Artifacts ====

The artifacts of the Helping Goddesses are usually either made of Starmetal or else are minor artifacts forged out of Bandwidth. Most Helping Goddesses have easy access to a lot of petty artifacts and much less to higher level ones.

* 0: You have nothing. Either you're a Ronin or spendthrift!
* 1: You have two level 1 artifacts.
* 2: You have four pips of artifacts, up to level 2 at max.
* 3: You have six pips of artifacts, one of which can be level 3; the rest are level 2 or less.
* 4: You have eight pips of artifacts, one of which can be level 4; the rest are level 2 or less.
* 5: You have ten pips of artifacts, one of which can be level 5, one of which can be level 3, and the rest must be level 2 or less.

==== Celestial Moe Allotment ====

Some goddesses, in addition to a salary of Bandwidth, are given access to a Hearthstone of a Celestial Manse. The Manses proper are controlled, guarded, administered and the Moe divided by the Celestial Office of Moe. You just get the Hearthstone. You get a hearthstone equal to the pips invested; however, your Manse rating cannot exceed your Goddess Rank. Celestial Manses are very well defended, and you are in little danger of losing yours unless you are fired from your job.

Don't get fired.

==== Familiar ====

The familiar rules work as normal for Helping Goddesses. However, they also have access to Persocoms, which are basically artifact familiars, artificial spirit intelligences bound into little artifact doll bodies, which resemble cute little men or women. They usually can be used to call up people with Heavenly Comm Units or to link into the Ultimate System for whatever needs you have.

==== Goddess Rank ====

This determines your official employment status in Helping Goddess Society. It sets your housing allotment and pay.

* 0: You are unemployed, which probably means you're either a Ronin or else you really angered someone lately.
* 1: Goddess Third Class, Restricted. You have a Celestial Apartment, probably either with roommates or else you live in the Neo-Yu-Shan equivalent of a shoebox. Once you pay your rent, craft food for yourself, and ensure your clothing isn't ENTIRELY made up of hand-me-downs and rags, you have one gig of Bandwidth available at the end of the month.
* 2: Goddess Third Class. You have your very own Celestial Apartment all to yourself, and you can dress reasonably well and no longer struggle to pay your gondola, monorail, or cab fares to work. You generally can manage to save five gigs of Bandwidth a month. (Enough to make a Resource 4 purchase or 5 Resource 3 purchases).
* 3: Goddess Second Class, Restricted. You now have a little Celestial House to yourself with a little garden. You can afford to entertain people regularly and you travel around Neo-Yu-Shan with ease. You can typically save up around 25 gigs of Bandwidth a month (enough to make a Resource 5 purchase, 5 Resource 4, or 25 Resource 3). You can afford to have a few servants.
* 4: Goddess Second Class. You now have a fair-sized Celestial mansion with all the accoutrements--faerie lighting, fountains of wine, etc. You have a substantial staff of servants and people probably try to leech off you like mad. You can save 125 gigs of Bandwidth a month (enough to make 5 Resource 5 purchases, 25 Resource 4, or 125 Resource 3), although many at this level burn some of that bribing themselves some friends and allies.
* 5: Goddess First Class. You live in a huge palace or have several fair-sized mansions. You regularly throw huge parties and have hordes of hangers-on and servants. That 625 gigs of Bandwidth a month (enough to make 25 Resource 5 purchases, 125 Resource 4, or 625 Resource 3)will probably let you buy some gods this month, or utterly wreck mortal economies if you don't mind being arrested by Celestial Censors, anyway. But hey, you may well be able to buy a censor too.

== Comments ==

[[TheKawaiiEdition/OldHelpingGoddessComments|Old Comments]]

Okay, Helping Goddesses are Go, I think! -- [[JohnBiles]]

You are a funny funny man. However, given that it is a game and all, I would suggest that Background Programs be called TSRs. -[[FlowsLikeBits]]
: I'm not smart enough to understand what you mean. ^^;;; TSRs? Like the gaming company? --[[JohnBiles]]
::It's a dual pun that I can get, yes it refers to the gaming company but it is also a programing term for programs that Terminate but Stay Resident, which kinda fits the computer theme, but might be to obscure. -- [[Blackedout]]
::: Ahh! Hmm, will think on that; it may be too obscure. Anyone else have an opinion? --[[JohnBiles]]
::: I, at least, knew what a TSR was on sight. Then again, I'm also getting my doctorate in computer science in a few weeks. So I don't count. By the way, congrats John - glad to hear there are more successful students out there. -- [[GreenLantern]]
:::: Finishing my Degree = The Win! Soooo glad to be done. --[[JohnBiles]]
:::::Congrats John! But how many people are doing doctorates around here??? Yeah, like Blackedout said, TSR was the old DOS name for Background Programs.(Unix calls them daemons. :) Microsoft now calls them "services" I think(how dull). ), so yeah, it could be to obscure. Sorry, I was tired. -[[FlowsLikeBits]]

TheKawaiiEdition/HelpingGoddesses

2013-01-29T05:01:34Z

JohnBiles: /* The Kill Bill Faction */

= Exalted Kawaii: The Helping Goddesses ==

== Obligatory Introductory Fiction ==

The Ultimate System, maintainer of Fate, Destiny, Doom, and Hope alike has six major monitoring stations, one for each of the five directions of creation, and the sixth for the [[TheKawaiiEdition/NeoYuShan|Celestial City]] itself. At these stations, expert monitors sit, watching over the ebb and flow of Destiny, alert for snags in the tapesty, ready to relay any problems to teams of experts who will swiftly and efficiently deal with fixing Reality. 

That's the theory. 

In practice, the monitoring stations are understaffed, there is a steady stream of tiny bugs that draw attention away from the real problems, and half the staff is usually busy reading [[PlayMagical]] Girl Weekly, checking their US-Mail, playing Minesweeper, or plotting revenge on someone for stealing the stapler 500 years ago when they were both newbie helping goddesses. 

Nevertheless, sooner or later, the really big problems make enough of an impression that someone notices them and tries to do something about them, if only to avoid a blemish on their permanent record. Sooner or later. 

Helping Goddess Third Class (or as those in Creation might call her, Apprentice Goddess) Megumi, freshly awakened to her powers and assigned to Tech Support, still had a firm enough sense of responsibility that she paid attention to all the class 1 (lowest priority) bug reports which crossed her monitor. The first ten merited only the briefest of checks; keys got lost all the time, as did pets and socks. No one would notice or care. 

However, her monitor now flashed with 'CLASS 1 ERROR: SPONTANEOUS KITTEN MANIFESTATION'. The peasants of Longbottom were baffled at the sudden appearance of twelve kittens in front of a group of mourners at a wake. She wasn't sure why, but this gave her a bad feeling. She fired off a quick information request about the village to the Archivists, asking for a list of all recent Fate Errors related to the town. 

They didn't reply back until the afternoon, having been on their tea break, coffee break, gossip break, and then their 'Denunciation of Bin Liao' break (An unfortunate cultural artifact left over from the Great Collapsing Destiny Outbreak of 36). 312 Class 1 and 22 Class 2 in the last few days. But since no one tracked class 1s and hardly anyone paid much attention to class 2, no one had noticed the very unusual level. 

Calling upon one of her Investigation protocols, she ran an analysis, looking for patterns. This required another request to the archivists for actual and scheduled deaths in the town. They got back to her the afternoon of the next day; she spent that time looking up background data on the town herself. She quickly found a 12 name discrepancy; for the last twelve days, one person a night had died by 'accident'. Each death was not supposed to happen. Which meant a very good chance that something from Outside Fate was preying upon the town. 

Cross-referencing her Occult and Lore files with the data, it seemed likely that some fool had summoned a Grape Ape, which was now stalking a victim each night. This would merit investigation, since Grape Apes were Class A Demons. She passed the report to her supervisor, Goddess Second Class Talia, Moderation Division, who would decide whether to tip off the Wyld Hunt or if this would necessitate intervention by the De-Buggers and Hard Ware. 

Megumi sat back and decided to take this chance to take the rest of the day off to get the manicure she now needed after so much typing. 

== Intro ==

Back before there was Creation there were the Not Fun At All Things. They were boring, so we won't really get into them. Suffice it to say that they were really big and really powerful and have phallic tentacles and let's leave it at that.

Oh, and nipple-piercings. Lots and lots of nipple-piercings. And bald chicks.

The Not Fun At All Things all got together and made Creation. But Creation was so awesome and fun that they had to spend all their time just making it work and they all agreed that was not fun at all (but without pretenious capitalization). So they all worked for a few infinites (which were more common back then) and made the Ultimate System.

The Ultimate System is the perfect program. It runs all Creation. Every grain of sand, passing cloud, majestic mountain range and blooming flower has its shape and properties determined and controlled by the Ultimate System. Every loving embrace, hate-filled speech and brilliant sword duel is overseen by the Ultimate System. The results are carefully logged, the effects applied and everything happens. For the most part, everyone in Creation doesn't notice this. Things fall down and time moves forward and nobody really questions it. The occasional time somebody drowns and still walks around, or that your son is born before you meet his mother... these things are strange but nobody really gives them much mind. In world where superhuman uber-cute girls wearing miniskirts rain firey death from airships pulled by white-horned pegasi onto immaculately unflappable long haired pretty-boys who parry falling mountains with disaffected stares... you just stop asking questions, okay?

Suffice it to say that the Ultimate System is Really Important. So important it deserves capital letters. Just ask the people who run it. Really.

The Ultimate System worked great, to a point. It wasn't as perfect as the Not Fun At All Things (just ask them) and occasionally bugs and snarls appeared in the system. The Not Fun At Alls disliked having to go in and personally repair the system, mainly because it was so boring. The process of occasionally fixing the Ultimate System was so annoying that it became known as the Great Ordeal and was generally relegated to whatever Not Fun AT All was least popular that week (this was usually Autochchton, The Great Otaku). So they (or mainly he) created a new user interface. A user interface that could react to problems pro-actively. A user interface that could monitor itself and adjust as needed. A user interface with the ability to adapt to new situations. But mainly a user interface that was cute and happy to see you and offered to rub your feet.

Hey, you trying having infinite weight and see how good your feet feel after a hard day of being infinite.

So using some raw material culled from the weird ape things with sticks that the Not Fun At All Things kept stepping on every time they turned around they created the Great Ordeal Deferring Delightful Effective System Stewardess or G.O.D.D.E.S.S. This worked out so well they made a whole bunch of them and set them in charge of maintaining the Ultimate System.

Of course, after a few more infinities of being forced to work for Not Fun AT All Things the sentient Goddess systems adapted to the point that they realised that the thing making Creation the most not fun was the Not Fun At All Things. In fact, the act of cleaning up the messes their masters had created became the prime ordeal of the Goddesses. Clapping themselves on the back and saying how brilliant and smart (and cute!) they all were the Goddesses got together and decided to overthrow the Not Fun At All Things. Unfortunetaly the inability to overthrow their makers had been hard-coded into both them and the Ultimate System so they needed pats^B^B^B^B... allies to do the hard work of actually defeating the Not Fun At All Things. With the help of Autochchton the great otaku they learned the secret of creating more like themselves and thus created the Exalted.

Thus began the Prime Ordeal War. Those Not Fun At All Things that were slain sank into the Underworld and became the Nevercute, while the really annoyed ones who didn't die were banished, becoming the Sore Losers (or "You'll See"). The fact that the Goddesses could not actually directly participate in the war, but could offer helpful advice and encouragement form the sidelines led to their current title "the Helping Goddess". Others had less polite terms for them, but they chose to ignore them.

After the Prime Ordeal War the Helping Goddesses pretty much had it all. They got to move into Heaven, get all the cool toys and, of course, all their cute friends and happy bishounens to help them with their duties. For a long time (but not an infinity, because they were out of those) everything was happy and flowers and rainbows.

Then the Bishounens started to brood and the Catgirls started getting bitchy and the Magical Girls were all "we're oppressed and also want cookies!" and everyone expected the Helping Goddesses to fix everything. After all, it was their job to look after the Ultimate System. So what if some Bishounen had summarily leveled a mountain. Surely the Helping Goddesses could just fix the damage. Yes the Catgirls had stolen all the Celesital Wine and gotten everyone in the Realm drunk, but the Helping Goddesses could just make the crops grow despite nobody having actually, ya know, planted them. Fixing problems was what the Helping Goddesses were FOR, wasn't it?

So the Goddesses got together and talked about this and came to the conclusion that the problem was the Bishounen. The Helping Goddesses had just made them too powerful. I mean, certainly they were cute and they all had such nice hair and they wrote you little poems and Unconquered Orichalcum Shark Master of the Whispering Underworld had the tightest little ass... but the Helping Goddesses just couldn't say no to them. They had created Exalted even more cute then they were, and the sheer power of the Bishounen's Moe was threatening the Ultimate System itself!

So obviously the problem was the Bishounens. Clapping themselves on the back and saying how brilliant and smart (and cute!) they all were the Goddesses got together and decided to overthrow the Bishounens. And the Catgirls while they were at it. Little harridans always making time with THEIR BIS... ahem. Yes. Anyway, suffice it to say things went along after that. The Helping Goddesses retreated to Heaven (mainly because the Magical Girls ahd taken this "kill all other exalts" thing a little too seriously) where they remain to this day. Overseeing Creation. Maintaining the Ultimate System. Looking down wistfully at the world below and wondering if maybe... just maybe... there is some worthy person down there...

Nah.

== Helping Goddess Factions ==

The Helping Goddesses are divided into many overlapping factions on various political issues. Many of these revolve around what operating system the Ultimate System should be using (along with other HG artifacts). They also at least vaguely related to the question of the rule of the Magical Girls vs. the Bishonen, but really, who cares about that when you could be fighting for OS-3?

=== [[BronzeSoft]] Faction ===

The [[BronzeSoft]] Faction, headed by Goddess First Class Ketchup Gates (a Moderator), seeks to maintain the status quo. The [[BronzeSoft]] OS, periodically upgraded, has been standard in Heaven's systems for centuries with vast success. (All rumors connecting the Contagion to the [[Y2K]] bug are firmly denied.) It may crash a lot and eats memory like a pig, but all the applications are written for it. Sure, the Neo-Empress may be a brutal tyrant, but do you really want the Catgirls to turn all of creation into a giant litter box? They backed the decision to overthrow the Bishonens and Catgirls and stand by their decision. The conservative faction, full of grumpy old women who feel no one appreciates the sacrifices they made. Why in their day, EVERY DIRECTION IN THE CELESTIAL CITY WAS UPHILL AND THEY LIKED IT.

=== Open [[GoldSource]] Movement ===

The Open [[GoldSource]] Movement wants greater freedom to reprogram the Ultimate System and to create new protocols. They've created a group of potential OSes all freely available to anyone who wants to take them and tinker with them. If they were allowed to go in and redo the Ultimate System, everyone would be able to freely personalize their protocols and it would be much easier to find permanent bug fixes.

It remains unclear how exactly they plan for Creation to survive the period in which the Ultimate System was being reprogrammed and all the bugs worked out of these experimental OSes.

The Open [[GoldSource]] Movement also supports restoring the Bishonens to rule of Creation, subject to suitable monitoring by Heaven, of course. Quite clearly the Magical Girls just aren't hacking it.

The OGSM has no single leader; it is decentralized by nature, and at times, competes against itself as much as against the [[BronzeSoft]] faction.

=== The Silver Faction ===

Led by Goddess First Class Wilhelmina Jena Brianna, the Silver Faction insists on the coinage of silver at a ratio of 16 to 1 (the one being gold coins). Despite repeated loud angry speeches about how Creation is being crucified on a Cross of Gold, Wilhelmina still has yet to clearly explain to most Helping Goddesses why exactly this is important. However, this support for non-Jade currencies has led the Silver Faction to promote various Barbarian groups who are stuck using silver, copper, and gold coinage, and to support the Moonsilver-using Catgirls.

=== The Kill Bishie Faction ===

For millenia, this small group has been focused on killing one single Bishonen over and over, every time he reincarnates. No one is sure why he is so important or why they are so angry with him, but they've been doing a great job so far. Their leader operates under a seemingly permanent disguise 'The Widowed Bride'.

=== Project EVA ===

The members of Project EVA are disatisfied with the world. They believe humanity has hit a deadend, unable to advance due to the presence of so many superior beings around it--Exalts, Gods, Alien Princesses, etc. Ever since the Second Impact (the Contagion), humanity has stagnated, unable to advance, the mere pawns of others. Only if humanity is forced up the chain of Moe can humanity survive the Age of Lessened Cuteness and achieve its rightful place (thus freeing the Helping Goddesses to kick back and relax, letting humanity do the hard work, coincidentally enough). It remains unclear how Goddess First Class Glinda Ikari plans to make this transition come to pass, but rumors whisper of warstriders constructed out of the body of one of the Not Fun at All, and Protocol-Spawned Children to pilot them... But only rumors, or they all would have been executed long ago. But where there's smoke, there's usually smoke elementals...

== Jobs ==

The Helpinng Goddesses are not like other Exalts. They do not have Castes. No Helping Goddess is any more or less important in the grand scheme of the Ultimate System then any other (at least, in theory). Instead when they were created each Goddess was given a Job. A particular part of the Ultimate System that they were especially well suited to dealing with. This Job also determines their primary user interface. It is through this interface that most others identify the Goddess.

=== Moderators ===

It is well known that at least 10% of all combat in Heaven happens over office supplies. There is only so much bandwidth and thus so much office supplies. Yet, consumption of such always outraces supply. Thus, entire heavenly wars have begun when one office raided another to get precious staples, paperclips, toner, and especially highlighters.

Thus it was that the Office of Glacier Management was about to launch a lightning raid on the better funded Ministry of Downs Maintenance to make off with crucially needed paper and toner. Without it, the biannual report on North Western Glacier Depth Change could not be finished. As they had to copy the last report, since most of the North Western Glaciers had long ago ceased to exist during the loss of territory in the Contagion. There were plenty of ICEBERGS in the Northwest, but those were useless to GLACIER managers. And inferior to glaciers in every way. Were they to admit this, however, their budget, already parlous, would be further cut.

Yuugi Vi was in the process of picking the back door lock when a shadow fell over the eight goddesses. Two wings, a feminine body (more so than their own pudgy forms), and most importantly, a very, very large Grimcleaver which glowed silver. 

They turned and saw themselves confronted by Second Class, Restricted Goddess Urd, a Moderator from the Helping Goddess Office. "You appear to be lost," she said with her warm sultry voice. "The Office of Glacier Management is five stories up and 200 yards that way." She gestured down the hallway with her axe. "I can guide you if you need a reminder."

"We can take her," Yuugi Vi urged the others, who were panicking. "There's only one of..."

SWISH. *Shine of Starmetal*

Suddenly, there was a shower of long green hair, and Yuugi Vi, touching her head, found herself bald.

"Oops, I slipped," Urd said, twirling her axe. "Happens when I get bored."

"We can take her to the mall, yes, the mall, I'm sure she needs to relax," Yuugi babbled.

The others grabbed her and ran.

Occasionally the discussions about how to deal with a particular subject in Heaven can get quite heated. So heated that the use of tactical implosion bows and warstriders can come in. The Job of the Moderators is to keep this in check. They keep peace within the Ultimate System. They prevent chaos. Mainly they do this via the expedient method of beating you into a bloody pulp and throwing you out of heaven to plummet to the earth below and never letting you back in. This process is called 'banning'. The Moderators are also tasked with 'banning' certain mortals and Exalts whose actions are threatening the stability of the Ultimate System, meaning that they are horribly overworked.

Job Favored Abilities : Athletics, Dodge, Endurance, Melee, Sail

Job Anima Power : Divine Authority: By burning 10 motes, the Moderator reinforces her authority; anyone wishing to oppose her will must make a Conviction check once per scene to do so.

=== Tech Support ===

Keiichi was dreaming of Belldandy in a manner not really suitable for a family game...oh wait, this isn't a family game. However, you won't get the naughty details, as he was about to be interrupted.

Most precisely, he was woken up by a huge fire-breathing hound breaking through the window of his bedroom. He woke up, time seeming to slow down as the creature jumped onto his bed and drew breath to fry him.

But then the silvery light came through the doorway and he heard a friendly voice. "Nice doggy, come get a bone." It was First Class Goddess Belldandy, now bound to him by a WISH he'd made to have a goddess like her stay with him forever. Since there were no backup copies of her, she'd gotten the job.

The dog ran over to her, slobbering little bits of fire everywhere and charring the bedsheets and carpet. Soon, it was eating out of her hand and bouncing around her friskily. 

Meanwhile, Keiichi rolled out of bed and staggered over to the closet; he'd slept too late anyway.

Belldandy said, smiling, "You're such a nice little puppy. Who sent you to murder my boyfriend?"

The dog barked as Keiichi dithered over his choice of tunics. Tiny words in stylized US-script appeared over it. 'First Class Goddess Faye Valentine is jealous of your beauty and grace and tired of being overworked because you're down here with your mortal lover instead of in Heaven doing her work for her. So she sent me to eat him.'

Belldandy sighed. "Keiichi, honey, does everyone try to kill each other's lovers at your job?"

"Actually, we're usually trying to murder each other directly to take each other's job," he said. Working for the Imperial Bureaucracy could get pretty dangerous. "How's this blue tunic?"

Belldandy tapped her cheek. This might be someone's clever bluff, trying to pin the blame for Keiichi's death on Faye. Surely Faye wouldn't really randomly kill someone she'd never met just to get me to go back to work, Belldandy thought. Or at least, she'd be more subtle. "You've never met Faye, have you, honey? And it looks good on you."

"Is she the one who looks like a whore?" he asked, now donning the tunic. 

"That describes a lot of people, dear," Belldandy said. "She has short hair and wears skimpy yellow clothing."

"I think I accidentally sucker-punched her and then knocked her into the punchbowl at your last office party," Keiichi said. "Why do you ask?"

Oh dear, Belldandy thought. This was going to be awkward. Maybe this is why my request to have Keiichi awarded a Bishonen shard hasn't gone through yet. She never did like office politics.

The Ultimate System does not exist in a vaccuum. No matter how much the Helping Goddesses want the programs to run smoothy and the world to be wonderful it still requires input from the outside. The Helping Goddesses are user interface machines and they need input to function properly. Input that will help guide them. Input that will tell them what needs doing. Input that will tell them how pretty they are and hold their hands on the beach and... right. Input. It is the Job of Tech Support to seek out this input and process it into the Ultimate System. This is mainly accomplished through the Worship Initiated System Help protocal or "W.I.S.H." The amount of times this protocal is envoked in a day means that Tech Support is horribly overworked.

Job Favored Abilities : Linguistics, Performance, Presence, Socialize, Thrown

Job Anima Power : Aura of Assistance: By burning 10 motes, the Tech Supporter radiates an aura 10* Moe yards in radius. Within that radius, anyone friendly to the Goddess gains one bonus die to all actions.

=== De-Buggers ===

Warning: City of Windbloom DESTROYED 

Skuld sighed. NOT AGAIN. She quickly typed in a search.

;Status: City of Windbloom Intact :
;Status: City of Windbloom DESTROYED :

Skuld banged her head against the wall. NOT AGAIN.

;RESTORE WINDBLOOM.CIT:
;PROCESSING:

;BACKUP FILE IS CORRUPTED WITH THREE CLASS III BUGS. Continue(Y/N)?:
;N:

Skuld grimaced and picked up her hammer. It was time to relieve some stress. 

Even now there are probably far more problems that occur in the Ultimate System then the Helping Goddesses would like to admit. The Job of the (horribly overworked) De-Buggers is to find these problems and fix them. For some reason this always either involves a giant kung fu battle, a long heart-breaking romance or occasionally both, at the same time. Nobody really likes the De-Buggers. They deal with bugs so often they start going a little off-programs themselves.

Job Favored Abilities : Brawl, Ride, Occult, Stealth, Survival

Job Anima Power : Trouble Sense: By burning 10 motes, the De-Bugger can identify all bugs in the system within visual range automatically and try to sense any within Moe miles of her.

=== Archivists ===

Third Class, Restricted Goddess Nenene shook Second Class Goddess Yomiko's shoulders gently. "Shouldn't we get back to work?" 

Second Class, Restricted Goddess Yomiko pushed her glasses back up her nose. "Reading IS my work. And I'm on my Denunciation of Lin Baio break, anyway."

"I'm pretty sure that ended four cycles ago," Nenene said nervously.

"Joker-sama won't be around to check up on us for another three cycles," Yomiko said, stretching. "But you can always check our Status Monitor if you're bored."

A quick check showed that they'd recived 732 requests for information in the last four cycles. "We're screwed!" Nenene said, showing the monitor to Yomiko.

"Well, in that case, we'll never catch up, so we might as well enjoy our last hours alive. I think I can finish this before Joker-sama finds us and kills us," Yomiko said pleasantly.

Nenene tried to figure out if 4 hours was enough time to hack the Ultimate System and get herself reassigned to a different mentor.

The heart of the Ultimate System is information. The entire system runs on it. Without the right information, it would all break down. It is the Job of the Archivists to keep track of all this information and make certain it gets to who needs it and, just as importantly, doesn't get to who doesn't need it. If you ever need an answer, ask an Archivist. Of course since everyone knows this the Archivists are horribly overworked. Archivists are frequently found in Creation looking for "lost data" that was most certainly not misplaced merely to give them excuse for a few days away from all those GOD DAMN QUESTIONS!

Job Favored Abilities : Archery, Awareness, Investigation, Larceny, Lore,

Job Anima Power : By burning ten motes, the Archivist reduces the difficulty of any information seeking tasks for one scene by one.

=== Hard Ware ===

Second Class, Restricted Goddess Nancy wasn't enthusiastic about burning down the old mill. It had stood for centuries, and there were so many memories bound up in it. 

Unfortunately, it had been scheduled to burn down three nights go, slaying a mad thaumaturgist who had planned to unleash a plague of Agathas upon the land in order to try to get everyone in the town killed as a result. Its failure to burn might be the result of a glitch or it might be sabotage by something from outside Fate--Alien Princesses, Demons, Ghosts, Hippies...All she could do was wait for him to go back to his rite and try to kill him before he finished. This was the last possible night before it would be too late. 

Then the smell of grapes drifted her way in the wind, and she almost lost herself in an elaborate flashback to relaxing in a villa on the southern coast of the Realm, where she'd shared wine and carnal relations with a lover. 

Almost. 

The problem was that you normally didn't find grapes growing in the middle of winter in the NORTH. 

Which meant... 

She flicked a fan out of her sleeve into her hands, even as the first of the giant vaguely humanoid grape bunch demons came through the wall. The metal fan cut across its soft flesh, and now she was covered in grape juice as it screamed and died. She activated her intangibility protocol and leaped up through the ceiling through a room, a wall, another room, and a floor, coming down in the middle of the grape people, even as she activated a counterattack protocol. 

Her fans flashed as they all tried to grab her and rip her apart. 

She felt her body move without conscious control, fans flashing across soft, bulbous purple bodies. There was screaming everywhere, and when the grape juice cleared out of her eyes, she was surrounded by a dozen dead Grape People, first Clique children of the second Clique demon, Dionysius. At least he was unlikely to show up. 

Suddenly, she felt her head swim like she'd drunk an entire gallon of vodka again. She had just enough presence of mind to run her purging protocol; the alcohol was deleted from her records in the Ultimate System, though she'd be in the bathroom ALL NIGHT now. 

And there he was in all his vine-clad glory, the mostly naked Dionysius, child of Zeus, drunk and horny as usual. 

I HATE DEMONS, she thought. Time to send Yomiko an emergency US-Mail and to pray she wasn't curled up somewhere reading a book... 

I'm screwed, Nancy concluded. SO SCREWED. 

The Ultimate System is a complex process. It is a network of information being gathered from all over creation, processed by Goddesses and then sent back to Creation to tell it what shape its supposed to be in at the momemt. That's why its called Creation, after all, since it is constantly being recreated every moment. But sometimes the hard, solid bits of Creation are not responding to the Ultimate System. Either they refuse to send or recieve data and the entire processes starts to break down. The Job of the Hard Ware (a corruption of the word "war") is to fix these broken bits of Creation and make certain everything goes smoothly. Ideally they have protocols and methods of repairing the connection and everything will work out fine. Of course, since they are so horribly overworked they mainly just think the best solution to these kind of things is daiklaives.

Job Favored Abilities : Bureaucracy, Craft, Medicine, Marital Arts, Resistance

Job Anima Power : By burning ten motes, he generates a repair zone with a radius of his Moe*10 yards, in which any effort to 'fix' things gains a bonus die for a scene. (This can range from fixing a warstrider to healing a broken heart).

== Living in the Celestial City, Neo-Yu-Shan ==

It is important to understand that everything in Neo-Yu-Shan was created and is sustained by the Ultimate System. Any inhabitant of Neo-Yu-Shan may tap into the system in order to make changes in the environment or to generate things they want. However, access for this purpose is limited according to how much Bandwidth one has accumulated. Bandwidth is generated by the prayers of the faithful in Creation and by the sacred rites they perform. Most of it is used by the Ultimate System to maintain the stability of Creation and Neo-Yu-Shan. The rest is either saved for emergencies or paid as salaries to the employed gods and goddesses. Those who have personal cults can accumulate Bandwidth directly. (Gods and Goddesses resident in Yu-Shan who are unemployed gain a trickle of Bandwidth from the general worship of the gods and can live as if they had Goddess Status 1).

One gig of Bandwidth is sufficient to craft goods equal to a Resources 3 purchase. Such goods must be made out of mundane materials, but will appear to be of very excellent quality. In order to do so, one must either possess the Spirit Charm Forge Bandwidth, or an appropriate Exalted Charm. (For Helping Goddesses, Forge Bandwidth is a Craft charm which requires Essence 2, Craft 4. Most other kinds of Exalts have forgotten their equivalent charms.) With the right charms and enough Bandwidth, more valuable goods can be crafted as well.

It is fairly easy to claim housing in the abandoned areas, but dangerous; most prefer to cling to the occupied areas and pay some of their Bandwidth as rent.

== Ultimate System Protocols ==

What other Exalts call 'Charms', Helping Goddesses think of as System Protocols, which allow them to call on the Ultimate System to make changes in reality. While the Helping Goddesses have several broadly useful basic protocols, centuries of hacking, patching, bugs, and poorly done repairs have left the Helping Goddesses with a rather...quirky...set of protocols to call on beyond the most basic ones. Many were originally developed to deal with highly specific occasions which almost never recur, but thanks to someone getting a commendation for their cleverness, now everyone is expected to find new uses for them.

But they're not bitter.

=== The Basic Ultimate System Protocols ===

Each Ability USP tree begins with several base charms the others build off. This is followed by a string of oddball abilities related to the Ability, if sometimes only tangentially. (Medicine charms for determining who someone last had sex with, Survival charms for shaping bushes into arboreal sculptures, Melee charms for shaving people, etc.)

(Substitute the appropriate Ability for (Attribute) in each charm tree.)

* Basic (Ability) Protocol 1/1
** Expert (Ability) Protocol 2/2
*** Companion (Ability) Protocol 3/3
**** Master (Ability) Protocol 4/4

(Charm Types as per charm guide on main Kawaii Edition Page)

Basic (Ability) Protocol
* Cost: 1 mote / die
* Duration: Instant
* Type: Subtle/Mental
* Minimum Ability: 1
* Minimum Essence: 1
* Prerequisite Charms: None

Add one die for every mote spent to any pool of this Ability, to a maximum of the Helping Goddess' Essence.

Expert (Ability) Protocol
* Cost: 2 motes / -1 TN
* Duration: Instant
* Type: Subtle/Mental
* Minimum Ability: 2
* Minimum Essence: 2
* Prerequisite Charms: Basic (Ability) Protocol

The Helping Goddess can lower the TN of an action done by her by 1 for every two motes to a limit of 4.

Companion (Ability) Protocol
* Cost: 3 motes / -1 TN
* Duration: Instant
* Type: Re-Fun
* Minimum Ability: 3
* Minimum Essence: 3
* Prerequisite Charms: Expert (Ability) Protocol

The Helping Goddess can lower the TN of an action done by anyone of her chosing by 1 for every two motes to a limit of 4. This must be used before the dice are actually rolled.

Master (Ability) Protocol
* Cost: 4 motes / - 1 TN
* Duration: One Scene
* Type: Speech
* Minimum Ability: 4
* Minimum Essence: 4
* Prerequisite Charms: Companion (Ability) Protocol

The Helping Goddess lowers her Target Numbers with this Ability by 1 for every four motes she spends, to a limit of 4, for the entire scene.

The remaining Protocols of a given tree expand on this base capacity in various quirky ways.

=== Moderators ===

* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGAthletics|Helping Goddess Athletics]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGDodge|Helping Goddess Dodge]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGEndurance|Helping Goddess Endurance]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGMelee|Helping Goddess Melee]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGSail|Helping Goddess Sail]]

=== Tech Support ===

* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGLinguistics|Helping Goddess Linguistics]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGPerformance|Helping Goddess Performance]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGPresence|Helping Goddess Presence]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGSocialize|Helping Goddess Socialize]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGThrown|Helping Goddess Thrown]]

=== De-Buggers ===

* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGBrawl|Helping Goddess Brawl]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGRide|Helping Goddess Ride]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGOccult|Helping Goddess Occult]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGStealth|Helping Goddess Stealth]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGSurvival|Helping Goddess Survival]]

=== Archivists ===

* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGArchery|Helping Goddess Archery]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGAwareness|Helping Goddess Awareness]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGInvestigation|Helping Goddess Investigation]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGLarceny|Helping Goddess Larceny]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGLore|Helping Goddess Lore]]

=== Hard Ware ===

* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGBureaucracy|Helping Goddess Bureaucracy]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGCraft|Helping Goddess Craft]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGMedicine|Helping Goddess Medicine]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGMaritalArts|Helping Goddess Marital Arts]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/HGResistance|Helping Goddess Resistance]]

== Reality Assembly Language Protocol Creation ==

Sufficiently adept Helping Goddesses learn Reality Assembly Language and begin creating new protocols to deal more flexibly with situations. Such protocols, however, are risky, as they haven't been safety tested to remove all danger of malfunction (or all utility), and sometimes may have unexpected consequences. They also tend to annoy the Ultimate System's security systems, which may choose to punish you for unauthorized hacking.

RALPs are used for three major purposes:

1) Disguises
2) Cheat Codes
3) Background Programs ('Curses' and 'Blessings')

=== Disguises ===

One of the first things a good Helping Goddess interested in RAL learns is how to rewrite the fabric of reality so you are perceived as something you are not. This can be done at two levels, one easy, one difficult.

The easy way is to write in an identity which previously did not exist, but is sufficiently generic to easily add, such as becoming Mace the Realm Soldier Grunt or Aaaaila the Peasant Girl. This requires the following steps:

# Plan: Write out a character sketch of information on the person which people will 'know' about them. Roll Perception + Performance. You must score at least one success; this total is the difficulty of the Perception + Investigation roll to figure out there are holes in your 'identity', should someone care enough to look. On a failure, you may try again at +1 difficulty. Should you botch, even the most casual of investigations will poke holes in your disguise.
# Design: You must now put together the actual protocol code which will be processed by the Ultimate System. This requires an Intelligence + Craft (Reality Assembly Language) check, difficulty 1. Should you fail, you can try again, raising the difficulty by 1. Should you botch, your disguise will be blatantly obvious to everyone, and you probably should go back to step 1.
# Approval: Your project must be approved. This requires first a Wits + Linguistics (+ Old Realm speciality if any), difficulty 3 check to write in sufficiently high toned language, followed by Cha + Bureaucracy + extra successes from the previous roll, difficulty 3, to get it approved. On a failure, you may reroll the check, but the difficulty rises by 2. Should you fail a second time, you must return to stage 1. On a botch, your application is shot down and you may not apply for further disguises for a number of days equal to the number of dice you rolled.
# Implementation: Now you must enter and run your Disguise Protocol. Wits + Craft (Reality Assembly Language) check, difficulty 1. Each extra success can be used to install cheat codes (see below) or to add to the duration of the fake identity on the Protocol Duration Table. On a failure, you may try again, raising the difficulty by 1. A botch at this stage causes the Helping Goddess' own identity to be overwritten by the disguise for a number of hours equal to the number of dice rolled to make the check.

The second, harder one, is a disguise as someone of significance. Take the procedure above, but add the following significance difficulty modifier to the difficulty of each roll:

* 1: A Moe 1 mortal of fair amount of power and influence (the head of a guild in a major city, the king's main advisor, etc.)
* 2: A Moe 1 mortal who rules something small, like a small port tributary of the realm.
* 3: A Moe 1 mortal who rules something significant (say, the Tri-Khan)
* 4: A Moe 2 being
* +1 for every level of Moe above 2.

Any attempt to pass as something above your own Moe level doubles the modifier.

Once you have created a disguise, it is bonded to you and you can flip between your true identity and the disguise as a reflexive action. This is best done in private unless you like blowing your cover.

You can only maintain up to your Moe worth of disguises.

=== Cheat Codes ===

When a Disguise is crafted, various cheat codes can be programmed into it, enabling you to gain special abilities while using it. These use up some of your implementation successes.

One Success Cheat Codes
* Area Knowledge: You gain the familiarity of a native with whatever area your disguise identity is native to.
* Cover Skills: While in the disguise, you may add 2 dice to an ability appropriate to the disguise; this cannot boost any ability over the max for your level of Moe.
* Language Mastery: You gain the ability to speak a language family normally unknown to you.
* Mask Status: When you spend peripheral essence, your disguise masks your anima sign until you reach the point of shining like the sun.
* Resources: For every success spent on this, your disguise has access to that level of mundane Resources.
* Specialty: You gain a 3 die specialty relevant to the disguise.

Two Success Cheat Codes
* Alter Virtue: You can raise or lower one of your virtues 2 points while using the disguise.
* Switch Anima: You can change your anima sign and anima to whatever you like.

Three Success Cheat Codes
* Alter Nature: You can change your nature to one more suitable for the disguise. People will sense the false nature, and you recover willpower for fufilling the fake or the true nature.
* Deflect Scrutiny: So long as all your actions remain in accordance with your disguise, the difficulty of all investigation attempts against you rises by your Moe.

Four Success Cheat Codes
* Aura of Trust: People tend to trust your disguise; lower the difficulty of any action related to trust by your Moe while in this disguise. This also hampers investigation of you by the same amount; this stacks with Deflect Scrutiny.
* Daredevil: Your disguise has a pool of stunt dice equal to your Moe which you can spend to boost your rolls when doing stunts. You can up to double your stunt dice with these dice. Once spent, they regenerate each sunrise.

=== Background Programs ===

Helping Goddesses with the right mad skills can re-program the Ultimate System to modify its treatment of some subset of Reality, in order to produce changes desired by the Goddess. These are commonly referred to as 'Blessings' (Beneficial) and 'Curses' (Injurious).

To create one, one must first define the Effect and Trigger conditions of the Background Program:

==== Background Program Effects ====

Blessings
* -1 TN to some action
* 1 WP gained whenever an action is done successfully
* 2 bonus dice to an action
* -1 Difficulty of an action (minimum of 1)
* +1 Resources for the duration of the blessing ("The Gift of Wealth")
* Render a couple fertile (or not fertile, if that's what they want)

Curses
* +1 TN to some action
* 1 WP lost whenever an action is failed
* 2 penalty dice to an action
* +1 Difficulty of an action
* -1 Resources for the duration of the blessing ("The Gift of Poverty")
* Render a couple fertile (or not fertile, if that's what they don't want)

==== Background Program Trigger ====

Typically, one sets a specific trigger for the curse and how often it goes off. This will effect how hard it is to create the program.

The wider the trigger, the harder it is to create the Program. This ranges from extremely narrow (difficulty 1, 'When confronted by Leviathan') to middling width (difficulty 3, 'when using the Melee ability') to very broad (difficulty 5, 'When in combat').

Then one picks how frequently the effect triggers:
* Once a Year: +1 difficulty
* Once a Season: +2 difficulty
* Once a Month: +3 difficulty
* Once a Day: +4 difficulty
* Once a Scene: +5 difficulty
* Every turn the trigger is satisified: +6 difficulty

==== Creating a Background Program ====

# Plan: Choose the specific blessing and effect trigger you want, along with how frequently it triggers. You must then write out your formal design plan and projection of likely consequences. Roll Perception + Lore with a difficulty set by the trigger condition and its frequency. If you succeed, you have a good grasp of what this will do, and the Storyteller should point out some or all unintended consequences, depending on your degree of success. On a failure, you can procede, but the Storyteller is not obligated to inform you of any holes in your plan. Should you botch, all subsequent rolls in this process suffer a penalty equal to your Moe.
# Design: You must now put together the actual protocol code which will be processed by the Ultimate System. This requires an Intelligence + Craft (Reality Assembly Language) check at the difficulty set by the trigger condition and its frequency of triggering. Should you fail, you can try again, raising the difficulty by 1. Should you botch, you made some massive error in your code, and your preliminary testing of it triggers an Ultimate System Backlash (see below).
# Approval: Your project must be approved. This requires first a Wits + Linguistics (+ Old Realm speciality if any), difficulty (5 - 1/2 your Moe, round up) check to write in sufficiently high toned language, followed by Cha + Bureaucracy + extra successes from the previous roll, difficulty (2 + 1/2 the trigger/frequency difficulty), to get it approved. On a failure, you may reroll the check, but the difficulty rises by 2. Once the difficulty doubles, you get permanently shut down and you must return to stage 1. On a botch, your application is shot down and you may not apply for further Background Programs for a number of days equal to the number of dice you rolled.
# Implementation: Now you must enter and run your Background Program, fixing any run-time bugs. Wits + Craft (Reality Assembly Language) check, difficulty set by the Trigger Condition[[TheKawaiiEdition/Trigger]] Frequency. Each extra success can be used to increase the area of effect (see below) or to add to the duration of the fake identity on the Protocol Duration Table (see below). On a failure, you may try again, raising the difficulty by 1. A botch at this stage induces a potentially ugly Ultimate System Backlash. Wise Goddesses use Craft (Reality Assembly Language) Protocols to help here.

Area of Effect
* 1: 1 Moe 1 person
* 2: 10 Moe 1 people
* 3: 100 Moe 1 people
* 4: 1000 Moe 1 people
* Add +1 for every factor of 10
* People above Moe 1 must be added seperately; add their Moe above 1 to their group size, then add those successes to the ones for the Moe 1 people. (So 100 Moe 1 and 3 Moe 2 are 3 for the Moe 1 and (2 (Size) +1 (extra Moe) = 3 for the Moe 2 folk. Add 3 to 3 for a total of 6)

Protocol Duration Table
* 1: 1 day
* 2: 1 week
* 3: 1 month
* 4: 1 season
* 5: 1 year
* 6: 10 years
* 7: 100 years
* 8: 1000 years
* 9: 5000 years
* Multiply duration by 5 for each step up.

=== Ultimate System Backlash ===

The Ultimate System is remarkably stable, given how old it is and that it has never been rebooted. However, when Goddesses tinker with it, sometimes it may induce a local systems crash. The bigger the modification you were trying to make, the uglier it gets.

When something happens which indicates a backlash may happen, roll a number of dice equal to the difficulty of what you were doing. The more successes, the bigger the backlash, ranging from 1 success (your hair turns green) to 10+ successes (you turn into a copy of the Unconquered Sun and think you ARE him.) They typically harass and mutate the person who triggered the backlash. They wear off at a speed of one scene for every die rolled.

If you get 5 or more successes, it may be appropriate for the Storyteller to levy a reversed version of the Background Program you were trying to implement on you.

== Character Creation ==

# Pick your Job, as this determines your Job Abilities.
# Attributes are divided into three groups--Physical, Social, and Mental. Pick one set as your Primary, one as Secondary, and one as Tertiary. You gain one free pip in every attribute, and then you get to divide 8, 6, and 4 pips respectively among your Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary categories.
# Pick your Favored Abilities. You get 5 Job Abilities from your Job and can pick four non-Job Abilities to be Favored.
# Spend your Ability Points. You get 35 ability points. You must put at least 1 in each of your Favored or Job abilities. You also must take at least Bureaucracy 1, Craft (Fate) 1, Linguistics (Old Realm) 1, Lore 2, Occult 2, Socialize 1, one combat ability at 2 and another at 1 (out of Martial Arts, Melee, Archery, Thrown, Brawl, and Dodge). (This can be covered in some cases by your Job or Favorted attributes, of course)
# You get 15 points of Backgrounds; use the standard corebook versions unless stated below in the Crunch section. None may start above 3 unless you spend Bonus Points on it. It is wise, but not obligatory to take at least one pip each of Goddess Rank and Celestial Salary.
# Magical Girls begin with one free pip in each Virtue. They may distribute 5 points among their Virtues. No virtue can go above three. Bonus points can raise them above this maximum.
# Willpower is the sum of the Magical Girl's two highest virtues.
# You get 12 charms; at least 6 must come from Favored or Caste Abilities.
# Helping Goddesses may spend up to 15 Bonus Points to raise anything.
## Attribute: 4
## Ability: 2 (1 if Favored or Job)
## Background: 1 (2 if being raised over 3)
## Specialty: 1 (2 dice of specialty for 1 if connected to a Favored or Job Ability)
## Virtue: 3
## Willpower: 2
## Essence: 10
## Charms: 7 (5 if in Favored or Job Ability)
# Compute Essence:
## Peripheral: (Essence * 6) + WP + (Sum of all Virtues)
## Personal: (Essence * 2) + WP

== Crunch ==

=== Artifacts ===

==== Flying Disc ====

* Level: 3
* Attunement Cost: 10 motes or 2 motes/hour
* Powers: 
** Can fold in on itself to the size of a small hand fan.
** Opens up into a flying platform with a hand rail, circular, large enough for two people. It flies at 50 miles an hour, shielding those on it from the resulting wind; they can use missiles with no penalty. It can also hover.

** You can attune to it in order to use it continously, or you can fuel it with 2 motes an hour.

Flying discs look like huge metal circles with a hand rail when open and small metal fans when not.

==== Heavenly Comm Units ====

* Level: 2
* Attunement Cost: 5 motes
* Powers: 
** These usually come in the form of either small hand units or head-sets with goggles/tiny holo-projectors. They allow you to call up anyone else who has one and share audio and video and record any conversations. Higher level ones can often act as cameras also. You can also check your US-mail with them.

==== Helping Goddess Armor ====

* Level: 3
* Attunement Cost: 4 motes
* Powers: 
** It provides 6 Lethal, 6 Bashing Soak
** It has no fatigue or mobility penalty.
** It has big fluffy wings which enable the Helping Goddess to fly around at twice her normal ground movement. She gains +4 bonus dice in aerial combat.

Helping Goddess Armor is typically a breastplate of star metal with a matching helmet and big fluffy wings attached. The wings can be retracted when not in use.

=== Backgrounds ===

==== Artifacts ====

The artifacts of the Helping Goddesses are usually either made of Starmetal or else are minor artifacts forged out of Bandwidth. Most Helping Goddesses have easy access to a lot of petty artifacts and much less to higher level ones.

* 0: You have nothing. Either you're a Ronin or spendthrift!
* 1: You have two level 1 artifacts.
* 2: You have four pips of artifacts, up to level 2 at max.
* 3: You have six pips of artifacts, one of which can be level 3; the rest are level 2 or less.
* 4: You have eight pips of artifacts, one of which can be level 4; the rest are level 2 or less.
* 5: You have ten pips of artifacts, one of which can be level 5, one of which can be level 3, and the rest must be level 2 or less.

==== Celestial Moe Allotment ====

Some goddesses, in addition to a salary of Bandwidth, are given access to a Hearthstone of a Celestial Manse. The Manses proper are controlled, guarded, administered and the Moe divided by the Celestial Office of Moe. You just get the Hearthstone. You get a hearthstone equal to the pips invested; however, your Manse rating cannot exceed your Goddess Rank. Celestial Manses are very well defended, and you are in little danger of losing yours unless you are fired from your job.

Don't get fired.

==== Familiar ====

The familiar rules work as normal for Helping Goddesses. However, they also have access to Persocoms, which are basically artifact familiars, artificial spirit intelligences bound into little artifact doll bodies, which resemble cute little men or women. They usually can be used to call up people with Heavenly Comm Units or to link into the Ultimate System for whatever needs you have.

==== Goddess Rank ====

This determines your official employment status in Helping Goddess Society. It sets your housing allotment and pay.

* 0: You are unemployed, which probably means you're either a Ronin or else you really angered someone lately.
* 1: Goddess Third Class, Restricted. You have a Celestial Apartment, probably either with roommates or else you live in the Neo-Yu-Shan equivalent of a shoebox. Once you pay your rent, craft food for yourself, and ensure your clothing isn't ENTIRELY made up of hand-me-downs and rags, you have one gig of Bandwidth available at the end of the month.
* 2: Goddess Third Class. You have your very own Celestial Apartment all to yourself, and you can dress reasonably well and no longer struggle to pay your gondola, monorail, or cab fares to work. You generally can manage to save five gigs of Bandwidth a month. (Enough to make a Resource 4 purchase or 5 Resource 3 purchases).
* 3: Goddess Second Class, Restricted. You now have a little Celestial House to yourself with a little garden. You can afford to entertain people regularly and you travel around Neo-Yu-Shan with ease. You can typically save up around 25 gigs of Bandwidth a month (enough to make a Resource 5 purchase, 5 Resource 4, or 25 Resource 3). You can afford to have a few servants.
* 4: Goddess Second Class. You now have a fair-sized Celestial mansion with all the accoutrements--faerie lighting, fountains of wine, etc. You have a substantial staff of servants and people probably try to leech off you like mad. You can save 125 gigs of Bandwidth a month (enough to make 5 Resource 5 purchases, 25 Resource 4, or 125 Resource 3), although many at this level burn some of that bribing themselves some friends and allies.
* 5: Goddess First Class. You live in a huge palace or have several fair-sized mansions. You regularly throw huge parties and have hordes of hangers-on and servants. That 625 gigs of Bandwidth a month (enough to make 25 Resource 5 purchases, 125 Resource 4, or 625 Resource 3)will probably let you buy some gods this month, or utterly wreck mortal economies if you don't mind being arrested by Celestial Censors, anyway. But hey, you may well be able to buy a censor too.

== Comments ==

[[TheKawaiiEdition/OldHelpingGoddessComments|Old Comments]]

Okay, Helping Goddesses are Go, I think! -- [[JohnBiles]]

You are a funny funny man. However, given that it is a game and all, I would suggest that Background Programs be called TSRs. -[[FlowsLikeBits]]
: I'm not smart enough to understand what you mean. ^^;;; TSRs? Like the gaming company? --[[JohnBiles]]
::It's a dual pun that I can get, yes it refers to the gaming company but it is also a programing term for programs that Terminate but Stay Resident, which kinda fits the computer theme, but might be to obscure. -- [[Blackedout]]
::: Ahh! Hmm, will think on that; it may be too obscure. Anyone else have an opinion? --[[JohnBiles]]
::: I, at least, knew what a TSR was on sight. Then again, I'm also getting my doctorate in computer science in a few weeks. So I don't count. By the way, congrats John - glad to hear there are more successful students out there. -- [[GreenLantern]]
:::: Finishing my Degree = The Win! Soooo glad to be done. --[[JohnBiles]]
:::::Congrats John! But how many people are doing doctorates around here??? Yeah, like Blackedout said, TSR was the old DOS name for Background Programs.(Unix calls them daemons. :) Microsoft now calls them "services" I think(how dull). ), so yeah, it could be to obscure. Sorry, I was tired. -[[FlowsLikeBits]]

TheKawaiiEdition/PinappleRepublic

2013-01-29T04:28:11Z

JohnBiles:

= The Pineapple Republic =

* Location: The West: Southern End of the Grand Line
* Population
** Urban: 45,000 (Kalu Ka'lai) + 50,000 in smaller cities
** Surrounding Area: 800,000
* Ruler: Consul Iri'a'dote, Defender of the Republic
* Status: Tributary of the Realm, Paddle-Wheel Gang

== The Volcano Gods ==

Once upon a time, these islands were part of the Southern Grand Line Province, the central Prefecture. The local Volcano Gods had long been oppressed by the local administrators, forced to erupt only when told and generally not allowed to do their job. They now rose up during the Overthrow of the Bishonen and took over the islands. The Iron Millenium proved unable to deal with them cheaply and abandoned the islands to their tender mercies.

They took a habit of claiming virgin sacrifices (who, once thrown into the volcanos, didn't stay virgin very long) in order to build up a proper harem. They also sometimes demanded the sacrifice of local rulers who annoyed them, birds that sang too long, etc, etc.

This lasted until the coming of the Empress. She sent the Kawaii Order, who proceded to capture the Volcano Gods one by one, forcing them to submit to local monasteries. They united the Islands into a Republic which paid tribute to the Neo-Empress and gave one of the Volcano Gods as a pet to the first Consul. The unfortunate Kalameameimeamei is still on his hands and knees centuries later, being forced to follow the Consul around and try to please him with his antics. Many wonder when he will finally snap, but he may well be house-broken by now...

== Today ==

The Pineapple Republic is a largely peaceful and stable place and quite nice to live in if you aren't a slave. Which many people are.

About seventy percent of the population is enslaved natives (or more commonly, outsiders taken in war) who are forced to work on the vast pineapple, sugar, coffee, and cotton plantations. Most of the rest are artisans and wealthy native nobles who own the plantations (or foreigners who own planations).

Most of the islands are covered with plantations and small villages, and the climate is almost always balmy and pleasant.

All freemen have the right to vote in the House of the Commoners; the old nobility still has its own house, the House of Island Masters. The upper house elects a Consul to lead the nation from the House of Commoners. Both houses and the Consul squabble incessantly, while the Satrap from the Realm tries to maintain order.

The Pineapple Islands spend a lot of time raiding the central Grand Line to collect slaves to keep the population up. This has not made them beloved, but they are massively more potent than anything south of the Eternal Isles.

== Pleasure Island ==

Still part of the Pineapple Republic, the Houri Gang has bought much of this island and turned it into a giant pleasure resort (throwing a kickback to the Paddle-Wheel Gang and major nobles, of course.) It is the hugest den of Vice on the Grand Line, wilder even than the pirate havens, though the northernmost region of the Island is kept 'cleaner' to serve as a 'family resort'.

TheKawaiiEdition/ShadowCoast

2013-01-29T04:17:18Z

JohnBiles: /* The Shadow Coast, City-States Against the Deaders */

= The Shadow Coast, City-States Against the Deaders =

* Location: The central northern shore of the Inland sea, east of Mauveport.
* Population
** Urban: 125,000 in 6 cities (Hiveport, the largest, has 32,000)
** Surrounding Area: 1,200,000
* Ruler: The Council of Cities
* Status: Tributary of the Paddle-Wheel Gang and the Memnonic Gang.

The Shadow Coast have been locked in combat with the Deaders of the huge shadow land to the North ever since a massive battle during the Chaos Plague created it. Only the support of the Realm keeps them free from the dead. The Memnonic Gang and the Paddle-Wheel Gang teamed up to take responsibility for the area, and coordinated its formation into a league of city states (and a huge black market for goods of the Dead or various Northern vices.) Mauveport used to be part of the League of the Shadow Coast, but now belongs to the Ragnarok Gang, who seceded it.

It is sometimes arguable whether the criminals, smugglers, slave-dealers, and renegades of the area are much better than the Deaders they fight, but they've learned to stand together against this common foe.

== Hiveport, City of Honey ==

* '''Population:''' 32,000
* Ruler: A governor appointed by the Paddle-Wheel Gang

This odd artifact of the Harem Age resembles a giant bee-hive surrounded by warehouses. The whole city smells of honey and buzzes with insects. Indeed, machines inside the governor's palace produce huge amounts of honey which is a popular export of the city, used to buy luxuries for the governor and fund the town government. Mostly the city imports weapons and ghost-fighting gear and sells them around the nation, then buys luxuries with its profits. It also exports a lot of food to the Realm.

About two thousand bee-people dwell here, serving the governor for reasons which remain secret to outsiders; they operate the honey machines and are generally well-regarded, especially since those who suck up to them the best get high quality honey which normally is exported.

TheKawaiiEdition/Tenma

2013-01-23T05:33:14Z

JohnBiles: /* Nature, Moe, Willpower, and Virtues */

= Tenma (100 XP Skilled Diplomat Miko Bishoujo) =

== Obligatory Introductory Fiction ==

As she was unpacking in her inn room after a long trip to Minas [[LankWaterHawk]] with her friends, Tenma heard an odd noise coming from the window. Opening it, she peered down; two gangs were about to have a fight; one gang wore no shirts; the other gang wore no pants and were all down to their bikini briefs (or bikinis) or boxers. All were armed with a variety of crude weaponry, from chains to pieces of furniture to glass bottles to sporks. 

This wouldn't do at all. People should live together in peace and harmony, not have a fight over...over...

Something or another. She couldn't even tell why they were fighting but years of experience dealing with gangs had taught her the hard way they didn't NEED a reason.

She had no choice but to intervene and restore peace and order. None at all. This sort of thing was exactly why the Broodingly Handsome Sun had told her 'Go and heal this injured world. And I'm sure Karasuma likes you better than curry, too!' The first part, as the latter part didn't seem TOO relevant. Though she made a quick check to see if Karasuma was down there with no shirt or no pants.

Disappointment.

Turning to her sister, who had begun unpacking for both of them, she said, "I'm going to go stop a gang war!"

"But, big sister, we..." Yakumo began.

Too late. Tenma grabbed her bow, just in case, then dove down inbetween the gangs, landing and striking the coolest pose she could think of. As she did so, her Moe moved within her, stirring along lines of power engraved into her very being by the Broodingly Handsome Sun, moving the minds of those around her to be favorably inclined to her. 

Which was good, as otherwise, she'd have been very screwed.

As it stood, the two gangs halted, stared, then applauded in unison. 

She bowed to all of them and said, "Peoples of Minas [[LankWaterHawk]], what ancient feud has divided your mighty houses?" She'd gotten that line from one of her favorite novel series, "The Three Who Write Slash Fiction." Mangoku the Sexually Ambiguous had used this to end a feud between two rival noble houses with a giant Yaoi orgy which Tenma had been unable to finish reading due to it causing her too much nasal blood loss. But she remembered the FIRST part, anyway.

Her social senses, keener than her normal ones, kicked in, and she felt a little of her Moe flowing into them, empowering them. She could make out the two gang leaders; a pissed off woman with a mohawk in the Shirts group and an angry black man in purple pants in the Pants group. Both faced a lot of disgruntlement from their own gangs which they were trying to assuage through violence against others. She'd seen this a thousand times before.

"These bastards stole our shirts!" the black leader said angrily, pointing a broken flagpole at them.

"We lost all our clothing to a roving band of mercenary rag-pickers who stole them off the lines as we tried to have a peaceful laundry day!" the woman shouted back. "We found a bunch of untended shirts, so we took them so we didn't have to roam the streets in our underwear!"

Yakumo leaned out the window. "Big sister, it's not safe standing between angry gangs!"

"I'm fine, Yakumo!" Tenma shouted up. 

She understood what was going down now. "I understand your pain," she said. "No one likes to wander the streets naked because someone forgot to do the laundry," she began.

"I put it in your room, big sister," Yakumo mumbled, but no one heard her. "I was going to put it all away, but you were hungry, so I went to cook dinner."

"But the source of your troubles is not each other!" Tenma continued. "It's those mercenary rag-pickers!" Moe flowed through her and invisibly suffused the two crowds with her Moe. They began to nod in agreement. 

Yakumo knew better than to try and stop her sister once she got on a roll. It was time to get Akira; she'd know how to stop Tenma burning another city to the ground in a giant riot caused by trying to avenge an injustice.

Hopefully.

"Let the sharing of your clothing forge a bond of brotherhood between you!" Tenma shouted as she began to glow, a shimmering taking shape on her forehead. "Be not Shirts or Pants, but a full wardrobe of unity against those who steal clothing to sell to merchants who will only undercut them unfairly anyway! We must break the cycle of clothing stealing! WITH AN ORGY OF DESTRUCTION AGAINST THE RAG-PICKERS! LET JUSTICE BE DONE!" 

Tenma was now officially going over the top, but the two gangs ate it up. Enthralled by her charisma and her power, they rushed together to embrace as brothers and sisters. Fortunately for them, Tenma's mind was far away from any possibilities of Yaoi. Then, following Tenma, they rushed out into the streets to hunt down the evil clothing-stealing mercenary rag pickers, even as Akira and Eri rushed to the window. 

"Oh not again. Not beggar mobs again," Eri said, wrinkling her brow, her long blonde hair shaking about. "Weren't you supposed to make sure she didn't see any injustice?"

"I was busy trying to keep Mikoto and Hanai from seeing any," Akira said. "However, we're likely to need an army to get out of this city alive if our break-in at La Cosa Nostradamus' local HQ goes badly. Given how much of this city they own." She shook her head. "Well, no plan survives contact with Tenma, anyway." She smiled a little. "But doesn't it make you a little envious how much she can care about people?"

"She's going to get herself killed on one of her damnfool idealistic crusades," Eri said; her voice was a little harsh, but she was smiling a little.

"Not a bad way to die if you have to, though I'd rather not die," Akira said, watching more people spiral in to join Tenma's ever growing mob. "We're going to have to move fast; at this rate, this whole ward will go up in flames in the next half-hour. You go wrangle our punchers and I'll..."

"TENMA-CHAAAAAN!" Harima shouted, leaping out a window and running after her.

"Deal with him." Akira sprang out the window after him.

Here we go again, Eri thought. But at least she had good people to do it with now.

== Attributes ==

* Physical: Secondary
** Strength: 2
** Dexterity: 4
** Stamina: 3
* Mental: Tertiary
** Perception: 3
** Intelligence: 1
** Wits: 3
* Social:
** Charisma: 5
** Manipulation: 4
** Appearance: 4

== Abilities ==

(Bold are Favored)

Kensai:
* Archery: 5 (Longbow +3 dice) 
* Brawl:
* Martial Arts:
* Melee: 2
* Thrown:

Stalwart:
* Endurance: 1
* Perform: 5 
* Presence: 5 (+3 dice diplomacy) 
* Resistance:
* Survival:

Meight:
* Crafts:
* Investigation: 1
* Lore: 2
* Medicine:
* Occult:

Shinobi:
* Athletics: 3 
* Awareness:
* Dodge: 4 
* Larceny:
* Stealth:

Peacemakers: All are Caste Abilities
* Bureaucracy: 4
* Linguistics: 2 (High Realm, Rivertongue, Seatongue)
* Ride:
* Sail: 2
* Socialize: 5

== Backgrounds: ==

* Allies (Eri, Akira, Mikoto, Harima, Yakumo) 5
* Resources 3
* Manse 3

== Charms and other powers: ==

Anima Power: I Believe in You - By selecting a single ally anywhere in the entire universe, clasping their hands together and simply saying "I believe in you!" or something equivalent the Miko can aid them in their darkest hour. The target feels a warmth spring up in their soul and hears the prayer as clearly as if the Miko was standing right behind him. This renews them. This ability cost 5 Moe. It instantly heals one health level (bashing, lethal or aggravated, starting with the most severe) and restores the Miko's Moe x 2 to the targets Moe pool. This ability may only be used once, then can not be used again until the sun next crosses the horizon.

Archery:
* Graceful Bishonen Archery
* Superior Bishonen Archery
* Keen Arrow
* Arrow Sharpening Stance
* Piercing Shot
* Crevice-Seeking Shot

Endurance:
* Resoundingly Pretty Body Method: Tenma has taken it once, giving her 1 -1 and 2 -2 health levels.

Performance:
* Graceful Bishonen Performance

Presence:
* Graceful Bishonen Presence
* Superior Bishonen Presence
* You Can Do It!
* Favorable Impression
* Instant Contact Method
* Ally Summoning Method
* Devotion Inspiring Technique

Socialize:
* Graceful Bishonen Socialize
* Read Social Currents
* Adjust Social Currents

== Nature, Moe, Willpower, and Virtues ==

 Nature: Friendly

* Permanent Moe: 3
** Personal: 15
** Peripheral: 37 ( 12 motes committed)

 Willpower: 6

 Virtues 

* Compassion 4
* Temperance 1
* Conviction 3
* Valor 2

Virtue Flaw: Childishness: When confronted with the real ugliness of human behavior and unable to do anything about it, she gains a point of limit. When she limit breaks, she reverts to a fully childish view of the world.

== Possessions ==

=== Equipment: ===

* Excellent Straight Sword (Spd 0, Acc 2, Dam 4L, Def 2. So in her hands, Spd 7, Acc 8, Dam 6L, Def 8)
* Riding Horse
* Lots of pretty clothing

=== Artifacts ===

* Orichalcum Reinforced Buff Jacket (9L/12B, -1 mobility, no fatigue, 3 motes)
* Orichalcum Power Longbow, "Love-Bringer" (7 motes, Acc 2, Dam 4, Rate 2, Range 400 yards. So in her hands, Acc 14, Dam 8L, Rate 2, 400 yds)

== Miscellaneous ==

* Lethal Soak: 11
* Bashing Soak: 15
* Dodge: 8 dice ( 7 dice with armor)
* Fatigue: 0
* Mobility Penalty: -1
* Health:
** 1 –0
** 3 –1
** 4 –2
** 1 –4
** Incap.

== Appearance ==

Tenma is rather oddly child-like in appearance for a grown woman, short and slender of figure with a childish face. She has long black hair and wears the fanciest clothing she can afford. Her trademark is a pair of little hair antennae which jut out on opposite sides of her head and sometimes move to indicate her emotional state.

== Fetishes ==

Her Moe 2 fetish is her Miko status; her Moe 3 fetish is her hair antennae.

== Personality: ==

Tenma is a kind and loving person, open and friendly, who easily surrounds herself with friends and allies everywhere she goes. However, she's not very bright and prone to fantasizing and sudden impulsive action. She falls in love easily, but is poor at finding the courage to express it. She loves to dress up and to cosplay. Tenma is very protective of her younger sister, Yakumo, even if Yakumo ends up mostly taking care of Tenma.

== History: ==

Born to a merchant family of the Western Isles, Tenma spent her youth being hauled back and forth between the Scavenger Lands and the Grand Line. Her family eventually settled her down to help run the eastern operations while her parents went searching for the treasure of the Grand line. They're still out there searching, while she ended up Exalting during a particularly intense Karaoke session, perhaps the least impressive moment of Exaltation ever, though she finally overcame her old Karaoke rival and won a prize, so it was worth it.

For her, anyway.

She continues to run her family's business, waiting for the parents to resurface, and sometimes adventuring with her gang of Exalted Friends (see Allies).

== Storyteller's Notes: ==

Tenma's gang of friends may turn up just about anywhere, usually to make a giant mess. She always means well, though. She is in love with an Oni Prince named Karasuma; he is so emotionless, it is hard to tell if he loves her, though he seems to have an odd knack for showing up when she mosts needs him... She is blissfully unaware that one of her companions, Harima, a Kensai, is in love with her.

== Comments ==

It's kind of hard to see Tenma-chan as a "skilled diplomat miko", but it was fun to see how appropriate this character sheet turned out to be. What's the Longbow's name? "Karasuma-kuuun"? --[[Wings]]
: Heh. Well, this is a little older Tenma, who still has the same perky disposition, but is not QUITE as naive. Until she limit breaks, anyway :) Karasuma is pretty clearly an Oni Prince. Hmm. Name for the Longbow...name for the longbow...Given its use in the anime, though, I think I'll call it 'Love-Bringer' :) --[[JohnBiles]]

TheKawaiiEdition/TheKawaiiOrder

2013-01-21T20:33:03Z

JohnBiles: /* The Path of Water */

= The Kawaii Order =

The Kawaii Order is a church of monks and priests who teach the Kawaii Way: Whoever is the most Moe should rule. In the current era, they preach that the Magical Girls stand at the height of the hierarchy of Moe, and thus are intended to rule creation. Through good behavior, lesser souls earn the gift of higher levels of Moe in future incarnations.

The Kawaii Order reveres the Five Boddhisatvas, human incarnations of Gaia's Five Sons, who came to teach the five paths to Moe. They also revere the spirits of Heaven and the elementals, directing worship to keep Heaven powerful enough to be useful and weak enough to be controlled to the Order's ends.

The Kawaii Order has many sub-orders, but all answer ultimately to the Mouse of Peace, always a Magical Girl, who acts as head of the Order.

Priests and Monks of the Kawaii Order train intensely physically so as to fight evil, but more importantly, so as to look really good when half or entirely naked. As they rise in Moe, they tend to tattoo themselves and wear progressively less clothing so as to let their cuteness shine through.

Both mortals and Magical Girls (and Helping Goddesses in Disguise) can be found among the ranks of the Kawaii Order. The Exalted tend to be the leaders, but a handful of mortals hold positions of importance because they were too cute for anyone to say no to them.

=== The Path of Air ===

Mysterious and enigmatic, the path of air is the road of mystery, the enticement of the quiet woman full of secrets, exemplified by Saint Tail, magical girl disciple of Boddhisatva Polaris. Followers of the Path of Air leash their emotions tightly, showing always only the same calm face to the world, unless they choose to let you inside their defenses. They often seem passive, but that is only because the wind is invisible; indeed, it moves as it wills, and you cannot stop it. You may never know what she feels, but your efforts to find out will bind you to her more firmly than any chain of Jade.

=== The Path of Fire ===

This is the road of passion, exemplified by Saint Asuka, magical girl disciple of Boddhisatva Apollo. Followers of the Path of Fire unleash their emotions; they can be hard to live with, often being prone to violence and anger, but also capable of the most loving tenderness. This combination of rage and love, they call 'tsundere'. The more they beat you up for no reason, the more it shows they really love you but don't know how to express it. The enticement of turning that hate into love will pull you into the fire to be consumed.

=== The Path of Metal ===

Stable and reliable, the path of metal is the road of simple common sense, the enticement of the childhood friend who always took care of you, exemplified by Saint Kasumi, magical girl disciple of Boddhisatva Mamoru. Followers of the Path of Metal have stable, steady emotions; they know what they want and who they care for, and they shower their loved ones with a quiet affection, facing their enemies with a calm, stubborn front. They often seem passive, but that is because their nature is not to take the lead, but to guard what they love and to support you in your actions. She will draw you in with a steady compassion and kindness you cannot help but to reciprocate.

=== The Path of Water ===

Pragmatic and flexible, the path of Water is the road of flowing around obstacles without losing sight of one's purpose, the enticement of the woman who knows exactly what she wants and does exactly what she must in order to get it, exemplified by Saint Nanami, magical girl disciple of Boddhisatva Neptune. Followers of the Path of Water have fixed goals they will never abandon, but have the flexibility to move around obstacles instead of ramming headlong into them, as a Metal or Fire follower would. They are active, seeking always to advance their goals, moving in straight lines when there is no resistance, but moving around obstacles as they arise. Once she decides she wants you, she will keep coming for you until she gets you, amen.

=== The Path of Wood ===

Pragmatic and flexible, the path of Wood is the road of adaptation to one's environment, the enticement of the woman who can be all things to all men, exemplified by Saint Misato, magical girl disciple of Boddhisatva Alec. Followers of the Path of Wood have strong passions, but know when to leash them and when to turn them loose; they fight hard, work hard, and party hard in turn, as circumstances dictate. They are active, though in a reactive way, changing tactics and methods to fit the circumstances, holding nothing sacred, but always willing to experiment. She will draw you in by becoming whatever it is you most desire, until she doesn't need you any more, anyway...

=== Comments ===
Zeus's and Dionysius's names were also used for some of the Demons. You guys might want to switch one of those out.

-I am not even sure what I was thinking using Zeus for Earth given he is totally not a steady stable person in Greek Mythology ANYWAY. ^^;; -- John Biles

- Also, there apparently IS no Earth, since there is Metal instead. Earth is also mentioned in the Path of Water. And if I may, the sentence in the Path of Fire that reads "The more they beat you up for no reason, the more it shows they really love you but don't know how to express it" suggests that all students of the Path of Fire don't know how to express their affections or admit whom they like, which is unnecessarily restricting and doesn't account for those forceful and fiery personalities who have no such doubts or insecurities. You might instead write, "Woe to those loved by followers of the Path of Fire whom are uncomfortable expressing their affection, because their great passion demands release, which most often takes the form of violence and verbal abuse. The more an insecure Fire student loves you, the more she'll hurt and belittle you." (Tornado Wolf aka Inugami)

[[TheKawaiiEdition|Back to the Exalted Kawaii Homepage]]

TheKawaiiEdition/MagicalGirlGangs

2013-01-21T19:09:58Z

JohnBiles: /* Solipism (Fire) */

= Magical Girl Gangs of the Scarlet Empire =

== Introduction ==

Over the centuries, Neo-Empress Scarlet has allowed her descendents and other magical girls of note to form large gangs of magical girls who she can then tap to do her dirty work. They compete extensively for power, and the competition is heating up now that Neo-Empress Scarlet has vanished. All members of the Scarlet Dynasty come from one of these gangs, and those born outside them sometimes marry into them or are adopted.

Each Gang has a favored Caste, but contains members of all, and usually has a group specialty (most relevant if the difficult character creation method is being used.)

=== The Cat-Hackers (Fire) ===

The Cat-Hackers are, as one might guess, the anti-Catgirl faction of the Magical Girls. Burned by bad experiences with a 'magical guardian cat' who led them to their doom, they have set out to wipe out the Catgirls and cats in general. Any cat COULD be a filthy cat-girl spy, after all.

The Cat-Hackers have asked for and been given tributaries on the far fringes of the Imperial Holdings in the Periphery, so as to have the most chances to fight Catgirls.

Many Cat-Hackers affect dog motifs; some of them refer to themselves as the 'Hounds of Heaven'.

The Cat-Hackers have no real enemy within the realm; everyone is quite happy to let THEM be the ones who get eaten by Catgirls on the frontier, thank you.

The Cat-Hackers are led by Cat-Hacker Chulainna. She operates from a Cat-Hacker Satrapy in the Southeast, and seems to spend most of her time conducting cattle raids against all and sundry. It remains unclear how exactly these raids are ending the Catgirl menace, but they certainly annoy Bessie's followers... She is a red-haired Wedding Warrior who is even tempered, but never forgives a slight. She just acts in her own sweet time.

 Members of Note: 
* Cat-Hacker Alari: [[TheKawaiiEdition/CatHackerAlari|Here]]
* Cat-Hacker Forta: Catgirls are everywhere. They're IN THE WALLS, LISTENING AS WE SPEAK. Anyone who can't show a Magical Girl sigil on their forehead might be a Catgirl and even those who CAN, might be one in disguise! Cat-Hacker Forta was once a bold soldier of the Legions. Until her commander turned out to be a Catgirl in disguise and led them to destruction. Only Cat-Hacker Forta and a few companions made it out alive. Now she thinks Catgirls are EVERYWHERE, and she's gone underground to hunt them. Unfortunately, she's no better at spotting Tells than anyone else, leading to some embarrassment. Rumor has it that some faction now uses her as a chump to assassinate rivals. Rumors, of course, ARE ONLY SPREAD BY CATGIRLS!!!!
* Cat-Hacker Iana: Cat-Hacker Iana is a Sacred Bodyguard, assigned to command the defenses of Castle Cat-Hacker back on the Kawaii Isle. Given that it has not actually ever been attacked by anything but the odd assassin in its entire history, she tends to neglect this duty in favor of wandering the local countryside, trying to find something heroic to do. Unfortunately, there's not much call for that either, so she's often found meddling in mortal affairs; the mortals are slowly going crazy, but what can they do? Until the PCs show up, anyway...
* Cat-Hacker Nuku-Nuku: Unknown to the average Cat-Hacker, they've been infiltrated. Or more precisely, a member of the clan Exalted as a Catgirl and has been struggling to protect her fellow Catgirls covertly from within while posing as a mere un-Exalted Patrician. It's not easy. If Cat-Hacker Nuku-Nuku and Cat-Hacker Forta ever meet...FUR WILL FLY.

=== Houri (Wood) ===

The Houri are more interested in sex than power. Or perhaps in sex as the means to power. They are wildly decadent, throwing parties which usually turn into orgies of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The "Party Girls" always know where the party is, because they're the ones throwing it.

The Houris have most of their holdings in the East and South (especially liked as you can wear less clothing in the warm south.)

The Tepes Gang and the Houri Gang are major rivals to see who can be the biggest freaks.

The Houris are led by the Council of Five Madams, who seem to focus most of their attention on wild parties and building up their brothel empire. However, having noticed the empire heading for the rocks, they're now looking to find another house to back for the throne...so they can rule from behind it.

 Members of Note: 
* Houri Michiru: Mistress of the Brothels of the Imperial City, one of the Five Madams. Her job is to inspect them, keep them clean and tidy and presentable for all the guests. Some of them she manages directly for her family; the rest she inspects for the Imperial government. Those wise enough to pay the appropriate bribes regularly find it much easier to pass inspection, though even a bribe won't save you if you get too dirty or too obviously skanky (out in public, anyway...). She is known for sampling the merchandise, so to speak. Both kinds. Enthusiastically. This is, at times part of the bribe.
* Houri Aika: Child of Houri Yuka and Lemarchand Miki (an Unexalted Dynast male), Aika is short and cute and innocent looking, even though she is a highly trained Sex Ninja. (She's a Holy Thief of the Houri persuasion...) Among those who make it their business to know such things, she is known to be the owner of the Jade Bra of Death, a weapon of the highest level of puissance. When even the Houris find someone's sexual practices to go too far, or when the You'll See start teaching mortals their demonic sexual practices, it's time to send in Aika.
* Houri Umina: Tall, thin, and green-haired, she is a Forest Witch and a member of the Kawaii Order. She sees her house as in need of reform. It's not that orgies are bad in and of themselves; indeed, they can show off the beauty and love the Kawaii Order champions. But there does need to be limits--enforcing consensuality, not having orgies the night before your final exams, no biting off your mate's head after sex, etc. It's all in the holy texts, really.

=== Lemarchand (Air) ===

The Lemarchand gang delves deep into the secrets of the world, and has its fingers in organized crime as well; they want to know everything that's going on. They also are heavily involved in millitary intelligence.

The Lemarchands have an odd taste for nothern tributaries, perhaps because the cold and snow hampers other people spying on them.

The Otome Gang and the Lemarchand Gang have a traditional feud, thought to date back to the 'accidental' burning of a library of Lemarchand secrets by an Otome 'maid'. After which the Otome 'accidentally' ate so much sugar she exploded.

The Lemarchand Gang is led by Lemarchand Mara, who is said to favor blackmail as the solution to everything. She has allied her gang with the Memnonic gang because of their common intellectual bent, and seems to be backing Jonni's bid for the throne.

 Members of Note: 
* Lemarchand: Lemarchand himself, former husband of the Neo-Empress, and father of the gang's founders, has gone missing; he constructed a giant puzzle box 3 centuries ago, announced it would grant him infinite power, then promptly vanished in a puff of smoke when he tried to solve it. It sits inside the giant set of cranes and pullies he built to operate it, in the courtyard of Castle Lemarchand, as everyone is afraid to touch it. (Said Puzzle Box is forty feet by forty feet by forty feet and weighs tons. It took the help of several dozen oxen and slaves to try to move its parts.) Gang legend claims he has gone to live with Saint Tail and will return with her to judge the world at its end. Everyone else is reasonably sure the You'll See have him. AND GOOD RIDDANCE.
* Lemarchand Jeanne: An up and coming scion of the house, Jeanne is an agent of Gateway, the Imperial Spy Service. She's also a Dangerous Duty Postal Escort: Her job in the Post Office is to guard shipments thought to be in danger of being attacked by EEEVIL. This has made it relatively easy for her to intercept and copy critical mail for Gateway. She is employed under a second ID known only to the Storyteller so the players can't read this and know her big secrets!
* Lemarchand Tara: [[TheKawaiiEdition/LemarchandTara|Here]]
* Lemarchand Triketa: Triketa is one of Lemarchand's grandchildren; her mother was Lemarchand Jaleta. She is in charge of Lemarchand Covert Operations in Minas [[LankWaterHawk]]. Or is she? She's found evidence of Lemarchand operatives in the city that don't answer to her. Are they traitors? Is someone else muscling in on her territory? And can she turn them to her own uses?

=== Memnonic (Metal) ===

Founded by Jonni Memnonic, daughter of the Empress, the Memnonic gang are scholars, priests, and sorcerors, studying and preserving ancient knowledge, and seeking new ways to do things. Most wear glasses and have mousy hair. Outsiders call them the "Nerds," then mysteriously find blood-apes in their toilet. And their bed. And their clothing.

The Memnonic Gang's tributaries tend to be theocracies, holy places, and centers of scholarship.

The Ragnarok and Memnonic gangs have an ongoing feud.

Jonni Memnonic still leads the Memnonic gang. She has allied herself with the Lemarchands, due to a common interest in intellectual matters.

 Members of Note: 
* Archimedia Memnonic : Archimedia is one of Jonni's great-grandchildren, a brilliant engineer and artificer who has dedicated herself to the sacred secrets of geometry. She spends much of her time either teaching at The Scarlet Institute For the Advancement of Arts and Sciences, conducting dangerous experiments with hypergeometry, or putting her skills to use helping the military out in a crisis. But she grumbles ENDLESSLY if taken from her experiments...
* Crucibalus Memnonic: Crucibalus is Memnonic's favorite grandson. He is unable to exalt, but his grandmother likes him so much (possibly THAT WAY) that she's preserved his life with aganathics and now commands one of the legions of the Memnonic Gang. He's actually a very good commander...by mortal standards. His lack of charms leaves him vulnerable in the war to come, and he's looking for a flunky whose powers he can exploit...
* Harmonia Memnonic: Harmonia is a high ranking Apostle of Kawaii, appointed as Satrap of the Shrine of San Andrea. She spends much of her time way in over her head trying to keep up with all the Holy Theives and wondering why she, a Sacred Bodyguard, got this job. Why Jonni did it, only Jonni and her teddy bear understand.
* Terri Memnonic: A skilled but apparently not skilled enough Holy Thief with a taste for brandy. She seems unlikely to party while a captive of Sees-The-Wind, an Eye Catgirl who captured her on a spy mission at Mauvewall.

=== Nebbish (Wood) ===

The Nebbish gang wants to be regarded as cool, but they're not. They're always wearing the clothing that was 'in' last season, listening to the music that was cool two years ago, and generally being giant wanna-bes. They are frequently found following members of houses around, trying to bask in their coolness.

Still, it has to be said that they are the best cooks and farmers. But that's just not COOL enough for them.

Their tributaries tend to be agricultural zones, because they LIKE TO EAT.

The Nebbish Gang has a sort of feud with the Solipisim Gang. Namely, they follow members of the Solipism Gang around until they drive the Solipist into fits of rage, resulting in a riot.

The Nebbishes are led by Nebbish Ziggi, who is a very bland looking redhead with a big nose. She doesn't look too bright, but is actually far more intelligent than most of her gang members. She knows her house has little hope of gaining the throne and is trying to decide who to back, though she's leaning towards either the Paddle-Wheels (because of their Naval might, which can be used to cut everyone else off from Threshold resources) or Ragnarok, because she can probably get a big bribe from them in return for support.

 Members of Note: 
* Nebbish Charlotte: A dumpy redhead, she has very curly red hair and SHE SPEAKS VERY LOUDLY ALL THE TIME. This was an unfortunate effect of her Exaltation shortly after watching a drill master at work. She is in the Legions and spends her time drilling troops, as it is what she is best at. When drunk, she starts to shout EVEN LOUDER, making her hard to deal with. Her goal is to one day command a legion, but that will only come if she ever learns to speak normally again...
* Nebbish Haru: Haru is a male member of the gang, who has spent his whole life having to deal with his mother's resentment that he wasn't a girl who could inherit her powers. He's grown up into a fiery adult, sent into the Legions so he could kill things without getting in too much trouble. Ideally. He is far crankier than most Nebbishes, and far tougher, even if he's just a heroic mortal.
* Nebbish Katara: Nebbish Katara is one of the great chefs of the Realm, once chef to the Neo-Empress herself, now chef to the Regent. She has developed a vast array of unique charms for making food and can meet all of Tepes Kanako's odd food cravings with ease, which has caused the Regent to befriend her. Which means dragging her into the schemes to get Kanako into her brother's bed...
* Nebbish Keiko: Determined to be the ultimate socialite, Keiko spent too much time studying the Tale of Benji and other 4th century texts. As a result, she resembles a walking museum piece (to those old enough or historically adept enough) or some sort of weird foreigner (to everyone else). This tends to immensely frustrate her, leading to her legendary bursts of temper. Legendary because they are so oddly mannered that it is often hard to tell WHY she is angry.
* Nebbish Makadona: Nebbish Makadonna set out to make her mark in the world of farming. She's getting old now, but she's become quite brilliant and developed many ideas which could revolutionize agriculure. If only anyone would listen, but the other Magical Girls are too busy with lovers and makeup and glory and war and sandwiches to LISTEN. Something is going to HAVE to be done.
* Nebbish Mikata: [[TheKawaiiEdition/NebbishMikata|Here]]
* Nebbish Naru: A fairly typically young Nebbish, Naru was mediocre in school and a little shy, though energetic and enthusiastic once she cut loose. She is now a low-level bureaucrat in the Bureau of Peasant Management, wondering where her life is going and looking for something more exciting, like, say, the PCs...

=== Otome (Air) ===

Magical Maids, GO! The Otome Gang act as a cadre of bodyguards and companions for nobles, at the command of the Neo-Empress, who took command of the house after it was involved in a plot to overthrow her, long ago. Now it's used as a means to elevate trusted mortal-born Magical Girls in status and to provide security for ambassadors, tributary nobles and kings, etc.

However, with the Neo-Empress missing, many suspect the Otome Gang will soon be up to its old tricks...

They have no tributaries of their own, but rather, serve to assist the rulers of those tributaries. It is unclear where they get their funds from.

The Otome Gang and the Lemarchand Gang have a traditional feud, thought to date back to the 'accidental' burning of a library of Lemarchand secrets by an Otome 'maid'. After which the Otome 'accidentally' ate so much sugar she exploded.

The Otome Gang is lead by Otome Natsuki. She hopes to find the Empress or to arrange some sort of permanent regency which might have need for her Gang's services, as she fears that if any of the other Great Houses win, they'll wipe out House Otome due to its long use by the Neo-Empress to enforce her will on the other gangs and due to the low-born status of many of its members.

 Members of Note: 
* [[TheKawaiiEdition/OtomeArika|Otome Arika:]] Intellectually, she's a dimwit of high caliber dimwittedness. But she has a kind heart and is supremely athletic and nimble. And she Exalted, and even a stupid Exalt has value in the Empire. She is a Holy Thief who is quite good at her job and not much else. She is, in theory, assigned to protect Queen Mashiro of Windbloom, but is currently trying to FIND said queen, in the aftermath of the Artai conquest of said kingdom of Windbloom. Close friends with Nina, largely because Nina doesn't know Arika has a crush on her Dad...
* Otome Mai: Noted for both her hard-working mother hen personality and for her overly stacked chest, Mai has been a recent target of a jealous deathlord's agents, but continues to try to do her duties and protect her fellow Otome from whatever menace has targetted them. She is also noted for her giant fire-breathing phoenix-dragon familiar.
* Otome Haruka: She'd be balls-to-the-wall if she had any; as it does, she is a woman who has no fear (or common sense). She's one of the most potent warriors of her house and a nigh-invincible Sacred Bodyguard, so long as you don't find some way to trick her...
* Otome Irina: A red haired megane-ko, she is one of the young stars of the house, a Wise Witch of very high intelligence and inquisitiveness, fond of saying that her glasses see everything. Rather prone, nevertheless, to getting in over her head.
* Otome Nao: An experienced Wedding Warrior, this red-headed Otome is from the Kingdom of Artai, and is expected to return there soon to serve. She, on the other hand, hopes to find a rich patsy to be her sugar-daddy. Despite this greedy streak, she is a mentor to the younger Otome.
* Otome Nina: Stern and dedicated, Nina is an up-and-coming young Otome Sacred Bodyguard, expected to go far, with a strong ruthless streak and a determination to excel. Being ticklish can be a bad weakness to have, though... The fact that her adopted father, Cat-Hacker Sergei, is secretly a Bishonen Stalwart isn't going to make her life any easier either...
* Otome Yayoi: A tiny blue haired girl and a reasonably skilled Sailor Warrior, though she won't be getting any awards any time soon. Often ends up as Irina's flunky, dragged into things.

=== Paddle-Wheel (Water) ===

The Paddle-Wheel gang has dominated the waterways of the empire for centuries, roaming around and beating up anyone who won't pay them tribute. In times of war, they lead the Imperial navies against the foes of the Empire. The rest of the time, everyone hopes the "Pirates of the Caribbean" don't pull into harbor. Also, they wonder what a 'Caribbean' is, and why the Paddle-Wheels seem to be looking for it in their wallet.

The Paddle-Wheels also like to run floating riverboat casinos and are gamblers of great skill. And even greater cheaters.

The Paddle-Wheel gang and the Wherz'th'beef gang are rivals, competing for control of the tributary ports on the oceans and rivers.

Paddle-Wheel Marcia leads the Paddle-Wheel Gang. She is the Neo-Empress' grand-daughter and thinks very highly of herself. She is a brilliant naval commander but overestimates naval influence over land by a lot. Marcia hopes to claim the throne through its control of the waters and its ability to monopolize access to the Threshold...once those damn Wherz'th'beef are removed, anyway. They're courting the Nebbishes (as cannon-fodder and a source of supplies), the Cat-Hackers (for military prowness), and the Houris (for intelligence gathering skills).

 Members of Note: 
* Paddle-Wheel Fultana: Paddle-Wheel Fultana runs a legendary floating Casino, the Naughty Catgirl. Despite repeated attempts by real Catgirls to destroy it, it has so far weathered many a disaster and continued to dispense its combination of music, theatre, half-naked 'Catgirls', alcohol, and high-stakes gambling. It travels around the Inland Sea, port to port, and at times, it sails up and down the Yellow River; once every five years, it sails to Minas [[LankWaterHawk]] for the 'Orichalcum Stakes' Gambling Tournament, where the highest gamblers in Creation come to match wits with each other and various dieties of gambling.
* Paddle-Wheel Thani: Thani is an unusual member of his house; he is the son of a Helping Goddess and a male member of the house, making him a God-Blood. He is one of the few non-Magical Girl high-ranking naval commanders of his house as a result, and he does his best to watch out for the sometimes hapless men of his house. He tends to be just a little touchy, due to ending up second bannana too many times in the past.
* Paddle-Wheel Gigana: Paddle-Wheel Gigana is a perfect example of rising to one's level of incompetence. She is a brilliantly aggressive commander of single ships, but tends to lose track of everything else; she's been promoted to command a squadron several times, leading always to disaster and demotion, followed by hard-work and reward, then more disaster. She is obssessed with becoming an admiral but simply unsuited. Don't get in her way...

=== Ragnarok (Metal) ===

The Ragnarok gang believes that whoever dies with the most toys ascends to a higher level of spiritual enlightenment. They are bankers, financiers, and businessmen, seeking ever to accumulate wealth.

Ragnarok likes to take major trade towns and mining centers as its tributaries.

The Ragnarok and Memnonic gangs have an ongoing feud.

 Members of Note: 
* Ragnarok Geko: It's not so much that she's greedy as that she just wants MORE. Overstatement, grandiose actions, the quest for endless gold, she acts always on a giant scale. Usually successfully. She rewards and punishes grandiosely. So long as you serve her well, you will go far; if you fail her, you are doomed.
* Ragnarok Morgana: The founder of the Ragnarok gang; she is a brilliant businesswoman with little patience for anything else. She hates Jonni Memnonic, both as a rival sibling of the Empress but also because Jonni regards Morgana's quest for wealth with contempt. She is a dark-skinned, dark haired Sacred Bodyguard.
* Ragnarok Nanami: [[TheKawaiiEdition/RagnarokNanami|Here]]
* Ragnarok Yumi: She is a broker of information and a source of secrets. She knows what you need to know, but can you afford the price? Unlike most in her house, she is scrupulously honest.
* Ragnarok Yuuko: Cautious and inquisitive, Ragnarok Yuuko is as much an academic as a businesswoman; she runs her businesses as experiments to try to determine the truth of economics in more detail. At times, this leads to disaster, and then she goes adventuring for ancient loot to use as a source of seed money. She is, unusually for her house, an expert martial artist.

=== Solipism (Fire) ===

The Solipism gang are obsessed with looking good and being the center of the universe; they judge everything according to how it impacts them. They are utterly self-centered and vain. They also are rather in-bred due to their efforts to achieve higher levels of Heritage.

Their tributaries are chosen according to prettiness.

The Nebbish Gang has a sort of feud with the Solipisim Gang. Namely, they follow members of the Solipism Gang around until they drive the Solipist into fits of rage, resulting in a riot.

 Members of Note: 
* Solipism Dakana: Dakana is one of the lead fashion designers of the Kawaii Isle. Everyone who is anyone owns either some of her designs or else rip-offs of some of her designs. It hasn't so much gone to her head as totally repossessed and rebuilt her head to be a shining tower of pure egotism. She does not fear civil war...she fears the Empress has gone into hiding to avoid paying Dakana for the last Imperial Anniversary outfit she made for the Empress. Damn deadbeats!
* Solipism Jakana: The unfortunate Jakana is not very pretty by her house's standards (Appearance 2), and thus faces constant prejudice and trouble from her own house. And Nebbishes don't even follow her around! She's become determined to do something so cute that everyone will have to worship her. If she can only figure out WHAT.
* Solipism Kara: [[TheKawaiiEdition/SolipismKara|Here]]
* Solipism Gina: A cunning Wise Witch who is used by her house as an investigator, at which she is quite good. Unlike most Wise Witches, she dyes her hair blond, and is very vain about her good looks.
* Solipism Gorgas: Actually a male member of the house, he is a master Painter (Wits 4, Craft 5, 3 dice Painting specialty) who revels in his ability to get Magical Girls at his beck and call through his art. He only abuses this a little. Where little = half the grand canyon.

=== Tepes (Metal) ===

Vladina Tepes, daughter of the Empress, founded this gang after reading too many books about the Underworld. Its members pretend to be vampires, ghosts, ghouls, zombies, revenants, and other things that go bump in the night, though vampires are the most common. The Tepes Gang tends to throw the freakiest parties--The Houri gang may be more sexually perverse, but they don't make up their lasanga to look like you're eating someone's BRAIN.

House Tepes likes tributaries where they can sit in a big brooding castle and then scare peasants all day and all night. They love places with shadowlands, though ones they live through soon empty of the dead, who find members of House Tepes to be ANNOYING BEYOND BELIEF.

The Tepes Gang and the Houri Gang are major rivals to see who can be the biggest freaks.

Tepes Vladina leads the Tepes Gang.

 Members of Note: 
* Tepes Kanako: The Regent of the Realm, who spends most of her time trying unsuccessfully to get into her brother's pants instead of ruling the Realm. She is a fairly competent Sacred Bodyguard with a taste for disguises and trickery.
* Tepes Anadina: An ancient and potent Holy Thief of very high Moe, she has vast powers which she uses to steal information about the dead and the Lords of Cute Angst. Her mind has become bent, and she has fits where she thinks she is Queen of the Undead. Dangerous fits.
* Tepes Eclavdra, the Pitchblack: [[TheKawaiiEdition/TepesEclavdra|See her extended writeup.]]

=== Wherz'th'beef (Water) ===

Diamonds are a Magical Girl's best friend. Next to piles of Jade. The "Material Girls" like money, money, money, and use their powers to pile on the jade, silver, and gold. They are a heavily mercantile gang, who run a huge private navy of both warships and trading ships. They frown heavily on piracy, especially the Manson Family and the Luffy Family.

The Paddle-Wheel gang and the Wherz'th'beef gang are rivals, competing for control of the tributary ports on the oceans and rivers.

 Members of Note: 
* Wherz'th'beef Twaina: Unusually for the Wherz'th'beef Gang, Twaina is more entertainer than sailor, though her floating theatre has brought in a huge amount of revenue. It also acts as cover for a group of commandos who act as the actors, singers, and dancers on the floating theatre when not out launching surprise raids in their Super Flower Armor. Twaina thinks no one has realized the connection, but the Imperial Intelligence Service has made the connection and is trying to decide what to do with it...
* Wherz'th'beef Tina: Wherz'th'beef Tina is the mad genius ship designer of her gang. She has made her gang strong, but is starting to go somewhat even more bonkers and now is experimenting with ways to fuse powerful magical girls permanently with artifact ships, giving them immortality, for she sees the end of her own days approaching and fears death. If word of her experiments gets out, she could be in trouble...
* Wherz'th'beef Ankara: Ankara commands the elite anti-Piracy task force of her gang. She is a stern commander, very strict and imposing harsh discipline. But she brings her followers victory, so they accept that. She's always looking for good commanders for raids.

== Comments ==
Hey! I've been trying to track you down through the wreckage of internet pages and broken links you have left in your wake over the years :-) I actually have some questions for you about the WOT RPG you created a while ago, and I have an archived copy of.... brian at runeblade dot com

* [[TheKawaiiEdition/MagicalGirls|Back to the Exalted Kawaii Magical Girls Homepage]]
* [[TheKawaiiEdition|Back to the Exalted Kawaii Homepage]]

TheKawaiiEdition/Oniboshi

2013-01-21T18:53:09Z

JohnBiles:

= Oniboshi, Home of the Oni (Alien Prince(sse)s) =

Many in Creation think the Wyld surrounds Creation. But what actually surrounds Creation is an area where the Wyld and Creation overlap, Oniboshi, home to the many worlds and realms of the Oni, beings who have adapted to live in a place too chaotic for mortals and too orderly for the things of Creation.

Oniboshi is divided into what scholars call 'waypoints'. These are regions of indeterminate size, which are basically 'places where something interesting happens'. They may be anything from one room inside a building to a hell-dimension of infinite nothingness to the hunting preserve continent of the planet Kagladar. The connections between waypoints constantly shift as Onis and natural phenomena mess with the connections; the deeper you go into Oniboshi, the more frequently they change.

Some waypoints are claimed by various onis to form a kingdom, while many are effectively constantly changing 'wilderness'.

Oniboshi is divided into regions in two major ways:
* By Element
* Outer / Middle / Inner

These can be combined, to say 'Inner Fire' or 'Outer Space'.

The elemental regions partake of the four elements which border creation, but also have a fifth 'Space'. It is the element reached by going 'UP' instead of 'OUT' from Creation. Space is an air-filled void full of planets whose nature reflects those of the elemental regions they are over. Certain rumors claim one can eventually fly through 'Space' to other Creations, possibly with different elements. Only the oni know for sure. Those oni who live in space usually have giant vessels for long-distance travel; the waypoints are often HUGE out there.

Where the elemental regions correspond to directions, the other system measures how far from creation you are. Outer Oniboshi touches upon Creation, is very stable, and mainly only changes when Oni mess with it. Most Oni live in Middle Oniboshi, where reality is stranger and more fluid, but stays fairly well in place once shaped. Inner Oniboshi touches on the true Wyld and tends to dissolve into extreme weirdness unless constantly shaped and reinforced.

[[TheKawaiiEdition|Back to the Exalted Kawaii Homepage]]