Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku - Volume 12 - Chapter 5

The Making of Magical Girl Raising Project

Could the magical girls who had been selected through the exams held by Cranberry, Musician of the Forest—otherwise known as “Cranberry’s children”—truly be proper magical girls?

Shouldn’t the Magical Kingdom go beyond just revising the current exam system and also make sure those girls were formally reexamined, to strictly review their suitability as magical girls?

During the inquiry, the magical girl Keek had proposed such a reexamination plan, but the Magical Kingdom had not accepted her proposal. Its pretext was that it was going to treat the children purely as victims.

The response had been sloppy. The Magical Kingdom would not dig up the children’s memories or treat their wounds. But it should be indirectly making a strict check to see if there were any problems. To Keek, this was a matter for indignation: She would assert that if you were not a proper magical girl, then you were not a magical girl at all.

After raging and lamentation at the evils of the times, Keek strengthened her resolve. Even if the Magical Kingdom would stand by and do nothing, she couldn’t let this matter go. Even if she was all on her own, she would give this group a new exam. She swore as much to herself. Her magic, absolute freedom within cyberspace, would make it possible.

Regardless, she couldn’t carry out that plan immediately. Everything in life requires preparation. Despite her being at her absolute peak of raging indignation, preliminary work would be essential for holding an exam, so even as she grumbled about it, Keek started programming Magical Girl Raising Project. She was trying to create a game to be the stage for her exam.

Since it was too much hassle to do it all on her own, she also had Fal, the digital fairy mascot that she’d modified herself, help her out.

While Fal felt this was a job worth doing, it was also a lot of pressure.

Making an exam in which the life of each and every girl would be on the line was a serious matter, but that wasn’t all. Once everything was over, and it was all exposed to the Magical Kingdom, Fal’s master, Keek, would probably have her qualifications as a magical girl stripped from her. That was how determined she was—she was ready to throw away her position and status to face this.

Failure was absolutely not an option.

“You handle the testing and debugging for the parts that are done, Fal. I’ll finish up the rest,” Keek told her mascot.

“Master, is it a good idea to make it in RPG format, pon? An RPG will place more weight on combat,” Fal pointed out.

“Ahh… Wellll, they need a minimal level of strength, right? We can just check things like cooperation, consideration, and wisdom by sticking in puzzley sorts of events and mini-games and stuff, right?”

“Events and mini-games, pon?”

“I’ll leave those minor details up to you. You can use the simulator all you like. I’ve programmed it to reproduce personality quirks and abilities in super-high detail, so it should be useful.”

“If it reproduces things so well, then why not just use the simulator to reexamine everyone, pon?”

“There are certain subtleties you can’t determine with just a simulator, you know…probably. Look, just get back to work. It’s never gonna get done if you just goof off and run your mouth.”

Keek had devised the general rules of Magical Girl Raising Project: The Evil King would pose as one of the magical girls, with both parties pitted against each other, and whoever was left standing would be the winner.

The player side had many people, but there was only one Evil King. The surviving magical girl would be forced to fight a lonely battle all by herself, so that did put her at a disadvantage, but Keek was okay with that.

With Cranberry’s children on the magical-girl side and Cranberry’s ally as the Evil King, maybe it was more accurate to call the Evil King a device for appraisal than a participant in the game.

If they could defeat Cranberry’s ally, then you could say that Cranberry’s children had graduated…had to be what that meant. Keek didn’t say out loud what her true intentions were, but Fal thought that was what it was.

Keek’s library had saved the virtual personality data for real magical girls both past and present. There was such a vast amount saved, even just making a catalog of it in the real world would require a supercomputer. For use with this test, Keek had selected the data of over a hundred of the magical girls connected with Cranberry, and then she’d transferred the authority to manage it to Fal.

When a master was putting in this much effort, the mascot also had to do its part. With renewed vigor, Fal set the situation and difficulty level and shoved sixteen randomly chosen magical girls into the simulator.

The result was that all of them cleared the game.

Maybe this game was a bit too easy.

Fal adjusted the difficulty level of the event one more time and ran the simulator again.

All of them still cleared it.

On closer inspection, for some reason, the Evil King and the magical girls were all finishing the game. But they were supposed to have conflicting conditions for completion—so why was this happening?

Was there an error in the settings, or was there some kind of game-breaking bug? Fal was moved by a sense of duty. If Fal were to find issues here, that would be a great achievement for his master. Keek would surely praise him.

“Master, there’s a bit of a problem, pon.”

“What sort of problem?”

“One particular magical girl ruins the game whenever she participates, pon.”

“Ruins the game…? It’s not the kind of game one person can ruin, though.”

“Somehow, after just a little time passes—say, thirty minutes or an hour—everyone becomes her friend, pon.”

“Her friend…? Uh, what?”

“Everyone becomes friends, including the Evil King, and then they start talking about defeating the master… Does this simulator really give accurate results, pon?”

“Yeah, I made it. So who’s this nitwit magical girl?”

“It’s Tot Pop…”

“Why’re you having Tot Pop participate? She’s not one of the children or anything.”

“But her data was in the simulator. She’s tagged as being connected to them, pon.”

“Well, I guess that’s an error. I don’t think she’s connected to any of it… In any case, exclude her from everything. She always ruins stuff when she’s around.”

“Ohhh, she’s that sort of person, pon?”

“Yeah, basically. Anyway, just check over the data again to make sure only people connected to the Musician are in there.”

After erasing Tot Pop’s data, Fal booted up the simulator again, thinking that now it’d start working properly. But the game ended without losing a single player, and Fal sighed. Just what was going on this time?

“Master, when Snow White’s in the group, the game doesn’t work, pon.”

“Huh? Snow White?”

“She hears that the Evil King is in trouble and figures out the rules of the game faster than anyone, and then she convinces everyone, Evil King included, to go to beat the master, pon.”

“Why does Snow White have to be in there?”

“Isn’t she one of Cranberry’s children, too?”

“What the heck is up with you? Are you mocking Snow White? Snow White is the hero who defeated Cranberry! She’d never need to take another exam! Agh, seriously!”

“Also, with Detec Bell, depending on how she uses her magic, it can be quite a hassle…”

“Then just put some kind of restrictions on it.”

“But isn’t it unfair to restrict only one person’s magic, pon?”

“Whatever, it doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter, pon.”

“Agh, come on… When there’s a problem with character balance, you make adjustments. That’s the basics of game design. Snow White is excluded, duh, and Detec Bell’s magic needs nerfing. So get to it.”

So Fal transferred Snow White’s data elsewhere and also made some modifications that put restrictions on Detec Bell’s magic. Now, that should have eliminated all the problems. After inputting the data, Fal ran the simulation.

The result was that the game ground to a halt yet again, and Fal weakly hung his head.

“Master, game progress comes to a stop during the footrace mini-event… What do we do about this, pon?”

“Why does that happen?”

“Marika Fukuroi says, ‘Well, all the other participants should just be made so they can’t run,’ and she punches out every single magical girl she sees, pon.”

“Just make it so she loses due to foul play.”

“And then Archfiend Pam butts in, saying, ‘A sport only truly comes into being when all three elements of the holy trinity are present… Technique alone, strength alone, or spirit alone will not give rise to harmony.’”

“Sheesh, what a pain in the butt.”

“And then the other Archfiend Cram School people and Cranberry join in, too, and they start up a brutal race where they head for the goal while attacking and obstructing their opponents, pon.”

“No, no, no, no! Why is Cranberry in there?! She is definitely Musician related! But I’m not gonna examine her! And wait, you can’t examine her anymore, anyway!”

“Ohhh, that’s true, pon.”

“Remove her, obviously, and the rest of the Archfiend Cram School crowd. I can’t stand those guys… I just can’t handle their jock enthusiasm.”

With the elder magical girls all cut out, now Cranberry’s children had to fight purely among themselves.

In the simulator, Pfle took the position of overall leader, while Akane operated as a subleader. Pfle had been born into a family of exceptional wealth, with lots of opportunity to give orders to people below her, and she was quick-witted, so she was perfect for the role of leader. And it made sense for Akane to be number two, since she’d captained a national-level kendo club as well as fulfilled a mediator-like role at home.

Fal was thinking that with this lineup, things had a good chance of going pretty well, when all too soon, the whole party was wiped out.

Not because the Evil King had won or anything like that—all the magical girls had gotten game overs because of monster encounters.

Fal ran the simulation again, but it didn’t change the results. No matter how many times the simulation was run, it was always the same party wipe. At a spot where Fal had thought they’d been easily clearing it thus far, they were hit with unrecoverable losses of many party members, leading to their stalling out in the game.

Wondering why this was happening, Fal suddenly figured it out. Since he’d removed all the current and former members of the Archfiend Cram School, the overall combat level of the participants had been greatly reduced, which made the monsters more of a threat.

In this game, the monsters were ultimately just extras. The main event was supposed to be the Evil King versus the magical girls—so they couldn’t let everyone get wiped out by monsters.

Fal had to redo it all, starting from adjusting the difficulty.

The robots resisted even nuclear strikes, so Fal reduced their defense as well as the attack power of satellite-to-earth beams. Fal also made changes to the wild monsters, like turning the oni into goblins and shrinking the dragons. Now there was just the boss.

“Master…”

“Whoa, what’s up with you? You look kinda sick. Like, gray and black instead of black and white.”

“Well, um…fixing monster strength and spawn numbers and special abilities and encounter rates and drop items…everything, basically, just took some time…”

“Ahh, workin’ hard, huh? Thanks.”

“Eventually, Fal ran into another wall, pon.”

“Huh? Why?”

“The Great Dragon is supposed to be strong enough that if you just challenge it directly, you’ll lose, but with information and items, you can win, right, pon?”

“Yeah, that’s right. If they’re the kind of idiots who won’t even notice proper hints, then it’s game over.”

“Once they defeat the Great Dragon, then Nonako Miyokata can control it, though…”

“Ah…”

“The Evil King’s castle was destroyed from the outside, pon…”

“That’s…not good, huh? Anyway, let’s just make it so the Great Dragon can’t be controlled.”

“Huh? So then we change the basics of the Great Dragon, pon? We rebuild the program from square one, pon?”

“Well, that depends on how you work it. Just figure it out somehow. It’s not like we have all the time in the world, here.”

“Pon…”

Fal made the entrance and exit of the Great Dragon’s spawn location narrower to prevent it from getting outside.

And now that Fal was looking things over again, some players’ powers could be dangerous depending on how they were used. Fal decided to focus on simulating those. So the mascot bumped up the magical girls’ imagination settings by three levels. This should make their virtual personalities perform at a higher level with more flexibility, doing their absolute best to finish the game.

The higher imagination settings made all their basic combat tactics suddenly more polished. Fal discovered that magical girls who had ranged attacks were far too effective, and the danger that they’d take enemy fire from a distance was far too low.

Long-range attackers like Pfle, Melville, Magical Daisy, and Akane were the ones doing all the fighting, while close-combat fighters undertook more risk and had the choice battles stolen from them. This was no good.

First, Fal tweaked the geography. More areas with obstructed lines of sight, like underground caverns, libraries, and towns, would make long-range attacks more difficult, and in addition, Fal also changed the monsters’ positions.

Once players acquired the monster encyclopedia after the middle section, the red skeleton monsters that reflected long-range attacks would appear throughout the game.

Mixing in monsters capable of reflecting projectiles prevented long-range fighters from launching attacks indiscriminately.

Additionally, Fal went over every magical ability that seemed like it might pose problems. Wherever possible, Fal wanted to avoid forcibly locking down magic abilities like with Detec Bell. Finding more clever work-arounds to deal with things was the best course of action.

“Master…there’s another problem, pon…”

“Again? What is it this time?”

“When I turned up the imagination settings, it made Shadow Gale able to modify Magicaloid, pon.”

“What.”

“She became the giant magical-girl robot Ultimate-Powered Magicaloid 555, capable of wielding 55,555,555,555,555,555 futuristic gadgets at will. She not only finishes the game, she defeats the master, pon.”

“Seriously?”

“It kinda feels like…Fal put together two people you shouldn’t ever allow together, pon.”

“Wait, by Magicaloid, do you mean Magicaloid 44? Why are you putting her in there?”

“Why? She’s connected to Cranberry, isn’t she, pon?”

“Ah, right. I should’ve realized when you put Cranberry herself in the simulation. Listen, she’s deceased. Sticking her in there in order to test behavioral patterns is one thing, but you don’t have to have her participate in there.”

“Ohhh, right, pon.”

“Your thinking is too rigid; you need to be more flexible. I’ll adjust your learning functionality settings accordingly.”

“But then Fal would feel bad for Shadow Gale, pon. She’ll never get another chance to meet her destiny ever again.”

“We don’t need any of that kind of poetic stuff, okay? What you need to do is remove anyone not related to the children from the simulator data. Just narrow it down to only those we’re planning to have participate.”

“So then Fal will change out the data…”

“Yeah, transfer it to me. I can just reuse part of it for the enemy data. She’d be happy to be useful, right?”

“But then Shadow Gale would wind up fighting against the one meant for her.”

“I told you to drop the sentimentality! You’re an AI, so do your job!”

“Master, the game broke, pon.”

“Huh? Is it even possible to break the game from inside?”

“Pfle kept buying up travel passes, causing an overflow in the number values, pon.”

“That rich bitch, pulling nasty tricks… All right, let’s put a cap on the total number of any items in circulation. Like hell I’ll let her keep getting away with whatever she wants.”

“Master, no matter how Fal adjusts the Great Dragon’s settings, it’s too strong. Multiple players always drop out at that stage, pon. It’s got nothing to do with hints or items or things like that, pon. We just never anticipated a situation where they would be fighting against an enemy with so much firepower in such a small space, pon. The den of the Great Dragon was originally planned to be bigger, after all, pon.”

“Guess we have no choice… We’ll reduce its range of attack. Confine the breath attack even further.”

“Master, for some reason, there’s no monsters in the library, pon.”

“Huh? No way… Eugh, you’re right. I forgot to create them! Agh, I’ve had enough of this!”

“Fal’s the one who’s had enough of this…”

“Hmm? Did you say something?”

“No, nothing… So what do we do about this, pon?”

“What a huge pain in the ass… I don’t wanna bother coming up with new monsters now, so… Oh, I know. We just decided to reuse the data from other magical girls, right? Let’s use that here.”

“Okay, okay… Agh, how long is this going to go on, pon…?”

“Master…”

“Hey, Fal, are you okay?”

“When you break through the ceiling of the subterranean cavern area, you come out in the Evil King’s castle, pon…”

“Huh?! Why were those two areas connected?! Ugh! Whatever! Who cares!”

“You can’t say that… When the magical girls get in a big fight underground, it takes them straight to the last stage…”

“Well, that’s no good. Should we just move the Evil King’s castle elsewhere? But maybe moving the subterranean area would be less of a hassle.”

“Move it? Where to…?”

“Wherever’s fine, okay? Wherever. Just as long as it’s not connected to the Evil King’s castle… Hey, couldn’t you just connect it with the previous stage?”

“Okay, then…”

“Uhhh… Fal, you’re looking pretty rough there, so how about you switch over to simple tasks. Just tweak the mini-games.”

“Roger, pon…”

The magical girls’ obstinance had turned a simple mini-game—the rock-paper-scissors event—into absolute hellish pandemonium.

Rionetta detached her arms, transformed them, then put them back on again. Pechka swallowed a yelp. Now Rionetta’s hand was paper—hadn’t it just been rock?

“Heh-heh, this transformation-style rock-paper-scissors technique may only be performed by a doll,” Rionetta said. “Were you capable of seeing through it?”

“Uh, there’s no transforming anything, pon,” Fal told her. “In rock-paper-scissors, the rules say the hand you play first counts. You’re not allowed to change it after, pon.”

“If there was such a rule, one would expect it to be stated earlier.”

“That’s just the basic rules of rock-paper-scissors, pon. Rionetta, you broke the rules, so you’re out.”

Clantail played rock…or so it seemed, but then her lower body transformed into that of a great ape, and even though her main magical-girl body still held out rock, the ape fist was playing scissors. Which was supposed to be her real hand?

“You can’t do this stuff, okay, pon?! Play a normal rock-paper-scissors game! You can only use one hand!”

“You never said we couldn’t,” Clantail pointed out.

“It doesn’t matter, you still can’t do it, pon! Okay, Clantail, you also broke the rules, so you’re out!”

Lazuline crushed a gem in her fist and sprinkled the shards. By rapidly teleporting around over and over, she made it as if there were multiple Lazulines—and each and every one played a different move.

“Nope, not allowed! Lazuline, out for rule breaking!”

“Falzey, you’re bein’ too strict!” Lazuline argued.

“Fal isn’t being too strict, pon! You guys are just all over the place, pon!”

Genopsyko Yumenoshima insisted that all her papers would win—she had the ultimate paper that couldn’t be cut, torn, or broken by anyone.

“The nature of the individual’s magic doesn’t count when playing rock-paper-scissors,” said Fal.

“No way! Then there’s no point in having this super suit!” Genopsyko wailed.

“That’s for the best, okay? It’s not like Fal is telling you to play rock-paper-scissors naked, pon.”

@Meow-Meow summoned three stone statues from her talismans. They were in the shapes of human hands—one clenched, one open, and one with just the index and middle fingers stuck out. Didn’t that mean the same thing as playing all hands at once?

“@Meow-Meow is out!”

By making herself gigantic, Cherna Mouse raised her arm so high that her opponent couldn’t see her hand no matter how they craned their neck. By doing this, even if she changed her hand afterward to make the move she wanted, she made it so nobody could complain.

“Cherna Mouse, out!”

By focusing intently on the thought that she was going to play scissors, Nokko controlled the moves her opponents would play. The problem was that she wished for it so strongly, she also wound up playing scissors herself, and her games ended in nothing but ties.

“Okay, by Fal’s authority as contest holder, Fal is calling that a draw, pon.”

And Masked Wonder controlled the weight of each finger on her opponents to move their hands to her will—

“Out!”

Melville changed the appearance of her hands to alter—

“Out!”

Akane didn’t even care and swung down her katana—

“Of course that’s out! Why does everyone use their magic so casually, pon?! Give us more of a, like, psychological battle, a match of the minds, a clash of ideas or something like that, pon!”

“Uwaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!”

“Whoa, Fal! What’s wrong?!”

“The magical girls! The magical girls all just do what they want! The mini-game isn’t a mini-game anymore! Master! Is this simulator working properly, pon?!”

“Come on, I made that simulator, you know? So of course I’ve paid every attention to making it precisely accurate, making sure there’s not even the slightest difference between the simulation and real life.”

“So then you should just use the simulation, pon!”

“No, there wouldn’t be any point in that.”

“If it perfectly recreates what would happen in reality, then if you just make the judgments in the simulator, there’s no need to bother having a game, pon! Forget about this stupid game, pon!”

“Hey, Fal! Calm down!”

“How can Fal calm down, pon?! With all these magical girls running amok… Fal can’t take this anymore, pon… Every day, Fal reads blogs from people who’ve been working at exploitative nightmare jobs to console himself with the thought that there’s people worse off in this world, pon…”

“Why are you so stressed out? You can’t even get a stomachache or a mental breakdown.”

“Ugh, master won’t acknowledge Fal’s individual rights… Fal is less than a corporate slave, pon… Every day is just being at the mercy of willful magical girls…”

“You’re kind of actually starting to lose it. Maybe making you capable of flexible thought was a bad idea.”

“Someone, help… The magical girls… The magical girls are attacking…”

“You’re totally broken.”

“Fal will spill all the beans, pon! And tell the players, ‘One of you is the Evil King, so just beat them up, pon!’ And with the Evil King gone, then this stupid game—”

“Hey, go take a break… This is bad. Seems like having the mascot know stuff about the Evil King is scary inconvenient. Better erase its memory.”

“Urk…magical girls…magical girls…pon…”

“Eh, whatever. We’ll just throw random stuff together for the events. And hey, it’s bumped their imagination settings way too high. This is what gives you such weird results. Those girls can hardly manage anything to begin with, so we can lower the settings even further. Having too many people gives them weird ideas, so we decrease the max party size. And then for the rock-paper-scissors and the race… How about we try making them compete over their number of magical candies? That’ll cause them to fight among themselves. And those red skeletons—why’d Fal stick these trash mobs in at the middle? You can have them at the beginning, come on. Also… Um, wow, there’s lots of stuff to do. We’ll just tweak this here, hide that there… As for Fal…”

“Pon…pon…”

“Not happening, huh? Oh well, gotta do it myself… Myself? For real? I’m doing all this? When there’s less than a week until game launch? When I already have my hands full, and feel tired despite being a magical girl? When I’m here thinking just how happy it would make me if I could stop thinking and just dive into bed? When I’ve started unconsciously talking to myself, saying negative stuff like I’ll kill you and Die?”

“Pon pon pon pon pon…”

“…I’ll just have an energy drink and think about it…”