Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku - Volume 15 - Chapter Aft

Afterword

This is the afterword for Magical Girl Raising Project: Breakdown parts 1 and 2, a project that took many years from start to conclusion. It’s been the fruit of a long serialization, with breaks taken along the way. To everyone who has been eagerly looking forward to this: I’m sorry for the wait. Please do enjoy it.

But still, I’m sure the majority will say, “‘Please enjoy it’? I’ve already read the book.” Since it’s called an afterword because it comes after the book.

But don’t you worry, there is still more after the afterword. The end-of-book fan pages that were also in part 1 feature a continuation of the magical-girl interviews, with even more volume this time. And those are also followed by evaluations from 7753 of the magical girls who appear in Breakdown. Please do take a look at 7753 as a professional, a side of her rarely seen in the main story.

And what’s more and more, there is one more thing related to the afterword. Those people who have been following the web serialization might know, but there is an online-exclusive afterword published in the Breakdown section of This Manga is Amazing! WEB. It’s the longest afterword in my history of afterwords. The information and such that I couldn’t put in the main story is there, so please do read that if you like.

And what’s more and more and more, recently I made a Twitter account. Aside from ramen and mahjong, Breakdown sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t come up. A little while ago I made a string of tweets related to Maiya, leading to some excessive work being thrust upon me, like, “You can write that much just about Maiya, so this will be no trouble for you.” Anyone who is interested, I would be happy if you would check out @asariendou.

Also, there is this afterword. You might think that what with having the online afterword and doing things on Twitter, I must have nothing to do here. I thought so, too. But I quickly reconsidered that.

Though I have done many things thus far, it’s not as if I’ve done everything I can. I figure there is still more. And so in this afterword I will touch on things I think I’ve still not spoken about. Saying “I think I’ve still not spoken about” is just in case I forgot that I mentioned it somewhere and have wound up repeating myself, but I will pray that doesn’t happen.

  The Great Magical Girl Athletic Meet: Beef Broth–Flavored Rice Balls Included

This is the event where Ragi met Clantail. It was originally a very small sort of thank-you-party-type event, but the one in charge of announcing the event gave it a strange name as a joke. And then that announcement caught the eye of the Archfiend Cram School graduates, who were starving for events, and it turned into a disaster. It was chaos: not enough food, not enough staff, too many participants, someone wanted by the law walking around over there.

Ragi, who was one of the guests, thought, This is no good, and so he worked to get the confusion under control. And since it was difficult for him on his own, he got help from three of the participants who had good sense, comparatively speaking: Clantail, a magical girl who loves ramen, and a magical girl whose personality changes when she’s on her lawn mower. They resolved all the problems.

  The Magic of the Sataborn Estate

A convenient spell is cast on the estate so that things come flying when you snap your fingers. When things come flying when you snap your fingers, a child’s prank can turn that into a big disaster (and Chelsea’s mischief actually did kick off a big disaster), so there has to be magic in the snap or it won’t activate.

Mr. Shepherdspie can still sort of use it, even though he has no confidence in his magic power at all, so it’s not like that much training is needed, but when your power is so weak, you tend not to get the item you want. Since Sataborn didn’t consider that his nephew would be in trouble when he used it, it seems it would be quite difficult for him to use.

  Magical Battlers

This is a card game that Touta and Yol both love. It’s not only very popular among elementary and middle schoolers, but also a fad among magical girls. They even say that the number of players continued to increase, thanks to a pretty girl showing up to cosplay at Magical Battlers tournaments.

Depending on the regulations, you might have to use expensive cards, so it’s known for being unkind to the wallets of children. It’s not uncommon for magical girls’ wallets to be similar to those of children, and sometimes they will go bankrupt for cards, or get caught with fake cards.

There has been a collaboration with Cutie Healer, and there are whispers of plausible-sounding rumors that there exists a limited-edition Archfiend Pam card that some Archfiend Cram School graduate made.

  Magical Girls’ Regular Clothing

One of Archfiend Pam’s teachings is that “a magical girl should not undo her transformation in front of people.” This refers to how, since the difference between magical-girl and human reflexes is as great as the division between heaven and earth, even if she thinks she could transform again, she might be killed before she could do it, so watch out. And it would expose her, and it would be bad if she were to be tracked. It’s a scary world.

Professional magical girls all keep in mind something like this idea, to a greater or lesser extent. And so the more professional one of them is, the more often she’ll transform from an outfit she can’t show to others. Leisure wear and pajamas are on the better side, and apparently some will be in their underwear or in tracksuits from middle school. There’s also the rumor that when a certain famous magical girl detransformed she was naked, but whether that is true or not remains unknown.

  Magical Gates

These are transfer devices used daily by people who work for the Magical Kingdom. They are extremely convenient devices that enable going from one gate to another in an instant, no matter how far apart they are.

But since the way they are used changes every time technicians develop a new version, or in the first place a different series of gates will look and be used completely differently, there are apparently a lot of magical girls who struggle with these systems. There was a short story where Filru had a really bad time trying to use them, and that is not because she’s bad with machines. There’s a special rule at the Department of Diplomacy that Archfiend Pam, who is truly incompetent with machines, is forbidden to use gates.

  Tepsekemei’s Parts

She can send off parts of herself to act independently. When the parts are away from her, if her main body gets wiped out for some reason, then the parts will return to the main body.

You might say doing all this is beyond becoming one with the wind to go anywhere she wants, but since Mei believes, My magic should be able to do this and she actually can do it, nobody can complain about it.

They say animal magical girls tend to be powerful, but there is also the theory that the reason for this is that they don’t have human common sense, so they don’t perceive crazy things as crazy.

  Children with No Magical Potential

The children of mages will generally become mages themselves, but rarely there are some who have no magical talent. If they are incompetent like Mr. Shepherdspie, then, well, it can work out somehow, and if they have magical-girl aptitude like Clarissa, then they can make a life for themselves in that direction.

If they lack even incompetent talent and can’t become magical girls, either, then you have something not very good for a reputable family. I will omit specifically what happens.

In common mage families, well, they can do decently enough, in the way of someone with no expectations of success. Since there are always nasty people who will demean them incessantly, it seems it’s not uncommon for them to live in the human world as humans.

  Chelsea Power

When she was straining against Francesca, the un-magical-girl-like remark, “The hell are you?” popped out of Dreamy Chelsea’s mouth. There is one reason that she panicked: She’d never before encountered a magical girl stronger than she was.

She can’t beat her mother in wrestling, but that’s due to experience, technique, and magic, and at the very least, in a pure test of power, Chelsea had never lost before. All her mother’s friends are also quite the lineup of fierce fighters, but she’s never lost to them, either.

That she can manage to have a shoving match against an incarnation base is incredible on its own, but Chelsea wasn’t aware of that. Her confidence in her strength, which she hadn’t even been aware she had, broke during that stage of the fight. Of course something un-magical-girl-like would pop out.

  Nephilia’s Life at School

It’s not unusual for magical girls who get on the track of freelance activity young to quit their studies early and ultimately live their lives without going to high school. Nephilia is a magical girl who got on the track of freelance activity young, but she is going to high school. Since it’s a university-oriented school, it’s hard to get into, and just keeping up with her studies takes quite a bit of effort.

Nephilia is busy to begin with, so why did she go to high school?

She likes nasty people—so, when you get down to it, she likes people. She loves school, it being a place where lots of people gather to live their lives. Also, she doesn’t want to make her parents worry, and, well, since schoolwork isn’t much different from memorizing laws, she went to high school.

The truth is that of the magical girls who went to that island, the most sociable one might be Nephilia.

  Mary the Artist

Aside from those who go freelance because of the agency, there are also people who do the work aiming for an official hiring contract.

Pastel Mary is the type who does have dreams for the future but is freelancing for money. Her dream, however, is not to make a living as a magical girl, but to make a living with art. And not just art, but pictures of the sheep that she loves. Her room is filled with pictures of sheep, and though her friends tell her it’s like the room of a psychopath, she still loves them so much.

To make it on just sheep pictures alone is pretty difficult. Actually, it’s crazy. Pastel Mary does know how society works, and so she’s accepted that making a living using magic that creates sheep from pictures is also in a sense making a living off drawing sheep, and she is working hard as a freelancer again today.

  Marguerite and Death Prayer

It’s been brought up in this story many times that Miss Marguerite is in charge of teaching at the Inspection Department. Death Prayer calls herself her partner, so where does she work?

The answer is accounting.

To those who think, Huh? An accountant is the partner to a teacher? Isn’t that funny? you’re entirely right. Death Prayer just decided that she’s her partner because she felt like it at the time. The staff at the Inspection Department can’t come down hard on accounting, so there is rarely anyone who will deny her proclamation. Marguerite had already quit Inspection, so she could deny it, but this sort of thing is kind of nostalgic for her, and it was too much hassle to shoot Death Prayer down every time, so she functionally ignored it and let it be.

Well, even saying she was in accounting, the Inspection Department never has enough hands, and people get sent out to all sorts of places, so maybe it’s not necessarily wrong.

  Love Me Archer

It was mentioned in this story that Nephilia took classes from a specialist in order to learn how to use a giant scythe. So as for Ren-Ren’s archery—she’s entirely self-taught.

Nephilia is actually the unique one here; most of the time a magical girl who possesses a special weapon as a part of her costume will be able to use it well even without education. It’s not like Nephilia couldn’t use the scythe, but she wanted to take it to the next level or two, and she sought the opinion of a specialist for that and got some education.

Ren-Ren has also practiced the bow on her own, but it wasn’t like she had nothing to base it on. She copied bow skills from manga and anime. It’s common for a magical girl to be able to recreate even an incredibly bizarre special technique, and normally this sort of study would never work, but it actually went well for her.

Ren-Ren sometimes did and sometimes didn’t use reference material for her various techniques in this book. While Love Me Ren-Ren is the messenger of love, when it comes to manga and anime, she loves action stories.

  The Bald Magical Girls

The bald magical girls who tried to raid the Management Department while Chief Ragi was out had the tables turned on them. The defense functionality of the Management Department will be a bit reduced when the master is out, but it still cannot be easily conquered.

Now, the truth is this scene isn’t inserted in chronological order. And some people might have thought, That felt sudden. That’s because it is.

I wrote that scene upon coming back from a fairly long break in serialization. It restarts from a scene you can read on its own, so that people who are like, “This is the first time I’ve read this in months” can slip right into it.

That background aside, those girls were sealed in for a few days until Chief Ragi came back, and upon his return, he gave them a full lecture before finally releasing them. However, if that would teach them a lesson, then they never would have tried extreme information theft to begin with. With this practice behind them, the girls are stronger, and they might yet attack the Management Department again.

  Magical Girl–Style Staff Arts

Although many people practice these, there is no head school, and their origin is unclear. I figure there was some Minmei Shobou–type episode, but there are no magical girls to talk about it. The general theory is that some magical girl with martial expertise created it.

  The Secret Techniques of the Inspection Department

That the ear-grabbing technique that isn’t supposed to leave the department is actually known on the outside is depicted in the short story “The Fairy of the Inspection Department.” There was no time to use it in the story of Limited, but the ace of the Inspection Department, Hana Gekokujou, can also use this technique.

She may have had an advantage in mock battles, since she made her opponents worry about just which set of ears they should grab. Just what is there in the position where her human ears should be? Or is there nothing? That’s a secret even Mana doesn’t know.

  Relics of the First Mage

They’re apparently dug up in quite a lot of different places. They’re generally broken.

They can be repaired with magic, but once you’ve repaired them, it’s difficult to restore the shape they took from before they were broken, so if there’s no business in using them, they’re often just left as they are. At the end of the day, the First Mage is the god of the Magical Kingdom, so part of the reason is that you can’t mess with these just because what God left behind is broken.

And now the page count is about to reach its limit. I am still brimming with the urge to write, but I think I will leave it here for today.

Thank you very much to Meru for submitting Dreamy Chelsea, Lapis Nyamuriinu for submitting Nephilia, Kujira Hebi for submitting Pastel Mary, Nottsuo for submitting Miss Marguerite, and DQR@N for submitting Love Me Ren-Ren. It’s thanks to all of you that I have been able to continue Breakdown until the end. They have all been cute, strong, and exceptional magical girls.

Thank you to everyone else who applied as well. You stimulated my muses quite a lot. They still continue to burn as fuel for my heart so I can do my best on Magical Girl Raising Project.

To all the people from the editing department who have guided me, and Corrections S-mura—or rather, my lifelong rival S-mura, who has been forced to clash opinions with me every month, thank you very much.

Marui-no, thank you very much for your wonderful illustrations. It becomes quite the job when you’re already busy with not only magical girls but also even human forms and mages. These convincing designs, and some more-than-convincing designs, have satisfied me so much, as a fan. The ones I personally like are Maiya and human Chelsea and also Mr. Shepherdspie. They just feel totally convincing.

And to all my readers, thank you very much for sticking with me for this long. Let us meet again in the continuation of this story, Cerulean Blue.