Kneeling beside the driver, Zelda cups her hands around one of his and looks him warmly in the eyes.

"Hi, I'm Rose. It's okay, we're here to help."

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Spoiler text: (Highlight or hover over the text to view)
03:19, Today: Zelda rolled 4 successes using 6d10 with the World of Darkness nWoD system with a target of 8, rerolling 10s with rolls of 9,9,5,6,8,8.  Presence + Empathy to calm the driver and make him feel safe so he's more ready to talk.

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Which means I completely lost a Fate/Stay Night OC (for a campaign that died roughly around New Years, but still) that I put a lot of brainstorming and writing into; as in, I came up with my own Nasuverse Standard-Issue Special Snowflake Powers for him complete with internally consistent metaphysical underpinnings and everything.

'When a string of Child Disappearances leaves Austin in a state of fear, Nina Washburn is on the Hunt! But will she succeed when the Kidnappers become aware of her?"

If you have your char sheet only on mythweaver, please recreate it. :)

So If I understand this correctly, our choices boil down to hunting through the bus looking for the 'get home' button while the monsters close in, or take our chances with the bomb? Just making sure I've got this right.

And on a more relevant note, we should probably hash out what our characters did back in Texas.

My character sheet was mostly intact, and I've since finished it.

Or using the overly complicated ritual/procedure I posted three pages ago.

Should we? I don't really see why we need to.

I'm pretty sure Shirley's currently in the middle of doing so.

Can you run that idea by me again, just so we're clear on it?

I did some brainstorming and, supposing that we want the hypothetical bus-saving ritual to build as much as possible off of existing mechanics and to take some measure of effort, here's how I personally think would make the most sense for it to work:

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1. Zoe and Nina bond to Inari, thereby officially becoming part of the nakama.

2. One of us stands in each inside corner of the bus and the fifth stands in the exact center.

3. We abjure the bus as a teamwork action to suppress the taint within it, with Zelda as the primary actor so she can use her Practical Magic (and probably a buff or two for good measure) to ensure that we roll an exceptional success and all temporarily become banes to the Darkness, which is needed for the next step to work.

4. We ward the bus against the Darkness as a teamwork action with Shirley as the primary actor (since she has the best pool for that).

5. We roll Entering Darkness as a teamwork action to escape the Dark World (with Zelda as the primary actor since she has the best pool for that and I can resolve Steadfast in a pinch to turn it into an auto-success), with each of us spending a Wisp to seal the deal and take the bus and everyone in it with us.

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The symbolism that the above procedure works off of is as follows:

1. By having a five-member nakama positioned as described we'd be "casting the net" of the nakama Sympathy link over the bus in such a way as to fully encompass it and everyone inside.

2. Abjuration (of which warding is a derivative) is essentially the act of imposing your own soul upon an entity or area. By using it to thoroughly exclude the Darkness from the bus we could, by extension, be said to be imparting some of our Noble-ness upon it (and on everyone inside). By doing so in unison while the bus and passengers are encompassed by our mutual Sympathy we can symbolically impart that Sympathy to them as well.

3. The above framework having been established, we exit the Dark World as one. The bus and passengers, by being brought in such close metaphysical contact with us, count as part of that "one" and come along for the ride.

4. The Wisp expenditure during the jump is mostly just a tax for the fact that we're doing something impressive and unusual, but also signifies us Lighting everything up to make absolutely sure that it's all Noble-y enough at that moment for the ritual to work.

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...Incidentally, when I say "I did some brainstorming" I mean that the whole thing suddenly just came to me in the space of a few minutes.