Battle Vixens! - 101

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Episode 101: 「Remedy」

On the way out of the meeting, with the decision made about the masks, Rowan indicated that he had something to speak to the two researchers about—possibly in private. They turned a corner in the hallway. "There's something I was wondering about," he said, particularly to Dr. Brand—or maybe more accurately Hephaestus, as she hadn't changed back yet. "For us, injuries and other problems don't seem carry between our forms, just exhaustion. Petra's burns from fighting those puppets disappeared when she changed back to Simon, and were able to heal even while he wasn't in that form. In Dawn's case, even cancer didn't carry over to her empowered form."
She said, "You want to know if the same is true in my case." He nodded. "It must be. I feel none of the usual ravages of age like this. And I had a papercut on my hand before, but—" she held out her left hand, palm-up, showing no cut.

"Uh-huh..." Ezekiel nodded. "So, just—hypothetically, I suppose—if someone was mortally wounded but still only mostly dead as of yet, you might be able to save their life by slapping a mask on them. Poof, fresh new body with powers, and most importantly, no injuries."
"That strikes me as an uncharacteristically irresponsible suggestion," Brand said to Rowan, "assuming that was your reason for asking."

"I'm not suggesting that it should become any kind of standard practice," he assured her. "But if someone has reason to be aligned with the VI—or one of its allies—and our overall goals, strongly enough that giving them powers poses no real risk? If their survival could be deemed important enough to warrant spending the resources?"
"I think I could agree with that," Dr. Bridges said. "Heph?"
"That's Dr. Brand, please. As long as we are already sending those things out, I suppose you could be afforded the discretion to determine when the use of one is necessary. We will discuss it further, and you will find out our decision later," she said.

Rowan kept a bag by her side; it included some medical and other basic supplies, a couple of water bottles. She got one of the latter out first, popping it open and pushing the water out into a dome around the three of them that obscured them from view. Then she got one other thing out while Petra was busy being confused as to how that first thing was supposed to help: A white half-face fox mask with some yellow and red paint across it, which had appeared in her office's mailbox that morning.

Emergency situations that required extreme, one-time solutions really weren't supposed to pop up this soon after they were imagined and prepared for. It could be manipulation by a certain powerful entity, or plain bad luck, or maybe things were just getting worse almost too fast for everyone to keep up. This was not her usual flavor of information management; it was a lie that someone else—maybe several people—would have to participate in along with her. But...it would save a life, and hopefully more than just the one. Or, at least that was the idea anyway.

Fixing the mask onto Karis's face resulted in a bright, reddish glow spreading from there across her body briefly. She gasped sharply, but then exhaled much more normally, and Rowan's water-oriented senses could immediately pick up the fact that all of the internal injuries were very abruptly gone. She didn't change in appearance very much, seemingly only gaining fox ears and a tail in the same deep brown color as her hair. A less-expected occurence was the sudden appearance of another person standing over the two of them, opposite Petra's position: A short, white-haired fox-girl with one red and one yellow eye, wearing a red-and-black metal gauntlet with two large red gems fixed in it over most of her right arm, bandages halfway up her left leg, a red skirt, a collar and a long black coat—and holding a sheathed sword in her left hand.

She seemed to just blur into view in that position, and Rowan's first reaction to this was to stand up and point her sword at the stranger, immediately on guard. Her voice came out in a soft, high, incoherent "aah" sound and she backed up, raising her hands over her head in a clear 'please-don't-attack-me' signal, dropping the sword which apparently resulted in it turning into a brief shimmer of red light and disappearing rather than just hitting the floor.

"Whoa, hey, hold up! That's just me," Karis said, sitting up quickly (now that Rowan wasn't on top of her), inadvertently letting the half-mask fall off of her face and land on her lap in the process. "Uh—sort of, anyway. So, what was...I mean, how am I..?"

---

Magus felt some hands on both sides of the injured shoulder, and heard Plus's voice from that direction. "I got it Igotit, sorry!" At about the same time, her ears picked up Minus mumbling from farther away: "I was supposed to keep you from getting hurt..." The pain eased off, and she took a few sharp breaths in and out, slowly managing to regain control over the strange muscle contractions. There had been the sound of Light saying something incomprehensible and a brief roar of thunder just before that, and now there was no noise of that fused monster running around or screeching beyond the range of human hearing—so that was good.

"GaaAAgh," she coughed a couple of times, feeling like some kind of thick phlegm was coming out, and then her breathing went back to normal. "What was that!?"

"Uh, your body was acting kinda like it had some sort of venom in it?—" "—but there wasn't anything there, I mean, at least not that I could—" "—wait wait, some black mist came out just now, so it must've been—" "—like the dragon, except...?"
"That's going a little too fast for the rest of us," Light said, coming up toward them. "Are you okay?" she gave the mage vixen a concerned look, offering a hand to help her up.

"Y-yeah, I guess.." After a brief hesitation she took it, her legs shaking a bit not from anything physically wrong, but just from the thought of how close she'd come to getting possibly actually killed by her own dumb plan.

"It's—" "—poisonous. Or, it acts like poison sometimes?" Gemma tried to explain. "If any of the, stuff those things are made of gets inside a person. Like when the dragon breathes a bunch of it, that time I got some of it in me?—" "—So, the stinger also injects it like poison. But, even though it went into the blood—" "—it still just came out of her mouth. But it was acting like, like a neurotoxin I guess—" "—she didn't have control over her muscles for a second or two. If there'd been more, if it had gotten a solid hit on any of us..!" Both of her were crying again, obviously feeling a bit panicky at the thought of all of this.
"Have you, heard of anything like this?" Light asked Magus, looking a little embarrassed that she hadn't made an effort to even know what randos writing a wiki knew about her own enemy.
"Uhh, s-sort of? It's actually pretty rare for the, tiger scorpion to land a hit with its tail at all, and um..when it has, the victim didn't really...s-s-stick around long enough to..." Magus took a shaky breath in and out. "S-sorry, I can't st-stop shaking for some reason..."

"You had a really close call."
"Y-you've had plenty of those! Right?"
"Yes, but.." Light exhaled a sort of half-sigh, like something unpleasant was just now occurring to her. "Those of us who she gave powers to, it isn't just physical superpowers and magic. It's like..we're psychologically hardened or something, so being nearly killed over and over again doesn't affect us anywhere near as much as it should."
"Y-yeah," Plus nodded. "I think I'd be crumpled up in a little ball in a corner somewhere by now otherwise...."

"Point being, we have an unfair advantage when it comes to this." She shook her head, looking disappointed in herself. "I didn't even think about that, sorry."
"That's okay..." Magus took a slow, deep breath, willing herself calmer. Advantage or not, she couldn't just stand here being useless all day. "I, I chose to do this anyway. 'Cause it's important. I mean, way more important than anything else I was gonna do with my life, as long as I don't do something stupid like that again and get myself killed for real."

"Teleporting away was pretty smart, though..?"
"I-I mean, maybe, but like, putting up a shield would've been better. Or just turning and running, or yelling for one of you to help? I probably wouldn't have gotten hit at all."

She winced after a moment, suddenly feeling sore and heavy. "..Aaugh, adrenaline's wearing off now. I think I blew through my whole stamina bar twice or something."

Light nodded. "Okay, come on, let's get you inside to rest." She put a hand on Magus's shoulder, starting to lead her toward the entrance to the nearest building. "No good having you collapse on the sidewalk out here. Are you gonna be okay, Gemma?"
She seemed surprised to have been addressed suddenly, both bodies snapping to attention. "Huh—?" "—Oh, uh—y-yeah, I guess, eventually.—" "—Heh heh," she semi-laughed nervously. "I've been in way worse; at least my idea for getting away worked."

"Good. There's, one other thing I just remembered I wanted to ask you about," Light said. "Nothing bad. If you don't mind coming in too?"
"Oh, uuh—" "—sure! No problem." She combined back into one body, following the two of them.

---

Dawn just stood there staring at the gargantuan bat-like monster for a long several seconds, ignoring Cynthia's increasingly worried questions and steadily freezing the air around her. Then she suddenly gasped for air, like she hadn't been breathing that entire time, and screamed like something was stabbing her straight through the eyes. This made everyone jump, and also got the beast's attention, as it seemed to suddenly find her an especially attractive target, leaning down toward her against its bindings.

While Sam quickly went to pull the steel wire taut to hold it in place for as long as possible, the scream terminated into Dawn gasping and exhaling, faster and faster, like she no longer understood how to get the air all the way to her lungs to breathe it—still staring wide-eyed up at the thing.

Cynthia tried to get closer, shivering in the cold. "Hey, c'mon, t-talk to me! What's wrong with you!?"

Warp glanced swiftly around at everyone, and then teleported directly in front of Dawn, hand raised, and slapped it across her face—lightly enough not to injure, but hard enough for her to feel it, her head turning a couple of inches to one side from the momentum and her eyes half-closing in a wince. Then, hands gripping Dawn's shoulders hard: "Breathe!" She gasped much longer then, maybe not because she comprehended the word, but because the brief pain had forced her back into reality enough to obey her own body's basic survival instincts. "That's it." Warp loosened her grip, but stayed close, making sure her head took up most of Dawn's view instead of the giant bat-stork thing. "In, out. Slow." Dawn obeyed this command, letting out an incoherent sobbing noise each time. She wasn't exactly calm, but she stopped making the air near her feel like the arctic. "Now I'll ask: What is wrong?"

"This is the same variant that killed Cynthia before!" Zeno said, watching it snap several of its bonds, including breaking one of the trees supporting them in half at this point. "Hey, eyes on me, buddy!" She sent several arrows particularly toward the thing's eyes, making it screech and tumble in her direction as planned while it freed itself the rest of the way, and finally she focused her earlier channeling into creating the biggest, widest shield she could for it to rake its claws against on its way into the air. "Did nobody warn anyone about the possibility of severe PTSD!?"

Warp guided Dawn several steps backwards, and down to a sitting position, all while she continued to sob and mutter something incoherent about protecting someone. "Either way, she's outta the fight for now. I'll keep her steady, you go break that thing, fire girl." She pointed back at the now-airborne monster.
"Uh—okay." Cynthia showed a rare moment of uncertainty at finding out that something just like this had killed her before—even though she didn't remember any of that—but turned around to face it, determined to fight all the same. "I'm on it!"

---

Rowan dismissed her weapon, whispering; "Long story short: That mask acted as a 'key' the same way our phrases do, and the fact we have something like that is an extremely high-security secret. As far as anyone else is concerned, you are a 'normal' vixen and simply hid it from the VI and everyone else until now. Whether you told your husband I'll leave you two to decide. Understood?"

"Uh, sure I guess? H-hey!" Karis was interrupted by Simon immediately picking her up into a hug, hopping and spinning her around in the air briefly before setting her down again.
"You're okay, you're okay!"
"Heheh, yes, I'm okay now, apparently." Rowan quickly retrieved the mask from under them before it could be stepped on, temporarily stowing it back in the bag. It also wouldn't be good if she accidentally put it on and changed back while not in the presence of someone who could then prevent her human body from dying. Then she let go of the dome of water at this point, carefully pushing it out and down onto the ground so it wouldn't soak the three (or four?) of them. "Bleah, your face is wet—put me down, you goof!"

Petra hadn't cried before, but now the tears were flowing pretty freely down. "I really, really thought I was going to lose you this time. Of all the beautiful things I've ever created, possessed, or seen, the only one that's truly priceless."
"I'm glad to hear you feel that way, dear." She ruffled Petra's hair gently.

Rowan cleared her throat, interrupting their moment somewhat. "Could you explain what you mean about this body being 'just you'?" she said, gesturing. Since she'd let go of her sword, the fox-girl had dropped her arms to the sides and sort of stood passively watching them, not doing anything.
"Oh, uh—sorta? I can see through her eyes, and like feel all the rest of her body's senses too. And I think maybe I can.." At some invisible prompting, the fox-girl vanished in a blur-like motion and reappeared next to Karis. "Yeah. And I can 'command' her to do things, but it's not like I have direct control—so, not exactly the way Gemma works, I guess? Hmn." The girl put out her right hand, placing the gauntlet on Karis's shoulder for a moment; a red gem set into the forearm glowed faintly for a second. "I'm..uninjured? Good to know, but wh..wait. Wait wait, you can heal, can't you?" she said to the other body, which dropped her arm back to the side but didn't otherwise respond. "With that mecha-arm thing, yeeaah. People usually get powers based on what they 'want the most', right? So that would make sense, given my condition half a minute ago."

"I suppose so," Rowan said. "So you can teleport her and 'command' her?"
"Uh, no, it's not really teleportation. More like I can dismiss her or call her out at will," Karis said, demonstrating this by having the body disappear, then appear again after a second or so. "Neat!"

She crossed her arms, looking at the 'extra body' for a second or two as if trying to understand everything she was experiencing through it. "...Wait, no, I think I get it. You're a Stand, aren't you!?"

"A what." Rowan had no idea what she meant by that.
"You know, a Stand! It's a—oh wow, I don't actually know how to explain this one concisely.."
"It may have to wait, then; we still have an active attack to handle elsewhere," Rowan said, taking out her phone. "Speaking of which."

"Sitrep, everyone?"

A loud spike of noise cut her last syllable or so off. "Boss, glad to hear from you! Tora got hit," Hugo said. "Nothing life-threatening, um, I think, but—a-anyway we're down one fighter." Another crash of noise came through. "Please tell me you and the brick are on your way!"
"'The brick'!?" Petra repeated, exaggerating her irritation at this nickname.
"We are now," Rowan said, muting the call and gesturing for the two-tailed vixen to follow. "You should probably come with us for the moment—so you'll have time to get your story straight," she added to Karis under her breath.
"'Kay."

---

The giant bat swooped down at Zeno, who ran to one side, forcing it to veer away from a building to chase her. Sam threw her knife in front of it, wire wrapped around the hilt, and pulled it back to herself to loop it around one of the thing's legs, catching the weapon in her left hand while holding the other end of the wire in her right, pulling back hard enough to bend the limb backward in a way that would've broken it on any normal creature.

Cynthia focused this entire time, 'channeling', and with a relatively stationary target she now used the stored energy to throw out a sphere of fire about half her height in diameter that erupted into a blinding explosion as soon as it made contact. The monster screeched, flapping and twisting itself around in her direction, scraping itself free of the wire and and diving hard enough to skid across the ground toward her. She felt a sort of 'pull' from behind and allowed it to take effect, Warp teleporting her to behind the thing and a fair distance off, to where Nico was.

Zeno stopped, catching her breath during the explosion, then turned and rapid-fired arrows at the monster while it stood up, Warp moving the few missed shots to hit it almost square in the eyes. It turned, standing on one leg and raking the other one down at her, which she backflipped away from, leaving behind a light-shield for good measure. Sam twisted wire up around the standing leg and yanked hard, pulling along with its momentum from the other leg's swing to tip it over onto its side, flailing its wings wildly the whole way down.

"Keep breathing." Warp knelt next to Dawn, keeping a hand gripped gently on her shoulder—even though it felt like holding onto an ice sculpture. "Slow, deep. It's not just you and her this time, and I'll make sure that thing won't get us." She whimpered something half-incoherent that sounded sort of like an apology. "Not your fault. Seeing it again must've brought back some awful memories, eh? You're crying icicles over there." Dawn sort of half-gasped and let out a nervous, confused giggle, then sniffed somewhat normally. "That's it. You're going to get better, just be patient with yourself."

Sam tried braiding some wire together for strength and throwing it up over the big bird, twisting it around the still-standing base of a lamppost on the other end before pulling it taut. Several more braided strands like this went up in succession, with her own hands holding on to the other side and pulling down to keep the flailing beast from getting free. Cynthia sent more fire from her hands, tossing it up so it fell down across the thing's body, burning it into an eruption of more mist. Nico's trees tossed fruits from either side, while she took the opporutnity to plant some new, sturdier ones spaced out to help trap the monster again. Zeno kept her distance, waiting for it to free itself so she could get its attention again.

When it burst free, taking off into the air, they were ready. Light-arrows landed across its body, and when it twisted and dove at Zeno she ran, leaned back and skidded along the ground under Sam's trap, and the big bat netted itself between the trees once again. Cynthia wove fire out from her hands onto one end of the net, running it across the length of it to heat it up. The fire damaged the trees, but didn't quite destroy them, and the heat along with the wires cutting into the big bat's body had it spewing black mist and screeching in agony and rage. It tried to land on Sam when it broke free this time, and Warp moved her out of the way and out of the thing's view.

---

"Let's see—the most logical way to explain what everyone else has saw is this: The Giver offered you power, maybe the same time as me, but you chose not to ever actually take it," Petra said. "Perhaps you told Rowan about it in private at some point, but you weren't sure how to tell me, so you didn't."
"Mmh, wouldn't wanna steal your thunder," Karis nodded, agreeing. "I can easily say I'd have some qualms with taking power from a being with her personality, even for as little as we knew of it at that time. So what just happened was Rowan convincing me to say the thing and take it anyway, just to keep myself alive, I guess?"
"That's what I was thinking."

"What're we up against here?" Rowan interjected; he was back in human form to drive more comfortably.
"Ah, yes, right," Petra nodded. "It's shaped a bit like a giant crocodile, with a very long mouth, huge tail with actual blades at the end, but six legs instead of four, all ending in these clawed-hand-things. Not quite as tall as your average car, but more resilient than most of 'em that size, and fast. Very, very fast." She glanced at Karis. "Now, I know what you're thinking."
"Well, I've got ears. Much bigger than usual, in fact," she said, pointing at one of them. "And I can at least do something about Tora's injury."
Petra sighed. "I know better than to try to stop you, but—please, at least be careful. We don't have another spare body to give you if you get hurt. Just, try not to ruin everything at this point."

"Oh, please, I'm nowhere near that efficient. It'd take me at least a week to ruin even half of everything," she said. "Anyway, you don't need to worry. I'll keep my distance and have my Stand do all the hard work."

"Have I mentioned the thing we're up against is fast?"

"Almost there, about to hit the brakes," Rowan said. "Hold on." There was about enough time for the two of them to lean back and grab onto their seats before the inertia of the sudden braking hit, making their seatbelts pull taut against the relative forward motion. Once they were around fifteen miles per hour, Petra gave Karis a brief glance and nod, undid her seatbelt, and dove out the door. Karis just shook her head, waiting for the car to come to a complete stop before getting out herself, at about the same time as Rowan.

Hugo threw a wave of noise, driving the beast back, ran in and grabbed Tora, all but tossing her over her back. "Grab on!"
"Gnngh, got it." Tora held on awkwardly with both arms, leaving Hugo's left arm mostly free to raise her shield against the thing's sudden charge, which made her stumble back a couple of steps. Fay ran in then, placing an explosion between the monster and the other two vixens and successfully grabbing its attention. It skittered close, raising itself up on its hindmost two legs and using the other two to swipe and grab at her. She parried with her staff, letting the claws knock it aside or grab it away occasionally only to re-form it, placing explosions strategically to briefly secure certain angles of attack and give herself room to back away and breathe.

Its tail had caught Tora's left leg on her way to leap out of its range, cutting a deep gash right along it. So much for their armor; she wasn't going to do much walking, much less running and jumping, in that state. "Hey, get the phone outta my pocket, open the comms, will ya?" Hugo could feel some blood wetting her right shoulder, but wasn't one to complain about that sort of thing.

"Hrnngh." Tora grunted, pushing through the pain to comply with the request. They picked up Rowan's voice asking after the situation just before Hugo threw a wave of noise at the beast to knock it aside before it could corner Fay.

"Boss, glad to hear from you! Tora got hit," Hugo said. "Nothing life-threatening, um, I think, but—a-anyway we're down one fighter." The thing turned on her, skittering up almost too fast for her to form her shield, and she amplified the noise of its claws raking across it into a high screech of feedback, twisting that into a pressure wave to push it back again. "Please tell me you and the brick are on your way!"

Tora sniggered at Petra's reaction to the nickname. She wasn't kidding about being an adrenaline junkie, apparently. She pushed the phone back into Hugo's pocket and then used the same hand to throw one of her claws at their opponent. By now Fay had caught her breath just enough to move back in and start her dance of death with the thing again.

This time, it used its hind and middle legs to walk, snapping at her with its big, wide mouth and advancing faster with more calculated-seeming swipes. She still managed to keep up, partially thanks to Hugo still throwing noise at it periodically, but she was obviously tiring out, and that thing seemed to know, refusing to be distracted into coming after Hugo again.

"..Gonna haveta let you down," Hugo said quickly, kneeling. Tora let go and slid off onto the ground, wincing and flinching from the slightest bit of weight hitting the injured leg for a second along the way. Then she raised her shield and charged, bashing the big six-legged gator across the side to knock it over and force it to change its target of attention. Fay knelt forward, panting heavily down at the ground and supporting herself with both hands on her staff.

It practically cartwheeled with the momentum from the shield hitting it, twisting near-instantly back at Hugo and clawing around the outer edges of her shield. She backed up quickly, not really able to adjust her position fast enough to keep up with its movements, and threw more noise back at it to try and push it away. She wasn't particularly feeling exhausted yet, but didn't like her chances if that thing decided to stop trying to push through and go around instead.

The sense of relief was immediate and immense when the noise of a car braking came in from one side, signalling the arrival of reinforcements. Within a second or two, a wall of concrete suddenly encircled the beast, Petra running into view while Hugo gracefully staggered backward several steps, realizing the arm she'd been holding her shield with was awfully sore all of a sudden. An unfamiliar vixen ran up from behind, toward Tora.

The monster skittered over the wall, starting off going in Hugo's direction but quickly interrupted by Petra tossing the sheath off of her sword to smack it across the muzzle. It twisted, closing the distance to her in an instant on four legs with the other two rasied to attack. She caught both on her sword, brought a spike of earth up through its body to pin it, and backed off while it struggled free of that.

Rowan also arrived. "She's friendly," she informed Tora bluntly, pulling into the space to one side of Petra and stabbing her blade into the beast's side, getting its attention and then dodging/blocking its four arms and one mouth's worth of retaliatory strikes with what looked to be an effortless grace, holding so much of its attention that Petra was able to slash right across its side unimpeded.

"You bet she is!" another voice said, someone standing next to the car nearby. Hugo sort of squinted her eyes after turning to look that direction, unsure if she was seeing what was there quite right. Was that...Simon's wife, with fox ears? Meanwhile, the stranger placed a metallic hand against Tora's wound, making the cut glow bright red and begin to seal itself up. "Say hello to Remedy!"

---

There are multiple songs titled "Remedy", but I have in mind the one by The Black Crowes. Also, full disclosure: I have only incidental and brief wiki glancing knowledge of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, but Karis is supposed to be a huge fan and therefore an expert on it. Sorry if I commit any critical research failures with this, it's just the kind of risk an author takes in writing a character who knows something he or she doesn't.

Battle Vixens - Bonus Post

Hey, so, uh, this is kind of an unusual post. It's a celebration of sorts for Battle Vixens reaching episode 100(!). However, rather than being a part of the story, it's just a bunch of background information, behind-the-scenes thinking about how the story might be adapted into other media, and other nonsense like that. It's extremely self-indulgent to talk publicly about all of this, and I appreciate not everyone will care about it. If you just want to read the story, Episode 100 is posting concurrently to this, and the link to it is here: https://whatevrtgcaptions.blogspot.com/2022/03/battle-vixens-100.html

 

Also, here at the top I'll put a list of the topics that are below so you can just ctrl+f to the ones you are interested in. If I think of other things to put in here, I may add more sections later and link back to this post rather than making a brand new one for that, since I don't want to clutter the update list with too many things that aren't actually narrative in nature.

And, in case it isn't obvious, this includes a number of spoilers for the events prior to Episode 100.

1: Stat Charts

2: "The Show"

3: "The Video Game"

1: Stat Charts

I wanted a sort of internal reference for myself to keep straight what powers different vixens had, at what level—basically, their strengths and weaknesses. What I went with was finding an online radar chart maker, coming up with a selection of "stats" that each vixen might have in varying quantities, and making a radar chart for everyone who'd been established in the story that far. I've continued to make them somewhat intermittently, and unfortunately the radar chart maker I used at first, which produced circular charts that I liked better, vanished off the face of the internet and I had to use a one that I don't like the look of quite as much for the later ones.

Before I show the images themselves, I'll try and explain what they're all about. Basically, I thought to myself that each vixen should have around 40 "points" to distribute to the various stats, with "weaker" ones having a few or several less and "stronger" ones having more than that. Something to keep in mind, though, is that these are all very much "loose guidelines" rather than hard-and-fast, absolute statistics. The goal was to help me remember what each vixen was supposed to be really good at, and what her weaknesses are. Also, the numbers completely fail to tell the whole story. I'll point out a few specifics as we go, but since each vixen's powers are fundamentally different from the others', a particular stat being high or low may have a somewhat different meaning.

Anyway, here are the stats I went with:

Stamina: The name is fairly self-explanatory; a vixen's stamina stat indicates how much she can use her powers before starting to become exhausted. That includes both running around and fighting, and using magic. The main nuance to this is that each vixen has a particular way of replenishing stamina, while this stat only indicates how long she'd last before collapsing if not replenishing any at all. 0 stamina (which isn't the case for anyone) would indicate an ordinary, average human's capacity to do the kind of physical feats most vixens sort of take for granted mid-fight.

Speed: This stat encompasses both the ability to physically move fast, and speed of perception/reaction to the environment. 0 speed is a normal human's typical reaction and movement time, so basically every vixen has some degree of super-speed, but some have much more than others.

Strength: A vixen's physical strength, which is actually being bolstered by magic rather than being entirely based on her physical muscle mass. A 0 in strength would indicate a vixen being no stronger than her human form is.

Magic (Power): This is a vixen's "maximum power output" in magic, the meaning of which varies greatly with what her magic can actually do. This is simplest to explain for "elemental" vixens like Light, Ning, Rowan, etc., where a low magic power means they can't throw around much "weight" in that element, and a high magic power means they can easily produce a highly concentrated burst or area-filling wall of it at will. Expending more of one's magic power capacity naturally costs more stamina, of course, and trying to "push" past one's usual limits is extremely taxing.

Magic (Control): This is a measurement of how well a vixen can make her magic do exactly what she wants. Similar to power, what this means exactly depends on the vixens, but for "elemental" vixens, high control allows her to make the element dance and spiral around at will, while especially low control (and especially if paired with high power) may mean that her element tends to lash out erratically and may even be a danger to her allies.

Technique: Nearly every vixen comes with a weapon; this stat measures how good she is at "mundane fighting," both with the weapon and just in general. This stat is somewhat unique in that a vixen with low "natural" technique can still get really good at handling her weapon/herself in a fight just from ordinary training and battle experience. In that respect, technique sort of measures both what level of weapon and/or fighting proficiency a vixen gets "for free" as part of her powerset, and "talent" for learning to fight even better.

Defense: Most vixens actually have 0 defense, which indicates that they are just as physically vulnerable to all kinds of attack as any unpowered human. Basically, a vixen only gets some "points" in defense if it's part of her specific powerset, and it's a measurement of how well she could take blunt-force trauma or a bullet. Even a fairly low value, as long as it's nonzero, indicates that a vixen is particularly tough. The caveat with defense is that magic of all kinds (including vixens' "magic" weapons) tends to pierce it, although a high-defense vixen will still be hurt less by magic than one with low or zero defense.

I'll go through the list now, and try to explain or make a note of any special features along the way. Most vixens have at least one "prime" stat which she excels at, and some have a "dump" stat while others are a bit more balanced. In many cases there are multiple "versions" of each vixen, including the version of her powers she gets while boosted by amp, which tend to add up to around twice as many "points" as her normal self.

Light:

Light's powers in particular have grown throughout the story so far, so I have three different stat charts for her without even counting the "boosted" one. Here's the first:

For the most part, Light's stats are balanced, except that she has very low stamina and particularly excels in speed. Light usually makes up for her low stamina by constantly absorbing ambient light to recover, but she's still easier to exhaust than most other vixens even in broad, cloudless daylight. She also has pretty high control over her magic, which in her case means high-precision illusions and free manipulation of ambient light in general. The events of "Episode 46: The Explanation" made her a little bit more powerful, shoring up her weak point and boosting her speed and magic a little more:

After that, Light "grew" more substantially in "Episode 82: Changes", gaining a number of further enhancements. I think she's actually been somewhere between the last chart and the following one from after that event for a day or two in-story, but I didn't particularly track it:

Finally, here's Light's "boosted" or "amplified" stats:

As her power grows, and especially in boosted form, it's even clearer where Light's "stat focus" and "weaknesses" are; notably, her strength doesn't go up much from its initial state at all, while her speed just keeps on increasing.

Amp:

A stat chart for Amp is kind of meaningless since she's a non-combatant, but I felt like making one anyway:

The total of 40 listed on the bottom right isn't actually correct; her defense is listed at a ridiculous "100" because neither other vixens nor the black mist monsters can actually hurt her at all. Beyond that, she has "unlimited" stamina and ultra-high magic power and control, more or less.

Ning:

Ning started out with the severe weakness of ultra-high magic power but abysmally low control, which caused her to shoot electricity all over the place without meaning to. Aside from that, she got a little bit of defense in her powerset, and emphasizes strength slightly while still being moderately good in speed. And her stamina isn't quite as bad as Light's.

In the events of "Episode 21: Sheathing the Sword", Light was able to "tune" Ning's powerset a bit, granting her more control at the expense of slightly lower power. Her stat total technically goes up by one as a result, but this is still pretty much a lateral change rather than a power growth like what happened with Light. The end result is a fairly balanced stat spread, apart from her powers still only granting her a tiny bit of extra defense.

Even though Ning has been boosted in-story, and I have stat charts for the boosted form of one vixen who hasn't yet, I don't have a chart for a "boosted" Ning. This is a good example of how inconsistently I've bothered to make them. I imagine she gets a pretty big boost in speed, strength, and magic power, a moderate gain in control (what with the ability to "jump around" as electricity), and maybe slightly higher defense?

Gemma:

Of course, Gemma gets two stat charts because of her two bodies. Overall, her "dump stat" is magic power and her "prime stat" is magic control. Gemma's powers are all about having extremely precise control over all of the "imitation" magic she uses. Apart from that, Plus and Minus have "opposite" stats in strength and speed, with Plus being a little faster and Minus being a little stronger.

 

Gemma also has her combined form, which gives her better physical stats than either body individually along with slightly more magic power.

However, all three of these charts are Gemma's "initial" stats; I think her power has probably gone up some points in-story since when these were drawn up. Also, while Gemma's "natural" defense stat is 0, she can use her imitation of Rory's power to pump magic into her defense and effectively go up to maybe a 2 or 3.

I also made charts for her two separate bodies' "boosted" stats, but not for the combined one; I imagine it's similar to how the regular combined form incorporates extra power from each of its parts, though.

Her physical stats don't go up much, but her control becomes even more ridiculous and is paired with a level of power that the original users of the powers she's imitating mostly don't have in an "unboosted" state. There's still some sense in which she'll never be "as good" as the original owners of the powers at using them on an individual basis, but she obviously makes up for it by mixing and matching the various different powers to do things they couldn't do in isolation.

Rory:

Of course, Rory is unique in that she can't use her magic directly to attack, but instead it gets "rebalanced" into all of her other stats, or else into things that the stats don't even account for (like "magic resistance", or even "lightning resistance" as seen when fighting the electro-worm).

Her weak stats are speed and technique, but even those can be shored up somewhat by her power if she so chooses. Aside from that, her best stats are defense, stamina, and strength, even before she does anything to particularly enhance them. All of this is emphasized even more by her "boosted" form:

Clark:

Clark's stats are extremely magic-focused, although her expression of magic is all "physically expressed". That is, she has to produce physical string and throw it around, or else use physical touch to heal someone.Her physical stats are all fairly bad, especially strength. Things change a bit after she gains the Puppeteer's power on top of her original one, though.

The "new and improved" Clark gets very high technique because her "weapons" include both the string/needle bulb and her puppets, both of which she has a pretty decent level of control over. Her speed and magic stats all go up a bit, too.

There's also Clark's "boosted" form, although the chart I have for that is from before she gained a "second power", so this might be outdated and slightly underestimate her current level of power while boosted.

Quinn:

This is the only "fusion" I've made a chart for so far, while sort of mentally "prototyping" how fusion would affect vixens' powers. Since Quinn only "exists" for the fully-boosted versions of Clark and Rory, she pretty much gets all of both of their strengths, leaving just her speed a bit lacking (but, of course, Rory's power lets her buff that quite a lot at will).

Rowan:

Rowan's prime stat is, and has always, been, technique. She started out with a "stolen" and therefore incomplete power, leaving her with relatively low magic capabilities.

After gaining the full use of her powers, Rowan became slightly faster and "fully realized" her potential in technique, but primarily made gains in magic. She focuses a bit more on control than power.

The focus on technique and magic is even more emphasized in Rowan's "boosted" form. I don't have a stat chart for the slight gains she made in "Episode 86: Ain't No Rest for the Wicked", but they're probably roughly in that direction too.

Dawn:

The chart I have for Dawn reflects her powers with the "stolen" fire powers included; she's presumably a bit weaker than this now that Cynthia's powers aren't with her anymore.

Either way, she gets high marks in strength, technique, and power, a tiny bit of defense, and a kind of overall balanced stat spread otherwise.

Cynthia:

 

Cynthia's focus is on magic power, and her control isn't bad either. Her physical stats aren't great and she gets no defense, but her technique isn't actually too bad. It just pales in comparison to Rowan's, and to some degree, actually making use of her technique level requires her to actually try to do so.

Petra:

You might notice the name in this chart is "Earth", because I made it when I was still first thinking up the character and hadn't even thought up Simon's name yet, much less the "superhero identity" of Petra. She has very balanced stats, with somewhat of a focus on strength and overall magic, but also gets pretty decent defense. Notably, her stamina isn't all that high, but she has the added advantage of regaining energy just by being firmly planted on solid ground, which sort of combines something like Light's constant regeneration with a higher capacity so that she's especially difficult to tire out.

I made a chart for how I thought her powers might look if boosted, but since it hasn't happened in-story I'm a little hesitant to post it. It might be not entirely accurate if I change my mind about something.

Sam:

Similar to Petra, this chart uses a "work in progress" name since I hadn't fully fleshed out the character yet when I made it.

Sam's prime stat is defense, but her physical stats otherwise suffer quite a bit. She gets pretty good stamina and magic, and not horrific technique. The stats don't tell the whole story, what with her having already been a seasoned soldier before gaining her powers, which bolsters her "effective" technique a bit beyond what her powers would naturally provide.

I'm actually not sure if both Sam's and Rory's defense being listed as the same number (10) is entirely accurate; her body is kind of literally made of steel and can take bullets no problem. A number like 12 or 13 might honestly be more correct. I also think in-story I've written her as being a little stronger than only a 3 would imply; I guess to be specific I imagine her physical strength to be at least higher than Light's was at the start of the story. But maybe keeping a struggling monster bound up in wire is actually more up to her magic capability than her physical strength.

Puppeteer:

I made a chart for Tobias, too.

Note that her stats are out of 20 like most "boosted" vixens, because swallowing up a lot of other people's powers made her extremely powerful even without any enhancement. Her physical stats are terrible, but she makes up for it by never directly confronting anyone and using puppets instead. Her stamina, magic, and technique are all ridiculously high, indicating her ability to control multiple vixen-puppets with fairly strong powers of their own simultaneously with extremely high precision—and to not get tired from a protracted fight. Zero defense is her Achilles' heel, and what she was so keen to take Rory's power in particular to make up for. She actually would've been equally happy to take Sam's power instead, if she'd known about it before the very hour of her death.

The gains from the other powers are stunted somewhat by their being "stolen"; if Clark had chosen to take the "full extent" of the Puppeteer and everyone else's powers instead of bringing them back to life, her stat total would've probably gone up into the hundreds, with magic stats around 40-50 or so, since she already had very high magic stats to begin with.

Magus:

"Artificial" vixens generally have weaker powers than "normal" ones, and I wanted to try to quantify that a bit for myself via lower stat values. The result so far is that each one kind of focuses heavily on one or two stats, largely to the expense of the rest of them.

Magus has very high magic power, but her control is kind of hard to put a number on. In the sense of making an element go and do some very precise thing that she wants, well, she can't—her spells each only do exactly one thing. However, she can invent spells on the fly, and gets quite a bit of versatility out of that which normal vixens with more "focused" powers usually don't have. The price of all this magic capability, of course, is that her physical stats absolutely suck. Her mid-high stamina is nice, but she has a bad habit of casting high-power spells that burn through it fast.

Hephaestus:

Dr. Brand's "vixen alter ego" isn't really all that combat-focused.

Her magic is mostly about "reading" other magic, with "cutting portals into existence" being the only thing she can do magic-wise that has obvious practical application in a fight. Her technique and speed are both pretty high to let her make good use of dual-wielding katanas for self-defense, though.

2: "The Show"

I definitely imagine Battle Vixens as an anime of some sort, big surprise.It wouldn't really fit a "monster of the episode" format because of the way the story actually goes, and even if an "episode" of the show is several "episodes" of the story, I still imagine there'd be many episodes with no action or almost no action whatsoever. When there is action, though, there should be a lot of fluid animation and varying camera angles, with some very careful choreographing. It should somehow both make clear what is going on, communicate how fast it's happening, and not completely lose the viewer. I think making the animation really good in this way for fight scenes would be a pretty tall order, overall.

I guess it would be in English since that's the correct language for the setting, and since it's the only one I actually speak it's the only way I can really imagine it going. Actually, it's not hard to see how the concept could be spun into multiple concurrent shows sharing the same continuity, including one for the team in Tokyo which Tenpo and Shuriken are part of, and that one would be in Japanese (with subtitles for any audience who doesn't speak it). Various other locations could be covered this way too, with the events of the "main story" involving Light and the VI informing all the other series, the Watcher being a major player everywhere, and everything just generally crossing over in various ways. Like, instead of the overall "blurry summary" I actually wrote for the Midnight Summit, it could be an big, one or two-episode-long crossover with characters from every series interacting with each other at once. Maybe whoever's in charge of the show could even host some kind of "fan vixen contest" thing like the early Mega Man games, and have some of the best suggestions for people and powers go into some of the spinoff series. I don't think the story so far has introduced a single person in Canada as of yet, for example?

Some of the things I've said before about how I'd imagine a version of the story told in a visual medium definitely apply, like having title cards throughout the puppeteer arc with different characters in a particular pose, bound up in red string, and then Tobias herself dying while in the same pose, bound up by Clark's glowing blue string instead. I think a lot of the transformation effects could look really cool in animation, with each vixen having certain unique flairs, but obviously I wouldn't have things straying into "power rangers/sailor moon" territory where a fully-animated transformation plays out every time. Maybe the first time and a few special events would have long animations, with an abbreviated version shown to the audience otherwise.

Overall, I think I could see the show having a lot of classic rock (a very vague, broad term these days, just whatever plays on rock radio stations) in its soundtrack, but maybe a proper composer would come up with something better.

As for openings, I picture the first few to several episodes of the show being cold opens with no theme, maybe up until the first monsters show up ("Trouble" in the story as it is). At some point after that, I imagine Matchbox 20's "Let's See How Far We've Come" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5d7EbtLb8ok ) as an excellent opening tune. The first lines (beginning with "Waking up at the start of the end of the world") could initially show some scenes from the first episode, of Blake waking up, greeting Amory, and going and becoming Light, but later episodes would show other characters waking up with that initial line instead and follow them. Apart from that, the verses would mostly be "peaceful scenes" where people are talking and interacting and such, while the chorus would be fast cuts between various action scenes. Each first phrase of the chorus (like "I believe the world is burning to the ground") would be a moment of things going bad (someone getting hit, pushed back, whatever), and then each second phrase ("Oh well, I guess..") would be a comeback or recover where the monster or whoever gets hit back. Every syllable of each "Let's see how far we've come" would have some motion timed to it. I'd particularly imagine a set of three or four action scenes being used for the choruses in this way, with each one strung between all of the choruses so that the first chorus has scenes near the start of the fights and the last several "let's see how far we've come"s showing the endings of those fights along with some various other positive-leaning scenes. The bridge/break (I'm not sure of the difference between these terms; I mean the part that starts "It's gone, gone") could show something especially bad happening, with a slight hope spot or cut to more positive times at "It was cool, cool, it was just all cool". Examples of things this part could show include Emma getting swallowed and Light becoming enraged, or Rory getting killed and Clark taking revenge.

I go out of my way not to reference the geography of the setting very specifically, to the point of not giving any of the main locations of the story actual names. In a setting where a larger number of people are working on a show, I imagine there would be someone whose actual job it is (or at least someone who's way better at it than me) to figure out a plausible location and come up with names of towns, the university, and such. There would be a lot better establishment of locations and relative distances, where exactly in the city the VI base is and how it looks/works logistically, and so on and so forth. Simply put, there are a lot of details I sweep under the rug that I think a larger production like a show could probably address much more porperly.

Another thing that would be hopefully much more clear in the show is the accents of various characters. The Giver would need to be voiced by someone who could swap seamlessly between speaking like a medieval noble, giving very clear, technical and almost nerdy explanations of magic things, and talking completely casually like a modern-day human. She'd also have to voice at least two or three other red-herring characters in totally different ways so that the cast listing in the credits of early episodes wouldn't give away who Beryl really is. For other examples, Sam and Gerald Nelson are both supposed to have fairly southern accents—though not uneducated—with Ning sort of mixing that with somewhat more immature, maybe millenial-ish phrasing; Warp is supposed to have a slight Aussie accent; Dawn and Cynthia are supposed to sound like people raised in, let's say, a not-so-good environment and educational system. Rowan's 'vixen form' should be completely monotone most of the time, with slight emotion bleeding through at times and rare instances of emoting normally, plus even rarer instances of abruptly going into seething rage. Overall, I guess it'd be necessary for the actors voicing the two (or more) alternate forms of characters to work together so that they intone and phrase things in very similar ways, to enhance the sense that that's the same person in a different body. That's doubly true for all of Emma's various forms, although it's plausible that a single person with a lot of range could voice all of them in subtly different ways. I don't know exactly how fusions would be voiced; maybe the actor of one of the 'input' people voicing in a way that sort of imitates the other?

When it comes to voicework, another consideration would be the vixens' "names" or "key words" or whatever. For an auditory medium like a show, it'd be necessary to actually come up with a set of syllables for each vixen to use, which the voice actors of the appropriate characters would then have to learn to the point of being able to just roll them off their tongue instantly. I'd think of each phrase being about as long as an average person's name, but made up of some very weird-sounding syllables. There's some kind of vocal structure that no real-world language uses, if I recall the Tom Scott video on that subject correctly, so maybe some of them could use that. Overall, someone with a decent grasp of linguistics would need to come up with these in a way that makes each one sound unique, yet completely alien to most if not all human language. (As a side note, for any visual-but-not-auditory medium like a comic, I'd just represent each name with unique combinations of hand-drawn symbols so there's no way for the reader to know how they're supposed to be pronounced.)

3: "The Video Game"

I have a hard time picturing how the canonical narrative of Battle Vixens could ever work as a video game. I guess it would have to be some hybrid mutation of a visual novel (for all the non-action parts) and a party-based action RPG like the most recent few entries of the Ys series mixed with Shadow of the Colossus (for the fights)? I guess it's true that the story has enough characters for a gacha game, besides an entire planet's worth of vixens the story doesn't focus on, but then the player character would most naturally take the place of Amp in order to fit the format, and I imagine that would completely change the story, too. However, the video game I could see working, and being sort of psuedo-cannoical, would be a fighting game.

The premise could be that the Watcher, with the help of some other extradimensional entity, makes an "extension" to the dream space that consists of an arena/training yard where the vixens can properly use their powers and fight each other, all without actually tiring themselves out or harming each others' actual bodies, for more "hardcore" training than they could ever do in the real world. This is pretty much the only way most of them would be okay with having no-holds-barred fights against each other, and it's quite plausible overall. This would also open the door for "simulacra" of characters who are dead or unwilling to participate in the arena, as well as "old" or "alternate" versions of characters, to be fought.

Now, I don't actually have a lot of knowledge or experience with fighting games. I've played street fighters and soul caliburs, I've played smash bros, but none of it very seriously. I've heard of frame data but don't really know what it is. So a lot of the speculating about how the game will work from here on out might not work at all for being a good game, but since no actual game is going to materialize anyway I may as well dream, right?

Basically, I imagine this being a very asymmetric fighter, where there are some basics to the controls that are constant across all characters, but by and large each fighter has her own unique quirks not only to her playstyle but even her very controls. Something like how Devil May Cry 4 and 5 handle having mutliple player characters, but in a fighting game. The end result should be that every character feels powerful and unique in her own way, different players maybe mastering different vixens, and maybe some degree of rock-paper-scissors where some matchups are fairly even but others will be a tough time for one side or the other. Players might be all-rounders who can handle a lot of different vixens well, or master specialists who are really good at using one in particular.

I mostly imagine the game being a one-on-one fighter, though maybe there could be tag team or two-on-two modes, or even a special mode where two players work together to fight some special superboss characters whose abilities are so complicated and overpowered that they can only be played by the computer. That in mind, I'm going to spend several paragraphs from here talking about how I imagine each vixen would play.

Fighters:

Light would be the "beginner's trap" character. She would obviously be able to make illusions and make herself invisible, which a beginner would naturally fall back on and would pretty cheaply and easily clean up other beginners and the computer on easy mode. However, for balance there would be visual tells to both, so higher-level AI and more experienced players would see right through the kind of illusion use that a beginner would do. The real capability of Light, which a player who actually masters her could use quite well, would be her high speed, allowing her to dodge around rapidly, get lots of little chip hits in and avoid damage, with a true master also spicing this with some very precise use of illusions at crucial moments to trip their opponents up.

There would maybe also be an extremely obscure combination of buttons that, when entered by someone playing Light, would bring up an "are you sure" confirmation box. If the answer yes is entered for that question, a brief animation plays where Light goes to throw her sword with everyone else making obviously panicked "wait, don't do that!" animations, followed by loud audio noise and the screen fading to white. This results in a special kind of tie where everyone loses, bypassing any further rounds that would've been played otherwise.

Ning I imagine as a glass cannon. Both her close-range physical attacks with the sword, and her long-range lightning strikes, would deal massive damage, but she wouldn't be able to take much damage. On top of that, maybe several of her attacks would have wind-ups or wind-downs which her opponent could take advantage of to interrupt her stronger strikes or exploit if they managed to dodge a strong attack. However, Ning would have some speedy but lower damage attacks that she could use to stagger an unattentive opponent and set them up for the real pain. In any co-op mode, Ning would have the unique trait of her magic attacks (i.e. the high-damage lightning) also being able to hit her ally, requiring strategic play to make up for the fact that her ally might be able to draw aggro and give her "free" attacks on the opponent(s). I imagine she'd even have some of the kind of "lightning strike from above" attacks that platformer bosses sometimes do, where a brief flash of warning shows the opponent where it's about to hit just a bit before they need to get out of the hitbox, and they alternate or move across the screen in such a way that no one spot is safe for the entire duration of the attack. Things like that would come with the possibility to hit her out of it with a strong enough close-range strike, as well as either a lot of charge-up that could be interrupted, or a very long "tired" animation afterward that could be used by the opponent who successfully dodged to knock her down.

Clark would obviously have the unique ability to heal herself (or her ally in co-op modes), probably at the cost of needing to stand still while doing so. On top of that, she could produce semi-auto-acting puppets to run around and attack or distract her opponent, and make needle/string strikes at various ranges. Part of her unique controls might involve using an analog stick to vaguely direct which way the puppets should move or to tell their AI to behave in a certain way.

Rory's controls would include a "stat tuning" system where the player could change her stats on the fly to make her faster, stronger, more defensive, magic resistant, etc., all by allocating a set number of points that can be put in our pulled out of each stat at will. She would also be a natural tank, with even her lowest defense having her take mere chip damage from most attacks, and her physical attack would be quite strong. The main weakness is that she has no magic attack, and her physical attacks are very short-range, so she'd be tough to use against opponents who can play keep-away and strike from range. But if she corners her opponent, there's probably no surviving.

Rowan would be entirely based on counterattacks. Essentially, I imagine Rowan having a fairly large bank of both physical and magical counters and dodges, and for every attack that every other vixen has, at least one of those counters or dodges would no-sell or at least greatly reduce the damage she takes from it and leave the opponent open to take damage from a counterattack. However, the timings and which counters work would vary for every single attack, and things like Rory's speed stat affecting her animations might also change the timing in subtle ways. Basically, mastering Rowan would require studying and understanding all of the other vixens' playstyles and attacks in order to know how to respond to each and every one, but someone who'd put in the effort to do so would be a force to be reckoned with. The best way to play against Rowan would essentially be to turn her natural strategy back against her, playing very defensively and punishing mistakes rather than going aggro and giving her an opportunity to counter and strike back. Alternatively, you could figure out which attacks are the hardest to time the counters for, and/or the ones the player isn't so good at countering, and stick to using those. Rowan would have a difficult time against any opponent who gets "allies", such as Clark's puppets or some other fighters, since she can only counter one attack at a time.

Gemma would be an extremely complex and difficult character to use well. She'd play a lot more like a "normal" fighter if you stick to her combined form, but when split into two bodies (which you'd be able to do at any time, as well as merging any time they're close enough to each other), the player must actively control both, at the same time, on an individual basis, with the same controller. I imagine some kind of layout where the left hand controls Plus and the right controls Minus, or else vise versa, requiring a wildly different control scheme from any normal vixen (and from her combined form). However, if someone got good at using Gemma's separated form, then any opponent will have to basically deal with fighting two opponents at once. On top of all of this, Gemma of course comes with a ridiculous variety of attacks. Maybe there would be some kind of "element selection system" where you can swap whose powers she's imitating at any time, mid-combo, with a ton of different attacks that can all chain into each other to produce an unimaginable number of particular combos and finishers to use. I also imagine that most of Gemma's pre-battle, mid-battle, and post-battle dialogue would be very nervous and self-effacing. The game might have that thing where, after the fight's over, the winner taunts the loser victoriously, but Gemma would have a special trait where sometimes, especially if she lost pretty badly, the "taunt" would instead be a screen of her apologizing for being "such a useless opponent" or something like that, and whoever just won against her looking sorry they did.

Petra would be a solid, straightforward all-rounder with good defense, good attack both physically and magically which includes options for hurting her opponent an pretty much any range, but not much in the way of speed or strange gimmicks to trip her opponent up. Maybe experienced players would recommend that newbies start learning to play with her instead of Light so they don't get tricked into relying on illusions.

Nico would be very unusual to play, having very little in the way of direct attacks—she'd be able to swing her shovel a few times, and that's it. Instead her playstyle would rely on planting seeds as "traps" and then being able to choose when and how much to grow them. Trees could throw fruit, try to entangle her opponent if they step too close, box them in until they cut the tree town with enough attacks, and so on. There would also be the option of her planting buffing trees to enhance her stats or even give herself regeneration, all of which an ally in any co-op mode would also benefit from. In co-op, she'd pair extremely will with any tanky, in-your-face vixen like Rory or Petra.

Zeno would be a long-range-focused character, all about making light shields to block attacks and keep her opponent back so she can charge up a lot of shots with her bow and arrows. She'd have high mobility to play keep-away with, but low physical defense so that getting cornered and beaten up is even more punishing for her.

Sam would be the ultimate tank, taking chip damage from all but the hardest-hitting attacks, and would also be a master at grabbing opponents from any range to wrap them up, throw them around, slam them into the ground—that kind of thing. She'd also be able to lay traps which bind any opponent stepping on them, and anyone wrapped up in her steel wires would also take continual damage until they get free, which is probably accomplished by either hitting all the buttons fast to struggle, or (for some particular vixens) using specific attacks that cut through the wires.

I imagine Dawn having the ability to switch between a wide variety of "stances" that each use a different set of ice weapons, and among her ways of changing stances would be things like throwing her current weapon set at her opponent or hitting so hard with them that they break (and deal a lot of extra damage in the process). Essentially she'd have pretty high versatility and be able to hit hard at any range by picking the right set of weapons. On top of that, all of her attacks would count as "magic attacks" for the purposes of piercing defenses, making her a top choice for fighting against most tanks. Maybe each stance would have certain weaknesses to exploit if one is familiar with how it works, though, and while not a glass cannon exactly, her defense would be middling-low to make up for the high attack variety.

Cynthia would be mainly focused on magic attack—sending walls of fire at her opponent nonstop. Her defenses would be pretty low, and a bit like Ning, she'd be prone to wind-ups and wind-downs that can be exploited to interrupt or punish if one successfully dodges the attack itself. Maybe she'd be a little slower than Ning and a bit less of a glass cannon, with not as high attack and not as low defense, but she'd at least never hurt her ally in co-op.

Warp's powerset would allow her to dodge most attacks by instantly teleporting out of their hitbox at the last second. She'd have a low-range physical attack with her knife, but also be able to throw it at her opponent at high speeds, and teleport it in midair so that it comes from any angle the player wants it to—allowing her to feint her opponent into blocking the front or jumping to dodge, then teleporting the knife behind or back in line with their new position where they don't have space to re-dodge. She'd also be able to teleport in objects from the background and/or offscreen to places like directly above her opponent, the ground between her and her opponent, etc.; this technique would have a lot of randomness as to which items exactly appear, so its damage output or blocking utility would also vary because of that.

Magus's unique trait would be a whole "magic casting system", which would include both a Kingdom Hearts-esque menu you could surf through to pick out a spell to use as well as gesture-based system. I'm thinking there would be a "cast spell" button that you can either press to surf through the menu and pick a spell to use, or hold down and then move the analog stick in a particular gesture in order to cast the corresponding spell. Every spell would be available to use in both ways, but using a spell from the menu takes longer than the gesture if you can input the latter quickly enough, and of course your opponent is going to know which spell you're using if they saw you pick it from the menu. Magus would also be pretty bad at close range, and not have much defense or speed either. Someone really good at playing Magus would maybe memorize a lot of the simpler gestures for good utility spells, and be good at quickly picking powerful spells that require difficult-to-execute gestures from the menu in a way that makes it harder for the opponent to see what's being cast in time to respond appropriately.

Superbosses:

The Puppeteer would be one of the game's superbosses, computer-control only, justified as a simulacrum as I mentioned earlier. She'd have a unique behavior where she hangs out in the background and literally can't be hit until you've beaten up a lot of trash puppets plus all of the vixen puppets she has, and even once she's come to the foreground and could theoretically be hit, she'll do a lot of teleporting away from attacks and still be able to re-summon all of her allies. However, she'd have such low defense and health that most attacks kill her in one hit, and on top of that her puppets would be incapable of dealing the finishing blow to her opponent. Her AI would have her teleport into the foreground to try to finish off a critically-damaged opponent, enabling the high-risk, high-reward strategy of skipping the fight against all of the vixen puppets by tanking damage to bait her into the foreground and then taking her down before she can make the killing blow. For co-op players it'd even be possible to sacrifice one player to let the other take her down, and maybe there'd be a achievement for doing so.

Las Espadas is another vixen I'd imagine being a superboss. I don't have too much to say about how she'd fight right now, but she'd definitely be a much more in-your-face kind of boss than the Puppeteer, aggressively chasing down her opponents and trying to shred their health as fast as she possibly can via a wide variety of attacks that come in quick from all angles.

Another possible superboss would be "Omega Clark", a version of Clark Quinn who actually took the full power of the Puppeteer and all of her victims after killing her instead of having everyone brought back to life. She would be dangerously tanky and aggressive, self-healing, control multiple puppets at once, and use her various powers directly instead of gifting them to puppets most of the time. Perhaps killing the Puppeteer with Rory and Clark would be a condition for unlocking her fight in the first place, while putting in Rory as one of her opponents would have Omega Clark react to her presence in a brief cutscene at the start of the fight and then be much less aggressive for the first half of her health bar or something.

Finally, there could also be a version of Light using the full extent of all of the powers she has access to at once. Between being able to use the attacks of numerous other fighters, ridiculous move and attack speed, and being able to also make illusions of all of those attacks to fake players out with only subtle tells that they aren't real, she would probably be the most difficult of the bosses, maybe only unlocked after you beat all the others. I guess there would need to be some mitigating factors, like after some big attacks she gets exhausted and stands still to allow a few free hits—unless she's just pretending to be tired so she can goad the players into attacking and counter them.