Mahou Shoujo Youkai
The MSY (Mahou Shoujo Youkai, 魔法少女ようかい, usually referred to as the MSY or Union in Standard) is the overarching magical girl organization of TtS, encompassing under its auspices every magical girl alive. In the past, this was compulsory as a matter of practicality—though it was required under MSY law—but now it is a legal requirement and assumption under Governance.
((Posts 2 and 3 still need to be incorporated. Also, a separate section on the breakdown and responsibilities of the contemporary MSY, along with known officials, is probably desirable.))
Contents
History
Founding
The MSY was founded in 2021, at a meeting of representatives from six teams encompassing the Mitakihara metropolitan area, the brainchild of the famous Mitakihara Four. It followed an extensive series of friendship meetings, social gatherings, and group hunts designed to bolster mutual trust. These ~24 girls, collectively considered the MSY’s founders, had previously been forced to cooperate in order to counter the depredations of the Southern Group, and were thus on very good terms, facilitating the idea of a mutual aid group.
While the original MSY did have some ambitions for expansion, as evident from the name and the grandiose act of penning a Charter, the scope of the group’s initial intentions were limited. As originally delineated in the Charter, the MSY was merely an agreed-upon framework for the fulfillment of five founding mandates:
- The elimination of grief cube shortages, by the formation of a collectively managed grief cube “insurance pool”, designed to mitigate fluctuations in harvesting and need for any particular team. Each team was expected to contribute a certain percentage of their takings or a certain minimum, whichever was higher, and could not withdraw more than a certain amount per month. Deviations from these rules, in the case of extenuating circumstances, could be accepted with collective consent.
- Provide for the airing out and resolution of misunderstandings and disagreements.
- Providing mutual aid, in the case of external threats or in dangerous circumstances.
- Smooth out differences in non-magical resources between groups, and attempt to acquire a source of steady income. It was recognized that the health of each team was in some degree dependent on that of others, and that some of the wealthier members could easily provide for everyone with the use of only a minimal amount of their resources.
- Allowing for the “borrowing” and “lending” of team members between city regions, to optimize team structures, as long as the borrowing team undertook to provide housing, training, etc. For instance, in the provision of healers to teams with no healers.
The original Charter provided for decision-making by informal meetings of teams, who would meet at least once every three months, and more if necessary. Formally, a majority was required for decisions, as well the agreement of at least one member of each team. A quorum was required of at least one member of each team. Informally, most decisions in the early days were made by effective unanimous consent. The unusually formalized and written structure of the Charter reflected both the beliefs of the famous Akemi Homura and the advice of the Incubators (via Kyubey), who had seen the rise and fall of many similar organizations.
It was intended that while the Charter could be extended to an indefinitely large area, it would only provide a framework for local cooperation, with the wider prefectural or (unimaginably) national level connections being used primarily to facilitate easy travel.
Early Expansion
The MSY succeeded beyond the expectations of both its organizers and the Incubators, driven by a combination of unexpectedly large grief cube surpluses and the overwhelming success of the rebranded D&E Corporation. The consequent more relaxed hunting schedule and relative opulence, with team members free to dine in expensive restaurants and dabble in personal careers (and even more unthinkably, outside relationships), attracted regional envy and “border” groups hurried to join. By the end of the first decade, decision-making with the full membership had become unwieldy, and the decision was made to fragment into local organizational groups, and Charterize a Leadership Committee (2031), formed out of prominent girls within the organization. While ultimate authority would still lie with the full membership, of whom a meeting could be called at any time, the Leadership Committee would be responsible for day-to-day decision-making.
This was also desirable because of a slow expansion of the organization’s mandate. With the expansion of the MSY’s financial resources and the lengthening lifespans of its members, the organization found itself expected to help with things like bribing local police, paying college tuition, providing plausible excuses to parents, providing medical and psychological care, hiding girls with missing limbs, and so forth. This entailed an increasing number of specialists, including non-contracted humans, deployed in more and more complex ways. Nearly all of this would eventually cement into a formal bureaucracy.
The first and perhaps most notable of these child organizations to emerge was the Soul Guard (2043). Headed by the founder Tomoe Mami, the Soul Guard began as a single team and grew into a full police force, and was designed to be the explicit fulfillment of part 3 of the original charter, suppressing insane girls, providing fire support, acting as response force to complaints of charter violation, and, occasionally, meting out approved revenge on behalf of organization members. All of these functions had been previously carried out haphazardly, with only an uneven record of success, and it was an embarrassing streak of unnecessary deaths caused by insane girls that prompted the Soul Guard’s formation, though ironically this role became less important with the rise of the MHD and the MSY’s increasing oversight of new recruits.
Hand in hand with the Soul Guard came the enshrinement of a legal system (2044), replacing mob punishment of “soul criminals” with formal trials, with a tribunal (two random members, one Soul Guard judge, at least two telepaths) for questions of guilt, a jury for decisions on punishment, and an executive panel for questions of interpretation of the increasingly convoluted “Law”, at the time a confusing mixture of Charter amendments, Leadership Committee Decrees, and common practice.
It is to this period that historians date the MSY’s institutionalization as a true government, with its seizure of the critical state monopoly on violence.
After the formation of the Soul Guard, with its legitimization of formal MSY sub-organizations (the Charter modified to explicitly give the Leadership Committe the right to make such organizations), there was a ballooning of the number of executive committees and organizations, with, for example, the MHD (2053) created to tackle the thorny issue of mental health (all-important to magical girls), the rehabilitation of insane girls and criminals, and, incidentally, the provision of health care when the normal hospital wasn’t a choice.
Japanese Consolidation
Dating the end of this second phase remains controversial, since the date on which the MSY absorbed the last Japanese holdouts (2085) considerably postdates the establishment of the first MSY overseas outpost (2068). Nonetheless, the period 2050-2075 clearly represented a considerable slowdown in MSY growth, as the organization stalled on the coasts of Japan and struggled to digest its new responsibilities and powers.
It was a period of consolidation and organizational maturation, as the MSY refined its techniques and bureaucracies at all levels. From an institutional standpoint, the most notable milestone was a major rewrite of the Charter in 2059, establishing a common law legal code, placing legislative powers in a newly-formed Rules Committee, formalizing voting and representation procedures for top offices, setting the structure of the Leadership Committee, and giving an explicit procedure for Charter amendment. Though in some sense the Charter had been a constitution for a long time, this was first time it began to resemble the other democratic constitutions then prevailing in the world.
This period was also the period in which MSY corporations began to represent a significant portion of the Japanese economy, and in which MSY infiltration of the Japanese government began to spread upward into the Diet and Cabinet. The MSY saw its first “second-generation” magical girls, inaugurating the Matriarchies that would come to dominate internal politics over the coming centuries.
It was also in this period that the MSY, tired of the mob’s outrageous crimes—especially its exploitation of teenage girls and women—and the nonstop jostling between the two organizations in the underworld they both inhabited, finally decapitated the Yakuza in a series of Soul Guard operations in 2055, installing its own bureaucrats at the top. From here on out, the Japanese Mafia would become a bound mastiff, abandoning most of its criminal enterprises and serving as an instrument of MSY policy.
By 2075, the MSY had become a dominant force in Japan, influencing its economy, controlling its criminal underworld, and helping to direct government policy, all from the safety of the shadows. It was only fitting that it would then turn its eyes outward.
