David McMillan wrote:
Aaron Nowack wrote on 12/27/2003, 9:27 PM:
> Also, the few hundred youma casualties (most of the thousand simply got
> deposited back in the Dark Kingdom) are trivial from Metallia's point of
> view. There are far, far more where they came from.
The raw fact is, Metallia can *afford* this kind of attrition,
easily -- her numerical advantage isn't just big, it's *enormous.* And
she's not limited in how many she can send over anymore.
Things aren't _quite_ so bad. Though the closest you'll get to a firm
youma population estimate from me is "Enough.", there are still many,
many more humans than youma.
On the other hand, when you consider how few humans are members of the
type of first-rate military it takes to battle the youma with any degree
of success, maybe things _are_ that bad.
This spells major, major trouble for the Good Gals/Guys. Frankly,
right now I don't see how they can win unless/until something changes
the strategic situation. Even if they can somehow hold Juuban and maybe
Tokyo overall against one thousand Youma per day (heck, why not per
hour?), Metallia can simply flood other sections of Japan, or Asia, or
Earth, while the defenders are tied down in one city.
That basically sums up the situation as of now, yeah.
At this point, if I were running things, I'd have Hermes and Mecury
dump all their data on Youma vulnerabilities to every government agency
and military office in Japan (if not worldwide), and hope that mundane
humans can, with technology, provide enough effective cannon fodder to
leave the Senshi and Champions free to deal with Generals and other
high-level threats.
The problem is that most of the information they could give to the
military would be close to useless, as it's based off of a totally
different paradigm. If the military had sorcerer units standing by,
it'd be another story. But with pure technological methods, there's
really no "trick" to bringing down youma other than pure firepower, and
lots of it.
Of course, there seems to be a third player(s?) in the game now,
given what happened to Jadeite. That may well upset the applecart...
Yep.
It's interesting to note that the current plot of Shades of Darkness is
very streamlined from the monstrosity that originally developed when I
was constantly adding one "cool idea" after another to it while writing
Shades of Gray. I think it was the point where I counted no less than
eleven distinct factions, and wasn't sure I had counted them all, that I
decided to start trimming things down. :)
At any rate, it'll be interesting to see how Our Heroes/Heroines dig
their way out of *this* hole.
I certainly hope so.
Though, I have to mention: there _is_ a reason why the "tag line" for
this story is "Welcome to the end of the world."