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Ah... I think I finally understand what details you're talking about
when you say "show more detail," Allyn. You want specifics of how the
various characters' powers will interact with each other right from the
get-go. A detailed chart in prose, as it were, showing exactly how every
power of each character will affect every other character in the story,
before they actually fight. (Give me a minute to get to the point about
making assumptions that seem unreasonable without this information.) I
think I can explain this whole thing away now. And this will be MY last
post on the subject. (Chapter 3 is finally advancing with some speed
despite the amount of RL work looming over my head, and many of your
questions will be answered then as I cannot answer them here.)
The Sailor Scouts were totally dominated in their first fight, and their
powers bounced right off of Ryoko's shield. They didn't hang around long
enough to experiment with their powers against their enemies, and
certainly didn't want to let the enemies try out all of their powers! I
don't want to turn the story into a statistics chart for the characters,
and I definitely am not going to make a character-by-character
comparison within the story as you described in your post. "More
detailed reasoning" will follow when the characters have more
information to work with. As of right now, the facts are:
1) Ranma, Lina, and Ryoko are definitely more powerful than the
opponents that the Scouts have fought in the past. (Sailor Mercury has
said this.)
2) Ryoko has a shield that can block the Scouts' nonphysical attacks,
and she was able to stop the Moon Tiara attack with her bare hands.
3) Ranma can outfight Tuxedo Mask hand-to-hand.
4) Ryoko and Lina's attacks are effective against the Sailor Scouts.
5) It is not yet known how the Sailor Scouts' powers will affect Ranma
or Lina.
6) The girl in black's powers include flight, but nothing else is known
about her abilities.
Based on this assessment of the facts, it looks quite hopeless for the
Scouts, since even Ryoko alone should be able to defeat them. I am not
going to list factors in the Scouts' favor because if there are such
factors, the Scouts don't yet know about them. They will be able to more
accurately assess the situation after a few more encounters. To cite
precedent for not giving away an enemy's powers all at once, consider
Cell from Dragon Ball Z. When his existence was first discovered, the Z
fighters didn't even know who he was. As the saga progressed, they kept
fighting, and every time it looked like Cell was defeated, he revealed a
new power that enabled him to recover and regain the upper hand. In
fact, he even GAINED power over the course of his time on Earth! Now,
think about what would have happened if he had originally appeared on
Earth and proceeded to list all of his abilities for the Z-fighters. Of
course, power levels on a relative scale are far more important to DBZ
than they are in these series, but I'm using the same idea... the heroes
must discover the power of their foes by fighting them, putting
themselves in danger each time, in order to find a way to win. Yes, this
prevents the reader from accurately predicting who will win in a
straight battle. Is that really a bad thing? Did anyone see last night's
episode of Battlebots, where a popular favorite battled a complete
novice, dealt a swift attack, and proceeded to lose a blade and become
overbalanced, giving a huge upset victory to the underdog? That's the
sort of surprise finish that will make this story fun to read... the
Sailor Scouts, unsure of what may or may not work, try everything in
their arsenals against their enemies to discover what will work.
As for Artemis' advice... just because the Scouts' powers are DESIGNED
to fight evil (and as mentioned before, the Negaverse is the only
example of pure evil that they've seen thus far) doesn't mean that they
won't work at all on other enemies! A screwdriver is designed to tighten
and loosen screws, but it can also be used to pry up boards. Their
powers have properties that can be turned against any opponent, such as
Mercury's fog to cover their escape, and Mars' fire will burn anything
regardless of amount of evil power. The powers simply weren't designed
to fight these particular opponents - they're meant only for fighting
beings of pure evil. Once again, this fact does not guarantee an instant
and unconditional victory for R/R/L, like the Tigers vs. the Sherman...
It just means that the Scouts may have to be creative in their use of
their powers.
Why is Beryl trying to kill the Sailor Scouts when they don't have their
powers? Because it's easier, to put it simply. The Sailor Scouts have
proven themselves remarkably resilient when powered up, but when not in
their costumes, they're just ordinary girls. That is mentioned in the
story, by the way... so it's not like I'm leaving out all of the
details.
Hopefully, that answers your concerns and explains why I have chosen not
to give the details you wanted to see. If not, we should take this up in
private.
- Nidoking
BURNS: What is this? Some kind of force field around these vegetables!
HOMER: That's the sneeze guard. You have to lean under it to get food or
sneeze on stuff.
JOHNNY BRAVO: *sigh* The only woman I ever really loved... and she's
gone. I wonder if I'll ever get over - Hey! Nuggets!
JACKIE CHAN: Oh, sorry. I broke your spy camera! (pause) SPY CAMERA?!
My webpage: http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~katinamp