How to kill a magical girl?

Or, to expand on the question: How could a team of 5-6 humans with no superpowers, who may or may not have obtained a couple of high tech gadgets and weaponry, but are otherwise left to fend off with what they have, take down a magical girl, or a team of magical girls, while avoiding that other magical girls find out their doings and intervene?

Also, from what kinds of background should the members come from, to justify where they get their stuff? And how would they interact with the others? So far, I have two members which are pretty much defined. One is Alyssa, a 20 something woman who’s very good academically, and who likes to have everything in her life under control. Her role in the group is that to investigate the magical girls, come up and oversee the plans to kill the magical girls, and possibly prepare and set up homemade explosives. The other girl I have defined is Mary Rose, an almost 18 computer and gadget expert, who comes from a family of computer experts, and aids the group with her gadgets inventions, and computer expertise.

I was planning to have the others come from a military or police background, as part of some secret government team that hunts down supernatural creatures, but I was wondering, would they accept civilians such as Alyssa and Mary Rose? And how would they treat them? And if they don’t come from the military or the police, what other background and professions could I consider?

Snipe them. Most Magical Girls tend to give In the Name of the Moon speeches. That's when you hit them.

Brutality. A Magical Girl is, well, magical, but she's still a teenage girl with all the frailties that implies in a society where women aren't encouraged to develop high fitness in the same way men are.

Give the girl-slayer some brass knuckles and a Colt Single Action Army revolver loaded with silver bullets.

Just to be safe.

^^That sounds like a good plan. Except for the fact that you would end up with a corpse with a clear bullet wound. And while the magical girls and their enemies do use guns in my setting, they use magical bullets, which wouldn't leave just a normal wound.

I forgot to mention that a large part of the magical girls in the setting are organized and genre savvy, like the ones in Nanoha setting, and while they do maintain a Masquerade to protect the muggle population, they have contacts in the normal world that could make them realize that humans are behind the killings, especially after quite a few accumulate.

edited 27th Oct '10 7:11:30 AM by Thy-Robocop

Saturation bombing and/or Kill Sat bombardment.

In that case, arson.

May I suggest having someone stealthily sneak up behind her while she's giving an In the Name of the Moon speech, grab her by the mouth and repeatedly stab her with a knife?

Clean, simple, effective.

Repeated stabs don't strike me as "clean". You'll want strangulation for that.

It depends on the magical girl's powers. I suspect your best bet, though, would be to attack her by surprise - particularly if she needs to do a significant Transformation Sequence in order to use her powers.

Regarding making it non-suspicious, you could suggest that she was killed, but not as a deliberate vendetta against magical girls. For example, she decided to intervene in a mundane crime, and the criminal (obviously, not the real killer) shot her.

Or else stage an accident that wouldn't give her proper warning to use her powers, such as flooding her home with carbon monoxide at 2am. Very often, people who get carbon monoxide poisoning in their sleep don't even wake up, and if they do, they may have already gotten a high enough dose to incapacitate them.

For added security, steal the Transformation Trinket before staging the accident, while making sure she doesn't notice its loss too quickly.

Magicians and Mystics have sensitive minds. Psychological attacks would work wonders agains a Magic Girl, specially if its just a teenager.

Are poisonous gases, biological weapons, poisons, venomous animals, or UV radiation weapons available?

edited 27th Oct '10 9:09:28 AM by GiantSpaceChinchilla

Landmines. Booby traps. Grenades on tripwires and ambush zones. That's the main starting point.

Pick a place with a lot of cover and concealment, then start firing form different positions, and move constantly.

edited 27th Oct '10 1:26:02 PM by Morgulion

Kill her in her sleep. If she's the main character she's probably an incredibly heavy sleeper.

Probably eats a lot, as well. Poison her food.

Or just hit her with a bat. They may master the most powerful magic in the entire universe, though I doubt that they can take a punch.

Is she a regular Magical Girl or is she a Dark Magical Girl, because that could change various dynamics like insecurity levels, affiliations, alignment, etc. Also, why does she need to die? Most Magical Girls are naive enough to be convinced that they're either working working for the wrong side or that they're not strong enough to be working at all and could even be working for the wrong side.

As above, snipe them or carpet bomb. I suggest the former, since shields don't go up as fast when they don't hear the bullet before the crack.

Half a brick in a sock.

Is the kill team familiar with who their targets are outside of their MG personas? If they aren't already, can this information be reliably ascertained via espionage and stakeouts, and good old fashioned intelligence gathering?

If so, subtle and traditional assassination techniques will go far; hit them when they least expect it, don't offer them a fair fight. Don't leave a body or significant signs of a struggle though; missing targets are far less likely to raise suspicioun than outright dead ones. Reliably unobtrusive kills or a brilliant cleaner team are a must.

If the opponents are as genre savvy as they claim, Never Found the Body will work against them, obscuring the fact that they have essentially been thrust into a Black Ops-ish Tom Clancy situation rather than a whimsical villainous plot until it is too late.

If they must be confronted in the open, the situation then changes depending on whether the kill team is up against a lone member or an entire sentai squad.

For the lone wolves, I fully support prior suggestions towards sniper strikes from afar while vulnerable. If the situation permits, the same protocols should be followed as above; conceal all evidence of the operation. No body, no blood, no witnesses, no problem. Again, I can't stress how important a cleaner is to keeping this under wraps as long as possible.

If up against an entire group, traps and high explosives are your best friend; redundant and backup plans are a must. This approach however, will pretty thoroughly blow the lid on the operation, so it's best utilized only if the previous methods have failed.

Control the battlefield, get them into a designated, prepared killzone, and go nuts. Explosives under fresh pavement, vehicles rigged as shrapnel bombs, hidden automatic weapons emplacements across the street, chemical warfare, whatever it takes.

Be merciless, and be thorough.

However, in order to sell the situation, the kill team will have to feign at least a minimal threat worth the target's attention in the first place. Great opportunity for rubber costume hijinks to lure them out in the first place.

To address the nonviolent questions, I'd have Alyssa and Mary Rose get caught up (separately or together) in a confrontation between the government agents and the magical girls. By violating the girls's masquerade, they become targets themselves. Because they have viable skills, they are invited to join the agents (rather than, say, put in a protection program). They may have motivation as well, if the original confrontation(s) involved the girls killing someone close to them.

As for the violent questions, look to the Bond movies. A supervillain deserves a super death, such as a SCUBA tank through the chest, decapitation by propeller, a falling submarine. Almost as if the area itself were trying to kill her.

Another personal favorite: reverse the polarities so she's hoist on her own petard. If she gets her power from the moon, lure her into a room where the ceiling reverses the phlebotinum in moonlight. When she summons her power to finish off the good guys, she asplodes.

Oh...I didn't expect this thread to be necro'd. Though, I was planning on going back to the topic sooner or later, so thanks Asiacatdogblue for resurrecting it! Just out of curiosity, what made you decide to resurrect this thread?

As for everyone else, you've come up with some really good suggestions, though some of them don't really work for what I want, and for the others, I would need some more info on how to use them in my setting.

So, here's a bit more info on the setting for my story. I am still working on most of the details of it (I may open up another thread in the near future to discuss them), so I will just give you the basic gist of it. I hope that will be enough to convey my idea through, but questions and suggestions are always welcome.

@Sand Josieph: There are three types of magical girls (and boys) operating in my story. They are:

-The Celestials, a 200-300 (or maybe slightly more) strong organization of magical girls with powers derived from the planets. Think of it as a mix between Sailor Moon's Moon Kingdom with quite a few elements from Nanoha's TSAB. They are divided into various factions, depending on planetary alignment (which I still have to work out) and power level. The Priestesses are the leaders of the Celestials and their magically strongest warriors, having inherited the powers of their planet in their purest form. Their power levels are usually quite strong, almost equalling or exceeding Nanoha's. The latter, except in certain cases, are usually sent to battle their enemies IN SPACE!, and stop the bulk of their forces from invading Earth. The Warriors are not as powerful, but a team of them can usually hold off and defeat the monsters of the week without external aid.

Of the three main groups, the Celestials, and especially the Priestesses, are the more traditional group, so a vast majority of them still have wands and staffs as their weapons, tend to have long transformation sequences (the Warriors have significantly shorter ones due to the fact that they have to strike first and protect the priestesses), and still do In The Name Of The Moon Speeches, though they are genre savvy enough to include a couple of damage control and targeting spells in said speeches, as well as have the warriors strike first without said speeches to allow the Priestesses to complete their spells.

-The Infernals, a catch-all term for all the magical forces that, for one reason or another, want to take control of Earth. Their overall goal is to conquer the Earth, enslave it's population, take control of magical resources, defeat the magical girl 'immigrants' from other planets that have arrived on Earth, and other such things, though for most of them their main objective is to defeat the Celestial and/or find the portal that leads to their Temple on Jupiter to attack them and remove the blockade caused by the Celestials in space. Except for some rare cases, they usually used to act like your typical magical girl enemy, but in the last couple of decades, they have started recruiting Terrans in their ranks, and have somewhat become more genre savvy, which has lead to the Celestials recruiting Terrans as Celestial Warriors, and the formation of several investigative teams amongst the Celestials to hunt the Infernals down and strike first before they can cause damage.

-The Terrans, a catch-all term for a rapidly growing faction of magical girls and boys gifted with a spark of power from mother Earth herself. They mainly manifest as mutants and were-creatures, though, if they are luck enough to get a hang on an elemental power, or any other source of power (the energy from a long-lost kingdom, for example), they can reach the power levels of the Warriors, and sometimes even the Priestesses. Due to this factor, Infernals and Celestials have started recruiting these Terrans in their ranks, telling them they are actually warriors from their faction instead of Terrans with an external aid. Those that are not recruited in either the Celestial or Infernal ranks tend to form their own small groups, with various degrees of genre savvyness and training depending on the individuals forming it. There are, however, some more organized groups that fight both Infernals and Celestials, the former because, well, they are invaders: and the latter because they consider them also invaders, and because the Priestesses put a curse on Earth to stop the birth of an Earth Priestess, as the last one went on a rampage to kill all the 'polluting' humans, and they don't want to risk that happening again (although some claim it was just a convenient excuse to rid themselves of what they see as a wild card and a threat to their power).

TL;DR: there are a wide variety of magical girls, each with their own issues and reasons to fight.

As for why they need to die, well, each faction has done some questionable acts on Earth civilians that has motivated the magical girl hunter team to hunt them down and kill them all. For example, Alyssa had a few friends from different school factions (such as an unpopular girl and a member of the Girl Posse), and the Libby and other people put a lot of peer pressure to put them apart, maintain the status quo, and shun Alyssa. So Alyssa basically set off to break the Libby and utterly destroy that status quo, just so that she could stay with her friends. One day, the Libby came back with an Infernal, who turned said Libby into a monster that killed off some of Alyssa's friends, while another of her friends was caught in one of the Celestial's killer attacks. Alyssa, who likes to have everything under control, sees these girls and their fight as a threat to her perfectly controlled worlds, and so sets out to remove them all from the equation.

Now, as for the magical girl hunter team, I was thinking about having them as a renegade cell of a bigger organization, or a group with people from different professions coming together after an incident with magical girls, or something along those lines. The reason I want that is because, later on in the story, it turns out that the original team once went up against a Priestess and got owned, only for said priestess, after a through interrogation, decide to sponsor/blackmail them in killing Terrans, Infernals, and Celestial political enemies, so I don't want their parent group to become too suspicious.

So, the thing I need to work out now is what kind of team could provide which kinds of solutions towards the magical girl killing, as well as a decent clean up operation. The 'solution' must also be pretty clean and reliable, and done in such a way as to not really leave an easy pattern or trail for the magical girls to follow. Of course, Terrans and Infernals don't really share information between them, and most Celestial investigators are being kept in check by the group's 'sponsor', but Alyssa and the group want to play it safe, and the group does not want Alyssa to find out about their agreement with the Celestials, due to the fact that she has a tendency to go for disproportionate retribution, and they fear she might not like what they have done.

So, having said that, which of the solutions you have proposed could suit my requirements? And what kind of group members am I looking for to justify everything?

@Omnis: The kill team is usually familiar on who their targets are in MG form. Information on their civilian form depends on how careful the individual is (Alyssa' first target's identity was found out using Facebook) and how dedicated their chosen faction is to uphold the Masquerade (the Celestials usually do a great job at it, with mind wiping and websites only magical people can see). Anyway, you have pretty much come up with most of the tactics I plan to include in the story. If you could now explain to me how to justify the team getting the hands on all that equipment to put their plans into action, then that would help me quite a lot.

I take it Diplomacy failed? Also, do all the Magical Girls need to die? What if there are disenchanted Magical Girls who aren't too happy with what their own factions are doing and would like to see things changed for the better. Killing should really be a last resort.

@Sand Josieph: Yes, you could pretty much say that diplomacy has failed for all of them, mainly because there are groups within the different factions that do everything they can to actively prevent a diplomatic solution. For example, the incident where the Infernal transformed the Libby into a monster was set up by the Celestial 'sponsor' of the kill team, in order to kill off Alyssa's magical girl sister, who was working to find a diplomatic solution with the Terrans.

The only one that really believes that all magical girls should die is Alyssa. She believes that, by getting rid of all of them, she is actually doing a favour to the world, as no more magical girls means no more incidents like the one she had to go though, but her real motives are rather more selfish than that. Everyone else in my story doesn't have such an extreme view (even Alyssa, after a couple of incidents, changes her views), but they do want to eradicate all opposition, and would do anything in their power to ensure that, even eliminating their own comrades. That's not to say that people favouring a more diplomatic solution on each side have not tried or are totally absent, it's simply that the groups opposing such a solution go through very extreme and unethical methods to get their point across, leaving death the only option to stop them.

The best thing you can possibly use is drama and betrayal.

Most shows with magical girls thrive on character to character trust and romance, and the power of friendship and love. If one of their closest friends or lovers turns around and says "Hahaha it's all a sham you can die now I never loved you KTHNXBAI" it's a perfect opportunity to take her down.

Of course, if doing that destroyed them emotionally enough, they might just end up quiting being a Magical Girl and thus negating the need to kill her!

In light of recent events, I think the best way to kill them is to distract them with feelings of hope while they confront a deceptively weak opponent. Sure worked on Mami, no matter how unintentionally she was distracted by Madoka's pledge to join her. ;__;