Just For Fun / Date A Skelter

WARNING: Unmarked spoilers for both series involved ahead!

Date A Skelter is a crossover between Date A Live and Mary Skelter.

During the final events of Mary Skelter Finale, rather than a world without suffering or simply "nothing", a desperate Jack wishes for him and his comrades to be taken away somewhere else: where Gatou's plan to Colony Drop the moon onto the planet won't touch anyone. This ends up with them being taken into the world of Date A Live with a spacequake, around the events of Yoshino's arc, and shenanigans ensue.

Included tropes:

• Adaptational Badass: Somewhat downplayed due to the limited perspective of the games, but the Blood Maidens all display far greater feats of power than they ever did in their own series. This is quickly explained as - courtesy of the spacequake that brought them there - them drawing ambient Reiryoku from their surroundings, thus drastically amplifying their capabilities and overlapping with Took a Level in Badass.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: Ripper Jack is a weird example, as he basically doesn't show up in the plot of Mary Skelter in a comprehensible form, but generally seems to function like Jack's equivalent of Blood Skelter. Here, however, he's more of a Jerk with a Heart of Gold.
• All-Loving Hero: There is all of one person that Jack absolutely despises and can never forgive, and that's Gatou, who is nowhere to be found. While he does find a new Hate Sink in Westcott, literally everyone else is getting a very weird degree of kindness completely for free... especially since a few of said individuals try to kill him when they first meet. This surprisingly doesn't backfire as often as some think it should In-Universe, such as his decision to have the Nibelcoles be separated from Westcott by means of Michael so that they survive when Beelzebub's Qlipha Crystal is removed from him (they end up having a Heel Realization). His unconditional kindness even helps save Mio, even if she is significantly nerfed, leading to the cast being far less unprepared once Beast shows up.
• All Your Powers Combined: Aside from Shido's very existence bringing this forth, we also have the Full Form from the Mayuri Judgement movie, which draws power from all the Spirits Shido had sealed at the time. Ellen, desperate to not be one-upped by Artemisia, uses her Realizer to take pieces of every single Sephira Crystal from the main eleven Spirits, and then fuse them together into a small spherical crystal that is then stolen by Tohka, forming a complete version of this state that lets the Angel Shekinah harness the capabilities of the other Angels to a certain extent. It can be used by any Spirit, and Shekinah transforms to match the Spirit (for instance, Kurumi's version takes the form of a second long-short gun pair, her dual-wielding the shorter guns while the longer ones are handled telekinetically), but the power is generally temporary due to the Spirits being unable to handle the strain of so many different powers. It even has a Demon King counterpart in the form of Choronzon, first used by Inverse Tohka, which Westcott manages to make a copy of and fight against Shido's version of Shekinah with in the final battle against him once he loses his powers as the Second Spirit of Origin.
• Chekhov's Gun: Ripper Jack becomes a massive fan of the manga "Silver Bullet" during the events between his awakening at DEM's headquarters and Nia's arc, binging the entire story up to that point. So, when said arc comes around, he becomes surprisingly helpful in getting genuinely close to her, as she is the manga's writer.
• Exotic Eye Designs: The Spirits have their whitened pupils, and the Blood Maidens have their eyes in Massacre and Blood Skelter.
• Fallen Angel: If Hikari is normally an angel, Inverse Hikari is definitely this, with a tattered black dress and all the white-and-gold energy bits, such as her halo, sun hairclips (which lose their beams, becoming simple circles), and wings, all turning black-and-purple.
• Fantastic Nuke: Willfully activated spacequakes are still this, but from the Blood Maidens' side of things, we have the spell known as Mortal Force: a mass of energy comprised of several elemental attributes at once that is stated to have similar energy frequencies to a spacequake. Sure enough, its damage output - likely due to the incorporation of Reiryoku - is akin to small spacequakes, and can hypothetically reach the level of larger ones with enough energy put into it. Thumbelina, Hameln, Otsuu, and Little Mermaid all have access to this overpowered spell, with Snow White and Gretel having a weaker version called Disaster Rune that still deals immense damage, even if on a much smaller scale.
• Magic Staff: Hikari's Angel, Shamsiel, takes the form of a white staff with a floating golden sphere at one end, surrounded by golden pyramid shapes to evoke the image of the sun. Its Demon King counterpart Decarabia is red with a cracked black sphere instead, with the sphere wrapped in a purplish glow, akin to a corrupted solar eclipse.
• Power Incontinence: The Blood Maidens have to take some time to get used to their Reiryoku-boosted abilities. Especially Thumbelina, who quickly finds that what was meant to be a simple fire spell became a borderline inferno due to the introduction of Reiryoku.
• Pro-Human Transhuman: Mamoru, Hikari, Kaede, Itsuki, and Chiaki are all this. Especially Hikari, who ended up becoming an angelic being with supposedly godlike powers in her original world and is now something akin to a Quasi-Spirit.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Ripper Jack delivers the most oddly supportive version of this ever (almost overlapping with Get A Hold Of Yourself Man) towards Natsumi, once he has enough of her self-deprecation. Only after punching her in the face, of course.
  Ripper Jack: Oh my god, can you please shut up!? Fine, I'll say it: you are ugly! The ugliest thing I've ever seen, even! And do you wanna know why!? Because you won't stop bawling your damn eyes out! Your constant whining about yourself does nothing but piss me off! *Beat* But wanna know the funniest part? That's it. There's no other reason. So go get some damn confidence in yourself, because neither I, nor anyone else here, can stand you crying about how ugly you are. You'll be much prettier once you're done with that.
• Red Baron: Of course, the Angels and Demon Kings all have these. Including Hikari's Shamsiel ("Staff of Clearest Dawn") and Decarabia ("Staff of Gloomiest Nightfall") respectively.
• The Rival: Kurumi and Alice often clash for Jack's affection. It's mainly one-sided and Kurumi only does so because she's Kurumi, not because of any genuine romantic interest in Jack, but Alice still falls for it every single time.
• Super Mode: The Blood Maidens have their Massacre Mode, in which their hair turns white, their eyes glow pink with white slits for pupils, and they gain some sort of accessories made of pink energy. It makes them somewhat more aggressive (the extent is on an individual basis), while also amplifying their physical and magical capabilities. While originally, it required Marchen blood to activate, they learn to harness the Reiryoku now within them to use it at will, similarly to a partial Astral Dress.
• Superpowered Evil Side: Three different flavors here.
  • The Spirits have their Inverse Form, triggered by them falling into what Westcott claims to be "the abyss of despair". They gain darker, skimpier Astral Dresses, their Angels are replaced by corresponding and much more potent Demon Kings, and they generally attack everything in sight without batting an eye. At least unless there isn't another personality to drive it around, though that's a very rare occurence. Because Hikari is the most Spirit-like of the Blood Team, she is also capable of an Inversion, and saying that Inverse Hikari is a problem would be the Understatement of the century.
  • The Blood Maidens have Blood Skelter, which triggers when the "corruption" building up inside them from emotional trauma reaches its breaking point. They become somehow even more Stripperiffic than the Inverse Forms, only covered up by a combination of pink energy and black armor with plenty of exposed skin, their weapons (generally) fuse with their bodies, the white pupils of their glowing pink eyes go from slits to scribbly swirls, and similarly to the Inverse Forms, they attack everything in sight. Unlike the Inverse Forms, there is no known countermeasure for this berserk state, the only option they have being the use of a Blood Youth's blood to purge the corruption within them entirely.
  • Jack, one of the aformentioned Blood Youths, has Ripper Jack, a mysterious separate persona that manifested during his tenure as a Nightmare in Mary Skelter 2. He has a much simpler visual change: black hair, the scribbly eyes of Blood Skelter, and a black-and-pink aura of "embers" when he gets particularly intense. However, while he does usually attack everybody around him and has a bloodthirsty grin across his face during combat, it's usually not for no reason (even if the reason tends to be a bit skewed). He also ultimately turns out to be mostly a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, wanting to protect Jack the best he can, not mincing his words when trying to support someone, and becoming a massive "Silver Bullet" fan on his and Jack's off-time some time after he awakens.
• The Tease: Two of the resident teases of Date A Live, Kurumi and Nia, both take a liking to teasing Jack as well as Shido. Alice... isn't too into that.
• Transformation Sequence: Along with the Spirits and the Blood Maidens, Hikari also partakes in this. For whatever reason, she had been reduced back to her human form by default, though she can still enter her angelic form. That is because it has become her Astral Dress, her in particular having been transformed into something like a Quasi-Spirit from Date A Bullet.
• Wham Episode:
  • The moment when Inverse Tohka manifests is even more this than in Date A Live proper, as she seemingly kills Jack, causing Alice to fall into Blood Skelter. Then, Jack's emotional turmoil at seeing that causes Ripper Jack to resurface, causing three varieties of Superpowered Evil Side to all be in play at once.
  • Uniquely to this story, there is the entire Inverse Hikari arc, mainly due to revealing Hikari's status as a Quasi-Spirit... and as the name implies, Hikari's Inversion. It all comes about thanks to Ellen seemingly killing Mamoru when he tried to protect Hikari, and things only go downhill from there as Kurumi is forced to send Shido back in time once more so he can stop it from happening.