Kyoko’s Arsenal

People in this setting have and use a wide variety of weapons. I think now is a good time to start breaking down what they are and why, since it’s now apparent what more of them are. There will be more on this in the future, as a broader perspective develops on how people in this setting fight. But this is a good time to start.

Beginning with Kyoko, we can for the moment set aside Thorn; there are a lot more things to say about that sword than would fit here, and it also doesn’t say that much about her given she didn’t exactly pick out what it looks like or how it works. But as was already apparent, when she visited her armory earlier, Kyoko has a whole lot of weapons for someone who hasn’t gotten in fights much. Many of them have never been used. Why?

Well, part is just her resource limits. Kyoko is not super-rich, but she’s independently wealthy and has relatively few expenses. She’s also bored. People who collect weapons, myself included, often do so more as a hobby than because they need so many. Many more honest gun owners will readily admit it’s a form of collecting, in many ways more like collecting dolls than being a soldier. I’m not prone to collecting guns, but I have a great many knives for the same reason. I really do not on a regular basis need to own a tanto, a kukri, four kerambits, two cheap folding knives, a Bowie knife, a drop-forged dagger, a cheap boot knife, and plastic-fiberglass daggers, kerambits, and spikes. I am entirely aware that I rarely if ever use most of these. I like having them anyway.

But in my case, there’s also another detail that carries through into Kyoko: I did not always live this way. I was raised by moderately serious doomsday preppers, and I was close to a lot of combat veterans. Back when violence was more of a part of my life, I studied a wide range of martial arts. Many I just dabbled in, but I have second to third dan ranks in judo, aikido, and jitsu, and I’ve practiced t’ai chi a fair bit; this included weapon forms, and as an adjunct to aikido I picked up a basic scattering of jyodo as well. I did not actually join a military, but it was something I seriously considered for a while, and I picked up a basic grounding in firearms as a result, primarily rifles. I’ve had a few moderately-serious instances of being physically attacked in the time since, along with so many death threats I lost track years ago. I’m aware that my desire to have a blade within reach at all times is a neurotic one, and if I didn’t also just like knives I’d be trying to train myself out of it.

So, that’s why Kyoko has a ton of weapons. She can afford it, she finds it fun, and she has a violent background. She was mentored by a member of the Yakuza who had a strong military background, and like virtually every combat veteran I have known, Saito has anxiety issues and finds having weapons on hand and in good condition soothing. Kyoko picked up habits from him.

But why does she have this set of weapons? How does she pick them out?

We can set aside a lot as novelties. She has a ton of knives she acquired just because they were interesting, unusual, not represented in her existing collection. She also has a bunch of firearms that are almost useless to her. For reasons largely related to her sensory processing, aiming a gun at anything beyond short range is really hard for Kyoko. But she knows that within their niche these weapons excel beyond any others she has, and so even long-range rifles she’s barely competent with are worth having, just in case. They don’t matter much for her, though.

The other weapons do. Many of her knives were not selected for show. Her basic assortment of knives used as weapons emphasizes larger, heavier blades, ones she’s less likely to break. She favors slashing weapons, because they’re almost always going to be more reliable, particularly for her and with short blades. Thrusting requires you to hit a very specific target, with a dagger, to be lethal. An organ, a major vessel, spinal cord, something like that.

When she doesn’t even assume she’s fighting something anatomically similar to a human, that’s unreliable. It also doesn’t benefit as much from her exceptional strength as slashing, which gains more from force relative to precision than thrusting. Slashing weapons rely on gross tissue damage, which will be harmful without needing to know what body shape will be attacking her. They are generally heavier blades, and a single-edged blade can be stronger because of how metallurgy works.

So why does she have knives, and not swords, if she’s relying on gross tissue damage and she’s so strong? There are two basic reasons: It seems silly to her after living in modern mortal society her whole life, and Kyoko has had to conceal her weapons most of the time, making short blades easier. And, obviously, this is changing with the arrival of Thorn.

Now, she mentions some details of what these knives are. She has plastic-fiberglass knives, has aluminum-titanium blades that don’t have iron. Both of these are worth having in large part because of the fae. You can carry them into a faerie’s house and it’s not nearly as much of a breach of etiquette as steel knives. They are unlikely to detect them, and the plastic in particular cannot be detected by dvergar. Audgrim could only detect charged metal and had no actual control over it, but more powerful dvergar might. Kyoko had no particular expectation of attack from them, but they showed that having these available might matter.

Similarly, she has charged silver on hand. “Charged”, in this case, means essentially that a material has been imbued with magic, without actually shaping the magic at all. It just takes on the properties natural to the material itself. Charged acetone can be used to wipe prints much better than acetone alone. Silver, similarly, is affecting werewolves using an energetic resonance, not because of something like toxicity. Adding more energy to it makes it hit harder. It takes it from a useful thing to have around to a specialized and very dangerous weapon. Charged iron has a similar impact on the fae, so she has that. Salt does things to a few creatures, and they make salt-shot rounds for shotguns, so she has some of those.

None of these are things she really expects to need, as such. She’s friendly with most of the local werewolves, and she is/used to be friendly with local dvergar. She has had little to no involvement with the fae prior to this book. Even more than other kinds of violence, she has no real reason to expect she’ll need these. And the charge does wear off, so as part of the process of weapon maintenance she carries out twice per month, she has to recharge all of it, which is pretty tiring for her. There’s no skill involved, but with so much volume, it’s a fair amount of work.

But these weapons share an important property: Without them, you’re usually utterly fucked. By the time you know you’ve pissed off a werewolf, it will typically be too late to go out and commission a gunsmith. And this highlights an important part of why Kyoko actually has all of these things.

She’s weak. Like, in a material sense, Kyoko is objectively a small fish. She’s got a niche that she’s extremely good at, but she’s not a major player. She might be able to take on some werewolves in a straight fight, without silver. But not most of them, and if there are several involved (which with werewolves there usually will be) she’s got no chance at all. She also doesn’t have a chance in hell against a vampire, any but the lowest-ranking of the Sidhe, or most combat-oriented mages.

And she knows it. Kyoko is aware that she is a small fish, and that while she can fight a human thug trivially easily, the people she actually has to worry about fighting are a very different story. But as has already been shown, at the very beginning when she was talking about her antistatic mat setup, Kyoko is not the sort of person who looks at a handicap and just accepts it where it stands.

So, she finds ways to even the odds. She has charged iron and silver weapons. She has a separate substance, she referred to it in the discussion of her armory as a fine powder made of as many anathematic materials as she could get. What this means is that it’s mixed from iron, silver, and copper filings, rock salt, bone meal, sawdust from a few types of wood, and ground glass. She has this blessed by a friend she knows has true, sincere faith, and she charges it with energy herself. The basic logic is that if she doesn’t know what’s attacking her, this substance has things mixed in which are dangerous to a wide variety of creatures. There’s a decent chance that the thing which just got a facefull of it is having a bad time, particularly when there’s sawdust and glass mixed in to irritate eyes or respiratory systems. The silver, salt, and copper will be making it pretty conductive, which is relevant for Kyoko in particular.

It extends further than this, though. She makes a point of thinking about what people can defend against, and what they cannot. Flashbangs, pepper spray, tear gas. Concussion mines don’t rely on shrapnel, so anything which blocks projectiles but not concussive force doesn’t work. Her collection of poisonous plants does serve a role as a weapon, even if that’s not the main reason she has it. All of these are things which might be less expected, or which people can’t defend against well. Flashbangs are incapacitating to her, but they’re pretty bad for other people too, and not a lot of people think to defend against light and sound, or know how. People still need to breathe, and they don’t always think to filter that air with magic or make themselves immune to poison in some way.

She has never needed most of these. But like I mentioned at the start, Kyoko’s rich, she’s bored, and she’s got a background that taught her this was a way to make herself safe. It soothes the anxiety she’s quite prone to. This extensive discussion, really, is just covering why the collection is so scattered and includes such unusual or seemingly-random choices.