Starlight Valor! Pretty Cure (WIP)

They say that the Earth was a shining jewel. Blue oceans, green forests, and enough food, water, and air that everybody could get what they need. More types of plants and animals than you could count in a thousand lifetimes. In the thousand years we've been travelling the stars, we've never found another one like it.

So we must have had a good reason for leaving it behind, right?

It was so long ago that nobody really knows what happened anymore. I've heard some people say that there was some sort of disaster; the environment turned bad, or maybe a meteor hit us. Or maybe we were invaded by aliens? Or maybe there was a war. Or maybe we just used it all up?

Or maybe, nothing happened to it, and we just left because we wanted to see what was out here! I like that one best. The others are really sad.

Either way, it doesn't really matter anymore. The Starlight Express is our home now!

A thousand years ago, humanity took to the stars, launching three great colony ships out into the great beyond, fleeing some sort of disaster that has been lost to time. Against all odds, these colonies survived and even thrived, and today millions of human souls travel the spacelanes. The original mission of the colonies was to find a new home, but today each of them is an enormous society in itself, and the UEN Space Colony Starlight Express is only home you've ever known.

There's a lot of work involved in keeping this many people fed and breathing in the depths of space, of course, but that's not something you need to worry about yet; right now you're more worried about homework, sports, and navigating the fraught social landscape of middle school.

But all of that is interrupted when a pair of strange fairies quite literally falls out of the sky. The Starlight Express is no stranger to alien visitors, but nobody's ever seen anything like these two; and they've come here from a faraway world on the brink of collapse. A marauding gang of space pirates has been draining the planet dry of life, and they've crossed the stars to find the only thing that can save it: the World Heart, and the legendary warriors who protect it: the Pretty Cures.

Only problem is, none of you have ever heard of a World Heart, or a Pretty Cure. And the pirates that devastated their world have followed in their wake, and are looking to make the Starlight Express their new project. It's all up to you: become Pretty Cure, defend your home, and save two worlds!

The UEN Space Colony, Starlight Express

Hoplite-Class mobile fortress, registration number CNL-0710-D

When the Starlight Express was launched over a thousand years ago, it was a spartan and military vessel, originally designed to take and hold a star system while sustainably hosting a garrison. Some of that is still in evidence in the design of the colony's exterior, and the original blueprints can still be seen, imprinted on a plaque commemorating its launch, in what is now the Command City Hall. But if the engineers who designed and built the Starlight Express could see her now, they wouldn't recognize her. Over the last thousand years, the central habitation ring has been expanded multiple times, and has transformed from a simple oxygen factory and hydroponics farm into an enormous artificial environment mimicking Earth's great outdoors...or, as best as they could, anyway.

Located around the central ring are four main cities, each named for the colony systems that they connect to. There are smaller settlements scattered between them, and even in the habitation ring proper, but the vast majority of the Starlight Express's two million souls live in one of the following:

• Command City: The largest settlement in the colony, and the seat of its government. Appropriately, the city is so named because it's connected to the primary bridge, from which the colony's course can be set and its various systems controlled.


• Engine Town: The smallest of the four primary settlements, Engine Town is so named because it lies in proximity to the colony's labyrinthine engine rooms. Its occupants are primarily those who work to keep the colony's Space-Time Fold drive and Neutrino Reactors operational.


• Cartographer's Rest: Located in proximity to the vessel's Stellar Cartography systems and laboratories, Cartographer's Rest is the seat of research and knowledge aboard the Starlight Express. Boasting the colony's greatest universities, the people who live here work tirelessly to study new phenomena encountered between the stars, and to develop new ways to improve the lives of the colony's occupants


• Lifesupportshire: Built around the enormous air reclamation and water purifier units that keep the colony habitable, Lifesupportshire is also home to most of the colony's agricultural workers who keep it fed, as well. it also has a vibrant culinary scene, taking advantage of those fresh-grown crops

In addition to the Starlight Express proper, there is a small fleet of smaller craft that follow in its wake, piggybacking on the colony's enormous fold drives whenever it makes a jump.

Who lives on the Express?

Unsurprisingly, most of the population of the Starlight Express are human descendants of the original colonists, who were drawn from all over the Earth. But humanity has never been alone among the stars, and over the centuries each of humanity's colonies have picked up some additional travellers.

On the Starlight Express, it was decided a long time ago that citizenship would be extended to anyone willing to join it on its journey and abide by its laws. It takes a certain kind of person to commit to a life aboard a space colony, surrounded by strange aliens, as they wander the stars. Still, over time, enough have done just that that the population of the Express is visibly diverse.

Here are examples of some of the types of alien travellers who now call the Starlight Express their home:

• Amiliens: The Amiliens are a slender, four-armed species that is heavily integrated into the Starlight Express's population...and most other spacefaring societies besides. For whatever reason, one of this species' strongest social instincts is to build social bonds between groups by exchanging members. So, when they went to space and discovered other spacefaring societies, they rapidly spread out and integrated themselves essentially everywhere in the galaxy that was willing to welcome them. As a result, Amiliens can be found almost everywhere, and make up the bulk of the Starlight Express's non-human population. Immigrant Amiliens retain their family ties from their old home, which means that they're often well-positioned to work as merchants, diplomats, or in other positions where being able to call on those ties would be advantageous.


• Maxmans (Pronounced like 'freshman', rather than like 'fresh man'): A long, long time ago, a technologically advanced species created the Maxmans to serve as shock troops in a long-forgotten war. The Maxmans decided that they were not interested in doing any such thing, and today have long since outlived their creators (or so the story goes). Maxmans have pointed ears, brightly colored hair, and in their natural state, a Maxman is 2-3 times the size of an average human. Because this is inconvenient for someone living in a space colony built to a human scale, Maxmans living on the Express almost always undergo a reversible process called minification, which shrinks them down to human size. Ironically, this tends to leave them the size of very short humans...although they're also correspondingly heavy and very strong. All that mass didn't go away, it just got compressed!


• Mushijin: The Mushijin don't look that different from humans, apart from the skin color, antennae, and wings. But looks are deceiving; they're actually technically more closely related to insects like bees and ants. Mushijin live in colonies that they construct together, only splitting into a second group when there's no more room for the colony to grow (or, much more rarely, when there is some sort of deep schism within the community). A common misconception about Mushijin is that they have a hive mind which they all obey. The reality is that through electrical signals transmitted through their antennae, a colony of Mushijin can reach a consensus very quickly. In practice it's not much different from a large community meeting to decide the next course of action, with each member of the community participating, except that it happens in minutes rather than the hours or even days that such a meeting would take for a human community, and happens almost completely invisibly to outsiders. Once a consensus is reached, member of the colony will generally defer to it...unless they feel very strongly opposed, of course. Mushijin wings are not quite vestigial, but aren't strong enough to properly fly with; adult Mushijin are only able to maintain a hover for at most thirty seconds. Mushijin children, on the other hand, can flit around with ease, much to everyone's irritation. Mushijin from different colonies are often testy with each other, because their antennae communication only works within a colony, and the signals given off by Mushijin from other colonies are offputting; one described it as like 'listening to nails scraping on a chalkboard, but autotuned to the worst melody you've ever heard'.

What is a Pretty Cure?

To pull back the curtain a little bit, Pretty Cure is a franchise of magical girl anime series. Each runs for a full year, and then is replaced the next year by a new series, with a new cast, in a new setting. They've been doing this for twenty years now.

Because the show is different every year, it's gone through a lot of iterations, but there are a few common themes that show up (almost) every time:

• Main cast are in the second year of middle school (by Japanese standards, so 13-14 years old). Some cast may be a bit older or a bit younger but that's where the center of equilibrium lies.


• The cast receive the power to transform into Pretty Cure from one or more fairies, which came from some magical world into our own on a mission. Note: it's a different magical world each time.


• Pretty Cures (or just 'Cures') have names in the form 'Cure Blank': Cure White, Cure Black, Cure Sky, Cure Mint, Cure Etoile, etc. The second word is always in English or, for some reason, French. Very occasionally Italian. They each also have a color associated with them, sentai-style: a very common team color scheme is Pink, Blue, Yellow, and Purple, with Pink being the group's leader and Purple joining the team later, but this is not universal.


• While they may also have a number of magical abilities, the Cures generally also fight their enemies physically, with bare-handed martial arts. Tokusatsu shows like Kamen Rider were a big inspiration for the series.


• Corollary: Pretty Cures are strong and can jump VERY high


• The villains are intruders from another world, generally a different world from the fairies. They may or may not engage the Cures in combat personally, but whether they do or not they also summon spirits that possess people and everyday objects and turn them into big monsters for the Cures to fight.


• After a fight, anything that was damaged during the fighting magically repairs itself


• The naming sense is INCREDIBLY on-the-nose. An example: in the original Futari wa Pretty Cure, Cure White's family name is Yukishiro...which in Japanese means 'snow white'. They've met writers who use subtlety, and they think that they're cowards.
  

For this campaign, the theme words for the cures will be cosmos, discovery, and friendship.