Alright everyone, here's the scoop. 

[quote]“Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men."

― John F. Kennedy, American president... Quoting Phillips Brooks, clergyman[/quote]

With the current operations over, machinations, for good or for ill, have made certain entities in the city of blood stronger. Fortunately, you are among those who have grown in power.

SoH has a "pyramid" level up system. You may chose to upgrade a [b]core[/b] glamor (Instrument, Style, Genre, Leitmotif) by one grade if you have at least one other glamour of the same grade. As an example, Finn has three silver glamors and one bronze. They may upgrade any of their silver glamors to gold rank. Meanwhile, Mika has one gold, one silver, and two bronze. They cannot upgrade a glamor to gold because they only have one silver. They will have to upgrade one of their bronze glamors to silver. If you like to plan out your levels far into the future, you should have one Diamond, Gold, Silver, and Bronze glamor by the time the final operation rolls around. Elroy has been added to my detailed NPC list if you want to see what your character would compare to. Upgrades won't be implemented until downtime starts next week, but you're free to prepare and get set up for when they do. 

The two [b]supplemental[/b] glamors (PR, Backup) are upgraded/downgraded based on events that transpire in the RP, and are more closely tied to your character's performance. In the case of PR, this is improved by rising through the ranks of your chosen faction. For Gemini, this means getting on Fritzi's good side by being an obedient little agent. For Maverick Alternative, this means being a rootin' tootin' maverick with Billy. For Freelancers, this means doing your job and satisfying all of your employer's criteria. I think for this first operation we're not going to see a whole lot of changes here. GEMINI totally owned those weretigers, but it was a rather straightforward operation. Meanwhile, the Freelancers were served a total fluster cluck that involved runaway dragons, a second set of theives, and [i]Oros the flippin' Mad[/i]. It was no freelancer's shining moment, but can you blame them? Do keep in mind that with higher rank/pay comes higher expectations. This is especially true if you're above silver, so don't go promotion hunting if you can't take more difficult assignments. Oh, and then there's backup. Basically an esper can get a totem object from someone they've interacted with over downtime. It would be easier to explain how this is acquired once downtime starts.

Now for the slightly less fun stuff. There's going to be some "patch updates" to the DoCS, but it's mostly going to be to clarify a few things that weren't executed 100% in this operation. It's fairly minute, and I'm mostly bringing it up now because it didn't seem worthwhile to do during the RP because it wasn't going to have a huge effect on the outcome of events. 

[b]#1: Effect notes (particularly push and pull) and the Aoe/Zone note[/b]

The idea for these has always been that the origin of those modification notes is at their center, and they just kind of "blow out" like an explosion. So in the case of a push/pull note being used, it's going to treat the center of the effect as the spot that's getting pushed/pulled to. 

[b]#2: Targeting parts of a target (Restrain/Suspend)[/b]

Restrain essentially binds part of a target to something nearby, be it a foot to the ground or a wrist to a shoulder. It targets part of a target. Suspend freezes a character's center of mass in a 3d space. Being able to target specific areas with suspend causes a lot of uncomfortable situations to arise. If you can target weapons, does that mean that if you shoot someone in the pants, they can just kind of, undress, to restore their movement? Suspend needs to work on the entire target to prevent the thirstier of you from getting ideas!

[b]#3: "Targets" are assumed to be human in size[/b]

A sort of addendum to the above, if something is larger than a human, you can expect notes to behave differently. Weightless is a nifty note if you don't want to worry about gravity for a moment, but you can't just turn a kaiju into a parade float and kick them into the stratosphere. Monsters that are larger than humans will usually be effected properly by weightless due to being a monster and thus weaker to arcane effects. But if it's massive enough, even that won't be enough to justify a melody working. 

[b]#4: Flight/Speedster + Push/Pull combo[/b]

Flight/Speedster are buffs with a duration. They allow for faster movement, and in the case of Flight, they also allow you to fly. Push/Pull is an instantaneous effect that moves a target a set distance in a set direction. There is no overlap between these notes. If used together, You'd get shoved/pulled in a direction and then your speed buff would take over, which is based on your esper's SPEED score and not your momentum. This has its uses for a quick strafe into a speed boost, but they don't combined to grant SSS++APEX/CHAD rank SPEED. 

In addition to clarifying above, a lot of the element specific notes don't feel special enough and will be getting some pretty interesting buffs/changes over downtime. Might even add a new type of supplemental glamor. Though it's probably one most of you aren't going to want to use... anyway, more details about the updates will be available after their implementation.