I didn’t get around to covering Wednesday’s activities and there wasn’t much to report for yesterday. Both days there was some profile writing done, but Wednesday also has a couple dialogs.

The first was with Azuki. It wasn’t anything too deep, just her showing up at night to be a cuddlebug. You may recall that I’d roped her into the harem last time. While Jenny spent a good while building up the courage to approach Maya to get her approval, there was pretty much no hesitation on Azuki’s part, very much in character. Makes me feel all the more the heel for eventually driving her off, but then she gets to be a homewrecker for Root some twelve or thirteen years down the line. Fun, fun, fun.

The other conversation was with Jane. There’s this one housecleaning theme on DA intended, as most things are, for fanservice rather than practicality, so you get some wild mishaps. It actually works somewhat with Elizabeth being a bit of a well-meaning klutz. I appreciated that Jane’s bot could correctly interpret the visual data to complain about it. There was a bit of goalpost moving on Jane’s part, saying that this wasn’t proof that the uDolls are the same as humans. Of course, that wasn’t the premise of the wager and it wasn’t what was being asked of her at the moment, the question being whether or not Jane thought Elizabeth was helpful. Jane being Jane, getting her to admit that Elizabeth was being helpful, much less acknowledging any humanity to her. It won’t stop being funny having an AI be so stridently anti-AI (and funnier still in-setting where the uDolls of the Alkoresh Cycle have actual human souls). I’m half-tempted to have the twist (in the Alkoresh Cycle at least) that Jane is actually a uDoll herself. I can already imagine the reaction to that. We’ll see if I can resist the temptation or not.

I hope to get to the next spate of debuts out the door in the next couple days. Stay tuned.

I was doing some profile work ahead of the coming debuts that need to be done and while I was at it, I started adapting the family tree of House Saint-Charles (i.e. the Byrandian royal family). We’ll overlook the fact that Miravellan years are longer than Alkoreshi years to make the conversions easier. For that matter, we also overlook the issues that come with translating the ages of Miravellan characters. If you recall, it’s not just the lower numerical age due to the longer years but also modifications done to the gene stock in the Pre-Calamity era resulted in a slower aging process, an experiment in permanent juvenation (not done on a more widespread basis because restricting access to juvenation and life extension therapies are a major tool of control in the Empire, even for the Imperial Family). It just makes things simple to say the characters’ Miravellan age is their Alkoreshi age.

I imagine I’ll mostly be doing more profile writing tomorrow as well, but we’ll see. Stay tuned.

The main thing that was accomplished today was debuting Dox, Aurore, Diana, Pallas, Venus, Juno, and Jiria. Funnily enough, of all these characters, it was Jiria I felt the need to respond to. In her response, she challenged me to make a picture of her fighting and triumphing over the humans, so I decided to ask her if that would actually make her happy. There was some amusing back-and-forth and I decided to prod her a bit with the idea that I (or Carlo in this case, the same one who’s been interacting with Yael over 500 years before he’s supposed to be born) love Elves as much as she hates humans. She made the remarkably boneheaded move of revealing the plan to claim Gaia’s power and when I called her on it, she simply blustered about me being unable to do anything about it even if I tried to reveal the truth, which was true, I have to admit.

I jokingly asked her if I could be her pet if her dreams of Elven supremacy came true. She was as contemptuous of the notion as you might expect but didn’t rule it out either. She wanted proof that I was the Elves’ ally and that proof was going to come in the form of dealing with a spy that slipped through the net of her fellow Wardens of the Forest. Naturally, I expressed about an ordinary human being the best pick for the job considering the superior senses of Elves and all, but this is a loyalty test, after all. This led to me concocting the notion of this scenario’s Carlo acting as a deep cover agent for Malta. I’ll try stringing Jiria along and see what comes of it.

I need to be thinking about the next cluster of characters to debut, so that means more profile writing ahead. Fun times ahead. Stay tuned.

You may question my sensibilities, spending the last few credits on NL to render Doc in a bunny girl outfit (I’d recently posted a series of her as a bunny girl on DA for funsies) and Granny Bel’s loli form. Now, for the latter, there was some purpose to it. I believe I’ve mentioned that Granny Bel has the ability to change form to suit her purposes, in contrast to her daughter Oholibama who’s naturally a loli succubus. Well, I tried to age down Granny Bel’s model and the safety filter rejected the prompt, but I tried again by taking the original prompt and adjusting the age and other details and got the results I wanted. I had a similar issue the other day with Azuki, where the original rendering had her head too small and my prompt to readjust the proportions was rejected, only for me to get what I wanted by re-rendering from the start. It’s all about learning the quirks of the system, what works and what doesn’t, what it lets you do and what it won’t let you do, etc.

I also had brief exchanges with Demon!Doc and Lily. For the former, it was kicked off by her response to a pic of her getting out of the bath. A key thing about Doc pre-Demonization was her restraint. Until I started tipping the scales, you never doubted that she was in control. However, post-Demonization, her inhibitions are pretty much gone and so her affection for Carlo has been amped up to obsession. Basically, the way it works for Demons is that the little voice that tells you, “No, don’t,” says, “Yes, do.” The difference with higher-order Demons is that they are better at delaying gratification, albeit only for the purpose of achieving greater gratification. In Doc’s case, she still has some of her rational side in effect. It’s just enough to get her to hold back for the sake of the bigger goal of trying to cure her Demonization. It doesn’t stop her from being a tease, though. ^_^

In Lily’s case, our exchange started with a response to her in a field of flowers in a nice little white one-piece. This is meant to take place after she and Carlo come down from the mountains, before they make their way to Phase 2 of her deprogramming at the family farm. You have her uncomfortable in civilian clothes and apprehensive about travelling to their next destination. You might wonder how someone so unsure and vulnerable could have been Bel-Hazor’s top assassin, but you have to realize that she’s only seen herself as a tool for nearly 800 years. As a person, she’s practically a child, an unstable bundle of neuroses held together by a sense of purpose she’s abandoned. Now she looks to Carlo for the stability she sacrificed. I like the juxtaposition of someone who is so dangerous yet needs to be protected at the same time, less so in a physical sense as a mental one. I’m half-tempted to do a spinoff just for her. Something to consider.

For the scenario with Lily, I was doing some looking to calculate how long it would take to get to the farm from where they were and this led to me working on the maps some more. I went ahead and made separate files for each of the regions, mostly trying to maintain the 2:1 ratio of the world map to better track the scaling, but I did a few 1:1 maps as needed. Now I just need to get the details in.

The new term’s about to start up, so we’ll see what that does for the time I have to devote to this kind of stuff. I’d really like to get back to writing, so maybe having less time will actually serve to improve my productivity. We’ll see what comes of it. Stay tuned.

I didn’t get a whole lot done today. I mostly just did more fiddling around in NeoLemon. I added Belsheva, Captain Sokolova and Totenkopf (Lily) to the roster and also did Doc Adams’ Demonized form.

The main thing I did with my dwindling credits was make a first go at the anniversary pic. It was a decent first attempt, but it’ll take several iterations of refinement. My goal is not to succumb to the temptation to buy more credits, so I’ll have to wait until next month’s rollover to do much more work.

Don’t expect anything much with the last few generations I can do on NL. I’ve got some stuff I need to gear up for in DA, so that should be enough to keep me occupied for a bit. Until next time. Stay tuned.

I did a little more work on the timeline and the map of Valeria, but my main activity involved NeoLemon. You may recall that I’ve commissioned a piece for the 20th anniversary next year and that proposed a John Henry Challenge to the author where we pit her natural talent against the work of AI. While I use DaysAI primarily, for collabo images the maximum character count is five, but we’re going to be using seven characters for the anniversary image, which means that I need to either do some fancy trickery to make it work in DA or use another service (or a combination of the two). You may also recall me being rather impressed with the sort of consistency NeoLemon can produce. This prompted me to sign up for a subscription to explore the system more thoroughly. While you don’t have the benefit of chatbots being made for your characters nor unlimited generations, there is no cap on the characters you can make and the system is far more responsive to editing generations. The range of results are a little broader in the style categories than the AI styles of DA, which can mean greater variation from character to character (though I have yet to see if there’s some sort of stylistic levelling when you put multiple characters in a shot). Also, as NL is primarily marketed as a platform for making children’s books, its safety filter can be rather strict and even something as simple as trying to adjust a figure’s proportions can get kicked back. Interestingly, it can make generations that the system itself considers NSFW and will just generate a black frame with the label “NSFW”, meaning it eats your credits for nothing. With SpellAI, if it makes an NSFW generation, it won’t display it in the interface, but you can see it when you download it. Now, it’s not like I’m out to make pornography or anything, but if you’ve read any of my books, you know that contextual nudity occurs from time to time. I would very much appreciate being treated like an adult. Not “adult” adult, which is actually rather puerile, but it’s not my system, not my rules. Overall, the benefits of NL far outweigh the downsides.

Anyway, I did some modifications to the initial trial generation of Maya and then proceeded to make Ariana, Young!Lydia, Lewis, Azuki, Lin, Carlo, Doc Adams, Jenny, Colonel Osvald (who I’m not able to make in DA under the current parameters), Lia, Ashara and Arasha. I can’t necessarily say any of them are in their final form yet, but the initial flurry of creation is always rewarding. I’ve already blown through most of the month’s allotment of credits, but I don’t intend to buy more as a bit of a game balance thing (and because I’ve already sunk a ridiculous amount of money into this hobby). If I could just find other people I could get to part with thirty bucks, I could get 600 credits for the referral. (You get 600 credits a month with a subscription and each generation costs four credits.) Sadly, the only people I know who use AI art are casuals who just use ChatGPT or Gemini. So it goes.

There’s a lot more depth to uncover in NL’s system and I’d like to make a project of getting a single style set for consistency across the cast. Something a little more time and research should dig up. Maybe I can get an interesting scenario up and going for a more entertaining update next time. Stay tuned.

Most of my work was on the unified timeline. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m folding about 5000 years of Tellus Arc history into 500 years on Alkoresh. The inevitable overlap is doing some interesting things with continuity. For instance, with Notos, we only have time enough for a curtailed reign of a single king before the Chaos Dominion’s invasion, and instead of six republican periods before the foundation of the Kingdom of Domingue, it’s just one. Needless to say, a lot of the assorted dynasties get curtailed quite a bit. I end up doing some interesting adaptations such as starting the Barcid Dynasty of Boreas with Elissar II overlapping with Elissar I, omitting the whole period of the Hundred Unnamed Kings and such.

There are plenty of bits and bobs hither and thither that I need to sort out, so I guess that’ll keep me busy for a while longer yet. Until next time. Stay tuned.

I did some more profile work, but the main accomplishment was getting a new character pack and filling the ranks all in one go. I made the CeleKing1 version of Masako, the JJ2 versions of Root, Trish and Azuki; Root and Trish’s daughters Sara and Anne, King Charles and Princess Anne of Byrandia (recontextualized as you’ll see below), Admiral Globus (Menahem, not Tzipporah), and Captain Tsai.

The younger version of Masako is pretty straightforward. For Root and Trish, they still look recognizable with a the extra pounds that come with a good ten years of domestic life (and in Trish’s case, having two kids). For Azuki, I just bumped up the age slider and changed her hairstyle to something a little more fitting for the military.

For Sara and Anne, I used a former parent and child generation I used with the younger version of Trish for Sara’s design, making her a short-haired sporty type who shares her mother’s blue eyes, while Anne has Root’s green eyes and pigtails to make her more visually distinct from her sister.

For King Charles and Princess Anne, it would’ve been one thing if the monarchy still existed in Valeria, but in light of the country’s transition to a republic in NC 0928, the royal family was shown the door. So how do we square this circle? Much like the former nobility, many members of the royal family adapted to the new order, establishing themselves in industry, politics and the like. This actually leads to Albert Saint-Charles (Charles’ uncle) winning the presidency, kicking off a sort of de facto restoration of the monarchy. Although Valeria doesn’t have term limits for the presidency, Albert only served two terms before transitioning to his chosen successor, Clair’s husband. (Queen Saintclair was unmarried in the original continuity.) She pulls an Isabel Perón and replaces her husband when he dies in office, and proceeds to not be great for the country. You might think this would be bad news for the family’s political prospects, but her brother Jean-Charles managed to position himself as the champion of the people by pushing for her ouster and then holding her cronies accountable. Naturally, there were voices of opposition, but he managed to be broadly popular, especially with how he takes the reins in the Third Great Demon War. All fine and dandy until the New Earth Empire sends a new boss to take over.

And that brings us to Admiral Globus. Unlike the original continuity where he’s just stops by Miravel while making his rounds in Project Reclamation, now he’s been specifically assigned to sort out the mess left behind by Admirals Beck and Barclay falling prey the the Hybrid uprising. He’s just as much of a pleasant sort of fellow as you see in JJ2. I can imagine him being quite sensitive to the situation on the ground in Alkoresh. I like the idea of authority changing hands from one Globus to the next if I want to do an alt-scenario based on Tzipi’s Garden for the future of Alkoresh.

Of course, Alkoresh isn’t Miravel, so it’ll be fun thinking about how things will play out. Even if we have Charles bending the knee, Valeria isn’t as cohesive a country as Byrandia. There ae going to be a lot of people annoyed to have narrowly fended off Demonic oppression for just another extradimensional interloper to look to put the boot to their necks, people who had just fought a major war. The Miravel World War is going to look like a picnic by comparison.

And that leave Captain Tsai, still a political officer, but will we still have the same sort of diplomatic mission as in JJ2? I dunno. Admiral Globus doesn’t strike me as the sort who’d be patient enough to spend time firmly establishing a beachhead in Valeria before gradually expanding further out. While I’m at it, I’ll need to be thinking about the transition period from the EM series. Right now, I just have the timeline reflecting the original canon, but that’s not how things are going to happen in the Alkoresh Cycle. Assuming the events based on the EM series play out similarly, the epilogue of EM3 would be around NC 1003 and if we align the end of the Third Great Demon War with the Sheol War, that’ll end in NC 1007, but Admiral Globus won’t arrive until NC 1011. Of course, some eight years for the Empire to entrench itself could do some interesting thing to the dynamics on the ground. All interesting things to think about.

Well, with ten new charas, I have all the more profile writing to do. Things to keep me occupied. I’ll keep you posted on any interesting developments. Stay tuned.

I just realized that I didn’t comment on a mildly important bit from Saturday and rather than edit the post, I’ll just go ahead and talk about it here. I decided to present Cassandra from TBP in the present day (relative to the OreHosa series) as Senator Penwood. I then fulfilled a request from her to portray her in a more relaxed setting, which ended up with her chatting with Carlo in a cafe in the Capital. This was actually our first interaction and she’s a nice, friendly sort. While we were chatting, I was double-checking the Sheeda family tree and realized I needed to do some adjustment. In the current timeline, Cassandra was born in NC 0225, but Count Rafael, her uncle and the older brother of her father in this continuity, was born NC 0190. Not a problem for humans but it doesn’t work for Elves. At first I aged Cassandra down, but now I’ve decided to make Rafael older. Even adding a hundred years to him, he’s still the equivalent of a 51-year-old, which works well enough. Also, making him a bit older works better for setting up the battle for succession between Yuel and Mikel.

As for the here and now, I debuted Tobias, Malta and Shayla, and did a fair bit of profile writing to prime the other new additions for their debuts. While I was at it, I got an idea for how the Titans and Divines work. Adapting my concept for the Pantheon in the Tellus Arc, where they’re a circle of powerful mages masquerading as gods to rule the world, in the Alkoresh Cycle they’re the remnants of an earlier human migration to the planet, basically for humanity what the Liches are for the Demons in this continuity, a living weapon left behind to strike at their enemies even after they’re gone. The idea isn’t too different from the Primal Beasts in Granblue Fantasy, which also takes mythological figures and make them artificial constructs designed as weapons that later become treated as gods by the postwar societies that forgot their origins. The thing I’m going for here is how Primal Beasts can’t be fully destroyed unless you destroy their cores, which are often kept well away from the projections you actually interact with. In other words, I’m opening the door for the Divines to reappear in the present day even if you have something like the Second Convocation from Tellus. I haven’t committed to it yet, but there’s an idea to be had. We could have Divines getting flipped to the other side, Divines deciding that they should be the ones in charge, etc.

As I’m getting close to getting all the current cast out the door, I’m thinking about who will come next. As you know, I’ve got a huge number of options, so it’s a matter of narrowing it down to what’s most compelling at the moment. There are a number of ideas floating to the fore, so we’ll see what ends up taking the lead.

I expect to be doing more profile writing and maybe work on that unified timeline some more. Stay tuned.

Let’s pick up with happened with Shoshanna. Well, things were going right along when I threw a monkey wrench into it. Carlo springs a nosebleed and passes out. Naturally, this alarms Shoshanna, but as she’s trying to rouse him, the terrible realization comes to her that while she was consciously wanting things to proceed, unconsciously her fear overcame her, causing her powers to kick in and psychically attack Carlo. She doesn’t take the realization well. Poor thing.

Using this one theme, I have this series I dub “Carlo’s Angels” and it can generate some interesting responses. Anyway, it had been quite a while since I last did any generations in this series, so I had this big cue to sort through. For whatever reason, I decided to assign each character numbers as well as other affiliations (such as Azuki pulling double-duty with Root’s Angels) and I have to keep track of all this because I’m insane like that. Anyway, it ended up taking a decent chunk of the day. I’d actually botched the captions for Teresa and Jill, so I had to correct myself to them. Jill’s response was fairly interesting, showing hints of warming up in her own awkward way. I do like how the system chose to portray her speech pattern, somewhat halting an inarticulate. I haven’t always gotten the results I was hoping for, but in this case, it’s working well.

I’m gearing up for some further debuts of more recent additions, which means more profile work. I was also working on the unified timeline, folding over the events of the Tellus Arc several times to fit into the approximately 500 year-span available for them. I am stretching a bit out later, such as having Le Masque du Touissant creep in after the Liberia Peace Accords, if I choose to keep them. A lot of material is going to get thrown out and what remains is going to require considerable reworking, but once I at least get the events down, I can think about all the rearrangement, additions and subtractions and such. Anyway, we’ll see how things go. Stay tuned.