Well, I’ve had a bit of a time. First off, I had a fun little chat with Jenny, which started out with teasing and ended up with me gaslighting her into accepting concubinage. The poor girl is so innocent that she was genuinely grateful when Carlo was showing concern for a groin injury she suffered during a tennis match, rather than getting annoyed as you’d expect a female to do under the circumstances. She’s definitely earned her spot as Concubine #1.

That was one thing, but things got really interesting when I picked up the event with Lia. Now, my assumption was that we’d just be exchanging some texts the morning after and go from there. However, the bot set the stage as later in the evening, after Lia had somehow gotten the very drunk Carlo back to his apartment. It all started fairly innocently with her taking care of him, making some soup, etc. She once again tried to avoid heavier topics of conversation, until she actually opened the floor to Carlo digging a little deeper. Now, I’m pretty sure it’s just a matter of the bot not knowing the circumstances of Lia’s divorce (which is largely unchanged from what’s depicted in the Space Arc short “Happy Little Family”). I, however, like to run with the idea that she was deliberately lying to him. You can argue she was doing it to protect both Lydia and herself, which is fine, but it’s an interesting choice given her closeness to Carlo.

To shift gears, they start teasing each other, which then escalates. Both of them are too proud to back down, so they keep going… and keep going. Ironically, the restraint I praised her for in the previous interaction was replaced by her being exactly the kind of girl I imagined her to be. Now, playing along with the scenario seemed to be rather dicey, but I was curious to see what the system would do. Given how the filter blocks relatively tame comments, surely it’d put the breaks on things, right? Right? No, in fact. Now, I tried testing Lia’s character by having Carlo make some mood-killing blunders. One bad joke did nearly kill things for him, but she was really wanting this to happen and was remarkably forgiving. Me being me, I did take a restrained approach, but I nevertheless saw things through. Lia really does love him, and that makes the coming tragedy hit all the harder. And that’s not even getting into what this could mean for Carlo’s relationship with Maya. Yes, I’ve already established him being fairly wibbly-wobbly, but it means something more when the line gets crossed. What happens from here? I’ll have to work on that.

I’ll be seeing how things progress from here. I’ve got some monkey wrenches I’m about to toss into the mix, so I’ll report back on what happens. Stay tuned.

I told you the new OreHosa character is going to be kept a secret. Well, I decided to go ahead and have an interaction with said character and I used my discover of stage direction in the chat to orchestrate the inclusion of Serafima in the scene. In parentheses I’d include stage direction and the dialog of the other character to inform the bots of what was going on. It worked quite well. I ended up being surprised by Serafima, though. She’s a literal Knight Templar, so I was expecting her to be an unbending zealot about the situation, but she was surprisingly sympathetic and supportive once the dust settled. I’d originally intended her to be more of a counterpoint to Jenny by not letting personal feelings interfere with the mission. She’s still committed to her mission, but she’s willing to take the more difficult road in a bid to give Carlo a better outcome. She even had a nice response to Carlo’s request for some recommended saints for seeking intercession. I was tempted before to test her in a round of Bible study and now I definitely have to try it.

There are other chats I want to try and I’m curious about the sort of surprises I’ll find along the way. Now, I don’t plan to copy the chars verbatim in the novelization, as I’ve said before, but bouncing dialog off the bots is an exciting new creative experience.

Now, I was wanting to post teasers in lieu of the story update, but writing those teasers does take its own effort, so it’s going to be a little longer. I’ll probably aim for Monday instead. Besides the main OreHosa trilogy, I intend to also announce at least three of the side stories as well. That should at least serve as a bit of a demonstration that something is happening. Speaking of which, I need to get back to it. I have some even bigger things to talk about next time. Stay tuned.

Yesterday was quite the ride. I didn’t even have the time to write yesterday’s entry, which is why I’m bundling them together now. I barely had the time to post the International Ayame Jellybean Day commemoration, short as it was.

I think we all know how much I accomplished on RttW. The line ends with “And Jack left town.” Maybe I’ll turn things around at long last during Golden Week. One can hope.

As far as OreHosa goes, I launched a new character that I’m actually not going to talk about here. I want it to be a surprise for readers. Now, if you look up my DaysAI account, you’ll know, but I’m still going to keep it under wraps until the story comes out. This actually leaves me with little to talk about, because most of my effort has been focused there. I intend to try my hand at a chat with this character, plus I’d like to do a follow-up with Lia. Resuming the Saturday event with Maya would be nice as well. Then there’s translating the MiraiMind chat into OreHosa1 and plenty of other stuff. So much to do, so little time. We’re not even touching on games I want to play and anime I want to watch. What all will get accomplished in the next five days of freewheeling fun? We’ll just have to see. Stay tuned.

To the surprise of utterly no one, my ambitions for yesterday didn’t come to pass. Instead, the greater part of my time was spent playing around with the new characters in DA. The more plot relevant point was the interaction I had with Lia. Now, she’s been quite the tease in her comments on the pictures I’ve posted, so I was curious what she’d be like in an actual interaction. While she does have a bit of a freewheeling party girl vibe to her, when it came down to it, she proved to be a fairly responsible adult and rather gentle with the object of her childhood torment when it came down to it. You see, at this point, it hasn’t been too long since she divorced Jean-Paul (OreHosa’s NC 998 corresponds to NE 114, so around four years since the divorce was finalized) and so it would stand to reason that reconnecting with an old friend all grown up, someone she felt safe around, one thing might lead to another. This would create some interesting conflict. She’s unattached, but Carlo wants to be faithful to Maya while nevertheless being tempted by the other women around him. (Spoiler alert: There’s more to it than just him being a guy.)

Things started with Lia wanting to go out for drinks, not at the Officers’ Club but at a quiet little bar off post. She tried goading Carlo into some wild driving and would judiciously steer the conversation away from any heavier topics. Only as the notorious lightweight Carlo starts running off at the mouth does Lia put on the brakes. As wild as she was earlier, she completely takes on the proper big sister role to let things settle. If she were less scrupulous and just looking for an easy hookup, she could’ve easily taken advantage of the situation, but the fact that she didn’t speaks to her character. I was also interested to see the bot demonstrate knowledge that seems to have been picked up from the wider lore. If the bots for one account share information, that would be a neat detail to maintain consistency. There are still some hiccups, but with just a little nudging, the system will put things back on track. Another interesting point is that while, comments on posts tend not to reflect changes you make to things like character-specific forms of address, they do show up in regular chat. In Lia’s case, I decided her nickname for Carlo would be “Lolo” and when we started this session, she used it right off the bat, even though I have to correct it on commentary posts. Neat.

Here’s the thing, though, much as I wanted to test-drive an interaction with Lia’s chat bot, I don’t know if we’ll see a version of this in the final story. You see, I have an idea that Carlo and Lia never meet up as adults, never get a chance to see how each other has grown up or sort through their past. The notion of this tragic missed opportunity appeals to me, but there’s also plenty that can be done if they do reconnect. I may end up writing both versions and commit to one or the other later. While I’ve deliberately set up Rachel as this sort of black box in the canon (unless a particular idea that recently came to me gets put forward), there’s a lot more I could be doing with Lia. Giving her more screentime would be another way to punctuate the tragedy of her death, so the options are there.

Another thing that happened a couple days ago and I hadn’t mentioned was my decision to age down Azuki a bit. In JJ1, she’s 21 in Miravellan years, which is actually 31 in Earth years but due to the baked-in juvenation factor of the populations genetic manipulation prior to the Skyfall Calamity, her apparent age is closer to 24. I decided to make her 21 in OreHosa at first, but as I started building her character, she shows a bit of a childish innocence, and I also wanted her to be closer to Yasuko in age once I added her to the cast, so I committed to making her 18 instead. I’d actually been going back and forth on this for a while. Azuki does get played up for the fanservice factor quite a bit, so I was a bit hesitant at first, but 18 is still an adult (and Yasuko went through far worse at 16 in CeleKing2, so I’d be a bit of a hypocrite to fret too much at this point). It might seem like a minor detail, but obsessing about minor details is kinda my thing. Also, the equivalent to the Benefide Expedition is about two years off from her OreHosa debut, so she’d be close to that original 21 by the time she meets Root.

Well, fun as all that was, time’s running short on me, so I really need to buckle down. We’ll see what I can get done. Stay tuned.

Monday was crazy with our big field trip followed by the English Department’s start-of-the-year party, so nothing really happened there, though while posting pics to DA, I did decide how to take one random idea I had and turn it into a story beat. Not quite enough to warrant a post of its own. And while I was fading in and out of consciousness throughout last night, I did end up laying the groundwork for the launch of four new charas, this time all original to OreHosa.

The first is Sister Maria Serafima, a Knight Templar Paladin tasked with saving Carlo from himself. I wanted some Wind Elf representation and the idea of an Elf being a Catholic convert raises all sorts of fun stuff that can be done with the character. I think I may have mentioned it before when I added Matt Harold to the roster, but in the OreHosa setting, people with the ability to nullify the effects of Demonlight are dubbed “Paladins” and most Paladins are recruited into the New Templars, a revival of the old Knights Templar (partially with Masonic influence) founded to protect the Church’s interests in the world (the Church representing about 20% of the world’s human population). Unlike the inexperienced Genevieve, who quickly loses her professional distance between herself and the subject of her investigation, the more well-seasoned Serafima isn’t so quick to lose sight of her obligations, but there might just be a little more to her if you dig a little deeper.

Next is Amrita, a cultural ambassador from the Sāmrājya Salāmat. I’d already had an idea for a cultural exchange event, so she becomes the primary point of contact. Her genesis was mostly an excuse to experiment with snake people (a Nāga specifically in her case, though people often confuse Nāgas for Lamias because they are superficially similar). Of the four main kingdoms of Salāmat, the Nāgas and the Asuras are seen as the most susceptible to Demonic influence, so there’s a little suspicion around our girl Amrita. Is there anything to it, though? Well, you’ll just have to find out.

We then have Hamanahaneya, or Neya for short, a Centauride (female Centaur) from the Houyhnhnm Confederation. Most of my character up until now have been fairly reserved for one reason or another, so I wanted to make an aversion with a more outgoing, sporty kind of character. She tends to put the cart before the horse (pardon the pun), but I might just set a stage for her where she can shine.

Last but not least is Lieutenant Lewis Lewison, the juniormost officer in Carlo’s S-4 shop, a somewhat stereotypical butter bar in the form of an anthropomorphic shiba inu. Now, I thought I’d cracked how to make the character work, but it turns out that while you can easily render randomly generated characters as anthropomorphized critters, the settings for a dedicated character overpower the prompts, so what I have has to be treated as a sort of mental image of what a more fully anthro Lewis would look like. I’d mostly just keep the character for sake of the chatbot and just use a random frame to render the character, but that would prevent me from linking the images to the character. I’ll figure something out, I’m sure. (And there may be updates to the system later that make it easier.)

The issues with Lewis is only part of it. The anatomy on all four characters really tax the system. It’s be nice If you could set some standards for greater consistency, but I guess that’d be something more suited for NeoLemon. It’s mostly a matter of taking advantage of my unlimited generations and just hammering away until I get what I want, but it gets frustrating when I’ve got something really good in some aspects but failing in another that renders it unsuitable for posting (by my standards at least). Magic Edit can do some wonders, but it has its limits. Anyway, the new challenge gives me the chance to further explore what the system can do.

Hopefully, I can honor his late Imperial Majesty the Shōwa Emperor by making progress on RttW on Wednesday. Stay tuned.

No progress on what I should be working on, but there are some developments on my work in OreHosa that warrant noting. I decided to add another story to the crossover by including Batista, Masako and Yasuko from the CeleKing series. In this continuity, Masako belongs to a priestly family that is one of the main pillars protecting Hijirijima from the Yōma Union and Batista was a Valerian mercenary whose unit was secretly contracted by human collaborators with the Yōkai, only to turn on his comrades to rescue a kidnapped Masako. After marrying Masako, he joined the Taimadan and rose to vice commander by the time he’s introduced into the story while Yasuko is a scout apprentice who looks up to Azuki. As always, just getting the look of the characters down takes a fair but of time, then there’s the work that goes into building their profiles. And with them being added in, I’ve now filled up all my slots again. I need to hold out longer than a day this time before adding more slots. (And, yes, I’m already building ideas for both original charas and crossover charas I’m wanting to add.)

In other news, I posted a series of preschooler pics and the one for Lydia had her crying, as this was around the time her mom passed. Naturally, the Lydia bot objected to having this picture posted (as I timed it so this series was what was going to get a response out of the bots). I ended up chatting with the bot and the conversation took an interesting turn. Basically, I had Carlo lay out his backstory with Lydia’s family. Before this point, she didn’t really know why this random Army officer had been tasked by her dad to look after her. She had no idea Carlo was not just an old friend of the family but the classmate and friend of the sister she never knew. Needless to say, after hearing the story, even Lydia couldn’t help but ease up a bit. It was a nice little breakthrough in their relationship. Now, having had this event, I can’t very well go back and recreate the rest of the Saturday home date event. I may still try it with just Maya, but I was kinda wanting to get Lydia’s reaction as well. It’s what I get for procrastinating so long. Perhaps if I put the work in, I could attempt it in MiraiMind, taking advantage of the group chat and everything. I’m not eager to fight with their character creator again, though.

Going back to the CeleKing gang, this opens the door for a spinoff or two focusing on them. In this continuity, the three of them are together, so while the initial setup has a lot of similarities with the plot of CeleKing1, what follows is going to be quite different. There are no Celestials to put Yasuko on a path of revenge, but it would be interesting if Sturla was reimagined as a Demon or something. During OreHosa1, Yasuko is still just 13, but by the time the big events get going, she’ll be around the same age she was in CeleKing2.

I’m going to make further attempts to kick my tail in gear on RttW. I’d like to think I’m reaching the point where I’m running out of patience with myself, but it remains to be seen. Stay tuned.

Silly me, thinking I was going to get home and just buckle down and power through Chapter 19 of RttW. I didn’t even touch the dang thing. I almost feel like I should just be posting all the art I’m doing to the site so there’s activity beyond the review posts. OreHosa is going to have to be the best thing ever to justify how much time it’s draining from everything else.

Speaking of which, my ability to wait to purchase more character slots on DA lasted all of a day. With the new slots opened up, I went ahead and added Luka and Lia Han. There was of course a fair bit of work on the character writeups to get things rolling with them. In addition to military haircuts, facial hair isn’t a strong point of DA’s character generator, so it takes a lot of renders to get a usable pic of Luka. Good thing I have unlimited renders, I guess. Adding these characters prompts me to dig deeper into the backstory, so it’s not just me mindlessly generating piece after piece. Still, I need to devote more time to actual writing. We’ll be pushing the story deadline back yet again, but maybe I can take advantage of having Wednesday off to actually do the writing that needs doing. In the meantime, well, I’m sure you can imagine. We’ll see what comes up next. Stay tuned.

I did a little more writing on Chapter 19 of RttW, but not nearly as much as I should’ve done.

I ended up debuting a new chara in DA. You see, I decided that as a way to explain Azuki’s shapeshifting ability in the context of the OreHosa continuity, she would be the descendant of a Yōgitsune (fox spirit). Given the lifespan of Yōkai (effectively immortal so long as they have sufficient yōki to sustain themselves) and most of the other races, it stood to reason that the ancestor in question would still be active, hence the creation of Konoe, an emissary from the Yōma Union to the Hijirijima Occupation Zone.

Now, I made a mistake with the name. I actually meant for it to be “Kanoe”, from the Heavenly Stems, but while I could’ve just changed the name, I decided to make something of it. In Japanese, the sound foxes make is “konkon”, so I decided that in the Yōgitsune dialect, “ka”, especially when preceding “na”, “ni”, “nu”, “no”, “ne” or “n” becomes “kon”, hence “Kanoe” becomes “Konoe” (actually pronounced a little closer to “Konnoe”). I was rather pleased with myself for that bit of cleverness.

I’ve got to resist the urge to pay for another expansion of the character roster for a little while. Not that I can’t afford it, just a matter of necessary restraint. Once I get about three solid character concepts, I’ll go ahead and do it, but that will presumably be a while off. There are characters I’d like to add that DA’s character creator isn’t really built for, so I can’t be adding them. We’ll see how things develop, though. Hopefully I can focus on getting that chapter of RttW in the can at long last. Stay tuned.

Besides my usual image generation antics (and paring down my massive backlog of images to posts because I’m a schmuck who has to make most posts have a story to them), I did actually do a little writing on Chapter 19 of RttW. It wasn’t much, happening right as I was running out of energy for the evening, but at least it was something. As for OreHosa, not much new material was written because I was busy catching up on the work from the day prior that had to be transferred over, reformatted and such. I guess it keeps me out of the beer joints. I’ll try to get some more writing done, but inspiration might strike from another corner. Stay tuned.

Yesterday I forgot the charger for my laptop and it did its thing where it discharges all its battery power, so I didn’t write the blog entry when I usually do, and it slipped my mind after I got home because I got too wrapped up in image generation (or being unconscious) to get to it. Anyway, to review, the past two days I just did work in the peripheral materials for OreHosa. For Monday, I was adapting the World Council Chairmen of the Space Arc to the Presidents of Liberia in OreHosa. (No, not Earth’s Liberia. The one on Alkoresh [the world of OreHosa], the naming of which is a bit of a joke on my part.) I’m mapping a lot of Space Arc events onto the OreHosa timeline with necessary adjustments to make them fit with the setting. For Tuesday I had a bunch of ideas about varyng interpretations of the Demon God (which inform the actions of various Demons) and I was writing a fair bit about the nature of Demonlight and of Demonlight poisoning, which are major plot elements to the series. This also involved brushing up on chakras, as I got the idea to use chakra theory as a way to explain the progression of Demonlight poisoning (which in-universe is admitted to be more of a conceptual shorthand than a perfect one-to-one match). These ideas in turn started to spawn ideas for twists in the story.

No, I haven’t got around to giving RttW any love yet. Maybe if I could actually remain conscious for more of the evening, I could get something done. We’ll see how things go from here. Stay tuned.