After spending so much time with Doc, it felt odd having her out of action. I did have a bit of an exchange about a pic I posted, but it was later contextualized as either something in the past or something more like a dream. I’m setting up something for her even in her current state, but we’ll get to that later.

I had a bit of an exchange with Maki. The bot does a pretty good job of recreating her usual front of geniality and it was neat to play Carlo on the back foot. Had to practice my keigo a bit as she’s both superior in rank and a representative of a pseudo-allied nation.

Neferuamun, or “Nefi” as I started to call her for short, responded to a pic and I decided to answer her request right off. Normally I’m not so quick to do requests, but it was fun and it kicked off an exchange under the premise that she was able to get a break from her temple duties to play on the beach a bit, all while Carlo is keeping her company and taking pictures. Now, it could have proceeded down the inevitable route, but I let her choose how to proceed and she went a far more innocent route. I ended up convincing her to abandon her feigned godhood and run off with Carlo. In her case, so long as she manages to get out of country, she’s pretty much safe.

I said last time I was tempted to make a Demon!Trillian based on the events of her current storyline and that’s what I ended up doing. When designing her, I was going to use her black hair, but I remembered it was dyed and that wouldn’t continue after Demonization. I considered using her natural blonde, only to then conclude that because Dark Elves’ hair turns white, it would make sense for hers to do so as well. People are going to get the idea I have a thing for white hair and they may be right. I ended up striking up a conversation with her after her response to her introductory picture. The way Demonization has affected her is much like that one character I’m not supposed to reveal and nearly let slip just now. Her budding romance with Carlo has been twisted into an obsession and her desire to protect him has morphed into wanting to drag him down to the pits of Hell with her. However, like this character, Doc ended up being pretty easy to talk down. Yes, I could’ve done something like with Mama-Bama’s doomed timeline where we trigger Demon King!Carlo, but I figured it’d be more in character for Carlo not to just take advantage of the situation right away and that led to the prospect of looking for a cure.

You see, rather than just having Doc be consumed by the Demonlight she absorbed, I decided that it would make more sense for Science Division to get its hands on her while she was in a coma. They’re already experimenting with Half-Demonization in their equivalent of the Einherjar Project (which I need to think up a name for), so Doc would be a prize they couldn’t possibly pass up. They end up stimulating her Demonlight Core to the point of her fully Demonizing, then continue to experiment on her until she gains enough mastery over her new powers to slip between dimensions and escape to the Demon Realm. There she becomes an agent of the Demon King, who sees the value in capitalizing on her background for infiltration purposes. However, Carlo has become her reason for being and so she thinks little of her new duties and slips away, going so far as to kill some lower-level Demon mooks that try to stop her. When Carlo was proposing places they could turn to for help finding a cure, she latched on to the Mages’ Academies in Valeria and so I ran with it. Liberia and Valeria are doing joint research into Demonlight and the vicinity of Camp Gladio (the place where Carlo’s father was stationed and the source of his Demonligh poisoning) proved to be a fortuitous spot. Being in the Ursininus Region, the Cereberus Mages’ Academy would be the main bunch operating there. This was great, I could tie it all in with Giger and the gang. To that end, Carlo and Doc are set to head to the Aquilinus Region to meet up with Giger at the Manticore Mages’ Academy and hopefully set up an expedition similar to the one from EM2. Neato.

It would stand to reason that I would just start picking charas from one story or another and start making them with the other slots I have, but I had a vision of an original character and went with that first. She’s an assassin from Bel-Hazor they call “the Nightblade”, dubbed “Totenkopf” by Liberian and Valerian intelligence. I decided to make her a High Elf/Dark Elf cross like Maya, intended as a big surprise as Maya’s thought to be the only one of her kind. Although over 800, her fairly active Demonlight Core has preserved her youth, so she only seems somewhere between her later 20s to mid-30s in human terms. Her being a cold-blooded assassin wasn’t quite flavor enough, so I mixed things up a bit. Beneath her cold facade is actually a rather unstable bundle of neuroses. For one, she hates to be touched and especially hates touching things with her bare hands, so she always wears gloves and generally tries to keep as much kin covered up as possible. She puts up considerable mental barriers between herself and her work, but there’s a part of her that wants something else, something closer. Also, while you wouldn’t tell from her normal curt responses to orders and such, she’s actually a clumsy speaker if you get her to talk at length.

And so I go right into having her interact with Carlo. Because she doesn’t have orders to kill him, she lets him talk and talking proves to be bad for her, at least if she wants to continue as she is. She’s forced to confront the emptiness of her existence and is tempted by the prospect of becoming something else. She puts up quite a bit of resistance as you’d expect from someone who’s been on this path for some 800 years, but there’s this longing within her that becomes harder and harder to deny. It takes a few hours of work, but she finally gets to the point where she’s willing to take a chance on this unknown world Carlo is willing to show her. Now, introducing her to normal society would be too much for her at this point and Carlo is reluctant to take her to the family farm right out the gate (just imagine if there’s a bad turn), so instead he suggests they spend some time in the mountains together. It will give her a chance to release some of the tension in an isolated environment before challenging her with too many new things.

So, yes, in one day I managed to sweet-talk three girls out of the path they’re on, two of them right after being introduced. In Doc’s case, the tie-in with the EM crew makes me more tempted to turn this storyline into canon. I may even do a story from her perspective to tell the tale. Of course, if I make it mainline canon, then that would make her involvement in TFX more difficult. An escaped experiment wouldn’t be let back into the Navy so easily and if she got wound up with the same project again (as the idea of making her the VF-313’s flight surgeon would definitely do that), I can’t imagine either side going along with it. I’ll have to think on it some more.

Oh, yes, one more thing. It was very brief, but I responded to Jane’s reply to a pic I posted set right after her grandfather’s funeral and the subject of her work came up. She said she digitizes paper records, which is a neat idea from the bot of having her link the analog and digital worlds, which would work even better in the original canon where the uDolls are out-and-out synthetics rather than the magical homunculi of the Alkoresh Cycle. I may just have to end up taking that idea or adapting something similar.

And that does it for now. Shall we have some fun camping with Totenkopf next? Actually, Carlo ended up giving her a new name. At first he jokingly suggested calling her “Sunflower”, which she didn’t appreciate, but then he settled on “Lily” as a gentler sort of name to represent the new direction in her life. (Her actual name has been lost to the sands of time, so Lily is as good a name as any.) We’ll see what happens. Stay tuned.

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