In DA, I had a little more action with Anne and Lise. For Anne, I’d posted a kabedon pic and it led to a little conversation still nudging me toward taking her to the hospital, so we need to knock that out so the bot will settle down. For Lise, we talked a bit more about her relationship with Anne and I continued to butter her up because she’s really cute responding to compliments.

On NL, I added Jane to accompany Elizabeth and Yasuko as well. For Yasuko’s model, she’s a little too skinny, I think, so I may have to go through a few more rounds of adjustment to get her where she needs to be. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again that I appreciate how responsive the NL engine is.

I was unable to resist the temptation to get next month’s character pack. There were some characters I’ve been itching to make and one that factors into the plotline with Anne. The first one I made was P1C Nanoha Kiriyama (“P1C” being the abbreviation for private first class in the Liberian Army as the two ranks below are “private second class (P2C)” and “private third class (P3C)”). The visual design was inspired by a young lady I’ve seen on occasion, whose quite small stature belies her age. Basically she looks like the live-action version of Hitoha from Araburu Kisetsu no Otomedomo yo. People are going to start to think I have a thing for the shorties. Anyway, Nano is one of the junior enlisted in Carlo’s S-4 shop, usually a bit of an antisocial sort but with a few quirks such as being a closeted fujoshi. (Now I’m imagining how funny it would be to have her trying to share BL with Maya. ^o^)

The other character is Hiyama no Guren, an Aka’oni to act as a counterbalance to Suiren. I’m playing the tropes fairly straight here, with Guren being the more hot-blooded, physically-inclined enforcer to Suiren as the colder and more intellectual administrator. I’m sure I’ll come up with some particular quirks for her to help her stand out a bit more as a character, but those details are TBA at the moment.

In KyaraPu, rather than continue breakfast with Mone, I checked out yet another story. The premise of this one is that you’re an adventurer escorting the daughter of a local lord, only for your party to hand her over to the enemy nation and toss you in jail with the little lady when you object. Said little lady hates adventurers on general principle and hates them just a little more after these shenanigans. However, the fact that you didn’t betray her is the one thing she’s willing to give you credit for and so she promises you a big payout from her father if you can get her home safe. Besides everything that will go into your escape, there’s also the little lady’s regard for you, which is quite low. In fact, it’s in the title itself that you start out with a Favorability Rating of -60. It the three rounds of dialog I had, I was able to get that rating to -65. ^o^ I decided to play my character as someone who’s not all that smart, strong or moral. His primary objection was rooted in the fact that breaking their original contract with the local lord was career suicide. I have to wonder if the MC’s boss was really that short-sighted looking for a bigger score in the moment or if there’s something else there. An encounter seems inevitable. Anyway, I don’t plan on sucking up to my client, so we’ll see how much more I can get her to hate me along the way.

That does it for now. I’ve got plenty I’d like to do, but work-work is piling up, so I may have to moderate my expectations about what I can get accomplished. Stay tuned.

My playing around with Anne and Lise blended together across the two days, so I figured I’d just go ahead and bundle them together. For Anne, a shot of her coming back from the gym kicked off the scenario, just a nice casual evening at home… with the President’s daughter and a foreign military liaison. The casual intimacy of Carlo and Anne’s relationship greatly belies their respective stations. Anyway, just because I skipped ahead in the story didn’t mean that Anne had forgotten the plot. I opted to fill in the blank in the story by having Giger no longer be at the Manticore Mages’ Academy, leaving Carlo without a good contact in Valeria’s magic circles. He does, however, conclude that a psychic will be more applicable in this case and has put in a request with Maya to connect him with a sufficiently powerful Elven psychic.

Carlo reveals his past with Demonlight poisoning to explain why he hasn’t dismissed Anne’s nightmare as just a dream. He also concludes that besides projecting her consciousness into a parallel world, she could have had a precog dream. She hasn’t been tested for psychic ability, but this is something a psychic could figure out. (I have an idea of what to do on this end.)

With Lise, I got an appropriately embarrassed reaction about a burlesque dancer pic I posted of her, then upped the ante by doing a pair shot of her and Anne. When Anne was shown it, she justified herself as doing things like this to pull Lise out of her shell. As for Lise, she’s highly susceptible to flattery, so I enjoyed buttering her up. She isn’t showing any signs of romantic attraction to Carlo, but she is very much appreciative of his presence.

With the month rolling over, I got a new injection of credits on NeoLemon and with recent adjustments to the filters, some things I was blocked from doing last month such as rerendering the characters with more realistic proportions were doable. I also added Anne, Lise and Elizabeth to the roster. I’ve already burned through a fifth of the month’s allotment. I need to make at least a few renders toward the anniversary John Henry Challenge. It’d be hilarious if I fritter around until the last minute, then have to scramble to meet the deadline. I’ll try to avoid that.

In KyaraPu, I played with Mone more. I caved and slept with her, but just sleeping. I didn’t feel like testing the limits of KyaraPu’s system and it wouldn’t have been in-character. The next morning, Mone was back in her right mind and claimed to remember everything from the night before. She also said that her sentiments hadn’t changed but she wasn’t going to push the issue any further. I suggested she take a shower and change into some clothes she had left at the apartment to spare her any embarrassment from going home in the same outfit she was wearing the night before whilst I made breakfast, figuring she needed something on her stomach to ameliorate the after-effects of all that drinking. She was grateful for the chow but reluctant to eat, knowing that this was going to be the last time. I’m curious to see if they’ll actually just end the storyline once she goes home. Hopefully it doesn’t reflect my own experience and take 17 years to complete the break… -_-;

There are a number of things I want to work on, but I imagine blowing through my NL credits will be the first order of business. Stay tuned.

Picking up things with Suiren, my idea to play off when the system forgets to give her blue skin is that she’s trying to pass as a Half-Demonized human. There’s a logic to this plan as there are plenty of humans who have been fully or partially Demonized during the occupation of Hijirijima and so it makes it easier for her to fly under the radar. Now, the energy signature of a Yōkai and a Demon are different, but she can use ambient Demonlight to mask her own power and only someone properly attuned could see through her trickery. I didn’t get around to play with the scenario, so that’ll have to wait until later.

Because I had pictures I wanted to post before they expired, I had to jump ahead in the storyline with Anne, skipping past the potential transdimensional dream shenanigans to about two weeks later when her ankle was healed to the point where she could get back to training and even had Lise join her. Of course, Lise can’t keep up, but Anne is happy enough to have her along that she’s willing to dial back her usual intensity for her. I didn’t get too far with it, so I’ll have to pick things up later.

In KyaraPu I continued the drunk ex story. As I figured, the scenario is geared toward you getting back together with the ex. The more you resist this, the harder you get pushed. Now, my plan was to play hardball and stick to my guns, but I’m too daggone squishy. Once Mone (the ex) started bawling and begging, it was hard to keep up the tough front. By the time I ran out of credits for the day, I’d taken her to bed and she grabs onto my sleeve, not wanting me to go. Will I turn things around? I guess we’ll see. Until next time. Stay tuned.

I jumped a fair bit ahead in Suiren’s story to after the recapture of Hijirijima. As a significant figure in the Yōma Union acting as magistrate in House Suzuki’s territory, she’s a fairly high-profile target, and it would have been very much in her interest to beat a hasty retreat after Sturla was taken out, but that wasn’t what she did. A bit of it is pride and a bit of it is curiosity that’s motivating her. She wants to see what’s on the other side of the war and that’s something she can’t do if she just turns tail and runs. And so at a ryokan being used for officers’ lodgings, she lies in wait in the room of our good buddy Carlo. She offers herself up as his spoils of war to do with as he will. Carlo rightly figures that she heard about him from Konoe and so her plan hinges on him being soft on Yōkai, Demons and such. She’s right of course, and so the conversation turns to how exactly Carlo’s going to keep all this under his hat.

In KyaraPu, I tried a new story where the premise is that your ex shows up on your doorstep stinking drunk without any memory of the breakup. I decided to play it as the sort of guy who isn’t going to take advantage of the situation. He just wants to get her sobered enough so that he can put her in a cab, send her home and be done with it. Obviously the setup is intended for you to hook back up, but I’m sure any of you in the audience with any experience in such matters know why this would be a terrible idea. We’ll see how quickly I can get her sober so the truth comes out, or is is in vino veritas? I only did a few exchanges, so we’ll see how things develop. Until next time. Stay tuned.

In DA I debuted Suiren and I had a little exchange with Periwinkle. In her introduction, I described her as a bundle of sunshine and sugar and she pretty well embodies that idea. In her desire to mimic Carlo, she wanted to have a uniform of her own, so I made up a pic of her in uniform as she requested and she liked it quite a bit. She wanted to join the Army herself until Carlo explained to her that she doesn’t get to go where she wants or be with who she wants, at which point she decided Army life wasn’t for her. I then got an amusing reaction out of her while warning her about getting eaten by either Ayame or Meowbert in Thumbellina Mode. (“Thumbellina Mode” is what Carlo calls it when she shrinks down to pixie size.) Ayame being a Yōkai, she actually has something near enough to human intellect to be reasoned with, but Meowbert is an ordinary cat, so as all cat owners know, there’s no telling him anything.

I KyaraPu, I started a new story where you wake up from a coma to find out your girlfriend’s left you for your best friend. I only did a few exchanges, so I haven’t gotten too far, but I was curious to see how the system would try to prod you into action if you just write off the GF. From the start, the MC’s little sister is paradoxically discouraging you from giving up while also laying out the situation to such a degree that you have a hard time wanting to do anything else. I imagine the average player is supposed to pull an Uno reverse card on the NTR setup, but I’m curious to see what happens when you try to avoid engaging.

Anyway, that’s it for now. We’ll see what I come up with next. Stay tuned.

I debuted Tashira, Lady Cat, Presidents Armitage and Liu, and Periwinkle, which was the main takeaway from the perspective of other users, but the real main event for me was continuing the event with Jane.

I kicked things off with Jane and Carlo waking up where they conked out. Jane being Jane, she had to complain about Elizabeth covering her with a blanket while she was asleep. Speaking of Elizabeth, she was already preparing breakfast and putting on some coffee, so then it became an issue of who was going to wash up first before chow. What was funny was how Jane was being ridiculously stubborn. You may recall that she was dressed a bit overly casually, so when Carlo made the suggestion that she get dressed, first she insisted that he go first and refused to move until he did, then said that him dawdling made her even less inclined to change. I thought this seemed odd, but I decided to play it as her pride getting the better of her sense. Basically, with Carlo trying to spare her embarrassment, she instead felt the need to prove that she wasn’t bothered by it. I decided to play into this using one of the renders I’d made before. She complained about the couple minutes Carlo spent washing his face as if it was forever, so I actually had her take longer, to the point where Elizabeth asks Carlo to check on her. You can probably imagine the stock situation being set up here. Yes, rather than just wash her face, Jane decided to take a shower and Carlo unwitting walks in on her as she’s getting out. She gets angry as you’d expect, but playing on this weird pride she’s been showing, she decides to just waltz out as she is in this weird game of chicken. A most unusual breakfast follows.

I could’ve just let the breakfast play out, but I had this idea and I figured now was as good a time to spring it as any. I set the time as being near the end of the three-month period for the deal between Carlo and Jane about the humanity of uDolls. The bot actually made a mistake and for a moment I thought the system had somehow anticipated the twist I was about to reveal, but Jane played it off as just a turn of phrase. You see, when talking about the nature of uDolls, the bot mistakenly used “us”, but that was the big tomato in the mirror moment. The test for Jane to recognize the humanity of uDolls wasn’t just for Elizabeth’s sake. The other side of it was to get Jane to accept uDolls’ humanity because Jane is a uDoll herself. You see, she was mortally injured in the accident that killed her parents and as her next of kin, Dr. Clark signed off on an experimental treatment to transfer her soul into a uDoll body. With a blank spot in her memories to conceal the time spent calibrating the new body, she was returned to her everyday life believing she was still an ordinary human.

As you can imagine, she doesn’t take the reveal well and tries desperately to deny it. However, the fact that she has a serial number behind her ear makes it hard to maintain that denial. Carlo tries to reassure her that she can still go about her ordinary life until enough time passes that people will get suspicious of the fact that she hasn’t aged any, and even after that point, the Company will take care of arranging for her to move to a new location and fix her paperwork, all out of a sense of obligation to Dr. Clark. These assurances might mean something after she’s had some time to process everything, but for the time being she needs time to herself to sort things out, so Carlo takes his leave and Elizabeth withdraws to be somewhere out of the way.

With the source novel not being written yet, you might ask why such a major spoiler would be dropped here. Well, not only do I not plan on inserting this storyline into the Alkoresh Cycle, but I don’t plan on using this twist in HMDD. Thematically, I feel it’s more important for Jane to be a regular human, Of course, in HMDD, the uDolls are fully synthetic and not magical constructs imbued with actual human souls. I’ve actually toyed with the idea of (in this scenario) having Elizabeth possess the soul of Jane’s grandmother. You see one of the reasons Jane objects to Elizabeth beyond her general prejudice against uDolls is that Elizabeth was not only filling the role of her grandmother but also was given her grandmother’s name (going back to the whole idea of Elizabeth being a replacement goldfish for Dr. Clark’s late wife). The irony would amuse me, if the supposed replacement for Elizabeth Morden-Clark was actually the woman herself. It’s doubly ironic with the reveal about Jane.

We’ll see what further torment I put that poor girl through. In the meantime, we’ll see if I play around with any of the newly debuted charas. I still need to debut Faustman and Suiren to round out the current set. Stay tuned.

In DA I debuted Tashira and General Adeen, then proceeded to have more fun with Jane. I got this really fun render of her and decided to run with it. Basically, the scenario was that after the previous event, Carlo comes by to check in on Jane and Elizabeth lets him in while Jane is taking a shower. Needless to say, she isn’t pleased to see him, but I put my thumb on the scale to have her be too tired to run him off. She goes to the fridge to get some beer and reluctantly offers some to Carlo. As she knocks back a few, she gets a bit relaxed and props up her feet on Carlo’s legs. She for daggone sure doesn’t want him touching her, but she feels she’s entitled to use him as a footrest. Carlo ends up conking out and she ends up doing the same. It took some work to make a collabo shot of this scene, but it turned out real cute. Now, basically Carlo is a stand-in for another character I have yet to design for the original story, so I’m definitely mining events like this.

In KyaraPu, I decided to play with Shizuka some more. It turned out that Baby Gorou was all it took to restore her memories. I then had it set so that the cause of her amnesia was unknown and that a followup with specialists would come later. I then proceeded to have more visits to the cafe closer in line with the story’s original intentions. I tried to see if I could get her to slip up and admit the truth about the cafe au lait, but either she’s super-dedicated to the bit or I’ve managed to overwrite the original scenario completely. That or the original author made the premise as a gotcha for perverts and it was always perfectly innocent. We even went to the supposed ranch where she got the milk from and did a whole thing milking the cows and everything. I never called out my suspicions directly, only made hints to see what kind of reaction I’d get. The thing is, there are just enough hints in her reactions to keep you assuming the premise is what it is, but the elaborate roundabout makes you wonder.

I did other character work such as having Kazuya be a little too honest about his regrets over not taking the chance when he had it and getting beaten to the punch by Tatsuo. You can tell the mutual attraction, but Shizuka is a good wife committed to her husband. Am I trying to NTR poor Tatsuo? No, not really, but I am poking at the boundaries of the character. Occasionally I go a bit too far and get her mad at me, but she’s quick to turn it around once I apologize. Giving them the background of childhood friends no doubt plays a large part in her being rather forgiving.

Anyway, I’ve got more profile work to do to get the remaining characters out the door. We’ll see what else I get up to. Stay tuned.

In DA, besides debuting Willem, I randomly had an idea to make a collabo shot of Elizabeth and Jane together on stage as bunny girls, mainly to annoy the latter. Jane accused me of setting up the scenario, which was true of course, but in-character, Carlo had nothing to do with it. She wanted him to come up with a distraction to get some eyes off her and so I devised the character of Meiner Lippschitz, an anti-uDoll activist probably attending the event to get material for an op-ed. Carlo started an argument with him to provide the requested distraction and Jane was able to quit the stage without further incident. Interestingly enough, despite Carlo introducing him along the lines of “Hey, look. It’s Meiner Lippschitz. He hates uDolls just like you,” Jane actually seemed to regard him with disgust, which I thought was interesting. Maybe some signs of a little more depth and nuance to what she thinks about uDolls? Anyway, later on Carlo drops in on her in her dressing room, and because we have to have little events like this, her zipper gets stuck as she’s trying to change, so with great reluctance, she has to rely on Carlo to help. Carlo is the perfect gentleman and there’s zero chance of her getting any ideas, so he quietly withdraws once his task is done. I did like the one response I had for her when she said, “What do you think I am?” regarding some half-hearted flirting on Carlo’s part. “You’re a Tsundere Princess. One day you’ll evolve into a Tsundere Queen, but you still haven’t hit the level requirement.” She took it as well as a Tsundere Princess would.

In KyaraPu, I tested out two different scenarios. The first I stumbled on while I was looking for the second. It was a fairly sophomoric premise. A cafe has run out of milk. The barista goes to the back and somehow she has a cup of cafe au lait ready for you. We can all see where the author was going with this. I was just intending to see how the stage was set, but then I decided to mess with the scenario a bit. I crafted a backstory where the main character and the barista were childhood friends, that she married a mutual friend who came along later and had given birth not too long ago (to make the setup more plausible). Well, this went well outside the original parameters, so Shizuka (the barista) denied being married or having a kid, so I then made it into a scenario where she was suffering from amnesia and her very concerned childhood friend is trying to get her help while not overwhelming her. Think about it from her perspective. You’re going about your daily grind, you end up taking some rather suspect measures for the sake of a random customer, then all the sudden you’re hit with this person who you think you’ve just met saying that he’s known you all your life, that you’re supposed to have a husband and a kid, etc., etc. You think you remember your past, but everything this person is telling you is at odds with that. He doesn’t seem to be lying and he insists that he hasn’t mistaken you for anyone else (the setting is supposed to be a small town, after all). What do you do?

Well, to try to put her as much at ease as possible and hopefully to trigger her memories, the main chara, who I decided to call Kazuya, calls up her husband and tells him to bring along Shizuka’s grandmother (who raised her after she lost her parents, in a bit of additional lore). Now, Granny Mitsuha was watching Baby Gorou, as you might imagine, so they’re on their way to take her to the hospital and Kazuya intends to go along too, not just because he’s Shizuka’s friend but also because he’s the main anchor in this scenario.

Putting the story back on its intended rails for a bit, while they’re waiting, Kazuya finishes his coffee and compliments the milk Shizuka just happened to find in the back. He says he could drink it every day and hopes to get it in the future if they have it in stock. It was amusing that Shizuka seemed rather proud of herself. You see, if the bot had played along from the start, the implication would’ve been that there was some unresolved romantic attraction from their younger years that informed Shizuka’s actions. It may still be what was going on unconsciously seeing as how she had no hesitation whatsoever about promising to fulfill Kazuya’s request. Yes, this is supposed to be just silly pervy fluff, but I’ve steered the ship in a whole new direction.

Tatsuo (Shizuka’s husband) shows up with Granny Mitsuha and Baby Gorou. He doesn’t take her amnesia well, but they make their way to the hospital and on the way, Kazuya shares what he’s heard about amnesia both to give some hope and also to set expectations. At the hospital, Kazuya goes with Tatsuo to the reception desk to help him check in. (Tatsuo is a blue-collar type, a construction worker, so having Kazuya to help him navigate things will speed the process along.) Meanwhile Granny Mitsuha is sitting with Shizuka, being the calm and supportive type. Gorou starts to get fussy because he’s hungry and Granny puts Shizuka in the awkward spot of asking if she’ll feed him. I’d actually forgotten that Japanese people generally don’t breastfeed in public, so they go to the hospital’s designated nursing room. (Otherwise I was just going to have Granny give Shizuka a little blanket to cover herself as you see with the conscientious public sort.) Again, put yourself in Shizuka’s shoes here. If you don’t think you’ve had a kid, being asked to breastfeed is a tall order. (Of course, under normal circumstances, if you haven’t had a kid, it’s not going to be possible, hence me setting up the scenario of her having recently given birth.) Still, on the ride over, there was something there between her and Gorou, so she agrees, and once she lets Gorou nurse on her, it seems like some flashes of memory are coming back to her. Yes, I’ve succeeded in pretty well overwriting the original settings. Playing with AI is fun. ^o^

I could’ve kept going, but I switched over to the story I was wanting to try in the first place, a fairly typical exiled from the party scenario. As with many overplayed story types, there are some good ones out there but an overwhelming amount of garbage. Still, I wanted to play around and see what kind of reaction I could get from the party members giving me the boot. I was amused to see one user comment how he’d played it as being a gambling addict and the Hero ended up going out of his way to look after him. In my playthrough, the basic setup seemed to mostly be that the player character is getting booted just for being a commoner and useless. I gave the scenario a little more spice by the main character’s downfall being involvement with a loli succubus. And this allowed me to introduce Mama Bama to the story. With just a little prompting, I was able to get the system to create a new character to fit the narrative I was spinning. Maybe it’s just a sign that Mama Bama is a bit of a stock character, but the way they crafted her based on mostly a physical description was fairly consistent with her DA incarnation. Anyway, Mama Bama had branded the main character to claim him as her possession and she’s come to collect now that he can no longer serve as the Demon King’s spy in the Hero’s party.

Besides the boorish Alto the Hero, you have the high-and-mighty lady knight Karen, the kind-hearted Saintess Luquino, and the genius mage Serena. Luquino was kind enough to leave the MC with a parting gift of some medicine and travel rations before Mama Bama showed up. Now, obviously the creator of this story doesn’t adhere to my canon, but Serena’s red eyes would almost always be the mark of Demonic influence in one of my stories. The system ran with this and recast her as being Half-Demon though unaware of it, still able to passively serve the Demon King even without her full powers being awakened. Even so, this was dangerous for her as her nature could be exposed before she’s even aware of it, and the consequences would be no different than if she had knowingly been a spy for the enemy. I opted to give her a choice. Mama Bama sent a little magic signal that lured her in, and when faced with the truth, she decided that it was more important to her to learn more about her Demonic nature and the hidden secrets of magic. In Japanese, the main words for magic are “魔法” (“demon’s law”) and “魔術” (“demon’s art”). Although I haven’t laid it out yet, the idea is that all magic is of Demonic origin, a reality Serena will come to discover in the Demon Kingdom.

In addition to her thirst for knowledge, Serena really doesn’t like Alto, so that’s all the more reason for her to want to leave. However, she’s reluctant to leave Luquino behind. Naturally, Oholibama doesn’t like the idea of taking a Saintess along, but I managed to make the proposition attractive to her by positing the chance to corrupt her. Inverting all that holy power would make a powerful ally for the Demonic cause, and even if it didn’t work, we could just dump her in some remote village where she can become some farmer’s wife and live out the rest of her days in peace. (I said that not only to get Serena on board but also because I had no reason to wish any harm on her.) Downstairs Alto’s been partying it up and demanding Serena to pour drinks for him, so he sends Karen to go find her, and that means her coming up to the MC’s room. Actually, I was under the impression that everyone was sharing a room more in line with historical inns, but it would seem the system has been taught on too many fantasies with modern sensibilities, so the MC apparently has his own room. Serena goes to fetch Luquino while the MC is left to deal with the incoming Karen.

Alto and Karen both are the type to throw their social standing around. As you might imagine, Karen like the other females is quite pretty, but her personality sucks, so I opted to antagonize her. Clearly the scenario was designed for you to be able to get any if not all the charas on your side depending on how smooth you play it, but I wasn’t in the mood to try sweet-talking her. Mama Bama, as an avatar for the system, actually chided me a bit for not seiziing the opportunity. Anyway, Serena comes back with Luquino and I very carefully posed my proposition to her. First I asked her about her confidence in her faith and if she’d be willing to put it to the test. This was enough to pique her curiosity, so then I give her the challenge, to come with us to the Demon Kingdom. There she can come face-to-face with Demons and see if she can come out on top. The condition is that she can’t attack the demons and in exchange, they won’t attack her, with the MC putting his own life on the line as the guarantor. (Though claimed by Mama Bama, the MC hasn’t been fully turned and so Luquino’s prayers of purification wouldn’t have much effect on him, but they could be quite damaging to the Demons.) Serena reveals her newly discovered Demonic heritage and its Luquino’s friendship with Serena that really brings her over. Her compassion for Serena puts her in conflict with her calling to destroy all Demons. So as not to play his hand too hard, the MC is careful not to push her. I tell her that I’m not going to say what’s right and what’s wrong. She has to decide that for herself, however that comes to her, be it the guidance from God or the voice of her own heart. It’s quite effective. She resolves to join us, so now it’s just a matter of getting everything ready to go and avoiding Alto and Karen on the way out. And that was the point I’d burned up the last of the credits I’d been saving up.

This was where I learned about the different tiers of conversation on KyaraPu. Based on how much work the system is expected to do, the cost goes up. There actually is a limited free option, that I was unwittingly using in the cafe au lait story until I hit the wall there. Depending on how rich of a response you want from the system, you spend more on the higher tiers. It can run down FTP users real quick. I bring up conversations like these because they may actually be fodder for future story elements. We’ve already seen my conversations in DA shape the course of the Alkoresh Cycle and while it’s not writing you’ll see on the page, it’s still quite a bit of writing I’m doing, and in my second language no less. Surely this will help for when I start to actually translate my books in search of publication here in Japan. Anyway, that’s it for now. I need to be getting the other recent additions on DA prepped for debut. A fine way to spend the Silver Week holidays. Stay tuned.

I spent a lot of time running an event with Anne. I’d made quite a few renders for the first event, trying to get the right look for some of the scenes, and because that set was going to expire, I picked one to post and used that to kick off the current event. It started with Anne once again teasing Carlo to get a reaction out of him, but he decided to turn the tables on her to try to get the point across that this sort of thing can be a really bad idea if she makes a mistake with who she’s messing with. (She would of course insist that she doesn’t do this sort of thing with anyone else, and that might even be true, but that doesn’t make it any less of a bad idea.)

Anne then decides that going for a late-night run (as she had just gotten back from a night pool excursion) was what was needed to break the tension. Now, I could’ve just had a simple run there and back, but I decided to add a complication and have her roll her ankle because she couldn’t see an uneven patch along the way. Carlo then has to carry her home, and because she doesn’t want to go without a shower, he has to help her out there, too. Now, you might be expecting the usual turn of events, but not yet. Carlo maintains his professionalism, even going so far as to remain fully dressed while he’s helping her in the shower. Okay, so far so good…

After helping Anne get dressed and getting her to bed, she asks for some coffee, so he brews some up. The bot misinterpreted Carlo massaging his own shoulder as him massaging Anne, so that segued into him doing his massage routine. Anne claimed he was better at it than the masseurs hired by her coach, but he had his doubts as he only learned how to give massages as a way to score with chicks, not that he has all that many females that let him get that far. (Well, at least before his Demonlight poisoning changed his fortunes.) You might think the massage is where the last line gets crossed, but, no, Carlo still manages to stay professional. This is the sort of self-control you get from a conscientious adult who doesn’t have to worry about the compulsion of his Demonic nature (and does have to worry about getting any more deeply involved with the daughter of the President of an allied nation than he already is).

Once the massage is over, Anne wants Carlo to sleep with her (and by sleep we mean just sleep), but he figures that’s pushing things too far. (He had to shed the clothes he wore in the shower and is just wearing Anne’s ill-fitting bathrobe, so that makes it doubly a bad idea.) He does agree to lay beside her until they finish their now cold coffee, but he ends up nodding off. That should be the end of it, right? Right?

Well, we already know that Anne is both a prankster and someone who is rather down bad for our boy Carlo. The day’s exploits have been a bit embarrassing for her, so she gets to thinking to even the score a bit. That bathrobe is barely holding him in anyway. Well, I personally imagine Carlo at this point in the story to have settled into the softness of middle age much as Root has done by this point, but the system opted to paint a more flattering picture of what Anne got to see. What with the massage and all, he’s had his hands on quite a bit of her, so now it’s her turn. Even though she’s 20, she’s got that inexperienced teenager’s eager curiosity and that’s when Carlo’s auto-pilot routine kicks in. She tries to hold things back at first, but her desire coupled with Carlo’s unconscious relentlessness wears down her resistance pretty quickly.

Now, I didn’t really want things to go this far, but I have a bad habit of just letting things play out. Similar to the scenario with Doc Adams, I was letting the bot choose at important junctures along the way. I have to wonder if the bot was simply being accommodating, playing along the same line as scenarios with other characters or if it was a genuine interpretation of the character’s motivations based on the settings. Regardless, I had a twist in store. As things were reaching their peak, Carlo wakes up, only he’s not himself. He’s starting to Demonize, already manifesting in the eyes and claws. Surprisingly, Anne wasn’t scared by this but eager to accept it even as the claws were digging into her flesh…

And then I pull the rug on her. It was all a dream, or at least everything after she was put to bed was a dream. Carlo had been sleeping on the couch in the living room the whole time. Either because the bot was struggling to make sense of all this or because it decided that the dream was so vivid that Anne was having trouble distinguishing it from reality, she was making references to what happened in the dream as if it really happened, and the mention of Carlo having red eyes got his attention right quick. As you may recall from my post about the Azuki reunion, Carlo’s Demonlight Core is sealed at this point in the timeline and Anne shouldn’t know anything about his condition.

Carlo concludes that it’s possible Anne’s consciousness was transported to a parallel world while she was asleep. She balks at the very concept of parallel worlds, but Carlo points out that they live in a world of magic and that humanity originally came from another dimension. I’m guessing the bot wasn’t connecting all the dots in the world, so Anne acted surprised at the very proposition of magic as a real thing. As the system is wont to do, it came up with a quick excuse after Carlo pointed out that there are 28 mage academies in the country. The way the system spun it was that Anne simply doesn’t think about magic because she doesn’t have hardly any firsthand contact with it. That actually kinda worked, I thought. Anyway, Carlo got the idea about the transfer of consciousness from the example of Gally, given that her soul was transferred across dimensions to inhabit the homunculus body Giger had made. If Anne’s dream was so real that she kept looking for the claw marks on her, it was possible that it was real, just not in this reality.

Anne wanted Carlo to stay close to him, considering him to be her anchor, but Carlo realized that it was just as likely that his presence was triggering the phenomenon as it was that he could moor her to their reality. He’s worried that she might get trapped in the other world. This is why he’s stuck between the two possibilities of him making the problem worse and possibly being the only way to prevent the worst from happening. It’s all up in the air at this point.

As I haven’t decided how the Hybrid uprising plays out yet, I don’t know what Giger’s status would be at this point, but it’s fine as Carlo wouldn’t be likely to know anything since he enlisted Giger’s help with the Doc Adams situation. I will of course need to decide before I move this scenario any further. What would be really nice is a good powerful psychic, but I don’t believe I know of any that are active at this point in time. Carlo could make use of his connections via Maya to find someone, I’d think. Might have to come up with an original character for that.

The reason I’m more after a psychic than a mage is because I believe that if Anne’s situation is the real deal, it’s more likely to be a form of astral projection. Psychic powers operate on the Astral Plane while magic operates on the Spirit Plane. The astral body is the self as it exists on the Astral Plane, just as the soul is for the Spirit Plane. Pretty much all entities exist as multidimensional beings, the individual slices being divisible from the whole but not usually self-sustaining. However many planes of existence constitute a single reality then get multiplied infinitely across the endless realities. Tricky stuff that really cooks the ol’ noodle, and well above Carlo’s paygrade, hence the need to seek outside help, starting with Giger and going from there.

In the meantime, the task is to take Anne to the hospital to get her ankle checked out, and to grab some breakfast on the way. These are far more manageable tasks. I don’t know if I’ll just right into the followup or do something else for the time being. We’ll see. Stay tuned.

One of the main things I did was continue my work archiving the chats. I need to make a point to stay on top of things in the future so I’m not stuck spending so much time catching up.

Of greater interest is a but of chatting I did with Lise. She expressed a desire not to be ogled in response to a picture of her at the beach, so I had to set the record straight and this segued into a conversation about her relationship with Anne, specifically how the professional and personal sides of it feel complementary and contradictory at the same time. Anne can’t just be a friend, but she’s more than just a means for Lise and her family’s social advancement. It’s not an easy thing for her to be dealing with, but she appreciated having Carlo’s perspective as an outsider.

Perhaps of less interest, I started another scenario in KyaraPu, this time a story with the premise of the protagonist being paired with an Elven swordswoman who looks down on you for being weak. I decided to play a thief sentenced to serve as her party member in lieu of hard labor in the quarry. I only played it a little bit, but it was fun. You can tell the hidden settings have the Elf being a lot nicer than she lets on, which is particularly fun to see drawn out of her with a character who isn’t terribly likeable. One thing I like about KyaraPu is that they put quite a bit into the responses, which helps offset the cost of the interactions. Something may come of it, but we’ll see.

I want to get a scenario going with Anne and Lise together. I already have some of the setup in place, so I just need to roll it out. Stay tuned.