WIP Update – 19 Oct 26
In DA I made a little progress on the Anne storyline and chatted up Nanoha a bit. Prompted by me posting pics of the rest of the Sheeda family, I decided to add Count Rafael’s wife Alaria e Palael u Tada to the roster. She’s Yuel and Mikel’s mother and has a considerable animus against poor Maya. If you think Yuel’s mean, well, this is where she gets it from. Interestingly, though, whereas Yuel tends to be more of a strict traditionalist, her mother is a fan of human fashions. The eastern Principality of Sidaris borders Valeria and so there has been more exchange with humans and that’s where Alaria comes from. In fact, this is why Count Rafael married her, to take advantage of House Tada’s contacts in Valeria to facilitate his business ventures.
As far as Alaria’s visual design goes, I decided to go with the ojou ringlet (“drill hair”) style, something I don’t actually like aesthetically but works for the character as an aristocrat mimicking old-fashioned human styles. A funny thing about the hairstyle is that the system occasionally renders it as big spiral twintails. Somewhat undermines the image I’m going for, but it is funny.
In NL, I made the CeleKing1 version of Batista. The uniform of the Regimiento de Rionegro resembles the uniform of the Mexican Army in the 1910s. When I specified this in the prompt, the system did make a fairly accurate rendition of the uniform in question, but apparently it thought that “Mexican Army” meant that a sombrero was part of the uniform. ^o^ Funny as it would have been to run with that, I did ditch the sombrero. By the by, broadly speaking, Batista is half-Filipino (from his father) and half-Mexican (from his mother), just in case you we curious. Obviously, the actual genetics of the Infernals is more complicated than that, but that’s the broad strokes of it.
I picked up the story in Zeta with the intention of bringing the current chain of events to the end to see what was on the other side of it. It didn’t work that way and in fact, the system surprised me by taking the initiative to have my character act without my input and force me to respond. I’ve talked about putting my thumb on the scales for the bots and this was the first time I had it done to me. I decided to play along, but this just spawned a new tangent. While I wasn’t much of a fan of the content itself, the push and pull between myself and the bot guiding the narrative was interesting. This has me wanting to continue to play along just to see where things go even though I consider things to have gone well off the rails a long time ago. I may just try a different story to get a different perspective. We’ll see.
I’m well behind on getting the update out, so I need to make that happen. I’ll see what I can do with that. Stay tuned.
Tags: Alkoresh, If Arc, WIP Update, Zeta
Alkoresh, If Arc, WIP Update | James Carmack | 20 October 2026 |
