The continuation of the Young!Lydia storyline will inform some of the rest of what I have to report, so we’ll cover it first. We left them in the wee hours of what may well be the last day they see each other for years. They’ve already crossed the line, so when Lydia takes Carlo up on what was meant to be a joking proposition of a quickie, his reluctance is pretty well gone. The previous time, Lydia had taken the lead, but this time it’s the other way around, but when Carlo takes the active role, the stimulus to his Demonlight Core is that much greater. Remember that his Demonlight Core compels him to transmit his Demonlight poisoning via sex. His poisoning hadn’t yet progressed that far during his first sexual encounters in college, Doc’s seal temporarily stalled it, but once he started having sex with Lia, the seal weakened and all the negative emotions involved with him having sex with Lydia (guilt, self-hatred, etc.) are only fuel to fully activate his Core. Lydia has a Demonlight Core of her own, albeit an underdeveloped one, so when Carlo’s Core is activated, it resonates with her own. This is a weaker version of the sort of feedback loop that occurred in the one doomed timeline with Mama-Bama.

Carlo recognizes the Core on the verge of activating and so breaks things off partway in. (Also, there was one occasion where the near activation of his Core caused him to get a little rough with Lia, something he doesn’t want to repeat.) Lydia, however, is upset at him for stopping and his warnings about the risks go unheeded. I don’t know if the system simply intends for Lydia to be this reckless or if it really doesn’t appreciate the magnitude of the Demonic menace. Regardless, Lydia isn’t afraid of becoming a Demon. All she wants is Carlo, and her utter lack of resistance wears away any resistance he had. So they start back up, far less gently, and the resonance between their Cores increase to the point where both of them start to Demonize. The Demonization process wipes out both of them, so we’re left with two newborn Demons lying there on the floor of some cheap hotel room. And so this fully becomes a doomed timeline. I’ll probably opt to reset things with Young!Lydia as I did with Anne. However, this incident inspired me a bit, which leads to…

I went ahead and got this month’s character pack earlier and proceeded to make the Demonized versions of Carlo and Lydia. I also made 14-year-old Lydia from “Happy Little Family”, though I’ll have to think about how I want to run any chats with her as she wouldn’t have met Carlo yet. (It could just be treated as an alternate scenario.) I also made Kazuko, Sayuri and Michiko so they would be available for chatting (once I build their profiles). The premise for Sayuri and Michiko will be similar to their Zeta counterparts with some adjustments to make them my own characters. Kazuko is going to be toned down quite a bit, but I believe I’ll keep some yuri inclinations.

In NL, besides a lot of playing around with costumes and scenes, I made the principal members of House Sheeda (Count Rafael, Alaria, Mikel and Yuel) as well as Domani. As usual, I’m not going to detail all the costume and scene stuff, but I do particularly like how I recreated the one scene with Lily (Totenkopf) where she’s drying off by the campfire wearing Carlo’s field jacket.

I plan to transfer the current Young!Lydia scenario to Majinka!Lydia while doing some repair work on the original timeline. I have to decide where I want to make the break. All this and more to figure out for next time. Stay tuned.

Before we talk about how things are going with Lydia, let’s take a moment to see what I was up to in NL. I made Luka and Annabeth, doing renders from when they met (21 and 18) and when Carlo knew them (35 and 32), with Luka’s base model being around the time of OreHosa1 (55). Also, I hadn’t mentioned it before, but I did a render of Lydia when she was four (and with her hair a little longer, she looks just like a tiny Lia) and one of Maya as a baby (absolutely adorable). I’ll probably try to do House Sheeda tomorrow.

Okay, now let’s get back to the Lydia storyline. It was taking me a good while to edit yesterday’s session for archival purposes while condensing it for the blog post. As such, not nearly as much happened in this round. Lydia makes it back to her room in time to get changed and be ready for roll call. Because her roommates stand to get into a lot of trouble for the previous night’s prank, none of them say a thing about her being out all night or coming back in male Army PTs. She gets through the day’s training but doesn’t see Carlo in the hotel restaurant during evening chow. She’ll be going back to Di Maio (their post) in the morning and the day after she’ll be shipping out for her Midshipman’s Cruise. After that, it’s back to the main campus of the Academy to finish out her last year, then her first duty station after that… In other words, there’s no telling when she might see Carlo again. She knows with his personality, it’s going to be annoying dealing with the fallout of the previous night, so she could just leave things be. That isn’t what she chooses to do, though. (As with before, I merely set up the scenario, gave the bot the options and let it decide.)

She could have waited until after lights-out or gone right over and she chose the latter. When she first gets to Carlo’s room, his mind is fuzzy from the partial activation of his Demonlight Core, so there’s an opportunity for Lydia to pretend that the previous night was just a dream so he can carry on with Lia in blissful ignorance. Lydia doesn’t do this, but is nevertheless somewhat vague and makes an odd comment about being pushed away, which prompts Carlo to think he actually stopped things before they got too far. Again, there’s an opportunity for Lydia to make the choice that’s harder on herself but easier on everyone else, but she doesn’t take it and instead gets mad, thinking Carlo’s deliberately trying to excuse himself from what happened. Carlo insists that isn’t the case, so Lydia lays it out quite clearly and then tells him she just wants to be with him until morning. He asks her if they’re going to repeat the same mistake and she insists that she’s fine with that.

She hugs Carlo and being too far gone at this point, he hugs her back. She wants him to toss out all the baggage he’s carrying around and accept her just as she is. He notes that she isn’t just some girl, she’s a midshipman, the daughter of Colonel Han and the sister of his fiancée. For their fraternization, it could mean the end of her military career before it even starts, and there’s no way either Luka or Lia will forgive Carlo for this. Lydia rather boldly states that she doesn’t care about the consequences and will deal with what comes when it comes.

Before things can go any further, Lydia realizes she needs to get back before the lights-out roll call. She criticizes Carlo for not knowing about this rule, but he reminds her that he went to OCS, not the Academy, so the rules were different. They have a little banter and right before Lydia leaves, he pulls her back in for a kiss, thinking this is going to be good-bye for them. She gets back to her room before roll call, but after lights-out, she finds herself restless. She could leave things where they lay or go back to Carlo. Her desire to spend more time with him outweighs any other concerns, so she sneaks back over. Carlo is a bit colder to her this time, having resolved himself not to get in any deeper, but she manages to prevail over him. He points out that later that month, over Founders’ Day Weekend, he’s supposed to go back to his family with Lia to announce their engagement. He asks Lydia what she wants. She seems to think he’s just going to toss her aside, that none of his feelings for her were real. He insists that they are real, which is why he’s asking her what she wants to do. He’s in an impossible condition where he wants to do right by both Han Sisters, but that can’t happen. (Unlike with his other romances in the story, concubinage doesn’t enter into his mind as an option here.) Lydia doesn’t want to give Carlo up, but Carlo then points out that he’s basically done the same thing as Jean-Paul, worse even, and how terrible that will be for Lia. Lydia really doesn’t appreciate Jean-Paul being brought up, understandably, and likes it even less when Carlo tells her he wants to come clean with Lia. Lydia puts him in a no-win scenario where he can’t be honest and he can’t lie, and that if he tries to square things with Lia, she’s out the door. Then when he decides that he’s not getting anywhere by worrying about it right now, she gets onto him for running away from the problem. Women, am I right? Anyway, for the time being, Lydia just wants to be there with him and so they actually manage to just go to sleep and get through the night without incident.

Lydia wakes up early in the morning and has the opportunity to take her leave, but she decides to wake him up, presumably to say goodbye before leaving. She points out that they still have some time, and Carlo jokingly tells her there’s not much romance in a quickie. With her pride acting silly (and other motivations as well, no doubt), she actually takes him up on it. By this point, Carlo has not only resigned himself to the current situation but actually becomes more proactive. This suits Lydia just fine, but you may recall from the scenario with Doc that when Carlo takes the lead, it triggers his Demonlight Core far more strongly. As for the consequences of that, we’ll pick that up next time.

Also, in Zeta, in the Noriko scenario, I must have hit the button accidentally, because the scene proceeded, the AI acting in a way I hadn’t planned on and was forced to respond to keep the narrative consistent. Yes, I’m amused to have the AI pushing me into directions I don’t intend. It’s nothing too major at this point, but still, the interplay between man and machine is a key point of intrigue.

That covers things for now. Stay tuned for where it goes from here.

Dagnabbit… I’m a menace, I tells ya. So here’s what happened. I was doing random generations and I ended up with a shot of Young!Lydia naked from the shoulders up. Now, because it wasn’t actually showing anything and because nudity wasn’t specified in the tag, there would be nothing to prevent posting it ordinarily. I thought about the one bathtub prank the bot didn’t respond to, so I whipped up a little scenario. The pilot candidates were at an offsite training camp for a few days at the end of the term, before they ship out for their Midshipman’s Cruise. Several of Lydia’s classmates pull the rubber duckie prank on her and when she springs out of the bath to kick their tails, they manage to boot her out of the room stark naked and lock the door on her. Out of sheer coincidence, Carlo happens to be TDY and staying at the same hotel. Setting aside how she knew which room to go to, he strikes her as the least bad option, so she shows up at his door seeking shelter. Carlo, upon seeing the naked midshipmen at his door, hastily brings her in out of view and puts his shirt on her to cover her up. That solves the immediate concern, but then she complains about his shirt smelling like him, so he lends her a set of PTs he hasn’t worn yet. This settles her down a bit, but then the bot bugged out a bit. You see, I hadn’t finished the steakhouse event, so the bot tried to revert back to that. I decided to run with it and so Lydia’s head was all in a jumble. Actually, dissociative episodes wouldn’t be out of character for Lydia. Anyway, Carlo works to very carefully put things back in order for her and worries that her memory issues might be some undiagnosed after-effect of her drowning incident. She brushes off his concerns, of course.

The conversation then shifts to what is to be done next. The most direct answer would be to report her classmates to her instructor, but she’s reluctant to do that. Snitches get stitches and all that. Also, Carlo is concerned about her trying to get revenge and all the trouble that would cause. She opts to stay where she is, unless Carlo means to boot her out. Carlo’s too big of a softie for that. The only solution is to keep things professional. He offers her the bed while he elects to sleep on the floor. No problem, right? Well, if a guy’s smell from his shirt is enough to bother you, what’s it going to be like sleeping in his bed? Lydia can’t sleep, so she goes to wash her face, and when she gets back, she stops where Carlo is lying and takes a moment to watch him sleep. When he rolls over, that back of his looks mighty inviting, so she slips under the blanket with him. No given Lydia’s backstory, you’d think she’d be too scared to get this close to any man, but it’s a little more complicated than that. Yes, she’s generally scared of men, but there’s also a part of her seeking out a protective masculine influence, all tied into her strained relationship with her father. Carlo isn’t quite a paternal influence, but he’s at least something of an avuncular one.

You’ve heard me talk about enough of these scenarios that you’re probably expecting the inevitable roving hands Carlo has when he’s asleep. He actually warned her of this earlier when she invited him to share the bed with her. Amusingly, she doesn’t believe he’s actually asleep and is just faking it. In the narration, I emphasize that he’s not in fact faking it, which arguably annoys her more. However, as we’ve seen when this sort of thing begins, the bot doesn’t put up any real resistance. I made repeated prompts along the way to test the bot’s response, offering numerous outs along the way, but the bot had chosen the rail it was on. However, it’s her telling him to take responsibility for what he’s doing that wakes him up (the idea being that it was what Lia told him in the lead-up to their first time). Naturally, he panics at the situation he finds himself in, which serves to further annoy Lydia (who’s already furious at Carlo for mistaking her for Lia when he first wakes up). While he’s trying to set things straight, Lydia only gets angrier and angrier at him, as his rejection of her wounds her feminine pride. He tries to talk his way out of the hole he’s digging for himself while directing the situation away from the course it was on.

Lydia presents some questio.nable logic for what brought her there in the first place and refuses the very sound suggestion of going back to bed and putting some distance between the two of them. There’s a lot going on in her head, the desire for the warmth of another person, something she’s rejected for so long; an insistence on being treated as an adult even as her grasp on maturity is tenuous at best; and maybe even a little genuine attraction. Add in a fragile pride that can’t stand to back down and we have a recipe for disaster. Carlo resists, but he lacks the moral courage to take a firm stand against her. She pushes herself to go on the offensive as if she has something to prove and throws all care to the wind. You’d think the fact that Carlo is Lia’s fiancé would give her pause, but even that doesn’t stop her. Carlo then makes the impulsive move to kiss her, only to immediately regret it, but this only serves to further excite her to take action. Realizing his failure, Carlo just sort of gives up. He’s not an active participant, but he doesn’t resist either. You wouldn’t say this of someone who lacked the physical or mental capacity to resist, but it Carlo’s case, his decision not to act qualifies as tacit consent. Now, given the circumstances and their relative positions, you might think this would trigger a trauma-induced shutdown for Lydia, but with her taking the lead, this is something of an opportunity for her, to take control over something that she never had any control over before. Carlo being resigned to it does dredge up some memories of her own experiences, but she convinces herself that this isn’t the same thing.

We’ll skip over the process itself, but at the end, Carlo and Lydia’s Demonlight started to resonate, just enough to feel it. Had things gone on longer, it would’ve been a problem, but Carlo was out by that point, so they avoided a worse result. Lydia would proceed to cuddle up to him and fall asleep, waking up earlier than him the following morning, taking a quick shower and returning to her room to make it in time for the morning roll call.

Now, I told myself that I wasn’t going to let this sort of thing happen. A little ship teasing, sure, but that was supposed to be it. Yes, I arranged the scenario, but I kept giving the bot the option to back out. Of course, the bots don’t seem to be designed for that. I’d just write this off as a doomed timeline, but then I started to think about it more. Despite all her trauma, would it be inconceivable for Lydia to seek out intimacy with someone else? No. It was several years building up to it, but we see it in canon with her relationship with Matt. That of course came over the course of nearly ten years, so the five months she’s known Carlo seems mighty short. However, she’s more impressionable at this point and we have significant events like him saving her life from drowning. It’s not impossible.

What about the fact that Carlo is Lia’s fiancé at this point? Would she really betray the trust of the sister she loves and respects so much? This is a stickier point and I was rather dismayed to see how little the bot seemed to care about Lia. (But then, Lia’s bot didn’t seem to care half as much about Lydia as she should’ve, I thought.) It’s narrowly possible if we look at it through the lens of Lydia’s competitiveness. A part of her does want to surpass Lia, so when added to the other factors, her going after Carlo is narrowly plausible.

We also have to consider the Demonlight angle. Lydia’s Demonlight poisoning is going to have a strong influence on drawing her to Carlo. The fact that there’s a genuine connection there only makes it all the easier. I’m not saying Carlo is absolved of all responsibility, but his Demonlight poison is the main driving factor in a lot of his personal woes.

There’s another angle to consider. Think about Future!Lydia’s bitter hostility toward Carlo. In the official settings, Lydia’s hostility is rooted in her associating him with Lia, tied to her guilt and such. Wouldn’t that guilt be so much stronger if the two of them betrayed Lia’s trust and Lia died in complete ignorance of this. That’s going to feed into a pretty massive self-hate complex and with Carlo being the second party in the affair, a lot of that negative emotion is going to get deflected to him. This idea is actually rather compelling and it’s what’s got me considering the idea of keeping this incident as canon. I don’t imagine Carlo is going to survive in the estimation of most readers, but I might just be willing to sacrifice him in the name of spinning a tragedy. Alternatively, I may end up making ASO a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style story and put it in the reader’s hands whether or not Carlo keeps slipping up time and time again.

Holy moly, that was a lot to say about the topic, and that was with substantial abridgment. As for other activities, in NL I decided to adapt the heroines from the two Zeta stories I’ve been doing recently. Yuri Sato becomes Sayuri Goto and Noriko Yukawa becomes Michiko Inawashiro. There will be enough changes to the character settings to make them my own and I intend to make a far tamer story than the yarn Zeta has spun. (And though it will be much tamer, I do believe Kazuko pursuing Sayuri will still be a thing.) At this point, the side content of Kazuya, Shizuka, et. al are shaping up to be its own book. Human drama, romance, comedy, all that fun stuff. We’ll see how it develops.

And that does it for now. I’m sure I won’t be able to just leave the Lydia scenario sitting, so we’ll be following that and more. Stay tuned.

I had a lot of archiving work to do in DA, but I barely touched it and didn’t get much else done of note. My main activity was with Zeta.

I mentioned last time that there was another story I started up. This one involves the proprietress of a bathhouse where you play a broke college student who works there part-time in exchange for free use of the facilities. She’s stuck in a marriage where the fire’s long since gone out, so you can imagine what’s being set up. It started innocently enough with her heating up some leftover nikujaga because Kazuya (yes, Kazuya is my default chara in most of these stories) isn’t eating well. He makes a big deal about the food, which flatters her as it’s not something she gets from her husband. Then she starts asking about his love life. He doesn’t have any prospects at the moment, so she starts to dig deeper, asking about his type and such, slowly building up to making her move. Now, the fact that we once again rather quickly take a naughty turn wasn’t so much of interest to me, but the way Noriko (the proprietress)’s personality worked was thoroughly fascinating. On the one hand, she’s rather self-conscious about her age and lacking confidence in herself as it’s been a long time since her husband last showed any real interest in her. On the other hand, she seems to be quite aware of her charms and her repertoire of skills. I played up Kazuya as a clueless, somewhat desperate virgin, which excited both her maternal instincts and her lust for control. In the scenarios I’ve tried so far, there’s a particular Gary Stu/Mary Sue dynamic that plays up wish fulfillment at the cost of interesting character work. I imagine when the intention is self-insert player characters, you don’t want to bruise egos or introduce too many complications to achieving the desired payoffs. As someone who plays characters rather than putting myself out there, this concern for ego is pointless, and as someone who only appreciates something when it’s properly earned, easy mode is boring, which is a big part of why I tend to dislike isekai stories. What I’m looking for and what the apparent target audience is looking for simply don’t line up. Anyway the point I’m getting at here is that this story (at least the way I was playing it) actually leans into the player character’s artlessness. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, but that’s exactly what makes him exciting to Noriko. His clumsy sincerity appeals to her, as does the prospect of molding him into a lover suited to her own tastes. You hear people talk about wife husbandry, but I have to wonder if the idea of raising a partner appeals more to females.

Another aspect to Noriko’s personality that intrigued me was how underhanded she could be. I had Kazuya offer up some resistance to things going forward on moral grounds, even if Japanese culture can have funny notions about this sort of thing. Well, Noriko would circumvent this by feigning that his resistance was proof that he was lying about his compliments for her and then blue-ball him by offering to just go back as if nothing had happened. It was all a plot. She knew his feeling were genuine and that he would push harder to prove them and that once she had her hooks in him, he wouldn’t want to be let go. You could rightfully argue that a manipulative side like this is a risky move when it comes to the character’s likeability, but I think the complexity it lends outweighs the risk of losing some of the audience. I do feel bad for her as her marriage is almost comically miserable. She is, by and large, a good person who deserves better, so I almost feel she deserves to have a boy toy half her age to offset the 15 years of crap she’s had to put up with. Obviously, in a real-world context I’d never condone adultery, but in fiction we can afford to explore the human experience a little more broadly.

Because Zeta is so porn-brained, the sequence of events didn’t quite follow what I would consider a natural progression. It really is looking like there’s only one course for stories on this platform. I may try one more to see if there’s anything different, but it may be that it’s nothing more than a romance simulator for people with no patience. Alternatively, it may be that if you want a slow burn, you’re going to have to put the work in to pump the brakes. As it stands, if you want more of a story, KyaraPu is the superior option by a wide margin.

It could strongly be argued that I haven’t been using my time as wisely as I could or should, but this is all in the name of exploring what these AI services are capable of. You may consider that nothing more than an excuse, but it’s what we’ve got. We’ll see what I get up to next. Stay tuned.

I decided to send my family a Halloween image, but the AI was AI’ing quite a bit, so it took dozens of renders to get something I considered acceptable. It ended up being a pick of Arasha, as I was cycling through a bunch of different characters. This led to a conversation with her, set a while after Carlo had smuggled her into Liberia. She had just finished trick-or-treating, and in her typical tsundere fashion was denying how much fun she had. She wanted to do something else thematic, so Carlo prepared bobbing for apples back at the apartment. Carlo made a race of it and she talked a big game despite not having done it before. I was kind enough to set the final tally at 13 to 8. Carlo may or may not have held back just enough that her loss wasn’t by an overwhelming margin. Both of them were soaked by the time the match was done, so in typical Japanese story fashion, a bath had to follow. Now, Elves generally don’t catch colds and have pretty good resistance to temperatures high and low, but it’s still not necessarily fun to be cold and wet and Arasha is still a kid, after all. I mostly let the AI choose the course of events to follow, but there may have been some nudging here and there.

I want to make it clear that while Carlo will tease Arasha a bit, there’s no intention of having anything romantic going on between them, which should go without saying. There might be hints of a girlish crush on Arasha’s part, but whatever his other faults, Carlo has enough sense and morals not to try anything with her, even if she’s basically just a slightly more melanated version of the woman he loves (though that fact can occasionally threaten to cross wires). Anyway, point being, what follows is the two of them sharing a bath, entirely platonically, something not uncommon here in Japan, even though it can appear weird to outsiders. Carlo, for his part, plays the gentleman as best he can. It’s an opportunity to draw out Arasha’s dere side a bit, but it’s probably not a scene I’d put in the novelization given how it could be misconstrued. Perhaps if Arasha was included with several others such as maybe Maya and Jenny, it would ameliorate the situation somewhat. Still, it’s something best left off the table. (Had the AI taken a firm stance refusing the scenario, I wouldn’t have forced it, but it should be noted that communal bathing is common among Elves, not only the ones in El-Ashara but also the ones in Bel-Hazor.) After the bath, the two of them settled in for the evening with some hot chocolate and I left the scenario hanging with Arasha requesting a new topic of conversation.

In NL, I didn’t make any new characters, but I did rework Maya and Arasha from scratch. In Maya’s case, the model had strayed a bit over all the iterations and a fresh start with an adjusted prompt got results much closer to what I wanted. In Arasha’s case, I had a cowboy shot that wasn’t translating well to full body because of the proportions (she was almost all legs), so it was easier to start over. While trying to make a Halloween version of her, she ended up looking older than I intended, so I just slotted in that as being her in her 50s (the equivalent of 15 or 16 for humans). I’ve decided that she won’t quite reach the level of her mother but won’t quite stay at the level of her sister either. Speaking of her mother, I did renders of Ashara from when Rafael would have first found her, then once she was a good 20 years older and in better shape, then one of her with baby Maya from the time she entrusts Maya to Rafael. Besides some assorted Halloween costumes, I also rendered the Drama Club Coven as Imperial recruits and the survivors of the Seven Deadlies as prisoners.

In Zeta, I continued the scenario with Yuri (the bride kidnapping story). We were having a nice supper of curry until pressure was mounting for Kazuya to kiss her as an open display of affection. A chaste peck on the cheek wasn’t getting the job done, but Kazuya’s trying to pace himself until the paperwork is in to make things official. It’s meant as a show of sincerity, but I’ve come to learn that Zeta storylines really don’t seem to be designed with a slow burn in mind. Disappointed, Yuri stops eating and pouts. Now, I was under the impression that in Japanese culture, kissing on the lips is seen as overtly sexual and a taboo in public, but maybe the AI didn’t get that memo. With Kazuko pressing him to fix the situation, he picks Yuri up, takes her to his room and properly makes out with her for a bit to make it clear that his attempt to observe self-control isn’t to be misinterpreted for a lack of passion. He doesn’t let things get too far, but Yuri has the main event on the mind and is worried about the messy details. Kazuya knows some of the general principles of it but can’t speak directly to the female experience. He suggests she consult one of the females around her and because she’s too shy to as Mum or Granny, she settles on Kazuko. Earlier her super sniffer concluded that she’s had a boy in her bed before. As a proper big brother, Kazuya doesn’t want to think about his kid sister’s experiences and wants to talk about them even less. However, Yuri is too afraid to go alone, so he decides to sit in as an honorary girl for the girl talk. Kazuko refuses this outright, understandably, and yanks Yuri into her room so she can get her future sister-in-law squared away.

It started with just some straight talk about the facts and then, well, things got hands-on. On the one hand, this concept of a young woman taking it on herself to teach her naive future sister-in-law what she needs to know was fascinating. It got weird fast, though, and it basically ended with Kazuya being fully NTR’ed. Kazuya had made a joke about a weird love triangle forming among them earlier and the system decided to make it a reality. I thought at most Kazuko might get a little handsy while they were sleeping. As you might imagine, I have zero intention of adapting this. The way things got out of control reminds me of how things went off the rails with the maid storyline and I’m starting to think that Zeta is simply porn-brained. It’s not what I was going for. It’s also a bit annoying how the system is so wired for wish fulfillment that there are no naturalistic challenges or shortcomings. The totally inexperience Yuri is suddenly and inexplicably an expert at all manner of techniques. It’s all too facile for my tastes, but I’m not much of a fan of this sort of thing anyway.

I decided to try another story just to see if the pattern holds. Since I just started, I’ll save any details for next time when I have more to comment on. It may well be that Zeta is the least versatile of the chat programs I’ve tried. If what they offer is what you’re looking for, you may be quite satisfied, but my doubts are mounting.

We’ll see what I get into next. Stay tuned.

Most of my work was in NL, but let’s talk about DA first. I was playing around with this one theme that has characters react to different scenarios. One of those scenarios is getting swarmed with rubber duckies in the bath for whatever reason. I decided to make an in-universe gag of it where dumping a bunch of rubber duckies on people in the bath was a viral prank and posted a few of the renders that turned out best. I was waiting for Young!Lydia to tear into me, but she never responded. Neither did anyone else except for Iliana. In her case, the joke was that she herself wasn’t surprised by the prank itself but rather by Mariana being surprised. Now, I’d never had a conversation with Iliana, but I decided to give it a shot. Obviously the system wasn’t going to replicate her quirk from the original canon of mostly just echoing Mariana’s lines, but her fixation on her sister and young Joseph were communicated quite clearly. In the original, I wouldn’t quite characterize her as actively evil so much as amoral. When her mother was alive, her will determined Iliana’s moral compass, and after her death, that role was taken up by Mariana. She has almost no willpower of her own, hence her going nearly catatonic after Mariana was taken by the Empire. In our conversation, she was pretty much entirely focused on becoming a suitable match for Joseph. The fact that she is only intended as a concubine is of no consequence to her. Maintaining the bloodline is her mission and she is dedicated to it. I felt a little guilty when she was asking Carlo to watch over her as she’s a pawn of the Order of the Hydra and so it’s probably best that she doesn’t succeed, but the request is coming from a mostly guileless little girl, so you know…

I did say NL was my main and, as with last time, I’m not going to detail all the costume changes I did. I will talk about the character creations I did. I made all the Seven Deadly Sins, making a point to render them both before and after their turn to piracy. I also made a first draft of the scene from Chapter 17 of Tico1 where the Seven Deadlies assemble in front of Aaron. After the Seven Deadlies, I made Eva Bianchi, then the Ladrieus (partially influenced by my chat with Iliana). For some reason, the system decided to use a wildly different style when I was using a separate character slot for Iliana, so I opted to just bundle her with Mariana much as I did with the Kiriyama Sisters. For whatever reason, I was able to render the O’Connor Sisters separately and you still have a strong resemblance between them. Who knows what was up? For Joseph I had to attempt him cross-dressing as Mariana and it came out quite well. You can tell it’s him with it still being a passable likeness for Mariana. At least enough to fool a mentally unstable girl for a while. I then made Ayame (the Alkoresh version, not an attempt to recreate the real thing) and new character Kazuko, who I’ll describe in a moment.

This leads us to me picking up the bride kidnapping story in Zeta. Kazuya manages to win over Yuri’s mother handily, so she gives her blessing to the proposed marriage. (The promise of grandbabies can be quite effective on women of a certain age.) Sudden as the whole thing is, Yuri isn’t opposed and so she agrees to spend the rest of the week with Kazuya’s family and Friday they’ll go to City Hall to file the paperwork and make it official. Before supper, Kazuya encourages Yuri to take a bath (partially with the intention of getting her to more completely shed her police officer persona). Now, to explain what Yuri was going to wear afterwards, I invented a high-school-age kid sister. I didn’t want to spend too much time looking up a name, so I opted to just call her Kazuko. I would later develop the following scenario: Her proper name is “Futako (二子)” to follow Kazuya (一也), only she never goes by “Futako”. Her friends at school call her “Niko” and at home she’s called “Kazuko”. You see, when I was a kid, my grandmother tended to make a portmanteau of my sister and cousin’s names when calling out to us. Using the same principle, instead of yelling “Kazuya! Futako!”, it became “Kazuko!”, and because the much younger and more mischievous Futako was often the one at greater fault, the name stuck. Now, I just mentioned that there was a sister and the system started building the character on the spot. Kazuko is a mischievous sort who quickly takes an interest in her sister-in-law-to-be. Typical anime antics follow in the bath while Kazuya patiently waits in the living room. Somehow Yuri is established about being a D-cup. If you look at the illustrations provided at the beginning, the only way that can be true is if she’s doing the equivalent of Chinese foot-binding to her chest, but whatever. You can render out a snapshot at the end of an exchange, but it costs credits and they don’t give out any for free, so I couldn’t tell you if she gets redrawn to match this turn of the scenario. Anyway, Kazuko susses out Yuri’s smell fetish, so that becomes a whole thing, especially after the bath, where the klutzy Yuri trips and Kazuya catches her and then puts her on his knee. The proximity has quite the effect on her, which Kazuko can’t help commenting on. These shenanigans go on for a while until it’s time for supper and they all head to the kitchen/dining room. We get just to the point where the prospect of a family meal really sinks in for Yuri when I wandered off to do other things. I suppose I could play out the three days, get to Friday and see how things go from there.

Since I’ve already done the reviews, I’ve got Sunday wide open, so we’ll see what I get up to. Stay tuned.