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.

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