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.

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment