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.

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