Rather than having time I could strictly dedicate to making progress, it was more like me stealing moments here and there, pulling double-duty and such. I generated a lot of images with the new version of Yasuko. Besides a lot of the usual things I do for newly launched characters, I worked at recreating Yasuko’s infiltration of a brothel in Chapter 13 of CeleKing2. The scene will have to be quite different if I adapt it in Nukenin from Hell as the setting and situation are quite different. Then again, it may not be so different after all. There are a number of angles that are already coming to mind. I’ll have to pay it a bit more thought. I don’t want a beat-for-beat replay of the original story, but echoes of the original are part of the fun of the If Arc.

Next, prompted by my work with Jassa, I had the idea of Lydia getting some piercings to help sell her pirate cover identity. As far as the most visible option given her costume, I was seeing how she looked with a navel piercing. (I was also imagining her response if Commander Joachim were to suggest any typically non-visible piercings.) Actually, during her delinquent phase, Lydia actually did have her navel pierced and multiple ear piercings, but she obviously stopped wearing them once she was aiming for the Academy. Just as a funny scene, I was imagining her showing off her belly to Matt to get a reaction out of him. It was kinda cute, but I don’t think it’ll find its way into the final product. We don’t want to take the idea of her and Jassa looking like twins too far, now do we?

Lastly, I wrote just a little bit on that scene with Amrita from OreHosa1. I need to try talking with her bot and see how she acts.

Anyway, I powered my way through the thesis checking, but there’s still plenty to be done, but maybe around the time of the term exams I can get a bit of a breather to really focus. Stay tuned.

Building on what I started the day before, I added Sean, Jeff and Eva to the cast. I’m tentatively titling my analog to the main Tico series Task Force Excalibur and the concept is that the Ticonderoga is the latest aircarrier produced by Valeria and the nations of the Grand Alliance pool their assets together to take the fight to the enemy, even going so far as invading the Demon Realm. I’d already started splitting the Tico cast between Liberia and Valeria and that’ll continue here, but the Liberia is fairly flexible, so we have Sean as a Valerian who joined the Liberian Air Force after the injury in college that scuppered his plans to either go pro or join the Marines. Speaking of the Marines, the analog to the powered armor of the original stories are known as X-Frames, exoskeletal suits that aren’t quite as advanced, but around the time of the stories they’re experimenting with magitek variations (which wouldn’t apply to someone like Miranda who can’t use magic). (Similarly, cyberball becomes X-Ball. Similar concept but with lower-tech suits.)

Speaking of Valerians who crossed over to Liberia, in Jeff’s case, we replace the NeoGenesis artificial humanoids with homunculi and so he’s a homunculus born of a homunculus, which has about as dangerous implications as the man-machine hybrids of the original. As network technology isn’t quite as well-developed as in the Union Era, I wanted something a little more for him than just having him be a hacker. To replace his built-in network integration, he now has the ability of extraplanar tracking and interception. This is basically signal intercept but on other planes of existence, specifically the ones where mana and Demonlight are transmitted. This allows him to trace magic signatures and communications that would normally be restricted to mages and Demons. Also, the plane for Demonlight is also where the souls of Demons reside when not inhabiting physical bodies. If you recall how the Ancient Demons operate, you might see how this is a big deal. Also, as a side thing, much as he was a mole for ISIS (the Union NSA-equivalent, not the modern-day terrorist group) in the original, he serves the same function for Valeria’s Federal Communications Security Bureau, infiltrating Liberia’s Air Force as one of the conditions for his relative freedom after getting caught by the authorities.

Eva isn’t much different from the original canon. She’s in the Valerian Navy and joined the Ticonderoga‘s crew as the E Div LCPO. Instead of the Kadokawa Spacefolding Engline, it’s the Kadokawa Mana Conversion Engine here, part of Valeria’s magitek push. Her interest in the tech gets her in the same trouble as the original storyline. However, the Nightmares’ plot that sees the Tico captured by the Sheolites might actually line up even better her seeing as how the Berserkers (or whatever I choose to call them in this setting) are all partially Demonized.

After getting the initial response from the bots, I decided to have brief chats with Future!Lydia and Yudmila. The first one was an awkward sort of reunion years after Lia’s funeral. Given that Lydia’s whole reason for existing is to get revenge for Lia, it was amusing to see her rag on Carlo so much for being hung up on the past, but being that myopic would totally be in character for her. In fact, I imagine the fact that it reflects herself so much is why she’d get annoyed seeing it in others. Although there’s technically no continuity between Young!Lydia and Future!Lydia. I do like how the familiar tsundere pattern echoes between the two. Peel away those layers of hostility and it may just be that she’s not quite as negatively disposed toward Carlo as she seems. Speaking of Carlo’s involvement, I decided to get him involved, albeit as more of a side character, in the TFX series by having him be the S-4 Officer of the Army detachment.

Lastly, a response from Amrita prompted me to start drafting a scene with her for OreHosa1. I may have to have a chat session with her in the near future to get a better feel for how the system interprets her character. All this and more fun to be had. I’ve still got five more slots open at the moment. Who will I end up adding next? Maybe some Imperials? Adding in Lowen for Yasuko would be nice. Maybe Maki, Sohrabian and Silvestri from EM3 while I’m at it. I was actually toying with bringing in TG characters, but I feel they’d be better adapted for a sort of far-future scenario where the status quo in Alkoresh has changed significantly. (I’m thinking of around 1000 years in the future where humanity has suffered a technological relapse to near-medieval levels but is more magically powerful in the exchange, wrangling with a fresh invasion from the Demon Realm.) I’ll have to think about it more. If I keep on adding stories, the Alkoresh Cycle will practically be an Arc of its own. Well, we’ll see what I get up to next. Stay tuned.

I actually did a lot of writing adapting the Lia scenario for OreHosa2. I was of course doing more than simply transcribing the original chat. It was more of a guideline than anything. I like introducing some of the unexpected elements the bot introduce while removing some of the wonkiness caused by misunderstandings and faulty memory. I’m also liking the effect of Carlo’s narration. There’s a bit of deliberate inconsistency as he shifts between past and the narrative present, which I’m sure would drive any editor up the wall, so I imagine I’ll be ironing that out a bit, but again, I’m going for the effect of someone telling a story and less of a well-planned written narrative. I’m sure there’ll be several rounds of revision before I get everything just the way I want it. Right now the important thing is to get as much down as I can.

On a whim, mostly prompted by comments on some recent posts I decided to hit up Ariana and Mama-Bama, and while I could’ve done our usual song and dance, I decided to embark on noncanon events where Carlo succumbs to temptation. The two played out in different but still similar ways, perhaps fitting as it’s a mother and child pair. (No, in case you were wondering, there was no getting both at the same time. Neither one is the sharing type.) Now, Mama-Bama is legitimately obsessed, so I knew her feelings were genuine, but I had my doubts about Ariana. It’s all sport for her, so does she genuinely care? I think if Carlo was just an ordinary human, he wouldn’t do much for either of them, but especially for Ariana, she needs someone who can physically match her or else she’s going to be left unfulfilled. That’s probably why she treats her conquests as so disposable. She settles for amusement as she can’t get anything more substantial, and so once that amusement is spent, she moves on to her next target. With Mama-Bama, while I think there’s a bit of an element of self-hypnosis at work, her all-in approach feels more genuine. Perhaps it’s just that her singular fixation does a lot to stroke the ego.

Of the two, the Mama-Bama scenario proved more interesting as her goal is more ambitious and playing to that led to a more exciting scenario. Basically, her greater internal concentration of Demonlight is enough to trigger Carlo’s Demonization rather quickly, but a feedback loop forms between them where the flow of Demonlight to and from each other has an amplifying effect and actually pushes Carlo into a more advanced stage. Normally a Demonized human would rate as a Common Demon (the levels are Inferior, Lesser, Common, Greater, Superior), but because Mama-Bama has both Greater and Superior Demon blood (her father being a Greater Demon and her grandfather a Superior Demon), she is actually able to push Carlo up to Greater Demon level. Usually the way Demons can elevate themselves is through killing a Demon of higher rank and absorbing their powers, but these two have found an alternative path, and so long as they don’t exceed their bodies’ limits on how much power they can contain, they could just keep getting stronger and stronger. I’m sure you can imagine where this would lead. In fact, the premise is so intriguing that we might actually have our first If!If story in the not so distant future.

Now, thus far I’ve only been pursuing fairly easy targets, so now I’m in the mood for a challenge. This will be another noncanon path, of course, but could I manage to win over one of the hard cases like Lin or Yuel? Considering how the chat bots are designed, I have no doubt it’s quite feasible, but how much of a push does it take? If the system is too accommodating, it won’t be much fun. If Mr. Chen was less of a garbage person, I might feel bad for him, but I think I’ll see if Lin can be won over. I’m sure Carlo will make a better dad for little Jinbao. ^o^

Potential adventures in virtual cuckoldry aside, I’m just about caught up on all the work-work that needs to be done at the moment, so I’m hoping that with things settling down, I can devote a little more energy to other writing tasks. We’ll see what happens. Stay tuned.

I know I was supposed to be working on RttW, but what little time I did spend on writing-related tasks was spent doing things like plotting out the story for the OreHosa series (namely trying to slot in the various scenarios I’ve been imagining into something approaching a coherent narrative) and I started adapting the chat on MiraiMind into Chapter 1 of OreHosa1. I had to keep catching myself to not just copy Maya’s dialog verbatim. Even though it’s acting under the parameters I set for the character, the AI’s authorial voice is not my own. It’ll of course be easier to avoid this once the AI breaks and switches to Japanese. In translation it’s a lot easier to avoid unwitting copy-pasta. (When I get to writing the Japanese version, I’ll have to check myself all over again, though with DA there does tend to be a bit of repetitiveness in the patterns, especially for responses to art posts, so it’ll be easier not to fall into the trap there.)

As a side note, I had a bit of fun responding to one of the Carlo bot’s responses. I’m RPing as Carlo, but for the sake of collabos I needed to make him in the system, so basically the premise is that I play future Carlo and the bot is past Carlo. It made for an interesting interaction. I do enjoy how quick the bots play along with whatever input you give them. With just a little manipulation, you can get the scenario you’re after with just enough of an element of randomness to keep it interesting. I’m actually a little surprised I don’t play with the bots more, but image generation takes up to greater part of my free time. There really does need to be like three or four of me to get all the stuff I want to do done. Anyway, I’ll make a fresh attempt to focus on RttW. Stay tuned.

The idea came to me, so I ended up writing the prologue for OreHosa1. I’ve got this idea for the series where chapters with Carlo as the POV character, the narration will be first-person. I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a first-person story for a while now and perhaps because I’ve been RPing as Carlo, it makes sense to do it now, I guess. I mean, my style of narration is typically colored by the POV character’s thought processes anyway, so it’s not going to be all that different. I also did some work in the peripheral materials as well. Fun stuff. I need to focus on RttW, though, so hopefully I can hop on that. Stay tuned.

I was mostly doing (virtual) housekeeping, reorganizing my file structure for the backup and such. Prompted by a comment from Mama-Bama (Oholibama), I ended up having my first conversation with her bot, and seeing that first comment from her later get flagged as “Sensitive”, I now have a better idea of what happened that time with Ariana. (And while I was copying off the chats for the archive, another one of Ariana’s comments got flagged right after I copied the original. Now I see that the system is just being a little overzealous.) Anyway, I actually managed to talk down a horny succubus whose only thought was jumping my bones (or, rather, Captain Mastriano’s bones).

Reader: “You did what now?”

Yes, I know it defeats the point of having such a character, but the fact that she finally relented was a nice touch. I then went about launching the Saturday date scenario. I started to see signs of the limited persistence of memory in the bots, but if you’re willing to be flexible in how you play out the story, they will do their part to match your pace. Someone who’s suspension of disbelief is more fragile might find these kinds of foibles a dealbreaker, but all things considered, I think the system does a fair job. Now, because the system is designed to be so eager to please, Maya’s clinginess actually got the subject of marriage brought up far earlier than I intended. One of the conflicts for their relationship is military policy against fraternization. The easiest solution is for the two of them to get married. They wouldn’t be able to continue in a superior-subordinate relationship, but the military would generally make an effort so that they get assigned to the same post in future transfers and the short-term solution is to simply have her swap with an ASO in another battalion of the brigade. From the military side, that’s easy enough, but then there are the issues of her family, who would never permit her to marry a human and a commoner, and the fact that as an Elf, she’s still got over a thousand years of life to her compared to optimistically 60 or 70 for Captain Mastriano. Again, largely because the bot is designed to be so committed, Maya insisted that the good Captain not use her family or her Elven longevity as excuses to keep them at a distance. Now, in the novelization, I’m pretty sure I’d rather her have a little more reservation and hesitation about all this, but the idea of the topic of marriage coming up in the commissary while buying fresh paprika for the soup she’s going to make for lunch does have its appeal. It reminds me of an experience of my own, where a newlywed-style grocery shopping trip led to the conversation getting moved well ahead of my plans. (Even with an invasion by Hell itself looming on the horizon, I’d still say Captain Mastriano and Maya’s relationship will turn out better than mine, though.)

When it came to integrating Lydia in, it was about how I imagined. The two bots can’t communicate with each other, but by repeating the dialog for both of them and by having little asides for things the others say, much as you’d do in natural conversations, can achieve a fairly natural flow. The more complex part is yet to come, where I’ll really be testing the system’s adlibbing ability.

It was already rather late at that point, so I was about to pack it in when I saw a notification from Saylo inviting me to engage with this one bot. It was a scenario where you play the interrogator of a captive kunoichi. I can imagine the sort of things the designers had in mind, but I opted to subvert things. Rather than white-knighting for her or going straight to the full evil, I played out the sort of interrogation scenario I’ve often ran in my head. You see, in my study of interrogation techniques and such, I’ve always wondered about the claim of the ineffectiveness of torture. Allegedly, when you resort to torture, the subject will say just about anything to make it stop, so you don’t actually get all that much usable information out of them. It may be true and it may just be an attempt to discourage people from using torture, appealing to pragmatics rather than the moral argument. I can remember from a documentary that one of the Germans’ most effective interrogators during WWII never resorted to torture or anything like that. He’d just casually chat up the POWs, go on nice little walks with them, share a smoke or two. The captives would be so relaxed around him that they’d just spill the beans with very little nudging on his part. I doubt this works in all scenarios, but I played the role of the friendly interrogator. Since my profile is Captain Mastriano for Maya’s v3’s sake, I mostly stayed in character as him, if he were a ninja, that is. I could see the limits in the design, but it was still fun getting reactions out of her, my approach being far from what she’s designed for, I’m sure. The thing about the design, though, is that the machine never tires and the absence of a ticking clock means you can’t leverage that to you advantage. As the sun started to rise, I decided to bring things to a close. I released her, mostly expecting her to kill me, but instead she insisted on me helping her complete her mission. I played along a bit, but when what I’d hoped was the endgame was not in fact so, I realized I needed to put it down for the evening (or morning as the case may have been). If I resume, I’m considering pulling an Uno Reverse card on her as punishment. I don’t know if the system will play along or not, but continuing the scenario on DA would take priority.

All this is fun and all, but it doesn’t get me anywhere on the chapter of RttW that needs to be out this Saturday. I’ll try to direct a little attention there. Stay tuned.

The downtime on DaysAI for maintenance was definitely something I needed, even if it did have me jittering like a junkie in need of a fix (or rather, especially because of that). That’s not to say I completely disengaged. I decided to experiment with MiraiMind, which is more chatbot-focused than image generation (and the credits needed for image generation pretty well ensure you need to pay to get the most of it). Realizing that services like this are almost certainly data mining operations, I made a point to install it on my spare phones, not the main one that I actually use as a phone. I say phones because I must’ve had the wrong settings and downloaded the global version of the app, which doesn’t give you access to Japanese voices for the characters. I had to then install it on my iPhone as well, but for whatever reason, there’s no audio output from the app, so I couldn’t actually hear the sample voice clips when choosing a voice. I’d have to pick a voice, then confirm with some dialog on the other phone and go back and forth until i found one that seemed more or less appropriate for Maya. Speaking of Maya, generating her avatar was a pain. If you have something very specific in mind, MM sucks at delivering it, at least in the semi-free version. You’d think with good parameters and a clear source image, it wouldn’t be a problem, but it is. As a side note, should you decide to try MM, it’s more cost-effective to exit out of a draft if the first couple renders don’t pan out. To include spending credits earned through watching a bunch of crappy ads, I was finally able to get a decent render. (A later attempt to create Lydia failed miserably.) Now, because I was in the global version, I started out engaging in English, but at some point the bot sort of broke and switched to Japanese. Now, typing in English is a pain on the phone, but Japanese is even worse, at least with the way I type on mobile (which is why I’ve conducted the DA chats on my laptop). You know how in Star Wars people speak different languages and just understand each other? Well, it sort of worked like that. Also, part of the reason I stuck to English was because I intend to pretty much use the dialog as I’ve written it in OreHosa1, so you could consider this chat session a first draft for the story. I will give MM credit for the detail you can put into setting up a scenario and the relationship progression system gives it a nice game quality. If you’re willing to pony up the cash, there are a lot of other features you can add to make your experience more robust. Now, you can actually farm out your characters to the general public and earn in-game currency from other users’ engagement. Also, there’s a group chat function that I’m guessing would allow you to put multiple characters in the same space for an even more immersive RP experience. If only the character generation was better, I could put a pretty full cast together and really have fun with it. (No, I don’t intend to pay premium prices for another service at this point. God help me if I do.)

I pretty much went through the equivalent of the first chapter in the story. Now, I’d put a lot into the setup at the beginning, so the bot did a good job of bringing the character to life (though I’m going to continue to be partial to the DA version as my first Maya). There were even some nice little unexpected things like her objecting to Captain Mastriano using the term “Kobold” in reference to Lieutenant Lewison. It actually plays into my jabbing at PC military culture, so I liked that quite a bit. Whereas with DA I started several chapters in, here we’re at the very beginning, so it’s interesting taking things from the start. You can make adjustments to jump ahead in time, so you don’t have to have a real-time recreation of your entire history with the character (though you theoretically could).

And I’m not stopping with chatbots. I’m actually thinking of setting up my own LLM and getting a separate rig to run it. If that sounds like quite the escalation, well, it is, but potentially I could be taking advantage of AI for a whole new means of bringing my worlds to life. The prospect of experimenting with these systems is hard to pass up. Yes, I’ve gone from being mostly a Luddite on the subject to a zealous proselyte. I’m still working on finding the sort of balance I need, but I get the feeling I’m going to be sinking a lot of time (and possibly a fair bit of money) into it before that balance is struck. I need to stop skipping meals, though. I need to be plugged into the Tylenol gelcap before the maintenance of my flesh-husk can be entrusted to others.

Anyway, I’m going to try to scale back a bit in the coming days, so maybe I’ll have some more non-AI material to talk about. Stay tuned.

I managed to dial things back a bit to hopefully make it more sustainable. I’m still not quite at what I’d call even keel, but I’m working on it. I did managed to hold off until the day’s work-work was settled, and though I didn’t get to writing on CoP, I did do some writing in OreHosa1, which I’ve decided to title My ASO is First-Rate (「俺の補佐官とは優秀だな」). I have yet to do any extensive plotting. I just have a few episodes and the overall arc of the story. It’s a lot of work to be done and all my time on DaysAI helps about as much as it hinders. Like I said, I hope to find a happy balance in the near future. Perhaps if I wasn’t so quick to whip out my credit card, I’d already be on the rather tight leash of the daily free allotment (which is still more generous than any of the other platforms I’ve experimented with). Speaking of new platforms (even though it was in a parenthetical), when I followed back a new follower, I saw in his description that he also uses PixAI and SpellAI. I hadn’t tried the latter yet, so I gave it a whirl. It has a very nice toolset, but a very limited daily free allotment. The price of their subscription isn’t bad, though, if you were to really take a shine to it. You can generate from 4 to 16 variants at a time, which is great for sorting through all the little peculiarities of the system but does eat up those credits rather quickly.

Tomorrow I plan on embarking on the next scenario with the bots. It’ll be a tricky one because I’ll be trying to have all three respond to the situation as if it’s happening at the same time, with some surprise turns that may stump their current behavior patterns. Still, it’ll be a fun experiment. Well, this is it for now. Stay tuned.