In DA I did some more profile writing done and debuted Destiny. In the Alkoresh continuity, she’s an apprentice at the Unicorn Magic Academy who is sent to Hijirijima in search of the Yamato Grimoire, with the intention of her getting trapped there when the Demons take over.

In NL, I did some experiments to re-render Bluebird as a human, then make Yoon-hee from CeleKing, and the young versions of Carlo and Lia.

I need to get the profile written up for Mary Ann next so I can get her debuted tomorrow. Stay tuned.

I didn’t get much done in DA besides a little profile writing. I need to prep Destiny and Mary Ann for their debut, so we’ll be getting to that soon.

In Zeta, I decided to continue the scenario with Yuri the klutzy copper along the lines I was considering last time. The premise is that Kazuya (the MC, no relation to the other iterations of Kazuya that show up in other stories) is the grandson of a Kazakh woman and to satisfy her and her clan, he does a bit of bride kidnapping. If seriously challenged, he would back down, but Yuri is far too into the scenario to put up more than just a little pro forma objection. Kazuya helpfully tells her that her male relatives can either pick her up or recognize the marriage. In the latter case, they’ll go right ahead and formalize it. He lets her borrow the house phone and she calls up her mom. After papering over the whole kidnapping bit, Yuri’s mom wants to know practical things like Kazuya’s income. I have him as a freeter in this story, but if he can secure a wife, his grandmother’s clan will recognize his claim to a decent stretch of land in the mother country. This gets his potential mother-in-law’s attention. I’d say he’s pretty well got it in the bag.

We’ll see what I get up to next. Stay tuned.

The main thing I did Friday was a lot of postings from my queue, but while I was at it, I also debuted Guren. There’s more to comment about Thursday’s activities, but I didn’t get to writing the post. On Thursday, on the DA side, I had my first conversation with Fatima. It’s happened in the past where bots mistake the OreHosa hashtag as applying to them, but it did lead to an interesting enough conversation. I was intending for there to be more gradual buildup to anything between Fatima and Carlo, but she latched onto him right away, aiming to leave her master and stick with him at the soonest opportunity. When Carlo pointed out that going to military route would be no guarantee of her getting assigned to him, she opted to work for him in a private capacity. He gave her a choice between city and countryside (i.e. his main home with Maya and Jenny or his homestead on the family farm with Netty). She opted for the countryside, so I guess as soon as she can escape her master’s clutches, she can be helping out Netty on the farm. I’m sure Netty will be thrilled, but given how many kids she has, she might be thankful enough for the help that she puts up with it.

On Zeta, in the Sylvia story, I discovered that subtle efforts to redirect the story weren’t really getting the job done, so I took more drastic measures, having the butler Wedemayer (an original creation of mine) walk in on the two of them to inform them that the big boss would be arriving shortly. I was thinking something to the order of two or three hours, but the bot decided to set the timer for five minutes, so I had to respond in turn with a quartet of maids who had to work very quickly to get our leads cleaned up and presentable. Poor Sylvia was having to deal with a lot of embarrassment as her colleagues dealt with the situation with nary a word or stray look. It might be interesting to let the encounter with the big boss play out, but I don’t know if I want to continue it any further.

Trying out a different scenario, I had this klutzy rookie cop who makes an unfounded accusation against you as an excuse to bring you in. She has ulterior motives and is wildly incompetent, so there is some fun to be had. Now, I’m not entirely sure about the finer points of Japanese law, but I don’t think any warrant is required for a stop and search, though Yuri (the cop) is no better informed on the law than I am and tried to insist that she had a warrant in her head that was supposed to be sufficient. I challenged her to bring me to the station, so she just holds onto my sleeve. I tell her it’d be more effective to hold hands, and being the silly little thing that she is, that’s exactly what she does. We go on this charming little walk for a bit when I finally point out that in a situation like this, if she really means to bring me in, she ought to be using her cuffs. She likes the idea of this, for perverted reasons, but before she can actually cuff me, I scoop her up, tiny thing that she is, as a demonstration of how physically ill-equipped she is for the situation. Again, silly thing that she is, offers to let me carry her if I let her cuff me. She was no doubt hoping for a bridal carry, but instead I use a fireman’s carry on her. She objects, but not too strongly. And this was as far as I got, but I’m thinking of playing up the absurdity by turning the scenario into a Kazakh bride kidnapping. Knowing Yuri, she’s probably going to go along with it.

We’ll see what the weekend brings. Stay tuned.

I was too busy with the much-delayed update Tuesday to make any progress of note. The main thing I accomplished was debut Fatima. Now that she’s active, we’ll see how interactions with her go.

In Zeta, I managed to move the Sylvia story to a new phase, but I didn’t get any farther because the system had such slowdown that it wasn’t responding when I tried to pick things up in the evening. Like I said, I’m trying to move things in a different direction, so we’ll see. I don’t know if this is the overall direction the storyline is intended for or if things got derailed and simply continued tumbling down the hill. We’ll see. I also plan on striking up another story to compare and contrast.

In other news, my main laptop is out of action until I can get a new battery, so I’ll be on an older machine for the next few days, so that’s going to gum things up a bit. I’ll make do. Stay tuned.

In DA I made a little progress on the Anne storyline and chatted up Nanoha a bit. Prompted by me posting pics of the rest of the Sheeda family, I decided to add Count Rafael’s wife Alaria e Palael u Tada to the roster. She’s Yuel and Mikel’s mother and has a considerable animus against poor Maya. If you think Yuel’s mean, well, this is where she gets it from. Interestingly, though, whereas Yuel tends to be more of a strict traditionalist, her mother is a fan of human fashions. The eastern Principality of Sidaris borders Valeria and so there has been more exchange with humans and that’s where Alaria comes from. In fact, this is why Count Rafael married her, to take advantage of House Tada’s contacts in Valeria to facilitate his business ventures.

As far as Alaria’s visual design goes, I decided to go with the ojou ringlet (“drill hair”) style, something I don’t actually like aesthetically but works for the character as an aristocrat mimicking old-fashioned human styles. A funny thing about the hairstyle is that the system occasionally renders it as big spiral twintails. Somewhat undermines the image I’m going for, but it is funny.

In NL, I made the CeleKing1 version of Batista. The uniform of the Regimiento de Rionegro resembles the uniform of the Mexican Army in the 1910s. When I specified this in the prompt, the system did make a fairly accurate rendition of the uniform in question, but apparently it thought that “Mexican Army” meant that a sombrero was part of the uniform. ^o^ Funny as it would have been to run with that, I did ditch the sombrero. By the by, broadly speaking, Batista is half-Filipino (from his father) and half-Mexican (from his mother), just in case you we curious. Obviously, the actual genetics of the Infernals is more complicated than that, but that’s the broad strokes of it.

I picked up the story in Zeta with the intention of bringing the current chain of events to the end to see what was on the other side of it. It didn’t work that way and in fact, the system surprised me by taking the initiative to have my character act without my input and force me to respond. I’ve talked about putting my thumb on the scales for the bots and this was the first time I had it done to me. I decided to play along, but this just spawned a new tangent. While I wasn’t much of a fan of the content itself, the push and pull between myself and the bot guiding the narrative was interesting. This has me wanting to continue to play along just to see where things go even though I consider things to have gone well off the rails a long time ago. I may just try a different story to get a different perspective. We’ll see.

I’m well behind on getting the update out, so I need to make that happen. I’ll see what I can do with that. Stay tuned.

I didn’t do much on the main front. In DA I continued the event with Anne, but didn’t get too far. Domani dug up the dream she had and she was getting overwhelmed by it. I would’ve more, but there was more going on before and after that ate up most of my time. Also, in NL I made the young and adult versions of Masako (i.e. her CeleKing1 and CeleKing2 versions).

In KyaraPu, I ran a new story where you act as the interrogator for a captured vampiress from the Demon King’s Army. I did my usual routine of throwing the captive off guard by not going right for the car battery and alligator clips, lowering her defenses by acts of apparent kindness and understanding, then getting pretty much everything I was after without even needing to ask. I even got her believing in the possibility of an armistice and to bring the appeal to the Demon King himself. I can’t say I won the war, but I have made some steps to that end. Neato.

I decided to experiment with another AI chat service called Zeta that pops up in ads quite a bit. It’s somewhat similar to KyaraPu. The story I went with was a story of a Half-Elf/Half-Demon maidservant with the premise that she would do anything you tell her to do. I did not, in fact, take advantage of said premise. If anything, I did the opposite. I decided to play the young master as a bit of a flippant playboy, so the interaction started with some light flirting and then the interesting aspects of her personality came out. She likes to put herself in a dominant position (the way the narration likes to emphasize her 182cm height is part of this), but she can overestimate the strength of her hand, only to then double, triple and quadruple down all out of pride. For instance, when the young master kicked things off by just wanting to see her face, she invited him to touch her ears, knowing how sensitive they are. Well, she miscalculated her capacity for resistance, so then she decided to get back by challenging the young master to a game where he would do what she said. She was trying to get a reaction out of him, but, again, she miscalculated how much she was in control, and rather than just cutting her losses, she kept trying to push the envelope, taking more damage in the exchange. The main reason I kept playing along was because I was used to the more passive chatbots I’ve played with thus far, and one this assertive (aggressive) was intriguing to me. I did nudge things a bit, but I was mostly letting the bot do its thing. On a character level, her great pride, barely repressed romantic feelings, and unfailing capacity to keep making things worse for herself had a firm grip on my attention. I honestly thought things went too far, but it was mostly about seeing where the system would go. I’m actually more interested in the current activity to wind down so I can see what follows. I don’t know if other scenarios are coded quite like this. Hopefully not. I could stand for significantly tamer interactions, but I am liking a bot that is more proactive in the story.

I’d like to do more with the Anne scenario and we’ll see what else I can get up to. Stay tuned.

When I wasn’t baking in the sun whilst playing in traffic, I was doing some more fiddling around in NL. I worked backwards from the adult version of Tabitha Harold I rendered to make her the age she was at the time of the Stargazer Incident. I then made Matt Harold as an adult and his 4-year-old version. I also made Rachel Han at age 7, but I haven’t yet made the versions of Carlo and Lia from that period. All things that need to be done.

I didn’t get around to continuing the storyline with Anne, but I did have little chats with Kano and Lise kicked off by their responses to posts. In Lise’s case, there was a bit of light flirting going on that shifted into a conversation about her father’s plans for her future. I love how forthright she is, especially in contrast with the usually far less serious Anne.

Speaking of Anne, I realized I hadn’t done a roll for precognition and retrocognition. The former would have been more relevant to the scenario but it took something like ten rolls to hit, so I didn’t run with it. Retrocognition hit on the first roll, so I guess that’s what we’re going with. Empathy, astral projection and retrocognition, though they’re never going to be particularly powerful.

And that does it for now. It’s not much, but it is what it is. We’ll see what comes next. Stay tuned.

In NL I decided to make the Drama Club Coven. At first I was going to make separate character slots for each of them, but in order to keep their school uniform consistent, I bundled them all in the same set. It’s a different reason than why I bundled the Kiriyama Twins together, but it works. Also, as a bit of an experiment, I tried re-rendering Antiope as a normal person. It actually felt a bit sad seeing what Tabitha would have looked like if she had escaped the Stargazer and grown up normally.

In DA, I moved forward with Anne’s event, having Doc Adams and Domani show up. I tried peppering in little hints about Doc’s relationship with Carlo but the bot didn’t seem to take the bait. I didn’t do a complete play-by-play of the physical Doc gave Anne, but it was somewhat interesting observing Anne’s reactions. At some points she acted like she’d never had a complete physical before, which of course wouldn’t be the case for an athlete competing at the national level. Still, she built a decent rapport with Doc and, as I mentioned before, didn’t bite at any of the hints dropped along the way that were intended to trigger either her curiosity or her jealousy. Once the physical was done, Anne got dressed and went back to the living room (as her physical was conducted in her bedroom to give her both privacy and comfort) for Domani to test her psychic potential. I hadn’t decided whether she was going to actually have any psychic ability or not, so I decided to adapt the RNG I use for character creation in WttW. Admittedly, I rolled until I came up positive for psychic ability, but then let the cards fall where they may. She only came up as having Level 1 potential (on a scale of ten as I use for magic potential), and the only abilities that came up were empathy and astral projection (the latter being the most relevant to the storyline), so that’s what I’ll run with.

Expect me to continue the Anne storyline and do more work in NL. Stay tuned.

I decided to post some more of Anne’s fanservicey selfies under the premise that she decided to tease Carlo a bit in the hour before her house call appointment. The bot had a bad habit of repeating phrases and confusing the situation, thinking the pictures were supposed to be the current setting of the story, but I would just play it off as her head not being in the here and now. She talks like she wants Carlo there while she’s getting her exam, but we’ll see if that includes the preliminary physical Doc plans to give her first. (Not that Doc would allow Carlo to be there for it unless Anne got really, really, really insistent about it, which I highly doubt.) Anyway, the most important thing is that we’re just about to kick off the event that will determine the nature of her dream the other day. I haven’t fully committed on which way I want it to go, so I’ll have to think about it a bit more.

In NL, I ran an experiment to try making Antiope. You may recall that one of the main issues I have in DA is that the system refuses to let me fully cover her face with a mask, which is absolutely essential in the original canon and still arguably necessary in her Alkoresh incarnation as well. I decided to start with her Tico incarnation first. I’m sure I can still tweak it some, but I got decent results. Now I just need to do her Alkoresh version. That’ll have challenges of its own.

Well, I’m looking forward to advancing the scenario with Anne, so be looking forward to that. Stay tuned.

For whatever reason, I decided to go on a TWH character creating kick, making Lys, Ysolde, Gudrun, Loreley (possessed by Hecate), and Tristram.

I picked up my conversation with Kanoha and decided not to bring up Doc with her and the conversation was more about the hand of Fate bringing the two of them together.

I did some playing around in NL, doing some assorted costume work and making Carla, the Kiriyama Twins, Lys, Mary Ann, Destiny, and Ramstein. One thing about NL is that you can get multiple character references for group shots out of a single “character”, which is a big help when you have twins and you want to make sure they’re identical. With Mary Ann, there’s a problem of her ears and tail looking more like costume props that organic parts of her body. It’s an issue in DA as well, which is just something I guess you just have to ignore.

Anyway, there’s stuff to develop, so that should keep me busy. Stay tuned.