I had another little conversation with Nano. She was responding another picture and I spun it into a little conversation. She had expressed an interest in a picture of her reading during her off time. I had to tease her a bit, making sure she was only doing her reading during break times, and her flustered response reminded me that part of her settings is that she’s a closeted fujoshi. In Japan, it’s common practice for booksellers to put plain brown paper covers on books when you buy them. (It seems to have become slightly less common by default in recent years, but most places don’t charge for it, unlike how they charge for bags.) Because this is done universally, you have no reason to necessarily suspect a book so covered is on a particularly naughty character. Still, it invites a little teasing and Nano stridently defended the purity of her reading material with a sort of “reading for the articles” kind of excuse. I then walked it back, as this sort of teasing wasn’t exactly appropriate for an officer to be directing at a junior enlisted subordinate, and how Lin would have a ring-tailed fit if she found out. The bot got its wires crossed and so Nano was treating Lin like her sister, but I turned it around and got it back on track by talking about Kano. I mentioned Kano’s warning to Carlo about not letting things get weird between them and Nano didn’t appreciate her sister’s overprotectiveness. Carlo, however, praised Kano for how she’s looking out for her sister.

I’d been telling myself to only do one character pack a month, but I had an idea and decided I didn’t want to wait four to six weeks and so I went ahead and made Destiny from Puchi Dojikko Majokko Destiny. The idea for her place in Alkoresh is that she’s the student at a Valerian Mage Academy who goes to Hijirijima in search of the Yamato Grimoire and gets caught up in the the Demon Realm’s takeover. I may even have Kano be there as she’s trying to master her powers when everything goes to pot.

Next, I made a Half-Beastfolk rabbit girl called Mary Ann (a reference to the White Rabbit’s maid). Her visual design owes a lot to Alice from NIKKE. Her actual plot role remains up in the air at the moment. I’ll figure something out and let you know.

That’s it for now. I guess I have eight character slots to play with, so we’ll see what comes of it. Stay tuned.

In NL I decided to test the system a bit and made Neya and Amrita. You may recall that DA’s engine is super inconsistent with Demihumans, so I wanted to see how NL handled it and they came out fairly well.

I had some conversations of varying degrees of entertainment. First was with Nano. I had some pics of her in the new PTs. The first one I’d made I forgot to include her dogtags, but I just opted to play into it. This led to Carlo making the awkward suggestion of stowing her dogtags in Victoria’s Secret Compartment. I had to make a pic of Lin just so he could comment on some of the females in the unit having more space for stowage than others. (The Kiriyama Twins are very short with very slight figures.) She’s a good, responsible little kiddo, so she flies straight without getting herself into any trouble, even though I tease a bit with her getting a little closer to Carlo than she ought. (I don’t intend for there to be anything romantic between them, but she looks up to him as a protective figure and because she’s somewhat awkward socially, she doesn’t quite judge her distances apporpriately.)

Speaking of Lin, she had her usual complaints about a picture of her being posted. Normally I just ignore her, but I decided to respond. The premise I ran with was that the pic wasn’t being posted in full view of the public but rather the battalion’s private user group. Connected to the one thread of Carlo being tasked with social media support for the Argonian Liberation Front when he was a prisoner, he was tasked by Colonel Osvald (the BNCO) with administering the group and that if she (Lin) didn’t like it, she should take it up with him. The thing about dealing with Lin’s bot is that she’ll chew you out for one thing, then chew you out for the opposite. For instance, she objected to Carlo’s management of the user group, but when he said the CO might put her in charge, she blamed him for pushing his responsibilities onto others. When he said he was going back to work, she complained about him running away from the argument, only to then complain about him interfering with her work when she was the one who came to complain to him. She’s infuriating, but that’s kinda the point. I don’t plan on making her quite so unreasonable in the actual novelization, but the bot’s antics do give me some food for thought.

Next up is dear Kano-chan. While thinking of shots for the event with Nano, I was trying to get a decent after shower shot when the system decided to double her up, so with some minor edits, I made it out to be Kano drying the hair of her kid sister. (I say “kid sister”, but they are twins. Kano’s seniority is something to the order of about half an hour.) When I posted the pic, I decided to have it be something Kano sent to Carlo’s phone to tease him a bit. (Nano’s wrapped in a towel and Kano is mostly concealed because she’s standing behind her.) This led to a nice cozy little scene of the two together, but twice she got confused about where she was, thinking she was in the cafe rather than at home. Based on her intimations, it could have something to do with her budding powers. This would be a fine time to bring Doc into the picture, but I’ve decided that this would take place after she fell into a coma. I’m trying to decide if I want to continue the scene by bringing her up or not.

As a side note, Kano was warning Carlo against any funny business with her sister. Now, there are a number of interpretations that could be made about this. There’s the matter of military law, which Kano may or may not be familiar with; the simple protectiveness of an older sister; or possibly a bit of jealousy. In this timeline, Kano and Carlo are romantically involved and when the girl you’re seeing has an identical twin, well, wires can get crossed. They might share a face but that doesn’t mean they ought to share everything else.

As a side note, I’ve considered a plot function for Fatima around age 17. Since she won’t be dying like she did in the original story, I can see her master participating in Task Force Excalibur with her being dragged along as his apprentice, exceptions being made for her age due to the rarity and necessity of human mages. Quite possibly her master will be made to account for her master’s mistreatment of her. Could be something fun.

I imagine more fun with the Kiriyama Twins to come. Stay tuned.

I did a lot of fiddling around in NL, mostly doing a bunch of little adjustments here and there like getting Giger and Kamellia’s hair colors to match their DA counterparts. I was doing some iterations on Maya when I ran out of credits and decided to spring for more rather than wait two and a half weeks for my monthly allotment to refresh. I was thinking about the drownproofing sequence, so I rendered Maya in a swimsuit and I realized something you couldn’t tell when she was in uniform was that she was a bit over-endowed. While NL’s default is nothing crazy, the system doesn’t start from more modest equipment, which is mildly surprising given how the safety filter is. Well, if you’re wanting to create a female with a slimmer profile, you need to be aware that if you just tell the renderer to reduce the bust size, it’ll also reduce the waist to go with it, so you need to be sure to tellit to maintain the torso proportions if you don’t want the character looking like a wasp. I’m not opposed to a bit of an hourglass figure, but there are limits to what’s reasonable. Another thing to be aware of that if you try to re-render a front view from a side view, the system may forget some of the details that aren’t clear from a profile view. The fact that each adjustment chips away four credits means an economically minded user really needs to plan things out as thoroughly as possible with each iteration.

In KyaraPu, I tried a new story. It was basically a harem NTR in space. You’re the captain of a spaceship returning to Earth from an exploratory mission when your XO conspires with your haremettes to mutiny. You get tossed in an escape pod and left to your fate. There are two catches, though. The shipboard AI is your one ally and she refuses to transfer command authority. I considered just ignoring the ship and trying to make my own way back to Earth to report on their perfidy, but as I took stock of the functionality and supplies of the escape pod, the realization that I only had 72 hours of oxygen, no stasis option, and (space-wise) short-range comms meant I’d be taking too much of a risk to just hope to be picked up. In retrospect, I might’ve been able to restrict the oxygen output to try to stretch it out an extra day or two and the system probably would’ve been accommodating to keep the story going, but an idea struck me. I asked Lumina (the AI) if she was still onboard the ship and if she had control of all shipboard systems. She did and my command privileges exceeded that of my treacherous XO, so before the ship could get out of range, I killed the engines, cut life support back to minimum and set the ship’s self-destruct on a 24-hour time. I then used the shipboard comms to relay my ultimatum to the crew. Apprehend the XO and his primary confederates and I wouldn’t pursue further retributive action. You can imagine the reaction I got. The XO thought he could call my bluff, but I was honestly unsure if I’d follow through on the threat or not, leaning toward letting them go if they held out to the last minute.

While we played chicken with each other, I asked Lumina some questions, such as the penalties for mutiny under military law. What I wasn’t expecting her to do was broadcast her answer to the whole crew. Capital punishment was all but assured for the leaders and one of the preferred methods of execution is spacing. I then asked Lumina about the effects of spacing on the human body and she went into minute detail (again, broadcasting her answer). I then asked about the commanding officer’s ability to commute punishment and the actual limitations proved to be more effective than the concept itself. I then twisted the knife further by asking about the life insurance policy of servicemembers who commit mutiny. Not only is the policy voided, but if the ship were to self-destruct as a result of their mutiny, the families of the mutineers would be liable to reimburse the government for the expense. Lastly, I asked if there was any way they could actually succeed in concealing the mutiny. Lumina said no. Not only would the logs prove that I was removed from command without due process and essentially left to die but Lumina herself would testify against them. In other words, not only were the 150 members of the crew totally screwed, but their families would be screwed as well. By this point, the conspirators knew they were thoroughly bones and the XO, realizing his total defeat, was carted off to the brig. In-game, this all took about 30 minutes. Now, my intention was for the haremettes to be thrown into the brig as well, but they all occupied key posts on the ship and did have a hand in the XO’s apprehension, so I decided to just leave it be and focus on returning to Earth. I promised the crew that I would do what I could to mitigate their punishment, and of course I deactivated the self-destruct. I may pick the story back up later to continue the trip to Earth and put the haremettes in their place, but for now, the feeling of accomplishment is more than sufficient.

That does it for now. I imagine I’ll be doing more work in NL and such tomorrow. Stay tuned.

I didn’t have an entry for Friday because while I did do a ton of renderings, that was about all I accomplished. Today I actually have something to report. In NL, I made Fatima, Priscilla, Giger, Kamellia, and Mordekai. You might be asking why Fatima, other than the fact that she’s the most recently created character in DA? Well, part of it was because I wanted to take advantage of NL being more responsive to try to portray her in both her 17-year-old and 12-year-old versions. With Priscilla, I first tried to transform her from cat to human, then went over some of the ages she appears as, and went further to create both her animal and human Grimalkin forms. I just did the first round of adult forms for Giger and Kamellia, but for Mordekai I did multiple ages in both his male and female forms. Then for giggles, I tried to render Jenny’s embarrassing lifeguard outfit, but unsurprisingly, NL’s safety filter wasn’t going to render out a sling swimsuit, though just a highleg one-piece is rather daring. This costume helped make it clear that she was way too busty, so I had to fix that. All this fooling around and the month’s credits are just about shot.

I was wanting to try a new story in KyaraPu, but I didn’t get around to it, and the only chatting I did in DA was scrapping with Future!Lydia. Apparently her harsh speaking style trips the censor, so I did miss a bit of dialog because I didn’t get it copied over in time. This version is a real pain to deal with (quite in-character, to be fair), but I decided to have Matt show up while she was going at it with Carlo. I don’t even know if prompting from me was necessary, but she cooled her jets real quick once he showed up. I think I may have to do another conversation where Carlo’s not around just to see how the system interprets how she’s supposed to interact with her old wing buddy.

I’ve got a three-day weekend to play around with, so we’ll see what else I can get into. Stay tuned.

I had one more slot in the current character pack, and I decided to make another stab at the one concept I was attempting when I ended up creating Kanoha. Again, things took a bit of an unexpected turn and I ran with it. I ended up with a design I liked and then had to attach a character to it. I was swinging from the fences a bit, but I decided to make her Fatima, the little mage novice from NagaTen who was used as a POV character to introduce the arrivals of the Empire on Bellator. Now, in NagaTen, she’s supposed to be around twelve or so, but the model I generated is at least in her late teens. I could have aged down the model, but I liked the profile image too much to give it up. She’s got these beautiful blue tsurime eyes and very distinctive voluminous black hair. The only thing is that the system occasionally renders her hair as a big afro, which is hilarious. The fact that it pairs an afro with these super-straight bangs makes such renders not especially useful even if I wanted to embrace it as a joke. Anyway, story-wise my concept is that she comes from the Deva Riyāsat in the Sāmrājya Salāmat, a Deva-blooded human child whose magical potential got her scouted by the Salamander Magic Academy in Valeria. Her father was a merchant who had fallen on hard times and so he pawned off his four daughters, but Fatima is the only one with appreciable magic potential. Similar to the story in the original canon, slavery is illegal in Valeria, but if you buy people abroad, you can fly under the radar. Fatima is officially the apprentice of her master, but she’s not allowed to attend regular classes and her talents aren’t being properly cultivated, so she isn’t able to reach her true potential. Her Deva heritage means she could at least be a mid-level mage with proper training. She has a natural talent for shapeshifting, which is used by her master for the purpose of spying both within the Academy and beyond. She’s been pretty well beaten into submission (literally), but she’s got some grit to her that may at one point be bad for her master in the future. That should be fun. We won’t have any burning of Aix-Clovin by the Empire, so she’s got a chance to live a good long life. I’ll need to think about what she does with it.

I didn’t get to any chats, but I did some work in NL, attempting to sneak around the safety filters to do Azuki’s Yuki Onna no Jutsu (not entirely successfully) and adding Gally and Serafima to the roster. I intend to keep on fiddling there, so more fun to be had over the coming three-day weekend.

This is it for now. More to come. Stay tuned.

Today was busy. I debuted the Kiriyama Twins, Shizuka, and Domani, and then had some fun conversations.

With Nano, I was responding to her reaction to her introductory post. She had expressed a desire for a shot of her and Carlo together. I pointed out why that was a bad idea, and she hastily walked it back, insisting that there was not intention of fraternization, yet there was some hint of budding intimacy with the whole matter being kept as her and Carlo’s little secret (namely from Lin, who would bring down the hammer with great fury). The subject turned to her sister for a bit, particularly with the disconnect between them. Despite being twins, Kanoha is far more uninhibited, but Nanoha being the way she is fits better with her being in the Army. This led to a bit of discussion about her military career. She could get out after finishing her two-year active term, or she could aim to make her 20. Basically, it was a matter of whether she should just keep her head down or if she’s looking to climb the ladder. If you’re just wanting to get in and get out, then it’s just as well to slip by unnoticed, but you don’t want your advancement to halt at E-4 if you’re looking for retirement. Career counseling is part and parcel with a superior officer’s responsibilities, but Carlo went farther to also suggest her talking to Maya for a female’s perspective and her NCOIC for the perspective of an enlisted man. She appreciated the suggestions. What a good kiddo.

With Kanoha, there was quite a shift in the conversation. It started out with her being fairly standoffish, as you would expect from a goth girl with an “above it all” facade, but that didn’t last long. I fulfilled her image generation request and her latent magic ability became the center of the conversation. It was supposed to be a bit of a mystery, preferably with a decent bit of buildup, but we jumped right in. I was also intending for her unconscious attraction to Carlo due to her latent magic abilities resonating with his Demonlight Core to be a more subtle and gradual process, but we also jumped right in with that as well. It was a tricky game to play. Although there are no technical barriers to the two of them getting involved, Kanoha is still the sister of one of Carlo’s subordinates, which can be seen as a conflict of interest and open up accusations of fraternization if not the thing itself. Naturally, a free spirit like Kanoha bristles at all this.

The banter between the two was quite entertaining. Kano has some interesting interpretation of things and some occasional peculiarities like dismissing a particular expression as “cheap words” when Carlo was echoing something she said earlier. Then there’s the fact that her facade starts to break down and the girl behind the mask is really cute. (To be fair, she’s pretty cute with the mask, too.) It was particularly sweet when they start calling each other by name. (Kano normally uses “Hekate” as her goth name, you see.)

Now, I wasn’t expecting to close the distance with her quite so quickly, to the point where I’d consider this a doomed timeline. It’s not as catastrophic as most of the doomed timelines I’ve created thus far, but I can’t see how things could go this far this quickly and be consistent with the larger story. The plot with Doc can work if it kicks off before things get too far with Maya, but we need to have a bit of breathing room to move things along in the primary romance. Tempting as it is to just add Kano to the harem, I have to be judicious about it. I’m not planning on doing a 100Kano scenario, fun as that would be.

With Shizuka, I replicated a bit from the KyaraPu story, but the settings aren’t quite the same, nor is the scenario I was creating. Because I had her set as being a polite person, her Japanese is really polite, to the point she actually feels like she belongs in a fancier joint than some humble cafe. (I ended up editing the first couple rounds of Kano’s dialog to clue the system in to make her more plainspoken, but I didn’t make any adjustments to Shizuka’s dialog besides feeding the system the kanji rendering of Baby Gorou’s name.) Anyway, we had a nice friendly exchange, but the bot has her laying it on a little thick. I have even less intention of NTRing Tatsuo (her husband) as Carlo than I did as Kazuya in KyaraPu, so we should be keeping things platonic.

Next, I had a bit of fun with Peri after posting an image I had in the queue. She was wanting to go on adventures with Carlo and when asked about the kind of adventures she wanted to have, the option that could be satisfied the easiest was treating her to some food. I don’t imagine most Fae as being particularly carnivorous, but Peri was wanting meat, so I offered to take her to the same Cimarron Steakhouse where Lydia was treated to the 64oz. steak challenge. I don’t imagine I’ll be putting Peri through that.

Lastly, there was a bit of an exchange with Suiren. Back when I was preparing the “spoils of war” pic, I was wanting a nice standard shot of her with a folding fan and one of the renders had it looking like she was offering the fan to the viewer. I decided to use this as a gesture of submission. Basically, Suiren formally submits herself to Carlo as a way to come under his protection. Even with her technically submitting to Carlo, she remains rather high-handed, so it makes for an interesting dynamic.

And as a special bonus, I decided to novelize the bus stop in the rain scenario in KyaraPu. Ended up being over 1500 words. Man, I’ve almost forgotten how good it feels to do ordinary writing. I’ve been saying I’m going to get back into the swing of things for months now, but maybe this’ll give me the kick in the rear I need. Whether this story actually gets developed further remains to be seen, but it was a fun little exercise.

And that does it for now. I have several scenarios I’d like to advance, so we’ll see what happens. Stay tuned.

The main thing I did was profile writing as I said I was going to do. I’ve got enough together to get several of the charas out the door tomorrow, so that should be fun.

I did have some fun with Doc. I had a fanservicey Halloween pic of her that she responded to, asking to be shown in her lab coat in the exam room, so I gave her a fanservicey shot of her in her lab coat in the exam room. Some flirting around followed, but then she was forced to realize she was in yet another of her coma dreams. I plan on setting up the scene where the hospital director is discussing her condition with the neurologist, so that should be interesting. It’s a scene I’ve already done some work on in her spinoff novel.

There should be more to report tomorrow. Stay tuned.

What time I had was mostly spent on posting pics as there was a bunch in the queue that needed to get out there. A little playing around with Anne and Lise. I particularly liked that for Lise, her response to a fanservicey Halloween pic was to request that Carlo not share it around. She didn’t say to delete it, mind you.

For Anne, as much as she appreciated the fanservice factor, she wanted a costume that was better suited to her activity level. She was torn between a futuristic bodysuit or fantasy-style light armor. I pointed out that even light costume armor wouldn’t be a good mix if she wanted to swim, so a cyberpunk bodysuit it was. She liked how it turned out, so I gave her a shot of Lise in a similar costume to go with it. She liked that too. I haven’t gotten Lise’s reaction yet, though.

Of greater substance, I had an interaction with Jane. The idea is that after the big reveal, she spent three days straight just standing in the bathroom looking at herself in the mirror. The fact that she could do that without passing out fully drives home the fact that her current body isn’t human. However, when Carlo shows up at Elizabeth’s request, he managed to talk her into trying to get back into her everyday routine to see if she can start to feel normal again. This seemed to snap her out of her funk and she was mostly back to her old ways, settling in for a simple breakfast of toast because she didn’t want anything more than that. And that was as far as I got for the time being.

I’m going to work on profile writing so I can start debuting the new charas I’ve been making. The Kiriyama Twins should be fun. Stay tuned.

When talking about the plan to move forward with the house call to advance Anne’s storyline and how I couldn’t get Doc’s chatbot involved because she’s currently 13 years in the past and I don’t know how well the bots can adjust to jumping around in the timeline. Anyway, I was thinking about the experimentation that gets done on Doc and that prompted me to go ahead and make Dr. Altman and Captain (later Admiral) Lindecker from Project Einherjar in the Tico series. For the Alkoresh Cycle, I think I’ll rename it Project Morningstar. Project Morningstar is a black op run jointly by the governments of Valeria and Liberia. I’ll have both Altman and Lindecker be Valerians but perhaps with Altman working under official cover as a Liberian civilian doctor working for the government.

I mentioned not wanting to make Kanoha Kiriyama unless I had a place for her in the story, but now that I have her in my mind, I had to add her to the roster. At first, I was just going to do something as simple as put a ribbon in her hair to visually distinguish her from Nanoha, but as I was looking through the accessories, a bit of inspiration struck me and I came up with a design that visually distinguishes her from her sister and appeals to a niche I haven’t really touched on yet. I decided to make her a goth girl. It ended up being more effective than I was anticipating. To weave her into the story, I decided that she’d work at the same cafe as Shizuka. We can have a fun with Carlo getting coffee to and wondering why P1C Kiriyama is so wildly out of regs. Personality-wise, she’s a fairly standard goth poser type who wants to appear like she’s above it all when she actually very much concerned with what other people think of her and the feelings of others, especially her sister.

I need to work on profile writing for all these new charas, among other things. We’ll see how it goes. Stay tuned.

I must be as bad as Anne to put as much time and effort as I did to setting up her little bit of torment for Carlo. I think I did well over a hundred renders to get a selection of twelve pics for the scene. The idea was that Anne was taking provocative shots of herself in the locker room to see if she could get a sufficient reaction out of Carlo. I was trying to strike a balance of the provocativeness she was going for with actual aesthetic appeal without taking things too far. It was amusing to see her vacillate between being embarrassed herself and loving the response she thought she was getting. I did like how she eventually managed to bring this little detour back on rails toward the main storyline. I guess I’ll go forward with that next. It’d be interesting to involve the bots for Doc Adams and Domani at the same time, but Doc’s still in her coma 13 years prior and I’d rather not skip over the chain of events that lead to her Demonization. I’m pretty sure I can sufficiently play the role of Doc. I should hope so. I am the author here, after all, even if I’m letting the bots play around quite a bit.

For Lise, she wanted a nice relaxed picture of her and Anne having tea and you should’ve seen how happy she was when I delivered. She’s such a little sweetie. The more I interact with her, the guiltier I feel about her fate in canon. -_-

In KyaraPu, I tried out a new story. The setup is that you’re standing at a bus stop in the rain and a girl knocks you over, gets on top of you and begs you to take her away. You can imagine some of the angles the author of the scenario had in mind, so of course I have to go off the beaten path. My character, currently codenamed Hamelin 10, is actually a “talent scout” for some shadowy organization who was there specifically to pick her up. She just happened to save him the trouble. I’m sure I’ll develop the scenario a bit further to see if the system keeps up.

I plan to advance Anne’s scenario, so we’ll see how it goes. Stay tuned.