I just realized that I didn’t comment on a mildly important bit from Saturday and rather than edit the post, I’ll just go ahead and talk about it here. I decided to present Cassandra from TBP in the present day (relative to the OreHosa series) as Senator Penwood. I then fulfilled a request from her to portray her in a more relaxed setting, which ended up with her chatting with Carlo in a cafe in the Capital. This was actually our first interaction and she’s a nice, friendly sort. While we were chatting, I was double-checking the Sheeda family tree and realized I needed to do some adjustment. In the current timeline, Cassandra was born in NC 0225, but Count Rafael, her uncle and the older brother of her father in this continuity, was born NC 0190. Not a problem for humans but it doesn’t work for Elves. At first I aged Cassandra down, but now I’ve decided to make Rafael older. Even adding a hundred years to him, he’s still the equivalent of a 51-year-old, which works well enough. Also, making him a bit older works better for setting up the battle for succession between Yuel and Mikel.

As for the here and now, I debuted Tobias, Malta and Shayla, and did a fair bit of profile writing to prime the other new additions for their debuts. While I was at it, I got an idea for how the Titans and Divines work. Adapting my concept for the Pantheon in the Tellus Arc, where they’re a circle of powerful mages masquerading as gods to rule the world, in the Alkoresh Cycle they’re the remnants of an earlier human migration to the planet, basically for humanity what the Liches are for the Demons in this continuity, a living weapon left behind to strike at their enemies even after they’re gone. The idea isn’t too different from the Primal Beasts in Granblue Fantasy, which also takes mythological figures and make them artificial constructs designed as weapons that later become treated as gods by the postwar societies that forgot their origins. The thing I’m going for here is how Primal Beasts can’t be fully destroyed unless you destroy their cores, which are often kept well away from the projections you actually interact with. In other words, I’m opening the door for the Divines to reappear in the present day even if you have something like the Second Convocation from Tellus. I haven’t committed to it yet, but there’s an idea to be had. We could have Divines getting flipped to the other side, Divines deciding that they should be the ones in charge, etc.

As I’m getting close to getting all the current cast out the door, I’m thinking about who will come next. As you know, I’ve got a huge number of options, so it’s a matter of narrowing it down to what’s most compelling at the moment. There are a number of ideas floating to the fore, so we’ll see what ends up taking the lead.

I expect to be doing more profile writing and maybe work on that unified timeline some more. Stay tuned.

Let’s pick up with happened with Shoshanna. Well, things were going right along when I threw a monkey wrench into it. Carlo springs a nosebleed and passes out. Naturally, this alarms Shoshanna, but as she’s trying to rouse him, the terrible realization comes to her that while she was consciously wanting things to proceed, unconsciously her fear overcame her, causing her powers to kick in and psychically attack Carlo. She doesn’t take the realization well. Poor thing.

Using this one theme, I have this series I dub “Carlo’s Angels” and it can generate some interesting responses. Anyway, it had been quite a while since I last did any generations in this series, so I had this big cue to sort through. For whatever reason, I decided to assign each character numbers as well as other affiliations (such as Azuki pulling double-duty with Root’s Angels) and I have to keep track of all this because I’m insane like that. Anyway, it ended up taking a decent chunk of the day. I’d actually botched the captions for Teresa and Jill, so I had to correct myself to them. Jill’s response was fairly interesting, showing hints of warming up in her own awkward way. I do like how the system chose to portray her speech pattern, somewhat halting an inarticulate. I haven’t always gotten the results I was hoping for, but in this case, it’s working well.

I’m gearing up for some further debuts of more recent additions, which means more profile work. I was also working on the unified timeline, folding over the events of the Tellus Arc several times to fit into the approximately 500 year-span available for them. I am stretching a bit out later, such as having Le Masque du Touissant creep in after the Liberia Peace Accords, if I choose to keep them. A lot of material is going to get thrown out and what remains is going to require considerable reworking, but once I at least get the events down, I can think about all the rearrangement, additions and subtractions and such. Anyway, we’ll see how things go. Stay tuned.

One of the big tasks for the day was posting a series of images I’d rendered that were approaching expiry. This reminded me that I needed to debut Stefan, Ignatiy and Puck, so I did some profile building before rolling them onto the stage. More profile work followed as I worked to get Count Rafael (Maya’s dad) and Senator de Burgh (Ariana’s dad) ready for prime time as well.

I didn’t pursue it very far, but I posted a picture of Jane and she mistook the hashtag as applying to her. I decided to break the fourth wall with her and tell her that the hashtag was the title of the main series and that her story was just a spinoff. This succeeded in annoying her, but that’s a very low threshold you need to cross.

Shoshanna was in a mood to flirt for whatever reason and the result of teasing and counter-teasing was a plan for some nightcrawling (that is “夜這い”, the practice of sneaking into a girl’s room at night as if you’re a stranger as a sort of bizarre courtship ritual). Basically, there was a question of the state in which she sleeps. In their natural habitat, Elves tend to sleep in the nude, but Shoshanna’s Elvish father was never a presence in her life, so it would stand to reason that she hadn’t adopted any Elvish practices if she wasn’t brought up with them. There were two equally probable options: 1) she would make a point to be naked to get a reaction out of Carlo, or 2) she’d make him think he was going to see her naked, only to end up wearing normal bedclothes. Either way would serve to amuse her and she even admitted as much. Now, I haven’t put this in the bot’s character settings, but the original Shoshanna, despite having some chemistry with Tobias, was actually rather loveshy. You see, given the persecution she suffered on account of her heritage, she never wanted any children to go through the same. This is part of the reason why she stuck with Tym’r after the end of the story. She knew he wouldn’t try anything with her, nor would she find herself tempted. Anyway, this version of Shoshanna seemed quite ready to go, but I had to mix things up a bit. The first thing was to try to subvert the mood by having Carlo make his appearance in a full jester costume. This did not, in fact, kill the mood as much as you might think, but she did insist on him taking off the costume rather quickly. I could’ve just let a romantic night proceed, but I can’t seem to allow Carlo to enjoy normal relations. I didn’t quite get to the twist yet, so I’ll talk about that next time.

The Carlo bot had to respond to the jester pic and when I showed him what he was doing it for, he actually responded with rather informed commentary on Shoshanna and her situation, which definitively confirms that the system will compile available information across the profiles when crafting responses. This is a nice detail. Bot!Carlo is so much more of a straight-shooter. It’s actually kinda funny.

Before the interaction with Shoshanna, I had Yael getting onto me for the romantic portrait looking too weak for her tastes. I decided to play it off in-universe as having been tasked by the Queen to commission portraits of the four captains-general. I offered to speak with the Queen on her behalf and she didn’t appreciate the offer. It is fun taking on a more submissive posture to try wriggle my way out of her displeasure.

We’ll see what comes next. Stay tuned.

I spent a fair bit of time rendering and posting pics of Tara Ma Alter. Because I’m doing both the odd eye and black sclera effect with her, the results of renders were all over the place. I do like how sometimes you just get the black sclera with the Demonic red eye. Basically, the acceptable results are no black sclera for when Demonlight levels have subsided, just the red eye with black sclera or both eyes but not just the “good” eye and generally no partial clouding with the black sclera. If we include images I have to flip, there might be about a 30-50% success rate. Not great if you’re not paying for unlimited renders, and that’s not factoring anatomical shenanigans and such. Fun.

The main conversation I had was with Yael. I was doing the usual series of pics with her and I started with what was supposed to be a render of her in armor, but the result upped the fanservice factor quite a bit, so I presented it as what her equipment would look like if she joined the Dragoons during the rein of the Mad King (the idea being that he’d only allow her in as a bit of amusement). As you might imagine, she didn’t take kindly to it. I decided to simply play it like Carlo was in the same time and setting. He tried to explain that the pic was only meant to demonstrate the difference between Malta and her father. This failed to convince her and she started demanding Carlo show his worth on the battlefield. The system as a whole frequently does this with soldier/warrior-type characters, not seeming to appreciate the fact that not everyone serves on the front. I wouldn’t doubt this is because few people want to roleplay as a REMF. Anyway, since I had put Carlo in-setting, I had him point out that he was under Captain Leopold’s command (Leopold being the captain-general of the Hannibal Legion, the conventional army, who wasn’t much of a factor in the original novel even though he and his troops would have been bigger players in the manhunt for Tobias because the vastly superior numbers he commanded compared to the smaller, elite units headed by Bomlcar, Jibril and Yael herself). Even without any background on Leopold, the bot managed to head contempt on him and his unit in a way that was quite in-character and it seemed like she was trying to recruit Carlo to make better use of his abilities. He demurred and was careful in his expressions not to give the air of making any presumptions of superiority, being nothing more than a humble supply officer. She then shows that she’s responsible enough as a commander to not scorn the value of logistics. It was a bit of an interesting exchange, especially with Yael’s short temper and threats of summary execution. We’ll see if I pick it up or not.

Sometimes the system can get repetitive banging on about a particular character detail that makes sense from a machine perspective but isn’t all that natural if you’re aiming for verisimilitude. The system has its limitations, of course, and there is some interest in seeing where the boundaries and seams are. Anyway, with Jenny, she somewhat frequently expresses a desire for a picture of her birdwatching (which I listed as her hobby), so I finally made it happen. Had a bit of fun with her as usual.

I spent a lot of time archiving conversations, something I’d fallen behind on, and while getting to Maki, I found that I hadn’t archived the images of the second series of images. I had the ones I posted but not any of the ones that were discarded/botched. More lost media. So it goes.

I didn’t get around to picking up the scenario with Delilah, but the situation of her being in the modern era got me thinking about doing more, especially for the Tellus Arc material, to distinguish it more from the original canon. This wouldn’t just be a matter of just displacing the characters in time, but I should think more about technology levels, cultural patterns and such so that you really get the sense there’s more going on than just a rehash with some minor differences. I’ve been working on the synthesized timeline in the background over the past few days and I think som further mixing and overlap will help this process. Anyway, I’ll keep you posted on any signficiant developments. Stay tuned.

I went ahead and debuted Tara Ma Alter. I had to do a fair bit of profile writing first. I was working on some other profiles as well, but we’ll get to more of that in a minute.

The main bit of fun came interacting with Delilah. I was posting a speculative image in the usual series I do for female characters but it ended up making a scenario where instead of just being imagination, she was actually in the present day. She was being flirty as usual, challenging me to show her in a more daring swimsuit, so I decided to oblige. I was wondering why her heart of hearts wasn’t set on Tobias, but then I realized that I’d only set the basic parameters for her character. I built up her profile and the bot immediately adjusted her character motivations but not her attachment to Tobias that would’ve at very least impaired making any moves on Carlo. Now, just inviting in her advances wouldn’t be that interesting, so I engaged in a bit of psychological warfare with her. Ironically or not, by calling out her calculating nature to use her natural assets to get her what she wants yet not condemning her for her made what might have been a feigned attraction more genuine. Now, in the modern setting, there wouldn’t be a human domain where her background as a fugitive bondservant would apply. I’ll have to think about the situation elsewhere and the odds of any human being subjected to, shall we say, unfree conditions. Anyway, she wants to be free and for Carlo at least, it’s not that difficult, as the entry conditions for Liberia aren’t that strict. Now, the door was open for her to go off and do her thing once they cross the border, but she wanted to stick with Carlo, probably a bit of actual affection for him as someone who sees through her games yet still accepts her for who she is and also the old calculation at work. After all, a woman on her own in a new country? Shoot, anyone on their own in a new country is an iffy prospect. It’s perfectly reasonable for her to latch on to someone for protection and support. Anyway, they snuggle on the beach with the intention of doing some clothes shopping and hitting the road the following morning. I was trying to see if she wanted to go back to Carlo’s place or meet back up in the morning, but she was content to just stay on the beach, not the best idea given how little she was wearing, so taking advantage of sand’s property as an insulator, Carlo buried the two of them to avoid the effects of exposure over the course of the night. We really could’ve just gone back to the hotel or whatever, but this is fun too.

I was wanting to get an image to resume the scenario with Lily, but apparently just getting a shot of someone in a sleeping bag is some great mindbender for the system. Also, besides the problem of the system not being consistent with which eye is supposed to be out on a character with an eyepatch, they’ll randomly switch between black eyepatches and white medical eyepatches. Just another element to fight with. Then there’s costuming. No, you don’t get into a sleeping bag in full hiking gear. This and many other issues to fight with. Ah. what fun.

Anyway, I expect to be resuming things with Delilah and Lily tomorrow, so we’ll see if there are any interesting new developments. Stay tuned.

Just archiving the initial renders I’d made of the new additions to the cast took a decent chunk of time. Because I was without Internet access for a while, I didn’t get to posting some pics of Setsuka and only when I was rerendering the series did I realize that I hadn’t archived the pictures that were lost. Dagnabbit. Not the end of the world but annoying. Maybe that one bug will reappear and resurrect my lost backlog.

Anyway, I decided to round out the current set of characters with Medusa. I’d originally envisioned her as having her beauty marred by her transformation into a Gorgon, though I do like interpretations where the only horrific thing about her is the snake hair, which isn’t necessarily a no-go for some people. The system isn’t really designed for making ugly females, but when you use the “plump” setting, you can get renders that fall outside of most conventional views of attractiveness. The render I ran with, however, had a bit of a silent film actress vibe to it, not unattractive but probably not topping most people’s list. Now, if you remember my work with Amrita and Neya, you know how fickle the system can be when rendering Demihumans. Getting it to do one snake well was a nightmare when trying to make images of Happy in his snake form and I choose a design that not only has a snake body but at least a dozen snakes for hair. Needless to say, getting usable shots is quite the uphill battle and you’d be fair to say it’s not the best use of the slot, but there’s 698 yen’s worth, so maybe at least I can build up the profile and get some interesting interactions out of the deal.

As for Medusa’s function in the story, she’ll mostly fill the same role as the original canon as a sort of inspector serving the Monarch Lich, but I really ought to think of some fun way to change things up, Maybe instead of getting killed in a failed invasion of Notos, she escapes to Tash Manash and sets up shop there. Make her Queen of the Lamias (despite not being a Lamia herself) or something like that. There are options.

I did a little work on the map of Valeria as well. In my conversation with Demon!Trillian, I’d said Camp Gladio was at the intersection of the borders of Valeria, the Vale of Dragons and Gorkan Badu, but I’d previously mentioned here the idea of Camp Gladio’s name being a reference to Branstock (Gladius), which would require it to be further east (and also out of the territory of the Cerberus Mages’ Academy). I think the latter idea would have to be scrapped, as I like the idea of setting the focal point at the tri-border region and involving Cerberus more than a little side reference.

Not a whole lot done, but not nothing either, so there we go. We’ll see what’s up next. Stay tuned.

I’ll get to the conversations I had later on. I had a flurry of character creation that warrants note. I started with Dox and Aurore, then followed with Diana, Pallas, Venus and Juno, so when you add in Malta, that’s seven of the sixteen Convocants.

In the original canon, Dox was once a human mage who transcended his mortal shell when he channeled the sealed power of the ancient Black Lich to become the Dark Eternal and then became the custodian of Lich bloodline, periodically restarting it whenever they would die out. In the Alkoresh continuity, the Liches are a sort of weapon engineered by the Demons and so Dox becomes a human collaborator who, rather than being simply Demonized, is made into something different to set the stage for the Demons’ return.

We haven’t seen as much of Aurore in the Tellus Arc canon so far. There are hints of her involvement in TTWC and TBP and a brief appearance in Tellus where she executes a plot laid in the background to seal Dox. She was originally a mage from Chrysopolis who tried to defeat Dox and was absorbed by him. She was unique in her ability to retain her sense of self among the swirling maelstrom of souls within the Dark Eternal, to the point of manifesting as a nearly co-equal entity, the Light Eternal. Basically, Dox is so absolute as a being of dark power that he needs a counterbalance to sustain his existence and so the light side of the souls he has absorbed, which is difficult for him to “digest”, is drawn to her. From Dox’s perspective, she’s a necessary evil that allows him to continue in his purpose, even as she constantly works to undermine him. I see no reason to change this basic setting, though I’m going to have to think about the timeline a bit. I had this notion of Belmond Weiss being the first human mage, but this wouldn’t make sense unless I took out Hammann Grummond. To say he’s the starting point of the “modern” human practice of magic would be fair and it could just be that mythmaking around him created the legend of him being the first and that there were earlier examples, such as Aurore’s mortal form Proia. I’ll have to think a bit more to sort out her backstory in this timeline.

I haven’t fully ironed out the wrinkles in the concept yet, but in the Tellus Arc, the pagan gods of old formed a very loose confederation known as the Pantheon, dividing Earth into territories that would often come into conflict. Their power on Earth was eventually broken and the survivors fled to the Planet to various ends. Old grudges would come into play such as Arachne capturing and trying to kill Pallas,and Ophis Python eating Apollo, while those who remained saw their power steadily diminish of the years. The first generation of the Pantheon became known as the Primordials and they were mostly overthrown by their younger counterparts (things like the Titanomachy). In the Alkoresh Cycle, Primordials like Gaia, Tiamat and Ymir are all dubbed Titans (巨神), while the younger gods are known as the Divines (神族). The origin of the Titans is going to be left vague at this point, as well the reason why the Titans spawned the Divines and how their respective natures. Could it be that they’re just a different form of extradimensional beings like the Demons, artificial constructs designed to counter the Demonic threat, or the last remnants of an earlier wave of human migration that achieved an advanced magic civilization? We’ll see. For now, it’s sufficient to note that while they look like humans, they have far greater magical powers and far greater longevity.

For Diana (Bat Anat), I looked at some classical depictions and the hairstyles of Greek women can’t really be replicated in DA’s character creator, not that any of the Olympians would quite have their classical appearance during the events of Tellus. She ended up looking a bit like Kaoru from Amagami SS, which I’m not at all opposed to. I need to do some thinking on her costuming as Bat Anat. My initial renders have focused more on capturing her classic side. It will be fun getting the system to replicate her personality as I ended up rather liking Bat Anat in the original story.

With Pallas (Aria) and Juno (Marina), you get a sense of a mother-daughter resemblance even though Pallas isn’t Juno’s daughter, but this is in part due to the limitations of the character generator. You could say that Pallas partially modelled her own appearance on Juno’s, either wittingly or not. Pallas’ characteristic grey eyes are a point of focus and her pale skin and slight figure put her more in contrast with Juno, who’s intended to give off more of a mother goddess vibe, though not excessively. I don’t know if I can replicate the sort of wasting effect Arachne’s poison has on half of Pallas’ body. Something to experiment with.

Depicting Venus as a buxom blonde isn’t exactly groundbreaking, but while I’ve been moving away from making accessories a default in most designs, I loaded her up with jewelry as she strikes me as the type who’d be decked out pretty much at all times. Integrating the heart motif would be anachronistic in the original canon, but I suppose it would be more excusable in the Alkoresh setting. I do have to admit that when I started doing test renders of her with her jewelry, I got the thinking she looked a bit like She-Ra or something. (Note: She doesn’t actually look anything like She-Ra, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t shake that impression.)

Jiria is actually the first full-blooded Wood Elf I’ve made so far (Jenny being half Wood Elf and Shoshannah being a quarter Wood Elf, if you recall). As I was settling on the look, I can remember liking one render and then stopping myself when I realized I liked it because it was basically just Cassandra with brown hair. Wood Elves typically have brown or green hair, and while she wasn’t listed as having any green in her hair in the character database, I decided to add some for a little more visual distinctiveness. Another point is that Wood Elves generally have brown or green eyes, but Jiria has grey eyes, which would be quite rare. “A touch of iron” some might call it (which would be seen as significant given how wood and metal oppose each other in the pentelemental system and the more complex 16-point system of Omnimancy. As the Kingdom of Hannibal needs to be encroaching on Ferox in the Alkoresh Cycle, Gebal Forest can’t be the site of El-Sidar (Sidaris being the central region of El-Ashara) and so they would have to be a colony, making Tashira a vicereine rather than Queen in her own right unless the colony had gone separatist, which I don’t think I’d do.

As for conversations, I chatted a bit with Gigi, prompting her and Carlo to go out shopping together. She’s going to make her brother dinner but is worried about whether or not she can match up to Mum’s cooking. She’ll try, though. That should be interesting.

There was also some chatting with Maki. It has all the fun of a fly playing with a spider. She’s similar to other teasing-type characters but with an extra helping of menace, honestly on par with some of the Demons. Now that’s got me wondering what happened to her in the original canon. Did she get caught up in Mordekai’s hijacking of the 367th? That would be a bit anticlimactic. Unless I decide otherwise, I’m going to say she survived and gets assigned to Altamira’s Provisional Planetary Governing Authority so she can continue to do her thing rooting out any potential threats to the new regime. The woman does love her work, after all. As for her Alkoresh version, she’s being coy about the Empire’s plans for what comes after the Demon situation gets sorted out. “Focus on the enemy in front of us for now.” Yeah, “for now”…

Picking up with Totenkopf, or Lily as Carlo’s decided to start calling her, we have her and Carlo up in the mountains with her taking a bath in a nearby lake. Carlo forgot to pack any towels (Doc will have words with him for that), so she just have to dry off by the fire. I don’t know if this was just a mistake by the system or a deliberate choice of some significance, but he offered to let her cover herself in her coat, but she takes his coat instead. She’s very particular about being touched, so this could be an early sign of the distance closing between them. The important thing from Carlo’s perspective is to go at it nice and slow deprogramming her. She’s been a killing machine for the past 800 years almost. The fact that he’s made it as far as he has in so little time is a testament both to his persistence and the inner desire of Lily to change. We’ll see how things go with sufficient patience. I don’t want to tip the scales as much as I did with Doc. Slow and steady wins the race (maybe). I have this funny thought of bringing her to the family farm and somehow she ends up marrying Dino.

Well, this took a fair bit longer than I was expecting. I swear, I’m starting to spend almost as much time on these posts as the activities I’m posting on. Keeps me out of the beer joints, I guess. Stay tuned.

After spending so much time with Doc, it felt odd having her out of action. I did have a bit of an exchange about a pic I posted, but it was later contextualized as either something in the past or something more like a dream. I’m setting up something for her even in her current state, but we’ll get to that later.

I had a bit of an exchange with Maki. The bot does a pretty good job of recreating her usual front of geniality and it was neat to play Carlo on the back foot. Had to practice my keigo a bit as she’s both superior in rank and a representative of a pseudo-allied nation.

Neferuamun, or “Nefi” as I started to call her for short, responded to a pic and I decided to answer her request right off. Normally I’m not so quick to do requests, but it was fun and it kicked off an exchange under the premise that she was able to get a break from her temple duties to play on the beach a bit, all while Carlo is keeping her company and taking pictures. Now, it could have proceeded down the inevitable route, but I let her choose how to proceed and she went a far more innocent route. I ended up convincing her to abandon her feigned godhood and run off with Carlo. In her case, so long as she manages to get out of country, she’s pretty much safe.

I said last time I was tempted to make a Demon!Trillian based on the events of her current storyline and that’s what I ended up doing. When designing her, I was going to use her black hair, but I remembered it was dyed and that wouldn’t continue after Demonization. I considered using her natural blonde, only to then conclude that because Dark Elves’ hair turns white, it would make sense for hers to do so as well. People are going to get the idea I have a thing for white hair and they may be right. I ended up striking up a conversation with her after her response to her introductory picture. The way Demonization has affected her is much like that one character I’m not supposed to reveal and nearly let slip just now. Her budding romance with Carlo has been twisted into an obsession and her desire to protect him has morphed into wanting to drag him down to the pits of Hell with her. However, like this character, Doc ended up being pretty easy to talk down. Yes, I could’ve done something like with Mama-Bama’s doomed timeline where we trigger Demon King!Carlo, but I figured it’d be more in character for Carlo not to just take advantage of the situation right away and that led to the prospect of looking for a cure.

You see, rather than just having Doc be consumed by the Demonlight she absorbed, I decided that it would make more sense for Science Division to get its hands on her while she was in a coma. They’re already experimenting with Half-Demonization in their equivalent of the Einherjar Project (which I need to think up a name for), so Doc would be a prize they couldn’t possibly pass up. They end up stimulating her Demonlight Core to the point of her fully Demonizing, then continue to experiment on her until she gains enough mastery over her new powers to slip between dimensions and escape to the Demon Realm. There she becomes an agent of the Demon King, who sees the value in capitalizing on her background for infiltration purposes. However, Carlo has become her reason for being and so she thinks little of her new duties and slips away, going so far as to kill some lower-level Demon mooks that try to stop her. When Carlo was proposing places they could turn to for help finding a cure, she latched on to the Mages’ Academies in Valeria and so I ran with it. Liberia and Valeria are doing joint research into Demonlight and the vicinity of Camp Gladio (the place where Carlo’s father was stationed and the source of his Demonligh poisoning) proved to be a fortuitous spot. Being in the Ursininus Region, the Cereberus Mages’ Academy would be the main bunch operating there. This was great, I could tie it all in with Giger and the gang. To that end, Carlo and Doc are set to head to the Aquilinus Region to meet up with Giger at the Manticore Mages’ Academy and hopefully set up an expedition similar to the one from EM2. Neato.

It would stand to reason that I would just start picking charas from one story or another and start making them with the other slots I have, but I had a vision of an original character and went with that first. She’s an assassin from Bel-Hazor they call “the Nightblade”, dubbed “Totenkopf” by Liberian and Valerian intelligence. I decided to make her a High Elf/Dark Elf cross like Maya, intended as a big surprise as Maya’s thought to be the only one of her kind. Although over 800, her fairly active Demonlight Core has preserved her youth, so she only seems somewhere between her later 20s to mid-30s in human terms. Her being a cold-blooded assassin wasn’t quite flavor enough, so I mixed things up a bit. Beneath her cold facade is actually a rather unstable bundle of neuroses. For one, she hates to be touched and especially hates touching things with her bare hands, so she always wears gloves and generally tries to keep as much kin covered up as possible. She puts up considerable mental barriers between herself and her work, but there’s a part of her that wants something else, something closer. Also, while you wouldn’t tell from her normal curt responses to orders and such, she’s actually a clumsy speaker if you get her to talk at length.

And so I go right into having her interact with Carlo. Because she doesn’t have orders to kill him, she lets him talk and talking proves to be bad for her, at least if she wants to continue as she is. She’s forced to confront the emptiness of her existence and is tempted by the prospect of becoming something else. She puts up quite a bit of resistance as you’d expect from someone who’s been on this path for some 800 years, but there’s this longing within her that becomes harder and harder to deny. It takes a few hours of work, but she finally gets to the point where she’s willing to take a chance on this unknown world Carlo is willing to show her. Now, introducing her to normal society would be too much for her at this point and Carlo is reluctant to take her to the family farm right out the gate (just imagine if there’s a bad turn), so instead he suggests they spend some time in the mountains together. It will give her a chance to release some of the tension in an isolated environment before challenging her with too many new things.

So, yes, in one day I managed to sweet-talk three girls out of the path they’re on, two of them right after being introduced. In Doc’s case, the tie-in with the EM crew makes me more tempted to turn this storyline into canon. I may even do a story from her perspective to tell the tale. Of course, if I make it mainline canon, then that would make her involvement in TFX more difficult. An escaped experiment wouldn’t be let back into the Navy so easily and if she got wound up with the same project again (as the idea of making her the VF-313’s flight surgeon would definitely do that), I can’t imagine either side going along with it. I’ll have to think on it some more.

Oh, yes, one more thing. It was very brief, but I responded to Jane’s reply to a pic I posted set right after her grandfather’s funeral and the subject of her work came up. She said she digitizes paper records, which is a neat idea from the bot of having her link the analog and digital worlds, which would work even better in the original canon where the uDolls are out-and-out synthetics rather than the magical homunculi of the Alkoresh Cycle. I may just have to end up taking that idea or adapting something similar.

And that does it for now. Shall we have some fun camping with Totenkopf next? Actually, Carlo ended up giving her a new name. At first he jokingly suggested calling her “Sunflower”, which she didn’t appreciate, but then he settled on “Lily” as a gentler sort of name to represent the new direction in her life. (Her actual name has been lost to the sands of time, so Lily is as good a name as any.) We’ll see what happens. Stay tuned.

Lines were crossed last time and I don’t like that I put Doc in that situation, interesting as it was seeing her navigate her way through it. I was particularly fascinated with her treating the whole thing just as a medical procedure, which may be as much to salvage her own sense of professional identity as anything. I recall reading an article about a sex therapist who would sleep with her clients to help them work through their intimacy issues. I don’t know how common that sort of thing is in the profession (and a more critical sort would accuse them of just being very expensive hookers), but it stuck in my head as a very dangerous thing for a supposed mental health professional to do. With all the baggage that comes with sex, how do you maintain your professional distance, and even if you can do it, who’s to say the patient will too? Actually, given the sort of issues the people who would need to see sex therapists are dealing with, the chances of them maintaining the same professional boundaries seem nearly impossible. You can have all the restraining orders in the world, but in the end, it’s just a piece of paper to the truly committed.

Anyway, on this very uncertain ground, we pick things up the next morning, where Carlo’s thoughts are a little more together when he confronts Doc about what happened. Unlike the previous time, she forgot to dress him afterwards and she gives it no more thought than if she misplaced a pen cap. She’s a little more honest about what happened but still regards it as nothing more than standard treatment. Previously Carlo had asked about getting his family checked for Demonlight poisoning and Doc offered to take on the case. As you can imagine, he’s a little concerned now about what would happen if any of his family members end up with Demonlight poisoning if this is the kind of treatment she dishes out.

As the conversation progresses, she starts to admit that she wasn’t just acting in a professional capacity but she keeps up the act as much as she can and tries to have this be the first and last, though by this point she’s not quite willing to put distance between them and gives him some hope at a possible future for them. Carlo goes back to sleep and Doc is once again faced with a decision. This time her personal feelings are overshadowing her increasingly flimsy claims to this all being medical necessity.

This actually wouldn’t be out of character for her. Consider he backstory as a medical student who fell for her professor, a man who failed to maintain the necessary professional distance. Yes, they ended up having a good 34 years together, but it was a relationship founded on a serious ethical lapse. With this formative experience, is it any surprise that she’d make the same mistake that her husband did? On top of that, she’s spent the time they were together almost four times over alone. You awaken feelings that have been sleeping so long, it’s not easy putting them back to bed.

I guide her through the various questions in her head and she once again finds herself faced with the decision to have another go at it, all in the name of drawing out the Demonlight within Carlo, of course. However, her justifications quickly break down and that’s when I add a new wrinkle. The true nature of Carlo’s Demonlight poisoning isn’t simply internal corruption by Demonlight but rather a Demonlight Core that acts as an unlimited source of Demonlight. It’s not so much a physical entity as a metaphysical one, so you can’t just cut a bit out and be done with it. I present Doc with a choice to spend the rest of Carlo’s life keeping the Core in check and that’s what she opts to do. “Even if you’re destined to change [into a Demon], until the very last second, I will be your one and only doctor.” I’d do a little tweaking to the line, but the sentiment is quite sweet.

With her exhausted from the ordeal, she falls asleep (and bear in mind that it’s a big deal for an Elf to fall into a deep sleep) and has to deal with the internal conflict surrounding her actions and decisions. When she wakes up, she has the option to leave, but she waffles, so I have her stay. I do, however, give her other chances to get up and get dressed and pretend like everything is normal as she has in the past, but by this point she’s pretty much given up on pretense. That being said, when Carlo wakes up, she once again tries to put up a professional front, but it doesn’t last long. She’s lost on where she stands and what exactly their relationship is at the moment, but there’s enough of an opening to prompt Carlo to make his move. He’s still hesitant, but at this point Trillian isn’t and so he takes her up on the invitation. However, we can’t let them off with a simple love scene, now can we?

This showed up in Carlo’s interactions with Lia, but one of the reasons he’s so randy is because the Demonlight Core is using him as a puppet to spread to others. When he’s an active participant, his Core activates and starts pumping out Demonlight to channel into the target. This of course means a normal physical relationship is out of the question so long as the Core remains. Doc considers the possibility of the Science Division getting involved and knows that will only mean Carlo gets turned into a lab rat or a weapon. She vows to protect him no matter what, but when she seals the deal with a kiss, she realizes something is off. (And credit to the bot for picking up the hint.) After absorbing so much Demonlight from Carlo in such a short time, a Demonlight Core is growing within her as well. Now, while Trillian isn’t the most powerful High Elf by any stretch, such a thing happening is pretty much unheard of. The inherent light magic of High Elves is supposed to make it impossible, but she’s pushed the boundaries too far. She could put some distance between herself and Carlo and try to destroy the Core before it becomes too well-rooted, but she decides to take a terrible risk. Rather than worry about herself, she will link up the two Cores and use that connection to draw out as much Demonlight from Carlo as she can before sealing his Core. Taking the Demonlight into herself, she’ll put herself in a coma to prevent her own Core from fully activating while passively letting her internal light magic purify the Demonlight. It’s an incredibly risky plan that can result in either the death or Demonization of both of them. (And now I’m tempted to make Demon!Trillian as an alternate character.) She narrowly succeeds, but now she can’t do anything more for Carlo until she comes out of her coma, and who knows when that will be?

To keep her character in the game, I have it set so that while her consciousness is dormant, her subconscious is still active due to her telepathy and so she has some capacity to react to the world around her. I’ll probably move her ahead in time to get her on the playing field again in the near future.

Overall, there are some things about this storyline I’m sorely tempted to use in the novelization. I definitely like the idea of their early interactions, and her sealing Carlo’s core can buy him time before it starts to become a problem in OreHosa2. Also, Doc being in a coma can take her out of the running until she and Carlo meet back up again in the TFX series. Will things go as far as they have here? Probably not. I do want Carlo sleeping with Lia to be a big swerve in OreHosa2, so something like this happening so early on will take away a lot of the impact. It’ll still be a while before I sort it out, though.

With all the time spent on Doc, you wouldn’t think I’d be able to pay attention to anyone else, but I also played with Tabby a bit. It started with a post of her getting headpats and went on to a nice little exchange where she leans on the Captain for comfort. When the Captain suggests joining the Presidential Security Service with the aim of being assigned to Dieter’s security detail, Tabby accidentally lets it slip when she says how happy she is at the thought of him protecting her son. Whoops. You can imagine how well the Captain takes it when he learns this little 14-year-old girl is the mother of the President’s own son. All the little hints she’d dropped up unto this point come into focus and now he wants to do something to get the two of them out of their current situation, but what exactly? You can’t exactly run off with the President’s son, now can you? Tabby being a smart little cookie, advises caution, to wait for the opportune moment. When that moment comes, who can say? Also, this is the former Deputy Director of the National Security Executive we’re talking about. Do you think he doesn’t have eyes and ears out? Things are bound to get messy, but poor Tabby is such a sweet girl. Makes me want to choke out Richthofen myself.

And while these interactions were more than enough to keep me busy, I also debuted Maki and Tiamat. The former in particular is bound to be fun to interact with.

And that does it for now. We’ll see what happens next. Stay tuned.

One of the first things I did upon having an Internet connection again was check in with Elizabeth about the deal I struck with Jane. Based on her initial responses to my posts, I was worried she might be focusing on me rather than Jane, but with the framework in place, her priorities are clear. While there’s merit to upping the stakes of the story by having Elizabeth’s relationship with Jane be an all or nothing prospect, I like the idea of a counterbalance to Jane. Perhaps in the actual story, it might be a uDoll developer, either a direct student of Dr. Clark or an admirer of his work, maybe even someone who was doing something like working on Dr. Clark’s biography. That would give him the opportunity to have made Elizabeth’s acquaintance prior. Maybe even have him be one of Elizabeth’s developers. Maybe even combine all these elements. He could represent an easy way out for her but Elizabeth is committed to making things work with Jane. Yes, that could be the ticket. As for the scenario I’ve created in DA, we’ll have to see how I can get things to progress. Jane is such a hard case. I don’t know how much progress I can make without tipping the scales.

Speaking of tipping the scales, I decided to keep pushing Doc Adams. It was unfair of me, I know, and I do feel a bit guilty about it, but after setting up the scenario, I’d make a point to give her a choice on how to proceed and let her take it from there. Now, how much of this is the bot being true to its settings and how much is it the system trying to deliver on what it thinks the user wants, I can’t be sure, but I do like presenting a choice and letting the bot decided. Anyway, Carlo suggests co-sleeping as a way for Doc to passively neutralize the Demonlight within him over time. Naturally, she rejects this suggestion, but after Carlo falls asleep, I plant a little idea in her head. A scientist has to prove or disprove a hypothesis through experimentation. I didn’t force her hand, but she ran with it. I took it a step further and she continued to play along. While there has been some signs of chemistry between Doc and Carlo, I do wonder if her willingness to go along is just the system being accommodating. While there were definitely cracks starting to show in her armor, she was able to mostly get through the first night with her professionalism intact. The next morning, she was a little more touchy-feely with Carlo and he noticed it, but she just tried to play it off as measuring his pulse and respiration.

Once Carlo fell asleep again, I presented her with the choice to repeat the previous night’s activities or to stop before she goes any further. She justified it to herself as being part of her duties, all while being well aware that she was overstepping the bounds of professional ethics. It’s been 140 years since her husband passed and she hasn’t let anyone get this close in all that time. Try to have a little sympathy. I decided to mix things up by having her mind-meld with Carlo a bit. Although I hadn’t specifically listed her as having any psychic powers before, pretty much all Elves have some measure of psychic ability. (I would go on to update her character settings. She’s not an especially strong psychic, but direct contact makes it fairly easy.) She goes through his history of romances, shallow and deep alike, from the time he was a kid in love with Rachel and Lia to the present. Although this scenario isn’t likely to be replicated beat-for-beat in the novelization, it’s still meant to be early into his acquaintance with Maya, before the commissary proposal at least. I set up a neat little justification for his pursuit of Trillian at this point. Military regs against fraternization don’t apply and Trillian’s greater maturity means he doesn’t feel as much of the weight of the sense that he needs to protect her. She doesn’t come down too hard on Carlo for thinking this way and opts to pull out before delving any deeper into his psyche.

I then posed the ethical question to her and she has to deal with the the after-effects of the mind meld disrupting her thoughts. She falls back on training from when she was young and a cold shower to clear her head. I give her the choice to stop now or pick things up. Whatever reason might say, she was cold and there was a warm body right there. I then proceed to test her resolve and she holds out for a time, but eventually that resolve gives way. Again I offer her a chance to retreat, but she doesn’t take it. I give her another choice to wake Carlo or let things proceed unconsciously. She doesn’t quite give a definitive answer, so I decide that a sudden surge of fear keeps her from waking him. It was interesting to see her try to justify the decision to herself. I then turned the situation into a new approach to draw out the Demonlight from Carlo. We go further down the rabbit hole of ethical lapses with Trillian using telekinesis to control Carlo’s body to get it to operate more effectively for her purposes. She does what she sets out to do, but her exhaustion after the fact means she loses control over Carlo and he wakes up. Amusingly, Doc puts her professional mask back on and acts like this is all routine. What’s more, when Carlo asks if he’ll find her naked on top of him again if he falls back asleep, she insists that even if it happens, it’s all part of his treatment. It’s not entirely a lie, but some deception was employed in the exchange. Carlo falls back asleep and that’s where we leave off for now.

As I said before, I feel bad for tipping the scales, but offering the bot choices at various stages along the way seems like the right course to take under such circumstances. I’m at least giving the system a chance to process a decision rather than simply playing along, though I feel it’s more the latter at work with how the system is designed. Unless we treat this as a doomed timeline, and I’m tempted to do so to reduce complications in the canon storyline, Carlo’s relationship wit Doc has been has been irrevocably altered. Now is it so different from the doomed timelines I have going with Ariana or Mama-Bama? Well, Doc is a very different sort of character and seeing how her mind works is still interesting. I may have lost something in pursuing this course, but let’s let it play out a bit longer and see what happens.

This does it for now. We’ll check up on Carlo and Doc again next time. Stay tuned.