Before we talk about how things are going with Lydia, let’s take a moment to see what I was up to in NL. I made Luka and Annabeth, doing renders from when they met (21 and 18) and when Carlo knew them (35 and 32), with Luka’s base model being around the time of OreHosa1 (55). Also, I hadn’t mentioned it before, but I did a render of Lydia when she was four (and with her hair a little longer, she looks just like a tiny Lia) and one of Maya as a baby (absolutely adorable). I’ll probably try to do House Sheeda tomorrow.

Okay, now let’s get back to the Lydia storyline. It was taking me a good while to edit yesterday’s session for archival purposes while condensing it for the blog post. As such, not nearly as much happened in this round. Lydia makes it back to her room in time to get changed and be ready for roll call. Because her roommates stand to get into a lot of trouble for the previous night’s prank, none of them say a thing about her being out all night or coming back in male Army PTs. She gets through the day’s training but doesn’t see Carlo in the hotel restaurant during evening chow. She’ll be going back to Di Maio (their post) in the morning and the day after she’ll be shipping out for her Midshipman’s Cruise. After that, it’s back to the main campus of the Academy to finish out her last year, then her first duty station after that… In other words, there’s no telling when she might see Carlo again. She knows with his personality, it’s going to be annoying dealing with the fallout of the previous night, so she could just leave things be. That isn’t what she chooses to do, though. (As with before, I merely set up the scenario, gave the bot the options and let it decide.)

She could have waited until after lights-out or gone right over and she chose the latter. When she first gets to Carlo’s room, his mind is fuzzy from the partial activation of his Demonlight Core, so there’s an opportunity for Lydia to pretend that the previous night was just a dream so he can carry on with Lia in blissful ignorance. Lydia doesn’t do this, but is nevertheless somewhat vague and makes an odd comment about being pushed away, which prompts Carlo to think he actually stopped things before they got too far. Again, there’s an opportunity for Lydia to make the choice that’s harder on herself but easier on everyone else, but she doesn’t take it and instead gets mad, thinking Carlo’s deliberately trying to excuse himself from what happened. Carlo insists that isn’t the case, so Lydia lays it out quite clearly and then tells him she just wants to be with him until morning. He asks her if they’re going to repeat the same mistake and she insists that she’s fine with that.

She hugs Carlo and being too far gone at this point, he hugs her back. She wants him to toss out all the baggage he’s carrying around and accept her just as she is. He notes that she isn’t just some girl, she’s a midshipman, the daughter of Colonel Han and the sister of his fiancée. For their fraternization, it could mean the end of her military career before it even starts, and there’s no way either Luka or Lia will forgive Carlo for this. Lydia rather boldly states that she doesn’t care about the consequences and will deal with what comes when it comes.

Before things can go any further, Lydia realizes she needs to get back before the lights-out roll call. She criticizes Carlo for not knowing about this rule, but he reminds her that he went to OCS, not the Academy, so the rules were different. They have a little banter and right before Lydia leaves, he pulls her back in for a kiss, thinking this is going to be good-bye for them. She gets back to her room before roll call, but after lights-out, she finds herself restless. She could leave things where they lay or go back to Carlo. Her desire to spend more time with him outweighs any other concerns, so she sneaks back over. Carlo is a bit colder to her this time, having resolved himself not to get in any deeper, but she manages to prevail over him. He points out that later that month, over Founders’ Day Weekend, he’s supposed to go back to his family with Lia to announce their engagement. He asks Lydia what she wants. She seems to think he’s just going to toss her aside, that none of his feelings for her were real. He insists that they are real, which is why he’s asking her what she wants to do. He’s in an impossible condition where he wants to do right by both Han Sisters, but that can’t happen. (Unlike with his other romances in the story, concubinage doesn’t enter into his mind as an option here.) Lydia doesn’t want to give Carlo up, but Carlo then points out that he’s basically done the same thing as Jean-Paul, worse even, and how terrible that will be for Lia. Lydia really doesn’t appreciate Jean-Paul being brought up, understandably, and likes it even less when Carlo tells her he wants to come clean with Lia. Lydia puts him in a no-win scenario where he can’t be honest and he can’t lie, and that if he tries to square things with Lia, she’s out the door. Then when he decides that he’s not getting anywhere by worrying about it right now, she gets onto him for running away from the problem. Women, am I right? Anyway, for the time being, Lydia just wants to be there with him and so they actually manage to just go to sleep and get through the night without incident.

Lydia wakes up early in the morning and has the opportunity to take her leave, but she decides to wake him up, presumably to say goodbye before leaving. She points out that they still have some time, and Carlo jokingly tells her there’s not much romance in a quickie. With her pride acting silly (and other motivations as well, no doubt), she actually takes him up on it. By this point, Carlo has not only resigned himself to the current situation but actually becomes more proactive. This suits Lydia just fine, but you may recall from the scenario with Doc that when Carlo takes the lead, it triggers his Demonlight Core far more strongly. As for the consequences of that, we’ll pick that up next time.

Also, in Zeta, in the Noriko scenario, I must have hit the button accidentally, because the scene proceeded, the AI acting in a way I hadn’t planned on and was forced to respond to keep the narrative consistent. Yes, I’m amused to have the AI pushing me into directions I don’t intend. It’s nothing too major at this point, but still, the interplay between man and machine is a key point of intrigue.

That covers things for now. Stay tuned for where it goes from here.

I had a lot of archiving work to do in DA, but I barely touched it and didn’t get much else done of note. My main activity was with Zeta.

I mentioned last time that there was another story I started up. This one involves the proprietress of a bathhouse where you play a broke college student who works there part-time in exchange for free use of the facilities. She’s stuck in a marriage where the fire’s long since gone out, so you can imagine what’s being set up. It started innocently enough with her heating up some leftover nikujaga because Kazuya (yes, Kazuya is my default chara in most of these stories) isn’t eating well. He makes a big deal about the food, which flatters her as it’s not something she gets from her husband. Then she starts asking about his love life. He doesn’t have any prospects at the moment, so she starts to dig deeper, asking about his type and such, slowly building up to making her move. Now, the fact that we once again rather quickly take a naughty turn wasn’t so much of interest to me, but the way Noriko (the proprietress)’s personality worked was thoroughly fascinating. On the one hand, she’s rather self-conscious about her age and lacking confidence in herself as it’s been a long time since her husband last showed any real interest in her. On the other hand, she seems to be quite aware of her charms and her repertoire of skills. I played up Kazuya as a clueless, somewhat desperate virgin, which excited both her maternal instincts and her lust for control. In the scenarios I’ve tried so far, there’s a particular Gary Stu/Mary Sue dynamic that plays up wish fulfillment at the cost of interesting character work. I imagine when the intention is self-insert player characters, you don’t want to bruise egos or introduce too many complications to achieving the desired payoffs. As someone who plays characters rather than putting myself out there, this concern for ego is pointless, and as someone who only appreciates something when it’s properly earned, easy mode is boring, which is a big part of why I tend to dislike isekai stories. What I’m looking for and what the apparent target audience is looking for simply don’t line up. Anyway the point I’m getting at here is that this story (at least the way I was playing it) actually leans into the player character’s artlessness. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, but that’s exactly what makes him exciting to Noriko. His clumsy sincerity appeals to her, as does the prospect of molding him into a lover suited to her own tastes. You hear people talk about wife husbandry, but I have to wonder if the idea of raising a partner appeals more to females.

Another aspect to Noriko’s personality that intrigued me was how underhanded she could be. I had Kazuya offer up some resistance to things going forward on moral grounds, even if Japanese culture can have funny notions about this sort of thing. Well, Noriko would circumvent this by feigning that his resistance was proof that he was lying about his compliments for her and then blue-ball him by offering to just go back as if nothing had happened. It was all a plot. She knew his feeling were genuine and that he would push harder to prove them and that once she had her hooks in him, he wouldn’t want to be let go. You could rightfully argue that a manipulative side like this is a risky move when it comes to the character’s likeability, but I think the complexity it lends outweighs the risk of losing some of the audience. I do feel bad for her as her marriage is almost comically miserable. She is, by and large, a good person who deserves better, so I almost feel she deserves to have a boy toy half her age to offset the 15 years of crap she’s had to put up with. Obviously, in a real-world context I’d never condone adultery, but in fiction we can afford to explore the human experience a little more broadly.

Because Zeta is so porn-brained, the sequence of events didn’t quite follow what I would consider a natural progression. It really is looking like there’s only one course for stories on this platform. I may try one more to see if there’s anything different, but it may be that it’s nothing more than a romance simulator for people with no patience. Alternatively, it may be that if you want a slow burn, you’re going to have to put the work in to pump the brakes. As it stands, if you want more of a story, KyaraPu is the superior option by a wide margin.

It could strongly be argued that I haven’t been using my time as wisely as I could or should, but this is all in the name of exploring what these AI services are capable of. You may consider that nothing more than an excuse, but it’s what we’ve got. We’ll see what I get up to next. Stay tuned.

I decided to send my family a Halloween image, but the AI was AI’ing quite a bit, so it took dozens of renders to get something I considered acceptable. It ended up being a pick of Arasha, as I was cycling through a bunch of different characters. This led to a conversation with her, set a while after Carlo had smuggled her into Liberia. She had just finished trick-or-treating, and in her typical tsundere fashion was denying how much fun she had. She wanted to do something else thematic, so Carlo prepared bobbing for apples back at the apartment. Carlo made a race of it and she talked a big game despite not having done it before. I was kind enough to set the final tally at 13 to 8. Carlo may or may not have held back just enough that her loss wasn’t by an overwhelming margin. Both of them were soaked by the time the match was done, so in typical Japanese story fashion, a bath had to follow. Now, Elves generally don’t catch colds and have pretty good resistance to temperatures high and low, but it’s still not necessarily fun to be cold and wet and Arasha is still a kid, after all. I mostly let the AI choose the course of events to follow, but there may have been some nudging here and there.

I want to make it clear that while Carlo will tease Arasha a bit, there’s no intention of having anything romantic going on between them, which should go without saying. There might be hints of a girlish crush on Arasha’s part, but whatever his other faults, Carlo has enough sense and morals not to try anything with her, even if she’s basically just a slightly more melanated version of the woman he loves (though that fact can occasionally threaten to cross wires). Anyway, point being, what follows is the two of them sharing a bath, entirely platonically, something not uncommon here in Japan, even though it can appear weird to outsiders. Carlo, for his part, plays the gentleman as best he can. It’s an opportunity to draw out Arasha’s dere side a bit, but it’s probably not a scene I’d put in the novelization given how it could be misconstrued. Perhaps if Arasha was included with several others such as maybe Maya and Jenny, it would ameliorate the situation somewhat. Still, it’s something best left off the table. (Had the AI taken a firm stance refusing the scenario, I wouldn’t have forced it, but it should be noted that communal bathing is common among Elves, not only the ones in El-Ashara but also the ones in Bel-Hazor.) After the bath, the two of them settled in for the evening with some hot chocolate and I left the scenario hanging with Arasha requesting a new topic of conversation.

In NL, I didn’t make any new characters, but I did rework Maya and Arasha from scratch. In Maya’s case, the model had strayed a bit over all the iterations and a fresh start with an adjusted prompt got results much closer to what I wanted. In Arasha’s case, I had a cowboy shot that wasn’t translating well to full body because of the proportions (she was almost all legs), so it was easier to start over. While trying to make a Halloween version of her, she ended up looking older than I intended, so I just slotted in that as being her in her 50s (the equivalent of 15 or 16 for humans). I’ve decided that she won’t quite reach the level of her mother but won’t quite stay at the level of her sister either. Speaking of her mother, I did renders of Ashara from when Rafael would have first found her, then once she was a good 20 years older and in better shape, then one of her with baby Maya from the time she entrusts Maya to Rafael. Besides some assorted Halloween costumes, I also rendered the Drama Club Coven as Imperial recruits and the survivors of the Seven Deadlies as prisoners.

In Zeta, I continued the scenario with Yuri (the bride kidnapping story). We were having a nice supper of curry until pressure was mounting for Kazuya to kiss her as an open display of affection. A chaste peck on the cheek wasn’t getting the job done, but Kazuya’s trying to pace himself until the paperwork is in to make things official. It’s meant as a show of sincerity, but I’ve come to learn that Zeta storylines really don’t seem to be designed with a slow burn in mind. Disappointed, Yuri stops eating and pouts. Now, I was under the impression that in Japanese culture, kissing on the lips is seen as overtly sexual and a taboo in public, but maybe the AI didn’t get that memo. With Kazuko pressing him to fix the situation, he picks Yuri up, takes her to his room and properly makes out with her for a bit to make it clear that his attempt to observe self-control isn’t to be misinterpreted for a lack of passion. He doesn’t let things get too far, but Yuri has the main event on the mind and is worried about the messy details. Kazuya knows some of the general principles of it but can’t speak directly to the female experience. He suggests she consult one of the females around her and because she’s too shy to as Mum or Granny, she settles on Kazuko. Earlier her super sniffer concluded that she’s had a boy in her bed before. As a proper big brother, Kazuya doesn’t want to think about his kid sister’s experiences and wants to talk about them even less. However, Yuri is too afraid to go alone, so he decides to sit in as an honorary girl for the girl talk. Kazuko refuses this outright, understandably, and yanks Yuri into her room so she can get her future sister-in-law squared away.

It started with just some straight talk about the facts and then, well, things got hands-on. On the one hand, this concept of a young woman taking it on herself to teach her naive future sister-in-law what she needs to know was fascinating. It got weird fast, though, and it basically ended with Kazuya being fully NTR’ed. Kazuya had made a joke about a weird love triangle forming among them earlier and the system decided to make it a reality. I thought at most Kazuko might get a little handsy while they were sleeping. As you might imagine, I have zero intention of adapting this. The way things got out of control reminds me of how things went off the rails with the maid storyline and I’m starting to think that Zeta is simply porn-brained. It’s not what I was going for. It’s also a bit annoying how the system is so wired for wish fulfillment that there are no naturalistic challenges or shortcomings. The totally inexperience Yuri is suddenly and inexplicably an expert at all manner of techniques. It’s all too facile for my tastes, but I’m not much of a fan of this sort of thing anyway.

I decided to try another story just to see if the pattern holds. Since I just started, I’ll save any details for next time when I have more to comment on. It may well be that Zeta is the least versatile of the chat programs I’ve tried. If what they offer is what you’re looking for, you may be quite satisfied, but my doubts are mounting.

We’ll see what I get into next. Stay tuned.

Most of my work was in NL, but let’s talk about DA first. I was playing around with this one theme that has characters react to different scenarios. One of those scenarios is getting swarmed with rubber duckies in the bath for whatever reason. I decided to make an in-universe gag of it where dumping a bunch of rubber duckies on people in the bath was a viral prank and posted a few of the renders that turned out best. I was waiting for Young!Lydia to tear into me, but she never responded. Neither did anyone else except for Iliana. In her case, the joke was that she herself wasn’t surprised by the prank itself but rather by Mariana being surprised. Now, I’d never had a conversation with Iliana, but I decided to give it a shot. Obviously the system wasn’t going to replicate her quirk from the original canon of mostly just echoing Mariana’s lines, but her fixation on her sister and young Joseph were communicated quite clearly. In the original, I wouldn’t quite characterize her as actively evil so much as amoral. When her mother was alive, her will determined Iliana’s moral compass, and after her death, that role was taken up by Mariana. She has almost no willpower of her own, hence her going nearly catatonic after Mariana was taken by the Empire. In our conversation, she was pretty much entirely focused on becoming a suitable match for Joseph. The fact that she is only intended as a concubine is of no consequence to her. Maintaining the bloodline is her mission and she is dedicated to it. I felt a little guilty when she was asking Carlo to watch over her as she’s a pawn of the Order of the Hydra and so it’s probably best that she doesn’t succeed, but the request is coming from a mostly guileless little girl, so you know…

I did say NL was my main and, as with last time, I’m not going to detail all the costume changes I did. I will talk about the character creations I did. I made all the Seven Deadly Sins, making a point to render them both before and after their turn to piracy. I also made a first draft of the scene from Chapter 17 of Tico1 where the Seven Deadlies assemble in front of Aaron. After the Seven Deadlies, I made Eva Bianchi, then the Ladrieus (partially influenced by my chat with Iliana). For some reason, the system decided to use a wildly different style when I was using a separate character slot for Iliana, so I opted to just bundle her with Mariana much as I did with the Kiriyama Sisters. For whatever reason, I was able to render the O’Connor Sisters separately and you still have a strong resemblance between them. Who knows what was up? For Joseph I had to attempt him cross-dressing as Mariana and it came out quite well. You can tell it’s him with it still being a passable likeness for Mariana. At least enough to fool a mentally unstable girl for a while. I then made Ayame (the Alkoresh version, not an attempt to recreate the real thing) and new character Kazuko, who I’ll describe in a moment.

This leads us to me picking up the bride kidnapping story in Zeta. Kazuya manages to win over Yuri’s mother handily, so she gives her blessing to the proposed marriage. (The promise of grandbabies can be quite effective on women of a certain age.) Sudden as the whole thing is, Yuri isn’t opposed and so she agrees to spend the rest of the week with Kazuya’s family and Friday they’ll go to City Hall to file the paperwork and make it official. Before supper, Kazuya encourages Yuri to take a bath (partially with the intention of getting her to more completely shed her police officer persona). Now, to explain what Yuri was going to wear afterwards, I invented a high-school-age kid sister. I didn’t want to spend too much time looking up a name, so I opted to just call her Kazuko. I would later develop the following scenario: Her proper name is “Futako (二子)” to follow Kazuya (一也), only she never goes by “Futako”. Her friends at school call her “Niko” and at home she’s called “Kazuko”. You see, when I was a kid, my grandmother tended to make a portmanteau of my sister and cousin’s names when calling out to us. Using the same principle, instead of yelling “Kazuya! Futako!”, it became “Kazuko!”, and because the much younger and more mischievous Futako was often the one at greater fault, the name stuck. Now, I just mentioned that there was a sister and the system started building the character on the spot. Kazuko is a mischievous sort who quickly takes an interest in her sister-in-law-to-be. Typical anime antics follow in the bath while Kazuya patiently waits in the living room. Somehow Yuri is established about being a D-cup. If you look at the illustrations provided at the beginning, the only way that can be true is if she’s doing the equivalent of Chinese foot-binding to her chest, but whatever. You can render out a snapshot at the end of an exchange, but it costs credits and they don’t give out any for free, so I couldn’t tell you if she gets redrawn to match this turn of the scenario. Anyway, Kazuko susses out Yuri’s smell fetish, so that becomes a whole thing, especially after the bath, where the klutzy Yuri trips and Kazuya catches her and then puts her on his knee. The proximity has quite the effect on her, which Kazuko can’t help commenting on. These shenanigans go on for a while until it’s time for supper and they all head to the kitchen/dining room. We get just to the point where the prospect of a family meal really sinks in for Yuri when I wandered off to do other things. I suppose I could play out the three days, get to Friday and see how things go from there.

Since I’ve already done the reviews, I’ve got Sunday wide open, so we’ll see what I get up to. 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.