I spent a lot of time running an event with Anne. I’d made quite a few renders for the first event, trying to get the right look for some of the scenes, and because that set was going to expire, I picked one to post and used that to kick off the current event. It started with Anne once again teasing Carlo to get a reaction out of him, but he decided to turn the tables on her to try to get the point across that this sort of thing can be a really bad idea if she makes a mistake with who she’s messing with. (She would of course insist that she doesn’t do this sort of thing with anyone else, and that might even be true, but that doesn’t make it any less of a bad idea.)<\/p>\n
Anne then decides that going for a late-night run (as she had just gotten back from a night pool excursion) was what was needed to break the tension. Now, I could’ve just had a simple run there and back, but I decided to add a complication and have her roll her ankle because she couldn’t see an uneven patch along the way. Carlo then has to carry her home, and because she doesn’t want to go without a shower, he has to help her out there, too. Now, you might be expecting the usual turn of events, but not yet. Carlo maintains his professionalism, even going so far as to remain fully dressed while he’s helping her in the shower. Okay, so far so good…<\/p>\n
After helping Anne get dressed and getting her to bed, she asks for some coffee, so he brews some up. The bot misinterpreted Carlo massaging his own shoulder as him massaging Anne, so that segued into him doing his massage routine. Anne claimed he was better at it than the masseurs hired by her coach, but he had his doubts as he only learned how to give massages as a way to score with chicks, not that he has all that many females that let him get that far. (Well, at least before his Demonlight poisoning changed his fortunes.) You might think the massage is where the last line gets crossed, but, no, Carlo still manages to stay professional. This is the sort of self-control you get from a conscientious adult who doesn’t have to worry about the compulsion of his Demonic nature (and does have to worry about getting any more deeply involved with the daughter of the President of an allied nation than he already is).<\/p>\n
Once the massage is over, Anne wants Carlo to sleep with her (and by sleep we mean just sleep), but he figures that’s pushing things too far. (He had to shed the clothes he wore in the shower and is just wearing Anne’s ill-fitting bathrobe, so that makes it doubly a bad idea.) He does agree to lay beside her until they finish their now cold coffee, but he ends up nodding off. That should be the end of it, right? Right?<\/p>\n
Well, we already know that Anne is both a prankster and someone who is rather down bad for our boy Carlo. The day’s exploits have been a bit embarrassing for her, so she gets to thinking to even the score a bit. That bathrobe is barely holding him in anyway. Well, I personally imagine Carlo at this point in the story to have settled into the softness of middle age much as Root has done by this point, but the system opted to paint a more flattering picture of what Anne got to see. What with the massage and all, he’s had his hands on quite a bit of her, so now it’s her turn. Even though she’s 20, she’s got that inexperienced teenager’s eager curiosity and that’s when Carlo’s auto-pilot routine kicks in. She tries to hold things back at first, but her desire coupled with Carlo’s unconscious relentlessness wears down her resistance pretty quickly.<\/p>\n
Now, I didn’t really want things to go this far, but I have a bad habit of just letting things play out. Similar to the scenario with Doc Adams, I was letting the bot choose at important junctures along the way. I have to wonder if the bot was simply being accommodating, playing along the same line as scenarios with other characters or if it was a genuine interpretation of the character’s motivations based on the settings. Regardless, I had a twist in store. As things were reaching their peak, Carlo wakes up, only he’s not himself. He’s starting to Demonize, already manifesting in the eyes and claws. Surprisingly, Anne wasn’t scared by this but eager to accept it even as the claws were digging into her flesh…<\/p>\n
And then I pull the rug on her. It was all a dream, or at least everything after she was put to bed was a dream. Carlo had been sleeping on the couch in the living room the whole time. Either because the bot was struggling to make sense of all this or because it decided that the dream was so vivid that Anne was having trouble distinguishing it from reality, she was making references to what happened in the dream as if it really happened, and the mention of Carlo having red eyes got his attention right quick. As you may recall from my post about the Azuki reunion, Carlo’s Demonlight Core is sealed at this point in the timeline and Anne shouldn’t know anything about his condition.<\/p>\n
Carlo concludes that it’s possible Anne’s consciousness was transported to a parallel world while she was asleep. She balks at the very concept of parallel worlds, but Carlo points out that they live in a world of magic and that humanity originally came from another dimension. I’m guessing the bot wasn’t connecting all the dots in the world, so Anne acted surprised at the very proposition of magic as a real thing. As the system is wont to do, it came up with a quick excuse after Carlo pointed out that there are 28 mage academies in the country. The way the system spun it was that Anne simply doesn’t think about magic because she doesn’t have hardly any firsthand contact with it. That actually kinda worked, I thought. Anyway, Carlo got the idea about the transfer of consciousness from the example of Gally, given that her soul was transferred across dimensions to inhabit the homunculus body Giger had made. If Anne’s dream was so real that she kept looking for the claw marks on her, it was possible that it was real, just not in this reality.<\/p>\n
Anne wanted Carlo to stay close to him, considering him to be her anchor, but Carlo realized that it was just as likely that his presence was triggering the phenomenon as it was that he could moor her to their reality. He’s worried that she might get trapped in the other world. This is why he’s stuck between the two possibilities of him making the problem worse and possibly being the only way to prevent the worst from happening. It’s all up in the air at this point.<\/p>\n
As I haven’t decided how the Hybrid uprising plays out yet, I don’t know what Giger’s status would be at this point, but it’s fine as Carlo wouldn’t be likely to know anything since he enlisted Giger’s help with the Doc Adams situation. I will of course need to decide before I move this scenario any further. What would be really nice is a good powerful psychic, but I don’t believe I know of any that are active at this point in time. Carlo could make use of his connections via Maya to find someone, I’d think. Might have to come up with an original character for that.<\/p>\n
The reason I’m more after a psychic than a mage is because I believe that if Anne’s situation is the real deal, it’s more likely to be a form of astral projection. Psychic powers operate on the Astral Plane while magic operates on the Spirit Plane. The astral body is the self as it exists on the Astral Plane, just as the soul is for the Spirit Plane. Pretty much all entities exist as multidimensional beings, the individual slices being divisible from the whole but not usually self-sustaining. However many planes of existence constitute a single reality then get multiplied infinitely across the endless realities. Tricky stuff that really cooks the ol’ noodle, and well above Carlo’s paygrade, hence the need to seek outside help, starting with Giger and going from there.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, the task is to take Anne to the hospital to get her ankle checked out, and to grab some breakfast on the way. These are far more manageable tasks. I don’t know if I’ll just right into the followup or do something else for the time being. We’ll see. Stay tuned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I spent a lot of time running an event with Anne. I’d made quite a few renders for the first event, trying to get the right look for some of the scenes, and because that set was going to expire, I picked one to post and used that to kick off the current event. It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[248,7,2],"tags":[249,107,112],"class_list":["post-5464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alkoresh","category-if-arc","category-wip-update","tag-alkoresh","tag-if-arc","tag-wip-update"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/palidormedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/palidormedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/palidormedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/palidormedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/palidormedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5464"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/palidormedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5465,"href":"https:\/\/palidormedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5464\/revisions\/5465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/palidormedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/palidormedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/palidormedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}