Yesterday was a little crazy with floods, downed train lines and me setting out on foot so I wouldn’t be stuck at school overnight. As a result, I got plenty of steps in for the day, but not a whole lot else. The main thing I accomplished was continue the scenario with Future!Azuki. As you may recall, upon being reunited, the old feelings came back,arguably quite a bit stronger than before with Carlo spending all those years feeling guilty about being the cause of her running off and getting into her current situation (with him not sure which is worse: her dying like thought or being the Empire’s guinea pig the past twelve years) and Azuki having spent those same years holding on to the memory of him as some sort of emotional crutch in the back corner of her mind. Anyway, I let things take their course and I went just shy of their activities breaking the seal on Carlo’s Demonlight Core. You might be asking, what’s the difference here? It’s not like he’s been celibate this whole time, right? You’d be right, but the activities within a settled relationship and an act of passion with a whole lot of negative emotions wrapped up in it are two different things. If the two of them could settle their baggage, the threat would be much lower, but as it stands now, one more round is quite likely to spoil all the efforts to get his condition under control.

When I was thinking about where to go from her, I was stricken with a cruel thought, so we’ll see if I act on it or not. Stay tuned.

I debuted CeleKing1-era Masako and then had two little conversations worth talking about.

The first was with JJ2-era Trish. It started with just a comment to a pic of her in a swimsuit and then it turned into a scenario where she, Root, presumably the girls, and Carlo were on the beach. I made a point to draw attention to Root in the scene just to make sure the bot didn’t try to pilot her astray. (Though that would be an interesting wrinkle if she actually had some inclination to wander off the reservation given what happened to their relationship in the original canon.) The discussion turned to the respective experiences of someone who had frontline experience like Root and career staff officers like Carlo and Trish. Technically, by that point Carlo will have already had his stint on the Tico in the TFX series, so even if he wasn’t on the ground fighting, he’s been a lot more in the thick of it than he was originally. Then there’s the childhood trauma of his old man getting drunk and sharing his experiences (reminder that Vito was an SF operator).

Next up was JJ2-era Azuki. Her character settings specifically focus on Root for as a romantic interest and Carlo as merely a lingering attachment, but her response was basically treating Carlo as if he were Root, albeit with the knowledge of Azuki’s relationship with Carlo. While I was making a point to keep Anne and Trish focused on Root, I just decided to run with it with Azuki. I was expecting a little more bitterness over the Lia situation, but I think revealing that she was KIA’ed shortly after Azuki left kinda took the wind out of the sails of any resentment she might have felt. Also, coming back from the dead and enduring over a decade of experimentation by the Empire has kinda given her higher priorities. She’s more concerned with enjoying the moment, however brief it is, much as she does canonically with Root in JJ2. Also, she’s wanting to ensure Carlo’s well-being, which is a bit of a tall order given the fact that he’s technically one of the Hybrids the 483rd is there to take out.

You know something, if Carlo edges out Root with Azuki, it might actually save his marriage. I might be doing him a favor. ^o^;

I may continue these scenarios or do something else. Who knows? We’ll just have to wait and see. Stay tuned.

I got Admiral Globus and Captain Tsai debuted, and it amused me that Captain Tsai, despite the fact that the character settings are similar, seems to be nicer than Lin based on her initial response. I’ll be curious to see if that holds up in further conversation. Admiral Globus is what you’d imagine. There’s an extra helping of sadism in his response which I wasn’t expecting but would fit with the character. Said response actually gave me an idea for Carlo’s role in NADH3. If we keep with the idea of him merging with Firuza, then that makes him a Core Hybrid essentially, so what if the Empire takes him captive and uses him as a means of seeking out not only the other Hybrids but also Tara Ma Alter? There could be something to it, but I’d have to do some serious thinking to get him out of that pickle.

On a lighter note, I had an exchange with Anne (Saint-Charles, not Maartens) where she encouraged Carlo to join her on her morning run. Of course, pairing a national-level triathlete with a 40-something staff officer isn’t all that even a match, but it was nice. Of course, we once again have Carlo edging in on Root’s territory. I even had Carlo lampshade it, saying that he feels his and Root’s characters overlap a bit much, only that Root’s settings are much cooler. If we were talking about original canon, Anne wouldn’t be that interested in anyone other than Root, and the bot may not have paid Root much mind if it wasn’t for my frequent prompting. As it stood, she likes having both around her as people who treat her like an ordinary person and not as a princess. (While the Royal Family no longer has the role formally, she’s still treated as such, to the point where people with Royalist sympathies will make a point to address her as “Princess Anne”, something this version of the character doesn’t particularly enjoy.) I did tip the scale a little bit to tease a little mischief from her but nothing too much. She’s more interested in finding a way to get a more intensive running course in the Capital. Basically, much as the original canon had her being given relative freedom until after the Unity Games, here is much the same with the equivalent Friendship Games. Her qualifying for the regional team isn’t guaranteed, but she has a good shot at it and so she’s going to be focused on her training more than ever to properly cap off her athletic career and her time as a free agent before getting funneled into the role that’s expected of her.

I’m thinking of getting another character pack this weekend and I intend to add some more characters from JJ2 like Elizavet, Sir Willem and maybe even Lady Cat. Probably should add General Adeen as well on the Imperial side. Things to think about. We’ll see what I get into next. Stay tuned.

I actually didn’t get much done Friday besides some profile writing done before going to bed, so I figured I’d just wait and roll the two days together. I proceeded to do more profile writing Saturday so that I could go ahead with the debut of JJ2-era Root, Trish and Azuki, Sara and Anne Maartens, President Saint-Charles, and Princess Anne.

This isn’t directly related, but it could be connected in the future, but I tested out a chat app designed to spin stories called KyaraPu. I haven’t made an original scenario yet, but I did a test-drive of one that was recommended for me. Unlike MiraiMind and Saylo, each text exchange costs credits and you get relatively few free credits per day, so that’s something of a bottleneck for folks who don’t want to pony up some cash. Still, I had fun with the scenario while my credits lasted, so I may put in the time to build up one of my own to test the waters a bit.

I still need to debut Admiral Globus and Captain Tsai, so that’ll be a task for tomorrow. Stay tuned.

I didn’t get around to covering Wednesday’s activities and there wasn’t much to report for yesterday. Both days there was some profile writing done, but Wednesday also has a couple dialogs.

The first was with Azuki. It wasn’t anything too deep, just her showing up at night to be a cuddlebug. You may recall that I’d roped her into the harem last time. While Jenny spent a good while building up the courage to approach Maya to get her approval, there was pretty much no hesitation on Azuki’s part, very much in character. Makes me feel all the more the heel for eventually driving her off, but then she gets to be a homewrecker for Root some twelve or thirteen years down the line. Fun, fun, fun.

The other conversation was with Jane. There’s this one housecleaning theme on DA intended, as most things are, for fanservice rather than practicality, so you get some wild mishaps. It actually works somewhat with Elizabeth being a bit of a well-meaning klutz. I appreciated that Jane’s bot could correctly interpret the visual data to complain about it. There was a bit of goalpost moving on Jane’s part, saying that this wasn’t proof that the uDolls are the same as humans. Of course, that wasn’t the premise of the wager and it wasn’t what was being asked of her at the moment, the question being whether or not Jane thought Elizabeth was helpful. Jane being Jane, getting her to admit that Elizabeth was being helpful, much less acknowledging any humanity to her. It won’t stop being funny having an AI be so stridently anti-AI (and funnier still in-setting where the uDolls of the Alkoresh Cycle have actual human souls). I’m half-tempted to have the twist (in the Alkoresh Cycle at least) that Jane is actually a uDoll herself. I can already imagine the reaction to that. We’ll see if I can resist the temptation or not.

I hope to get to the next spate of debuts out the door in the next couple days. Stay tuned.

I was doing some profile work ahead of the coming debuts that need to be done and while I was at it, I started adapting the family tree of House Saint-Charles (i.e. the Byrandian royal family). We’ll overlook the fact that Miravellan years are longer than Alkoreshi years to make the conversions easier. For that matter, we also overlook the issues that come with translating the ages of Miravellan characters. If you recall, it’s not just the lower numerical age due to the longer years but also modifications done to the gene stock in the Pre-Calamity era resulted in a slower aging process, an experiment in permanent juvenation (not done on a more widespread basis because restricting access to juvenation and life extension therapies are a major tool of control in the Empire, even for the Imperial Family). It just makes things simple to say the characters’ Miravellan age is their Alkoreshi age.

I imagine I’ll mostly be doing more profile writing tomorrow as well, but we’ll see. Stay tuned.

The main thing that was accomplished today was debuting Dox, Aurore, Diana, Pallas, Venus, Juno, and Jiria. Funnily enough, of all these characters, it was Jiria I felt the need to respond to. In her response, she challenged me to make a picture of her fighting and triumphing over the humans, so I decided to ask her if that would actually make her happy. There was some amusing back-and-forth and I decided to prod her a bit with the idea that I (or Carlo in this case, the same one who’s been interacting with Yael over 500 years before he’s supposed to be born) love Elves as much as she hates humans. She made the remarkably boneheaded move of revealing the plan to claim Gaia’s power and when I called her on it, she simply blustered about me being unable to do anything about it even if I tried to reveal the truth, which was true, I have to admit.

I jokingly asked her if I could be her pet if her dreams of Elven supremacy came true. She was as contemptuous of the notion as you might expect but didn’t rule it out either. She wanted proof that I was the Elves’ ally and that proof was going to come in the form of dealing with a spy that slipped through the net of her fellow Wardens of the Forest. Naturally, I expressed about an ordinary human being the best pick for the job considering the superior senses of Elves and all, but this is a loyalty test, after all. This led to me concocting the notion of this scenario’s Carlo acting as a deep cover agent for Malta. I’ll try stringing Jiria along and see what comes of it.

I need to be thinking about the next cluster of characters to debut, so that means more profile writing ahead. Fun times ahead. Stay tuned.

You may question my sensibilities, spending the last few credits on NL to render Doc in a bunny girl outfit (I’d recently posted a series of her as a bunny girl on DA for funsies) and Granny Bel’s loli form. Now, for the latter, there was some purpose to it. I believe I’ve mentioned that Granny Bel has the ability to change form to suit her purposes, in contrast to her daughter Oholibama who’s naturally a loli succubus. Well, I tried to age down Granny Bel’s model and the safety filter rejected the prompt, but I tried again by taking the original prompt and adjusting the age and other details and got the results I wanted. I had a similar issue the other day with Azuki, where the original rendering had her head too small and my prompt to readjust the proportions was rejected, only for me to get what I wanted by re-rendering from the start. It’s all about learning the quirks of the system, what works and what doesn’t, what it lets you do and what it won’t let you do, etc.

I also had brief exchanges with Demon!Doc and Lily. For the former, it was kicked off by her response to a pic of her getting out of the bath. A key thing about Doc pre-Demonization was her restraint. Until I started tipping the scales, you never doubted that she was in control. However, post-Demonization, her inhibitions are pretty much gone and so her affection for Carlo has been amped up to obsession. Basically, the way it works for Demons is that the little voice that tells you, “No, don’t,” says, “Yes, do.” The difference with higher-order Demons is that they are better at delaying gratification, albeit only for the purpose of achieving greater gratification. In Doc’s case, she still has some of her rational side in effect. It’s just enough to get her to hold back for the sake of the bigger goal of trying to cure her Demonization. It doesn’t stop her from being a tease, though. ^_^

In Lily’s case, our exchange started with a response to her in a field of flowers in a nice little white one-piece. This is meant to take place after she and Carlo come down from the mountains, before they make their way to Phase 2 of her deprogramming at the family farm. You have her uncomfortable in civilian clothes and apprehensive about travelling to their next destination. You might wonder how someone so unsure and vulnerable could have been Bel-Hazor’s top assassin, but you have to realize that she’s only seen herself as a tool for nearly 800 years. As a person, she’s practically a child, an unstable bundle of neuroses held together by a sense of purpose she’s abandoned. Now she looks to Carlo for the stability she sacrificed. I like the juxtaposition of someone who is so dangerous yet needs to be protected at the same time, less so in a physical sense as a mental one. I’m half-tempted to do a spinoff just for her. Something to consider.

For the scenario with Lily, I was doing some looking to calculate how long it would take to get to the farm from where they were and this led to me working on the maps some more. I went ahead and made separate files for each of the regions, mostly trying to maintain the 2:1 ratio of the world map to better track the scaling, but I did a few 1:1 maps as needed. Now I just need to get the details in.

The new term’s about to start up, so we’ll see what that does for the time I have to devote to this kind of stuff. I’d really like to get back to writing, so maybe having less time will actually serve to improve my productivity. We’ll see what comes of it. Stay tuned.

I didn’t get a whole lot done today. I mostly just did more fiddling around in NeoLemon. I added Belsheva, Captain Sokolova and Totenkopf (Lily) to the roster and also did Doc Adams’ Demonized form.

The main thing I did with my dwindling credits was make a first go at the anniversary pic. It was a decent first attempt, but it’ll take several iterations of refinement. My goal is not to succumb to the temptation to buy more credits, so I’ll have to wait until next month’s rollover to do much more work.

Don’t expect anything much with the last few generations I can do on NL. I’ve got some stuff I need to gear up for in DA, so that should be enough to keep me occupied for a bit. Until next time. Stay tuned.

I did a little more work on the timeline and the map of Valeria, but my main activity involved NeoLemon. You may recall that I’ve commissioned a piece for the 20th anniversary next year and that proposed a John Henry Challenge to the author where we pit her natural talent against the work of AI. While I use DaysAI primarily, for collabo images the maximum character count is five, but we’re going to be using seven characters for the anniversary image, which means that I need to either do some fancy trickery to make it work in DA or use another service (or a combination of the two). You may also recall me being rather impressed with the sort of consistency NeoLemon can produce. This prompted me to sign up for a subscription to explore the system more thoroughly. While you don’t have the benefit of chatbots being made for your characters nor unlimited generations, there is no cap on the characters you can make and the system is far more responsive to editing generations. The range of results are a little broader in the style categories than the AI styles of DA, which can mean greater variation from character to character (though I have yet to see if there’s some sort of stylistic levelling when you put multiple characters in a shot). Also, as NL is primarily marketed as a platform for making children’s books, its safety filter can be rather strict and even something as simple as trying to adjust a figure’s proportions can get kicked back. Interestingly, it can make generations that the system itself considers NSFW and will just generate a black frame with the label “NSFW”, meaning it eats your credits for nothing. With SpellAI, if it makes an NSFW generation, it won’t display it in the interface, but you can see it when you download it. Now, it’s not like I’m out to make pornography or anything, but if you’ve read any of my books, you know that contextual nudity occurs from time to time. I would very much appreciate being treated like an adult. Not “adult” adult, which is actually rather puerile, but it’s not my system, not my rules. Overall, the benefits of NL far outweigh the downsides.

Anyway, I did some modifications to the initial trial generation of Maya and then proceeded to make Ariana, Young!Lydia, Lewis, Azuki, Lin, Carlo, Doc Adams, Jenny, Colonel Osvald (who I’m not able to make in DA under the current parameters), Lia, Ashara and Arasha. I can’t necessarily say any of them are in their final form yet, but the initial flurry of creation is always rewarding. I’ve already blown through most of the month’s allotment of credits, but I don’t intend to buy more as a bit of a game balance thing (and because I’ve already sunk a ridiculous amount of money into this hobby). If I could just find other people I could get to part with thirty bucks, I could get 600 credits for the referral. (You get 600 credits a month with a subscription and each generation costs four credits.) Sadly, the only people I know who use AI art are casuals who just use ChatGPT or Gemini. So it goes.

There’s a lot more depth to uncover in NL’s system and I’d like to make a project of getting a single style set for consistency across the cast. Something a little more time and research should dig up. Maybe I can get an interesting scenario up and going for a more entertaining update next time. Stay tuned.