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Forum Name: Our Witches at War/Gallian Gothic
Topic ID: 87
Message ID: 6
#6, RE: GG Book 2 Act II: La Grande Rencontre
Posted by Astynax on Sep-25-20 at 01:40 AM
In response to message #3
>Pretty good, if I do say so myself. Specialized equipment's not
>particularly required, as far as I'm concerned; he's probably just
>baking them in cast-iron frying pans. That's how I do it in real
>life.
>

I've never seen a home pizza get the cheese to quite the right consistency and ever so mild singe level, but I may just be picky. In any case, as is often said even bad pizza is still pretty good (in most cases, I'm sure there are horrors out there I don't need to be aware of.) The cast iron pan seems like it'd be very good for good crust.

>Flandre thinks it's the bee's knees. Remilia thinks it's a bit
>unrefined, but tasty—but then, that's Liberion food for you. :)
>

Sometimes unrefined things are the tastiest, at least in proper context. A county fair, for example.

>(We'll get to see what was in it soon.)
>

That itch will be scratched, and at least hints that we'll get to see more people reacting to what would appear to be insanity at first blush (at least I'm guessing that if Remilia was willing to lay out her age and at least partially her nature to the clerk, she'd be at least as forthcoming to a head of state.)

>That, and it's a way of trying to save a little bit of face in the
>aftermath of having been chewed out by her little sister in front of
>the rest of the household. Remilia's pretty level-headed, but she's
>not good at processing embarrassment, and it was made all the worse in
>this case because she knew Flan was mostly right.
>

The interesting thing to me is that delivered differently that line might well have caused laughter, especially for anyone who has been present for one or more rounds of adolescence in others since exiting their own.

>Nope. :)
>
>(If you cornered Remilia about that, she'd blame the full moon. And
>she'd have a point, it does tend to make every aspect of her
>personality a bit... bigger.)
>

Since she was asleep when they returned, I am left to wonder if Remilia told Flandre about her excursion off screen, or if there will be at least a bit of good natured "oh, you didn't want me to go, but you can? I am definitely going with next time."

>Yeah, I'm really looking forward to Flan interacting with the crew.
>I've already written one such scene, and it's burning a hole in my
>drafts folder now.
>

If Minna's awareness ping hard on Remilia, she might actually be a bit afraid of Flandre (at least internally.)

>(Also, that Erica line is one of my favorites. :)
>

I hadn't really even thought about the 501st crew in ages, but that one line does an excellent job of reintroducing a character and setting 'this is who this is' expectations.

>Yeah, they've seen some shit. When you spend your days using magic
>powers and advanced technology to fight alien robot monsters, your WTF
>threshold moves. (Also, they're all still pretty tired from the day
>before, which takes the edge off their reactions a little.)
>

Also helped potentially by being told, if only moments before, that G's intended was in fact a vampire, then watching her fly into the room.
I wonder, does she have some 6th sense for finding him now, or did she just circle the building stealthily until she spotted him?

>Heheh, didn't have it yet in TTW. That decree came a couple days
>after he got back to St-Ulrich from his first spell at SDM. Time
>travel!
>

Yeah, I goofed, and was set straight on this. In my defense, time travel. Especially time travel involving loops. Austin Powers said it best, "oh no, I've gone cross-eyed."

>Quite a few witches have at least a rudimentary threat assessment
>sense, particularly veterans like the 501st, but Minna's is the most
>sensitive by a long stretch, since it ties directly into her magical
>specialty. The others have to concentrate to get a read on something
>like that; hers is always on, at a low level. Although, that said,
>Mio would probably have seen something surprising if she'd thought to
>take a look at Remi with her witch eye, too.
>

Makes me think of a scene in the Dresden Files novels where the titular character uses his mage sight on the faerie queens, and instantly regrets it.

>Having been tagged with the "vampire" label for most of her life,
>Heidemarie's read a lot more of the lore on the subject than most
>people of her era. She thought they were extinct, but she at least
>knew they used to be real. As such, she picked up on clues the
>others missed. One example is the fact that bat familiar witches'
>wings don't manifest that way, which Francie Whittle also noticed
>because she's obsessed with propulsion and maneuver magic, but she
>didn't know what the alternative interpretation was.
>
>TLDR: If anybody in that room was going to spot an actual vampire
>without being told, it was going to be Heidemarie W. "The Vampire"
>Schnaufer. :)
>

Fair enough. Interesting that enough evidence remained after whatever purges took place to prove, or at least strongly indicate, that vampires had been real. The revolution, it seems, was not as thorough as they were bloodthirsty.

>Semblance of brevity?! Who needs that?
>

I hadn't been in the habit of play-by-play style commentary before, but this series has led to me being... verbose. Possibly the audience side of the odd-but-good-vibe coin you've mentioned surrounding this.

>Yep!
>
>She probably does have a Charisma modifier on, because of the full
>moon, although not on a "supernatural mind control" level—just that
>she's feeling good and it's got her especially on her game.
>

I suspect several folks in universe would say, if not in the exact terms, that she always has a pretty significant Charisma modifier, but point taken about the moon providing a bit more. If nothing else, confidence that doesn't cross into cockiness always wears well.

>I grappled with that bit a little, thinking it might be going a little
>too smoothly, but ultimately I figured y'know, "no what that's
>impossible" has been done to death. What if they just...
>rolled with it?
>
>(Also, Francie's reaction in particular is kind of a callback to her
>learning that the rocket man is real, which just happened a few days
>before. When it comes to this castle, is there anything that
>can't happen here? :)
>
>What I'm taking away from this is that I needed to narrate these parts
>a bit better, which is totally fair. I had a lot of pieces on the
>board (and I totally missed out Witolda Urbanowicz and Wojtek! They
>must already have been asleep).
>

It might have just been the contrast to the first introduction, group 3 definitely felt much more Zen. It wasn't meant as criticism as much as musing, though I guess it is a question of whether or not the intent was to portray the witches as a whole as a group who have reached the level of 'well, now that's a thing that happened/exists' before carrying on mostly unperturbed when the improbable shows up.

>Well, yes, I mean, if she were trying to climb through a small window
>and they got hung up on the jamb, that would be funny, but only a fool
>would say so.
>

Might not have to be a fool, might just have to be willing (and able) to absorb the logical consequences. If one were very lucky, I'd think Remilia might actually find it funny as well, but only if no one else could see, and getting through the window was not urgent.

>The French (or Gallian) civil servant is a unique breed, the Alsatian
>doubly so. :) Also, this guy is worn the heck out. It's 10:30 on a
>Friday night and he's still at work, because somebody decided
>to close the office for a party that afternoon, but the same amount of
>work still needed to get done. He probably thinks he's hallucinating.
>
>(Also also, he's Gallian in 1946 and he was at an office party that
>afternoon, so he's probably a bit drunk.)
>

That might also feed into the suspicion of hallucination, especially if he had any absinthe.

>Please. He has some dignity. In public. Usually.
>
>(If it had been Flan saying that, he probably would have.)
>

And she would have laughed, so that would be another successful mission well executed.

>(As to the blood types thing, I'm not sure if it's in the games
>somewhere or just a very consistently adopted fanon thing, but I've
>seen numerous sources claiming that Remilia prefers type B, while A is
>Flandre's favorite. In that case, she's in luck, because she got
>around a gallon of it back in TTW Act VI. :)
>

The reactions all around if Flandre herself were to ever comment something like "I couldn't just let you wander off, you're my favorite flavor" would be something.

>(This is also a consideration for Sakuya, since her own timestream
>keeps running when The World has the continuum around her paused. Or,
>well, technically her personal timestream is accelerated to such a
>degree that the continuum around her appeears to have stopped. Either
>way you look at it, by rights that should have the side effect of
>aging her much faster than her surroundings, given how much she uses
>that trick. The fact that, on the contrary, she doesn't seem to age
>at all is... suggestive.)
>

Hmm, this reveal gets a bit more buildup again. Looking forward to more of the Maid of Blades.

>(My meta-problem now is that I've "caught up" to the main OWaW
>timeline, so his SDM time is no longer in the "past".)
>

I don't envy you that particular headache.


-={(Astynax)}=-
"This Space For Rent."