>That added bit does make it marginally less surprising. It stands to
>reason that Flandre would be a deeply special case for a few reasons.
>Still surprising that she arrived at that point so seemingly smoothly,
>but I expect there was a lot of pondering off screen when she could be
>alone with her thoughts.

Yes, I think a lot of the time that she's spent in her study, ostensibly reading her father's journals, has actually been spent looking out the window and contemplating the strands of fate. For those purposes, it's been convenient for her that G's spent the last several nights working on finishing the bath project, and Flan's mostly been either in the music room or outside blowing up the yard. It's given her the opportunity to give these matters the reflection they deserve without being obvious about it to everyone else in the house.

In the source, she claims to be able to influence, or at least see, the workings of fate, but if that isn't straight bullshit, it's obviously an inexact science, since in her initial appearance she's an enemy NPC and thus obviously intended to lose, and if she had known that she presumably wouldn't have bothered with the whole scheme in the first place. :)

(Either way, in UF she certainly believes in fate as a concept; she's mentioned it repeatedly since TTW Act I.)

>>It's true. When she wasn't being a straight-up magical doctor, she
>>was all about what we would now call "quality of life improvements".
>
>If she was known for such tendencies before they met and married, I'd
>suspect that was at least one quality that caught Count Victor's
>attention.

Act VI will hopefully have a bit that addresses this very matter (how Victor and Remilia the Elder met and decided to marry), which is a story even their daughters don't entirely know yet.

>Her esteem for those influencing her language use probably has
>a multiplier effect on how quickly and fully those traits get
>assimilated.

Luckily, she hasn't been hanging around picking up their language when they're doing work. Both of them know some very creative names to call, for example, stuck fasteners. :)

This reminds me of a joke that's in Bill Bryson's book about Australia, In a Sunburned Country, which I shall reproduce for you here:

In the 1950s a friend of Catherine's moved with her young family into a house next door to a vacant lot. One day a construction crew turned up to build a house on the lot. Catherine's friend had a four-year-old daughter who naturally took an interest in all the activity going on next door. She hung around on the margins and eventually the construction workers adopted her as a kind of mascot. They chatted to her and gave her little jobs to do and at the end of the week presented her with a little pay packet containing a shiny new half crown.

She took this home to her mother, who made all the appropriate cooings of admiration and suggested that they take it to the bank the next morning to deposit it in her account. When they went to the bank, the teller was equally impressed and asked the little girl how she had come by her own pay packet.

"I've been building a house this week," she replied proudly.

"Goodness," said the teller. "And will you be building a house next week, too?"

"I will if we ever get the fucking bricks," answered the little girl.

>>The really fun part is that it's even crazier than that hypothetical
>>guy thinks, because of the whole Crisis on Infinite Tracers thing. :)
>
>Yeah, I'm still trying to file that bit. Do all of the Tracers exist
>essentially concurrently, with awareness of one another?

It's more that, at any given age, she has access to the memories of all the others up to that same age. Normally they're not obvious except the ones of the timeline she's in, but she can find them if she wants them, which means her head is a giant ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey mess, but somehow still works, apart from her tendency to lose track of whether she's actually met people yet or not. "It just sort of 'appens," is the closest she can get to an explanation for anyone else.

(NOTE: This can be pretty jarring if, say, she goes riffling through the memories of an aspect who, for whatever reason, didn't live to be the age that she is at the time of the search. For obvious reasons, she doesn't like to do that.)

>>Gryphon and Meiling
>>working on the house always give me "Han and Chewie trying to fix the
>>Falcon" vibes anyway. :)
>
>That might be the sort of scene that line pinged. Now that you mention
>them, I could swear I remember Han yelling something vaguely similar
>while trying to make the Falcon spaceworthy at some point or
>other.

You are almost certainly thinking of this scene from The Empire Strikes Back, a scene which my father and I have (without meaning to) almost perfectly re-enacted on several occasions, albeit with automobiles or household wiring rather than a beat-up nth-hand starship. :)

>I had more meant hard for Remilia to acquire consensually, discreetly,
>and without whatever the domestic equivalent of a major diplomatic
>incident is. Anyway, I have probably spent more time than is healthy
>out of my life contemplating the care and feeding of vampires, so it
>jumped to mind quickly when the notion of an ethical vampire traveling
>away from their usual supply came up.

Well, it's definitely something that will need to be looked at. Luckily, she only requires a really substantial fix on full-moon nights—the rest of the time her appetite is much smaller, and on the two or three days around the new moon she barely has any at all—so with a bit of care and prudence, she should be able to get by.

(If she and Flan were both going, it would be a definite issue, since that would more than double the requirement.)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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