Shortly after arriving in 1946, the First Lensman and his intrepid Lenshound set out on a brief shopping trip that takes a most unexpected turn, as they discover that the Alsatian countryside holds strange secrets—some far older than the Neuroi invasion. What awaits within

Act I: "La Maison Écarlate"

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Count me in as pleasantly surprised. I didn't think Touhou was on your radar; it's been a while since it came out, after all. The OWaW world is a good place for flying girls of all provenances, though.

Sakuya's apparently gone the way of almost all humans, I see, but there are two other inhabitants of the SDM who don't suffer from inconveniences like mortality. I'm guessing that meeting them is among the eventful things that'll happen during the next month.

>Count me in as pleasantly surprised. I didn't think Touhou was on your
>radar

Well, funny story: it wasn't! Still isn't, in and of itself, the actual games themselves are not in a genre I'm interested in. I had heard of it, albeit mostly in the form of commenters on Danbooru declaring for the last five or six years that Kantai Collection would never be as popular. I'd seen a few of the characters, in crossover fan illustrations. I looked into a little, because it stands to reason that anything with that much of a following might bear investigating, but I wasn't particularly curious once I found it was a series of bullet hell games.

But the thing is (and I've said something like this recently in a different thread, but with a different metaphor), I have little patches of Velcro in my psyche, and occasionally, as media I'm not paying direct attention to flows past, random characters will come along and stick to one of them.

Approximately 14 days ago, thanks to a chance encounter while browsing the aforementioned art website looking for something else, Remilia Scarlet happened along and stuck to about eight of them. And here we are. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Intruiging. A mystery vampire, a mystery house, and a mystery maid who had a mysteriously early-model vortex manipulator. Looking forward to seeing where you go with this.

Oh, and the bit with Wolfgang and "whose will is stronger" was hilarious. I actuially cackled out loud; haven't done that since the last Discworld book I read.

--
Unable to save the day: File is read-only.

>Oh, and the bit with Wolfgang and "whose will is stronger" was
>hilarious.

:) That moment was the point at which I realized that this thing I was playing around with was really going somewhere*—that these characters were really connecting.

It's based in something that actually used to happen, whenever the real Wolfgang (dba Regal, most of the time, because that's what my mother called him) and I would go up north to visit my grandparents. For some reason (probably the way their living room was laid out), they didn't have a sofa, and only three stuffed chairs, which meant only one extra. So I'd sit in that one after dinner, and the dog would sit on my feet, grumble, and hit my knee until I got up, let him have it, and dragged in a kitchen chair for myself. It cracked my grandparents up every time, and my grandfather would always remark, "That dog's got personality." :)

--G.
* And go somewhere it has—yesterday evening I had the first 20+-kilobyte day I've had in a long time, writing a big chunk of of what will end up being Act III. It's not a lightweight 25 K, either, just so you're warned.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I see you're still hard at work giving lonely vampires a happy ending. And encounters with a beagle.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

>I see you're still hard at work giving lonely vampires a happy ending.

I dunno what it is with me (and/or G) and vampires. I'm not even that into the tropes. I mean, I like them better than, say, werewolves, but...

--G.
maybe it's the teeth?
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>I dunno what it is with me (and/or G) and vampires. I'm not even
>that into the tropes.

Well, you avoid most of the typical tropes or put your own spin on them. In a lot of stories, the big thing about vampires is that they are both more and less than human; they are set apart from normal humanity by their immortality, superpowers, addiction to blood, and inability to bear the sun. The authors usually take the perspective that these things are unnatural and should be destroyed.

In UF, there are so many badass immortals among the good guys (Detians, gods, robots, other long-lived races, and people who've just found a way to avoid Father Time) that there's no need to play the "Woe is me, I have a skin condition and specific dietary requirements" cards. You take these vampires out of their original context, and put them in a universe and social circle where what species they are matters far less than what they do with what they've been given. For instance, Roger Tremayne and Devlin Carter are both P12 psions, with almost identical basic powers, but one is a tyrant and the other is a liberator.

Back on track, I figure that you like the aesthetics of vampires, especially cute vampire girls, and pick ones whose personality idiosyncrasies mesh well with those of the other characters in the story. I'd be throwing quite a few stones in this glass house if I said there was anything wrong with pulling characters out of context just because you think they're cute or hot.

>Well, you avoid most of the typical tropes or put your own spin on
>them.
(...)
>Back on track, I figure that you like the aesthetics of vampires,
>especially cute vampire girls, and pick ones whose personality
>idiosyncrasies mesh well with those of the other characters in the
>story.

You make good points. In this case, in particular, it helps that there are so many divergent interpretations of the character out there already. Sort of like Kancolle, or the Vocaloid characters (not to quite the latter extent, since they're kind of chameleons by design, if you see what I mean)—there's so much room for interpretation in the canon that one doesn't really have to worry about getting it "wrong" (insofar as I ever worry about that).

In Remilia's case, fanwork interpretations of her range across a wide spectrum of both moral standing and competence, from classic gothic-horror "you mortals are but cattle to me" monster-in-human(ish)-shape to "the Charlie Brown of vampires". I went for kind of a middle road with my version—she does like to play to the room (and sometimes it doesn't work), but if you get to know her, as we've already seen, she's a sweetheart—but still one who shouldn't be trifled with. Or, put another way, I think it's cute when her attempts to be badass don't work, but only under the right circumstances. :)

Also, upon reflection, I think the general point fits into the larger framework of my dislike for the concept of "inherent evil". This has been getting a lot of play in RPG circles online at the moment because of WotC's recent 86ing of "evil races" in Dungeons & Dragons, and I don't want to come across as totally there-before-it-was-cool about this, but I was there before it was cool. Even when collective stereotypes do generally hold (as with, say, the svartelves of UF's Upper Worlds), I've tried to make it clear that they're not congenitally evil, it's just that culturally they tend to be assholes. And as an extension of that, I like it when characters who are "supposed" to be evil buck the system, which is basicallly every "good" vampire ever.

TLDR: I guess it's mostly that, like G says, vampires are people too. :)

(An aside: Back in the day, there used to be a cheesy direct-to-syndication TV show called Forever Knight, about a vampire police detective. I only watched it when it was randomly on in the middle of the night, so I never got any sense of the overall plot if there was one, but I liked the concept, even though it made no actual sense. How would a vampire ever get through the police academy and the inevitable years as a patrol officer before making it to detective and theoretically getting to set his own hours? You can't wangle it so you always work at night when you're in uniform. Anyway. About the only detail I can remember now is that the vampire cop owned a 1959 Cadillac specifically because it had a very large trunk he could hide in during the day, which was a nice touch. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

LAST EDITED ON Aug-27-20 AT 05:52 PM (EDT)
 
I remember staying up late to watch Forever Knight. I rather liked the first two seasons and have those on DVD. The third season wasn't my favorite at the time, but I may go back and rewatch it now just to see if it was a bad as I thought it was back then. I could totally see Nick, Natalie, and Don working in New Avalon.

And that Caddy was boss. I'd love to have one, but the mileage for something of that period would drive me broke(er) with the cost of refilling the tank every few days. :)

Michael C. Fortner
"Maxim 37: There is no such thing as "overkill".
There is only "open fire" and "I need to reload".

>
>(An aside: Back in the day, there used to be a cheesy
>direct-to-syndication TV show called Forever Knight, about a
>vampire police detective.

Originally aired as Nick Knight on CBS, if I recall... *Wikipedia* ...yep, as a TV movie. When it went to series, they changed the name so they wouldn't get confused with Nickelodeon's late-night program block.

> I only watched it when it was randomly on
>in the middle of the night, so I never got any sense of the overall
>plot if there was one...

He's trying to become human again, and to make up for several centuries of being Teh Evil Vampire. I didn't realize they'd continued with the series after CBS dropped it.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

>I went for kind of a middle road with my version—she does like to
>play to the room (and sometimes it doesn't work), but if you get to
>know her, as we've already seen, she's a sweetheart—but still
>one who shouldn't be trifled with. Or, put another way, I think it's
>cute when her attempts to be badass don't work, but only under the
>right circumstances. :)
>
>--G.
>-><-
>Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
>Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
>zgryphon at that email service Google has
>Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I got the impression that she has experience both with being badass, and trying to be badass, but not enough to merge the effects properly.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

>I got the impression that she has experience both with being badass,
>and trying to be badass, but not enough to merge the effects properly.

I think she's one of those people who are only properly badass when they aren't consciously trying to be.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>>I got the impression that she has experience both with being badass,
>>and trying to be badass, but not enough to merge the effects properly.
>
>I think she's one of those people who are only properly badass when
>they aren't consciously trying to be.

There's a character in one of the Wraith Squadron books whose Force sensitivity seems to work like that, and when it's pointed out/suggested to her, her response (IIRC) is something to the effect of "well that's dumb."