I am prepared to regard that as a virtual certainty, yes.

>Also, it seems that Flandre has perhaps just a hint of competitiveness
>with her sister when it comes to G's affections, in magnitude rather
>than type at least, which is another of those sibling handbook rules I
>think.

Hmm. Perhaps? "Competitiveness" implies a certain underlying insecurity that I'm not sure is there, although the fact that she seems specifically keen on duplicating experiences may suggest otherwise. To be fair to Flandre, she's only been having meaningful interactions with other sapient beings for about five weeks. She's still feeling her way along. As it were.

(As you can probably tell from her internal monologue in this scene, Remilia is aware that they're probably going to have to have A Conversation about this at some point, but, well, one bridge at a time.)

>> "And no one there had ever heard of the Earth Kingdom, or the Fire Nation,
>> or... or anything from the world I knew."
>
>There's Meiling's point of origin generally confirmed. I do sort of
>wonder if she knows how familiar G actually is with her home realm
>(such as being friendly with no less a personage than the Avatar
>herself.)

She didn't at the beginning of that conversation, but, you know, it came up. :)

>> She'd take being uncontrollably revolted by licorice over being unable to
>> enjoy half of Gallic cuisine any day.
>
>The reaction of any properly reasoning sentient being that enjoys
>Earth foods. Also, recent news stories have brought back up the fact
>that licorice is potentially lethal even to people who somehow enjoy
>its taste.

Heh, I just realized something: Eila is used to non-Suomi being put off by salmiakki, but she probably won't be expecting the Lamprey Hiss. :)

>And I have to note, I was already a bit on Team Flandre
>when it came to 'if you had to pick a favorite character at gunpoint'
>purposes, but her sequences here have managed to solidify that

I was a little unsure how I was going to handle Flandre when I started this project, but I have to say I think she's coming along nicely. It's always fun to have a character who's finding out so many things about herself in the mix.

>(I suppose that makes me a Flan Stan... and yes I'm prepared to dodge the
>rotten produce about to be launched in my direction for phrasing it
>that way, it was too good to pass up.)

I have only a limited understanding of the term, in my old age, but I think as long as you don't go around hijacking completely unrelated Twitter threads with demands that everyone buy her album, you'll be OK?

>> "By the government, not the people they're directly protecting. It's...
>> different." Remilia sighed.
>
>Would the government of the area in question in the 1200s have really
>been set up to be, or interested in, paying a monster hunting squad?

In those days, it wouldn't have been "the government" as we understand it today so much as the local gentry—for instance, if Victor and his team went and dealt with, say, a boggart infestation of the vineyards in Champagne, Remilia would have expected them to be paid by the King of Navarre (whose title, oddly, was coterminous with the county of Champagne in the 13th century, despite the fact that Champagne province was nowhere near Navarre, which is in Basque country), not directly by the vintners themselves. The fact that it generally was the latter and not the former gives the arrangement an unpleasant whiff of extortion to Remilia's (relatively) more modern sensibilities.

>> "Not really." Flandre grinned. "A lot of it's pretty common-sense stuff, you
>> know. 'Stay out of direct sunlight, remember silver hurts, and don't randomly
>> attack people, it's rude' isn't exactly high arcana."
>
>The phrasing on the last bit earned a hearty chuckle. Not sure if some
>personal bias is involved in my interpretation but it almost strikes
>me as Addams-esque.

Flandre is much more cheerful than Wednesday, but I could see them having some common interests. :)

While I've never been consciously trying to build exact parallels, the ménage at Scarlet Devil Mansion does give me a little bit of an Addams Family vibe in general—not that they're anything like as bizarre, when you get right down to it, or as interested in matters overtly macabre, but there is that same sense of "these folks would be considered monstrously peculiar by whitebread suburbanites, but are in fact the strongest family."

(I have always loved that little detail about both The Addams Family and The Munsters—the fact that the "monsters" on both shows are the best people in their settings.

>This actually left me wondering, everything so far about Meiling has
>screamed earthbender, or at least that culture, to me but I was under
>the impression fire flakes were rather specific to Fire Nation
>territories and settlements (or deliberately cosmopolitan areas, but
>I'm not sure if Meiling is from Korra's time period) so now I'm
>nursing renewed curiosity about just where she hails from.

Well, with luck, you should have a better sense of that soon. A mini covering the gap in her story this act (i.e., most of what she talked with Gryphon about) is in the works, to be put up as a sort of bookend to A Name to Call Her Own, and it should answer most of the remaining questions about her background.

>These two are almost frighteningly cute together, and Meiling has
>really come into her own on the page, something of a dark horse
>contender to the 'if you had to pick one at gunpoint' stakes among the
>characters.

Yeah, I like Meiling a lot. Well, I like all these characters a lot, or I wouldn't be working with them, but Meiling's special because she's just so not complicated. Not everybody has to be complicated! Sometimes it's OK to have a character like Meiling, or Nyima, whose Hidden Depths mostly have to do with her stomach. :)

(I will now invite you to picture Nyima and Meiling fighting crime. Or bankrupting a dim sum place. Whichever you prefer. Or, you know, ¿por qué no los dos? :)

>> "C'est impossible," Auriol mumbled.
>
>For a world quite aware of its reliance on magic for some things, they
>have clearly forgotten a lot of the more mundane utility is can
>provide.

Mm. To modern politicians like M. Auriol, magic is a thing you strap propellers to and point at the Neuroi. Its subtler manifestations are easily forgotten.

>This sort of scene always gets a grin, though I am somewhat concerned
>about this "Septième Bureau." IRL there was a Deuxième Bureau that
>was military intelligence in its time, but I haven't found any real
>life analog to Septième, and I'm really hoping it's more of a
>diplomatic or historical records arm of government than darker
>alternatives.

To give its full title, le Septième Bureau du Ministère de l'Intérieur ("the Seventh Bureau of the Ministry of the Interior") is the Gallian civilian government's principal agency for managing, coordinating, and recording non-military matters to do with magic and the supernatural—compared to, for instance, the Liberion federal government's Department of Paranormal Affairs. (Matters of military magic are handled by the appropriate department within the Ministry of the Armed Forces.)

It should not be confused with the aforementioned military intelligence agency, le Deuxième Bureau de l'État-major général ("Second Bureau of the General Staff"), the intelligence arm of the Third Republic's Army General Staff, which perished along with the Third Republic itself when the Neuroi occupied Gallia, and was not reconstituted by the Fourth Republic (at least not under that name). In its day, Deuxième Bureau was notable mainly for wildly underestimating the potential threat posed by the Neuroi in both twentieth-century Neuroi Wars and blithely assuring President Pétain that Ostmark and Karlsland fell because their armed forces were insufficiently patriotic.

--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.