Author’s Note – S2 Arc 2 ‘You will remember me’

Author’s Note – S2 Arc 2 ‘You will remember me’









HELLO!

At ~310000 words this Arc is stupidly long. I think you all noticed that as well. Then again, I also announced this as the longest arc in the season... well, it actually should be the longest arc in this branch overall.

Before I continue let me shout-out my Patrons. You guys are awesome, keep giving me money so I can keep giving you words. I will also now aggressively advertise YOU, dear normal reader, to give me some money.

As of now, this story is over 700’000 words long, all of which you have enjoyed for free. If you have the dollar to spare each month, every bit helps me along the road of justifying doing this full-time. I think the “Words to Money” ratio on that dollar would be quite good.

Head over to to support me. Would be much appreciated. Your money allows me to continue this and (if you want to look at it from a more selfish angle, which I respect) will get you more artwork to ogle at. Here is the Aclysia commission that hasn’t seen the light of CHYOA yet (although it has been online on the wiki for a bit):



ALSO! In important news, I got two new proofreaders. Say thanks when you see them on the Discord, they make this stuff actually readable.

Back to this arc: Due to the sheer length of it, I will not be touching upon everything, but here are the important bits.ÚpTodated novels on no(v)el()bin(.)com

In the last author’s note, I promised the following things:

The mother-daughter rivalry of Nariko and Rave

This one I regard as largely successful, although the second post-fight talk still needs to happen.

I couldn’t just make Rave win against her mother, would have made her look way stronger than

she is supposed to be (at this point). I am, however, happy to get Rave some character

development as she is one of those that are harder to develop on the basis of being pretty alright

already. Not much in the way of flaws to work with.

Momo getting a fighting style

Yeah, this one was pretty much scratched, sorry. It’s going to happen eventually, can’t have her be just a sitting duck all the time, but what I had in mind felt hard to justify to just give to her without the proper challenges.

Nia Fae

She is here, and she acts exactly how she is supposed to. Although I guess I am underdelivering on the ‘creepy’ factor considering how many people find her cute. More on that in the character insight.

A Christmas Party

Well, it certainly happened.

Thana’s true power

Many people actually got this one right from the start. I remember comments about her being a goddess as early as Season 1. That actually makes me rather happy; I don’t need or want to have every twist be unpredictable. However, I doubt anyone could have imagined that I was going to pull a goddess of genocide on you all.

Yes, I do like to go overly dark sometimes.

Siena being a murderous bitch

Nice bait and switch there, Fun. Siena mellowed out considerably over the course of this arc to the point where she actually gets along with everyone now. No, I haven’t forgotten about the violin thing, it will be back when I feel the story allows me to focus on Siena for a bit. No, her being mellowed out considerably does not mean she is fine yet.

What the Metracana really is

...

So... Yeah, there is just so much in this arc that could be addressed that I will do the only sensible thing and call it quits here. You can leave me questions in the comments or ask me directly on the Discord server.

Next Arc will be pretty straight-forward. I won’t be making promises like last time, that was kinda stupid of me. The goals have been established, the enemy is clear, and I am pretty sure you know which side is going to win at the end, so let’s not beat around the bush and call this war for what it is: one-sided.

And so I will declare to you that the next arc of this story and the final arc of Season 2 is called ‘The Five Day War’. I will now take my usual week off, see you all then~

Extended Character Insight - Nia Fae

Let’s prelude this thing with her character theme: Crystal Strings – Fading Away

So here were the basic characteristics that I went ahead to build Nia with:

BlondeFrenchAnti-MageEmotionless ExteriorBadassWeird

I think I delivered on all of those. Blonde I made her because there is a severe lack of blondes in my branch... not blue eyes though, I have a lot of blue-eyed girls for some reason.

French I made her for... no reason, actually. I just felt like making her French. Dunno. It gave me a nice excuse to tangle her up with the Horned Rat, but that was more an ‘after the fact’ thing.

The anti-mage part is because I think that every story of this nature will have at least one of the cancel type powers. Don’t know why, but there are certain powers that just appear whenever you have a story with basically unlimited different magics. Another one that pops-up almost every time is the power thief (in this story that’s Romulus) and the copy-cat (I don’t have that one yet).

And I just think that the emotionless exterior is a nice character gimmick. I hope I am pulling it off well. I think it was starting to get tiring, so I gave Nia the notecards so that I can actually describe her emotions while also keeping the attribute intact.

Now, the badass part needs some elaboration, I think. I call her that because of how her fighting is laid out. I usually try to give every character a basic fighting style that I then write around or subvert on the basis of how I want to twist the fight.

Examples: Lydia fights are planned to create a situation where her victory is guaranteed. John creates plans with individual steps to bring about his personal optimal outcome. Rave keeps her enemies on the ropes until she wins or they slip-up. That’s the basic idea.

For Nia the idea was that she wins all fights in as quickly a manner as possible while using her attacks as quickly as possible. This means that she will often put the big guns up front, because there is no need to conserve any strength if the enemy is beaten. The difference to Rave’s careless approach here is that Nia will take the time to analyse what the quickest way to triumph actually is.

This makes her victories seem relatively easy, even if they are often the end-product of ceaseless self-training, hence the descriptor ‘badass’. I think the two fights she was in show this relatively well. As her potential level has shown, Nia will actually be one of the strongest members in John’s group eventually.

Lastly, the weird thing is the whole ‘seeming wrong to other people’ thing. I feel like I underdeliver on this a lot, so I am going to crank it up in the future.

Her obsession with animals was a thing that I also just slipped into. Somebody mentioned it on the Discord server, and it just fit so well. I originally planned for the Void to be a more hostile place, but then I decided to have the Outsiders (also void) in.

Then I retconned the Outsiders to be Lorylim (not necessarily void) due to difference in what they were supposed to be and what I needed/wanted for my story. Well, I guess that’s fine in the end. The friendly emptiness is a nice change of pace. Don’t need everything you can’t understand to be filled with Eldritch horrors. Even if the creatures inside may not look all that friendly.

Introducing her with her own POV chapter was an experiment I ran to make it clear that Nia wasn’t actually emotionless without having her break character. Seems to be a success in that regard.

Welp, this is what I had to say about Nia Fae. Just one last thing. Her theme song is: Crystal Strings - Fading Away.

This was the second arc of the second season “You will remember me”. I hope I will see you all next arc “Five Days War”, have a nice break from my story, catch up with the other branches and all that niceness.

PS: If you have the time, please give me feedback using this form: