Robotics;Notes Ep. 5

Reviews without pictures may be faster to write, but they're not as fun. I'll put in the effort from now on.  But it would help if I could remember what Pixy said about FTP....

Before the credits, there's a brief recap of the end of the previous episode, where things might have gotten a little supernatural. Kai saw a girl through the camera of his PokeCom (Pocket Computer), and then after it rebooted, he got a strange email from "Sister Centipede" containing nothing but gibberish.  At school he overhears two girls talking about doing a "Test of Courage" at the supposedly haunted Space Hill Park, which was where he was that night. The girls mentioned they heard it from "That Karate Club girl", and thus another loop in the story is closed. A quick e-mail after the OP, and Kai has arranged to meet Juuna Daitoku, the incredibly shy Karate Club girl, up on the hill. This annoys Aki because she's expecting to meet at the clubhouse with the local paper to give an interview about their second place finish at the RoboOne competition. She wanted him there.


At the park, They discuss their similar experiences, although Kai's really got her topped. They discuss possible sources of interference, like this Russian shortwave station, "the Buzzer" that has been broadcasting this buzzer going on and off for 30 years. (True!) and they wonder if the nearby launch complex is broadcasting something similar that is causing the computers to lock up, since it is in the line of sight to the hill. That doesn't explain the ghostly girl though, so they wander around in search of the supernatural. And Kai cruelly startles her pointing at a mannequin head in the window that scares the bejebers out of her. In part he explains he did it because she was creeping him out by describing the legendary girl looking exactly like the girl he had seen. She pulls up a location of another sighting in a cave where she lives. He agrees to go, but ask if they can drop by the club's hangar on the way. She's not too thrilled with the idea. Apparently she's scared of, or hates robots, so they skip it.


At the Hangar, Aki is blowing it with the reporters, going on about the Gunvarrel project, instead of RoboOne. Subaru swings by with his Robot in hand, and the reporters instantly recognize it, but wonder why it's here. Aki nearly spills the beans, I guess the concept of a secret identity escapes her.

At the beach (I thought it was a cave?) Kai and Juuna don't find the digital ghost, although they do discover a dead whale on the beach, and she remarks that there have been a lot of them lately. They begin to discuss a lot of weird ecological phenomena around the world, a hot winter in Russia, snow in California, and some of the Nazca Lines were washed away by rain. Junna accidentally pokes him in a soft spot, by saying it's weird, like the S.S. Anemone incident, which I guess she doesn't know he was a victim of. At the end of their outing, he asks her about Karate, and she says that their season is over, so she's pretty much done with that. He then invites her to join the Robotics club, which she's not too thrilled with, but while she doesn't like robots, she wouldn't mind becoming better friends with Aki (hmmm?).


Kai drops by Aki's to find out what's going on at her end. The interview was a bust. Meeting with the candy guy about sponsorship was also a bust. She asks about what he was doing with Juuna, surious if she also managed to beat him at Kill-Ballad to get him to go with her, but he mentions that he asked her to go along. She embarrassedly says Hey, she doesn't mind if he dates Juuna, but it's unusual because he never really hangs around with anyone. (Does anyone think she really means that?)


That night, Kai returns to the hilltop to kill some time playing the game, and clearly to see if it will happen again. Just when he's about to give up, his PokeCom starts receiving again. He starts searching the grounds, using the PokeCom in Augmented Reality mode. Sneaking into an abandoned building, he makes contact, first spotting a password protected geotag, and then the ghost, who offers him the password. She's possibly an AI, rather than a ghost - would that be a ghost in the machine? She tells him to tap her on the screen, which allows him to talk to "Sister Centipede", and her voice and manner change. She mechanically states "Airi is a communications interface running on the Iru-O servers. Sister Centipede is a fully automated information gathering engine." It's nice to get some straight answers for once. Then, it gets a bit weird. Apparently he's been chosen as some kind of contact simply because he's been around the park so much, since he was a kid (when he was close to Airi's age setting) and they've been trying, 29 times in the last 8 years, to get through to him. Hell, Aki's known him even longer, and she can't get through to him either. Kai has NO real curiosity, no romance in his heart. His question? "How do I make you go away?" He pokes at the geotag, and Sister Centipede just coughs up the password for him. Now THAT'S security! It gives him full access to the Iru-O secret files. In particular, an "In case of my death" file written ten years earlier attached to the tag.


The file reveals that this guy knows that NASA has been hiding, since 2000, the discovery of Magnetic Monopoles at the south pole of the Sun. It leaked, but they make the leak of the truth look like a fake. He knows that this is a sign that the sun will explode, and has a schedule of upcoming massive solar flares. (This will probably ruin future RoboOne competitions).

Kai calls up Juuna, who confirms there are a lot of conspiracy theories about NASA and Solar Flares. She speculates that there must be a report #2 file to go with the #1 he read. And the dates he gave for the flares were accurate, she says. The aurora that's been oddly in the sky over Southern Japan has been there since the 2012 flare. And the crash that ruined the shop owner's legs was in '15. This comes to mind since he's making the call from the bench outside the mini-mart, and when she comes out to close the shutters, he mentions what he found to her. The name "Kimijima Kou" poleaxes her. She's on the verge of tears - something unusually for someone as hardened as she is - and wants to know where he heard that name.


Back at the evil Exoskeleton Corporation, Aki's sister gives her report on Kai to the CEO. She knows about his accident. And the episode leaves it hanging on that ominous note.

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Disgaea

It started with someone's LiveJournal Icon.  She was a very slender red-headed demon girl, with a DFC and kind of a kinky outfit.  It turned out her name was Etna, and there was a fair amount of fan art and Cosplay photos of her on DeviantArt (it's a really easy costume).  So I took a flyer and looked for a Torrent, and amazingly found one from 2010 that was still live (the show is originally from 2003), and after a very rocky start - fools, why turn off DHT and peer exchange? - it came down in a day or so.

I'm not going to say this is some neglected gem or masterpiece, but it is a little fun.

Meet Flonne, another DFC.  She's an Angel Trainee, sent from Celestia two years ago to assassinate the Demon Overlord.  She's not exactly good at the job, having been wandering around for two years without finding the Overlord's castle.  But no problem, it's been revealed that two years ago the Overlord choked to death on a dumpling ("of the damned").  She does run across a crypt/garbage dump with a coffin in it with the Overlord's Crest on it, and unleashes Holy Hell on it to open it.  Okay, her magical bow, dynamite, throwing axes, a steamroller and a missile launcher.... So you can tell what kind of series it's going to be from here.


Her efforts are enough to awaken this guy, Laharl, who is the overlord's son, and who was apparently poisoned and dumped in the crypt by forces unknown until halfway through the series.  Flonne is a little conflicted, because she doesn't really approve of assassination, but she was told to do it and had to follow orders.  Laharl doesn't really respect this, and tries to blast her, but his powers are severely weakened.  She's rather upset by the fact that Laharl is unmoved when they find out about the death of his father (from a conveniently wind-blown newspaper) but he explains that Demons don't know love, and thus they also don't know sadness.

A battle with guardians of the crypt ensues, but Laharl can barely fight them off, and that's when things go really gonzo, as a spaceship crashes through the wall, piloted by Captain Gordon, 37th Defender of the Earth, with his gorgeous, scientifically brilliant, and tremendously endowed sidekick Jennifer and loyal robot/giant cannon Thursday.


When Jennifer goes to comfort the "Children" they've just saved from the demons, we discover that Laharl's kryptonite is major cleavage, and we're talking original Green K.  The Robot scans him, discovers that he's been poisoned, and Flonne heals him.  The Humans are amazed to discover that they've saved an Angel, and upset to discover they've also saved the next Demon Overlord.  They draw on him, and he's about to blast them, when a glimpse of Jennifer bouncing knocks him back, ill.  Flonne shields him, and he buries his face in her (lack of) chest, and springs back.  With his power restored, he blows the humans, and the rest of the crypt, into the sky like Team Rocket.  This becomes a recurring theme.

One of the guardians isn't so dead, and a fully powered Laharl flattens him, and interrogates him trying to get to the bottom of his poisoning, but the creature ends up dead without talking.  Flonne abhors his violent ways, and makes it her new mission to either assassinate him, or teach him Love (no, not THAT way, it's a kid's show).  Unfortunately the pendant that allows her to survive in the underworld got stuck to the Robot somehow, and she collapses before she can make good on her threat.

Just as they're about to start fighting, Etna arrives and watches from a distance.  When Flonne falls, she reintroduces herself (Laharl knows her from the castle).  Etna expresses surprise that Laharl doesn't just blow away his helpless opponent, and wonders at him showing kindness.  Laharl nearly blasts her for the accusation, and insists it's actually because he wants her to die a slow death.  "Oh, I get it!  That's my prince!" she says, and they leave to go find the Overlord's Palace.


Etna is now one of Laharl's Vassals, but she has some Vassals of her own.  The "Prinnies" are the souls of sinners in these odd stuffed penguin bodies who have to work in the netherworld to earn a chance at rebirth.  Generally stupid, they're a whiny bunch, but usually productive.

Through a chain of events too long to go through here, Flonne gets back the pendant, and ends up attached to the crew.

They go on a number of short adventures on the way back to the castle, taking on other pretenders to the throne, and find out who poisoned Laharl. It was Etna, but she was under blackmail, and she was supposed to kill him.  Periodically they run into Gordon, who is determined to fight the demon prince, but is so simple-minded that Lararl actually uses him and his ship as a shortcut to get them to the castle.

Then, after half the series, an actual plot breaks out.  Gordon has unwittingly been a pawn of the humans, and in their travels, Thursday has been planting beacons that will help open up a gateway to the netherworld big enough to bring in a million-ship-strong space fleet from Earth  Earth wants to invade and wipe out the demons because they're demons, and because Earth needs more room for the population.

The Earth forces, in turn, have been pawns of the second in command of the Angels.  But Laharl is powerful enough to turn it all around, and after conquering everything... he abdicates and dumps it all on Etna, who at one point aspired to the throne, and now learns to be careful what she wishes for.

Technically, the files were encoded in an odd 3:2 aspect ratio, so I had to correct the screen shots, although after looking at them enough, I became unsure what was right.

In any case, I tossed a bunch more shots of Etna below the fold.

more...

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Robotics;Notes Ep. 4

The Island where our heroes live, Tanegashima, happens to be the home of the Japanese space program. (Yes, they have one). And this episode starts with a scene on May 21st, 2010, where a young Aki and Kai are with Aki's older sister in a crowd waiting to watch a launch.

At the end of the last episode, Aki proposed that they go to the JAXA (The Japanese Space Agency) for help. And it is revealed in this episode why she thinks of this. We come back from the OP with her making a presentation asking for facilities, assistance, and money from JAXA to help them build their robot. The director listens, but first "Your Father has to go to the bathroom." Yeah, her dad's the president of the base. He insists he's just a middle manager, but Aki will have none of it. Practically chasing him around the conference table trying to get him to give in. He even begs Kai to intervene. She's just about got him on the ropes when a call from her mother, who is far less of a dreamer than any of them gives him a chance to escape.

After school at the Hangar, it turns out they don't have access to the Robo-One prize money either. Kai gets a mysterious message while playing his game and leaves. But the location given turns out the be another building in the "Abandoned" complex. He arrives, but nobody is there, until their club adviser shows up in a mini-pickup, loaded with boxes. And from the top of those boxes emerges Frau Koujirou. Mitche, the adviser, reveals that her real name is Furugoori Kona. "What's Frau Koujirou? Your pen name?" Mitchie bitches about the principal making him help a student move in, which arouses Kai's curiosity. Kona says that she bought the entire place. In typical fashion, Kai gets ready to bail. "If you want me to help, defeat me in Kill Ballad." But as he turns to walk away, she grabs his hand, saying that he owes her, after all, she gave him the control code. So, thus it is revealed that she is the author of his favorite game.

As a character, I'm a little curious to see more, as she has a bit of a stutter, but also this twisted smile she makes. The credits seem to indicate she has a bit of a sultry side too.

Back in the hangar, Subaru is telling Aki all the things they should change about the robot, like removing the cockpit and making it remote control, and removing all the armor that makes it look like Gunvarrel. She refuses, citing the goals and history of the club which she won't abandon, and Subaru leaves.

Things get worse. Kai calls just then, bitching that he just found out this candy he eats all the time is made by a company owned by Mitchie's uncle. He hates that he's been giving that family his money. They should be giving some of that money back to the club, he says. This is a trick. Kai has been to the convenience store and taken Mizuka's challenge to eat this nasty passion-fruit dumpling she keeps on hand in exchange for information. (The first time was in Episode 2, where he eats it to find out about "Doc's" granddaughter, a classmate of theirs in the Karate Club. They wanted to use her to try to get a discount on the robot parts, but it didn't pan out.)

Kai shows up at the no-longer abandoned office building with some groceries for Kona. She thanks him, but apparently her manner of speaking confuses him. It's because she's saying TXT-speak out loud ("Thx", "TX", and "Facedesk" in Japanese are a revelation.). She gets even crazier from there, muttering about security, and how "They" shouldn't get at her "BL Folder", and refusing Kai's suggestion that a regular house would be better. And finally how the abandoned look is more Moe, and how he should get out, or bring her back a half-naked guy. "Time to fap," she says (I can't be 100% sure about this translation). Kai wonders about her parents, but all she says is that her dad is in Tokyo, and mom.... she doesn't say.

There is a brief interlude at Subaru's home. His dad, watching baseball, mentions that he heard about a robot tournament last week, but Subaru swears he had nothing to do with it, and that he's through with robots. He was a champion in Jr. High. The implication hanging heavy in the air is that dad must have a real hate-on for the whole robot thing. Mom being absent could be related?

Aki goes with Mitchie to the candy company to ask about sponsorship. It does not go well. The man is a vulgar creep (he trained his parrots to say "Hooters").

At the hangar, Subaru asks Kai if he'll team up with him to go the the first Robo-One world cup in Las Vegas next month. He refuses. Oddly, it's Subaru who issues the challenge to settle it with a Kill-Ballad match. Apparently after 22 wins, Subaru finally beat him, and so we next see him packing up the club's robot for practice.

In front of the hangar, they square off with their robots, and after explaining how M45 works, he asks Kai how it is he avoided the unavoidable attack. Kai doesn't want to talk about it, but says that it wasn't a gaming trick.

We get a flashback, which he narrates, how four months after they watched the rocket launch, on 9/11/10, some event on the ferry SS Anemone caused everyone aboard to faint. This included his class, on their way back from a school trip to Kagoshima. He and Aki were the only ones permanently affected. He calls it "Elephant-Mouse Syndrome" where their time perception is skewed. Aki's seizures result in her experiencing five minutes as if it were a second, and apparently Kai's is the reverse. This explains his incredible reaction times.

While sitting on a hillside in the twilight, about to play his game, he suddenly gets reception issues, and barely catches a glimpse of the lavender-haired girl. Then, as his game tries to reconnect, a voice comes through asking "Can you hear me?"

---

I had to go back to the first episode to check on a few things, and I noticed a few other things. The girl with the long brown hair (Aki's sister, Misa), the one watching them compete appears on a commercial for the Exoskeleton company. She's the one who provided the robotic leg braces to the girl in the convenience store (Irei Mizuka), who was injured in a crash 15 years earlier and has had the legs for 4.

I had forgotten about a scene at the end, because it didn't seem to fit with the conventional, plausible nature of the show. A girl with long lavender hair and a glowing ring on her forehead is standing there, holding a feather, apparently dictating a report, but all we hear of it is her reciting the date and time (June 13th, 2019 19:09) and that nothing has changed.

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Robotics;Notes Ep. 3

Finally got back to this.

We join our heroes on the way to the competition in Tokyo. In a flashback, we learn that the creator of the game gladly gave them to code to use the game's control system with their robot, and with a little help from the electronics shop owner, they were ready to go in a week.

Their first Robo-One match is against a previous winner, and fortunately, Kai's ability to analyze the enemy's moves really pays off, and he flattens him handily.

Mercifully, we are spared the one thing I hate in anime, the interminable fighting tournament, filled with spectators analyzing the action, and the contestants salvaging a win out of a loss by rampant rules lawyering. Instead, we get a montage, leading quickly to the finale.

The finale is against a suspiciously familiar person, dressed in a Char Ensemble :-) calling himself Mr. Pleiades. Kai instantly recognizes him behind the mask as their classmate Hidaka Subaru. This instantly puts his showmanship off balance, and he denies it. Kai even points out that Subaru is the Japanese name for the Pleiades.

The match is a tough one, with the club's robot getting knocked down twice vs. once for M-45. What doesn't help is that Kai is apparently subject to the same kind of micro seizures as Aki, and we get momentary flashbacks to something horrible that must have happened to him as a kid on some ship. It nearly costs him the match, but he is able to pull off one last move. The toy has a mode where it sits down and wheels in the butt propel it forward, thus carrying both robots out of the ring. We're left for the moment with the impression that this might have won it for them, but no, it actually counts as the third fall for their bot, so they lose.

At the highshool, the vice principal gives them a day to clear their belongings out of the clubhouse, but Kai has one ace up his sleeve. He's managed to summon Subaru to the office, and hands him a cardboard copy of the mask, well, more like "forces on him" rather than "hands". Basically at that moment, he blackmails Subaru into joining the club (something Aki has been unable to do for the past year), and thus, the Robotics club DID win the Robo-One competition. Rules Lawyering saves the day!

There are some other elements. Aki's older sister is revealed to have been the Robo-One champion 9 years earlier. She's apparently not talking to anyone in the family, and she's working for some guy in a possibly sinister corporation (is there any other kind in Anime?) that is taking an unusual interest in the competition and our heroes.

And some celebrity girl named Frau Koujirou is on the plane with them as they return to their home island of Tanegashima, and a small handful of the press is there to quiz her about her arrival. The credits make it clear that she's going to be part of the club.

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Mysterious Girlfriend X Manga

TKTranslate just recently put up a big fat complete collection of the translated Manga through chapter 71 on the torrents. If you search Nyaatorrents for "Mysterious Girlfriend X 1-71 + Extras" you should be able to go right to it.  I just finished getting it, and it's very interesting to see just how closely the Anime followed the Manga, almost shot for shot in some cases.

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Robotics;Notes Ep. 1 & 2

Two episodes in, and it has a certain ... I don't know if I should say Charm, but calling it "Comfortable" just sounds odd.  Maybe warmth.

I hadn't even intended on watching it, but I pulled in the first episode, and decided to get the second. I need to check for the next WhyNot sub, since uTorrent's RSS and Favorites function is made of fail. ("Why didn't you match? It's RIGHT THERE!")

So anyway, I know some folks would avoid it because the lead-in makes it look like it's about giant robots. Eh, not so much. The series centers around Aki, a girl with a very healthy sense of unjustified optimism, and Kai, her polar opposite. They are the last two members of their high-school robotics club, which is in serious danger of being disbanded. Her dream is to complete the club's one big project, a full scale replica of "Gunvarrel", a giant robot from a cartoon a decade ago that is still somehow popular.  It's housed in a disused hangar at an even more disused airstrip, where they tinker with it after school. His dream is, well, all he wants to do is keep playing his robot fighting game, Kill-Ballad. He's already the 5th-ranked player worldwide, and he kicks the game's creator's ass so bad in a random-match-up that he is accused of cheating. The game is played on an iPhone-like device that seems to be ubiquitous. And any time anyone asks him to do something he doesn't want to do, which is just about anything, he says sure, if they can beat him at the game.

The Vice Principal who wants to shut them down demands a very detailed budget on how they can finish the project before the year is up, and it's a very big one.  She is dubious that the two of them can accomplish anything, even with the money, so she sets an impossible condition, they have to show some results.  There's a Robo-1 competition coming up.  If they can complete and win, she'll approve the budget.  Aki shows her guts and determination and agrees!

Then reality smacks her in the face.  They don't even have a Robo-1 Robot, nor the money for one, nor the expertise to compete.  But she's determined to make a go of it, somehow.  Kai just keeps his head down and plays his game.

Robo-1 is an actual robotics competition that's existed for a decade.  You may have seen YouTube videos of these 1-2' tall robots powered by hobby servos dancing, or doing obstacle courses, or even wrestling.  They're pretty amazing, all things considered.

But it turns out that in the legacy of junk their garden-shed clubhouse is stuffed with, they DO have an 8 year old toy robot from the glory days of the club, the days when her idol, the club president and her older sister were members and were incredibly successful.  It's old, and beat-up, and the battery pack is unsalvageable, but she manages to scrape together enough money and wheedle a deal with an electronic junk dealer to get something compatible.

Even with the toy working, she can't operate the thing well at all.  And with a week left before the competition, things look bleak.  But she thinks that with Kai's expertise at the game, perhaps he can control it, but the complicated R/C controller intimidates him.  But he DOES have the address of Kill-Ballad's creator thanks to the cheating accusation, and if he can get him to say, create an interface that will control the robot just like the game, they might have a chance.

That's the plot of the first two episodes, but that's not the story.  Why is Kai hanging around with Aki when he clearly doesn't share her interests?  Is it something to do with a promise to look after her he made to her older sister?  What was the accident that took her out, and left Aki with occasional petit-mal seizures?  There's more to this than just some low-tech Angelic Layer.

Yes, low-tech.  The year seems to be 2020, but there's nothing really stand-out advanced technologically.  Everyone's got a smartphone, and the girl at the convenience store has a leg exoskeleton so she can walk, but it's all plausible, even today.  Okay, the phones are powerful enough that Kai can use an Augmented Reality program to view Aki as a Cat-maid, but in ten years?  Plausible.  That they can win Robo-1 with determination and an 8-year-old toy robot, not so much.

So in spite of the opening, I don't think we're going to be seeing actual flying, blasting, energy-sword wielding Giant Robot Action, more likely they can just make the thing walk into the trade show, if they make it.  And that will be good enough.

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Miku in concert, WITH subtitles

I forget who it was (Brickmuppet?), but someone commented on a translated version of one of her songs that made her sound absolutely horrible as a character.

A friend of mine just pointed me at this, a full concert that is supposed to be fully fansubbed.  The top-justified font is annoying as hell, but the words are there, and it's in full HD.

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Solty Rei - full series

Writers have a lot of tools they can use to create.  Some use typewriters, some use word processors, some even use pen and paper.

The writer of Solty Rei, however, clearly employed a sledgehammer and a crowbar.  It's got a little bit of everything, and none of it makes a heck of a lot of sense.

So, at the beginning, We have Roy Revant, Blade Runner.  Okay, actually he's some kind of bounty hunter, or private security, something like that.  Basically he gets to run around with a MASSIVE handgun with an underslung micro-missile launcher and built-in brass knucks.  It's a beast.  And he needs it while he hunts down replicants, er, Resembles.  Okay, they aren't robots, they're people with "Military grade" cybernetic prosthetic limbs, which usually transform into a gun of some kind.

Okay, you can make an anime out of that.  Making about one eighth of an anime out of that and filling the rest of it with other stuff, not so much.

You see, Roy is severely outclassed by the Knight Sabers.  Okay, that's not what they're called, but there's a four-girl armored crew, sponsored by the governing corporation out there nabbing the bad cyborgs too, under the direct command of the mysterious man who runs the corporation.  Now while Roy is getting his clock cleaned by a particularly nasty villain, the ersatz Knight Sabers are chasing after a strange girl clad in nothing but a tarp who is leaping from building top to building top.  She evades them, and then makes a bad leap, smashing through the abandoned building Roy is getting killed in, and manages to fall multiple stories through the structure and smash into the baddie just before he kills our hero.

He thanks her, so she follows him home like a lost puppy, and we discover she's some kind of super android with a wiped memory.  Aha!  So this is a variant on the Broken Doll storyline!  Since I haven't done a full write-up of that idea, let me recap:

Our hero is a loner, not interested in women.  Check.  In Roy's case, it's because the horrible disaster 12 years before took out his wife and daughter, and now he's a recovering alcoholic, rather than just being a high schooler living alone.

The girl next door has, or had, a thing for our hero, but sighs, knowing it will never be, but still helps him out, usually pressuring him to be good to the Broken Doll, Check.  In this case, she's his boss.  Her dead husband was friends with Roy when they were cops, and she also owns the building they both live in.

And then there's the doll, a mechanical, technological, alien, or magical non-human girl, with no memory, often no or rudimentary language skills - a problem that gets dispensed with very quickly - and no understanding of social skills, but filled with an intense desire to be helpful or useful to Our Hero.  This almost always takes the form of domestic servitude, including horrible cooking, which improves with the help of the GND, and at least one awkward scene of rejected sexual advances (In DearS there were two).

You can make an Anime of that too.  There have been many.  Most aren't as annoying as this.  Anyway, she gets named Solty, based on the title of a record album in Roy's apartment.  I'll explain why that record shouldn't even be there later.

Then they take her out to get clothes, at a nifty little mall that has a holographic dressing room, a technology that isn't seen anywhere else in the rest of the series (there's the crowbar at work).  Roy couldn't care less, and as she's flashing through outfits -  when she's got on some particularly bizarre outfit that is half Mezzo Forte cosplay (an orange Shorty surf wetsuit as the base), and half the author's weird fetish for flared gauntlets and boots with a matching collar, an outfit that has no business being in the store's database - he makes some comment about whatever you've got is fine with me.  She insists on taking the bizarre costume and wearing it all the time, and thanking him for it, attaching some special meaning to it.  And oddly, nobody else ever comments again on how bizarrely dressed she is.

Aside from leaping tall buildings in a single bound, while following Roy around at his work, she shows off the power to make her hand vibrate really hard and deliver a tank-killing punch, taking out a crude mech stolen by two guys Roy just put away.

But wait, there's MORE!  You see, this isn't some Earth city.  Oh no, this is a totally isolated colony world!  Totally isolated by the "Aurora Shield' that blasts with matter-anti-matter lightning anything that gets too high in the sky.  This was the source of the disaster 12 years earlier, BTW.  The Evil Corporation that runs everything was running an experiment and ran up an antenna from the tallest building in the middle of the city, and blew away most of the city.

So this city, the only one on the planet, well, has an underground city beneath it.  And you see, the registered citizens live above ground, and the unregistered are cursed to live in poverty in the under city.  That could be the setting for a whole 'nother show.  And for a while it is, because this trio of robin-hood theives, who somehow want to be famous as well as free, makes their appearance and gets Roy after them.  Solty fades to the background as we see these thieves go up against the Knight Sabers and Roy, but nothing gets resolved.

Even more bizarrely, the female member of the trio, Rose Anderson, ends up crashing at Roy's place, where for some reason he can't just arrest her and collect a bounty.  Don't ask me how this works.  She spends her time trying to recruit Solty for her crusade for social justice and fame, while still committing the occasional crime.

Meanwhile, when she's hanging out in the park, she is hit upon by a peculiar older man in uniform, who turns out to be the president of the evil RUC corporation that runs everything.

Oh, but we're just getting warmed up.  Roy's got a psychopathic enemy who is killing people off in a very SAW-like manner with bombs, and he grabs Rose at some point, but he rescues her against all odds.  But while on another job to stop another experimenter from taunting the happy fun Aurora Shield, a building gets dropped on her.  This of course is right after Roy finds out that Rose is his long-presumed-dead daughter, and she rejects him because she doesn't want to turn her life upside-down.

buh-what?

Oh, there are more sledgehammer strokes to come.  This is only the halfway point.

In season two, we find out Rose isn't as dead as we thought she was.  In an ultimate cheap-out, we find out that she was scooped out at the last millisecond by the speedster of the Knight Sabers.  Not only that, we get some ret-conning explaining why Rose is blonde, while long-presumed-dead Rita was auburn.  The Aurora Shield is actually an atmospheric layer of nanites!  And when they blew it up, a lot of people on the surface got infected.  Most needing the cybernetic replacements for the limbs that fell off, but others, got turned into some kind of super-powered meta-humans.  Like the four Knight Sabers.  And, it turns out, Rita/Rose.  Oh, and it changed her hair color.

Roy is a wreck, thinking he's lost his daughter yet again, kicks Solty out, and crawls back into the bottle.

Rose is very much alive, at the RUC, getting experiments done on her to figure out what her power is, and being made the latest member of the Knight Sabers, which pisses them off to no end.  It gets even worse though, as Ashley Lynx, the aforementioned director of the RUC decides that she is so superior to the rest of them, that he doesn't need them alive any more, frames the team for murder of one of their own, and sends Rose after the remainder with extreme prejudice.  He must have made quite an impression, turning the Glamorous Thief into the paragon of law and order and state-sanctioned murder.

There are some other elements.  One of the last of the Knight Sabers manages to get into the flying battleship the RUC was building, and launches an attack on RUC headquarters, causing Rose to don her battlesuit and fly up to fight her, while Solty comes back out of the shadows and shows she can actually fly, and tries to make peace with everyone, and of course, failing.

Now, I'm trying to figure out how I can use the author's crowbar to fit some of the other nonsensical elements of this show into this review.  I'll just throw them out there.

At one point, Solty runs away and ends up in the sparsely settled countryside.  She meets a boy who is building an airplane, but he plans to fly at low altitude so he doesn't get blown away by the sky.  He dies anyway before finishing it because he's terminally ill.  Solty finishes the plane and flies it for him in his memory, and is visited by his ghost sitting on the wing.

The boy was living with an old man who apparently Knows Things about the RUC, but has withdrawn from the game, until Roy, looking for Solty, comes to him just as he's been gunned down in his home by RUC thugs.  He gives Roy a key that will shut down the RUC computer that actually runs everything, long enough for them to accomplish... something.

The RUC apparently was the colonization committee.  200 years ago, they landed, part of the crew settled down, built an underground city while they terraformed the surface.  But disease swept through the rest of the colonists on the ship, and the ship's AI decided to quarantine the planet with the Aurora Shield, then it went mad.  The other AI was used to run the civilization, and RUC had isolated it and was trying to wrest control of the city from it.  On the other hand, it was also the thing that gave them cybernetics.  In fact, Ashley Lynx was one of the original colonists, and half roboticized by the AI.

So the whole first half of the show makes no sense, because with only one city, why is there military grade anything?  If the RUC controls the Resemble technology, AND the security forces, why did they equip thugs with arm cannons?  If the technology is good enough to produce Solty, and make Lynx live for 200+ years, why is it so crude and inhuman-looking?  If they're all colonists, how did they divide into an upper class and a lower class? (Answer, the AI is insane and thought they needed it).

But Lynx is insane too.  He wants to get past the shield, at the expense of the entire colony, for, well, self-aggrandizement I guess, since his lover lost aboard the ship is centuries dead.

Oh, and the AI in space is insane too.  Since it has digital backups of all the colonists, it decided that THIS is the better way to preserve humanity, and that wiping out all the humans on the colony is a good idea before it leaves to go protect its precious backups.

And to save the world, Solty is allowed to get her memory back.  She was the third AI, and the only one in a human form, and called Dike (That's pronounced "Dee-kay" sheesh!), and apparently a bit of a cold-hearted bitch.  Solty has to take Lynx's spaceship, and fight off the colony ship before it blows up the colony.

In one last stub of the Broken Doll meme, it's very important for Our Hero to finally admit love for the Broken Doll in order for her to acheive her great purpose.  At the very end, years later, Roy makes it into space where he retrieves the blasted remains of Solty in hopes of restoring her to her previous, adorably mind-wiped condition....

Oh yeah, the record thing.  Simple really.  Space Colonies won't have antiques.  They can't afford to bring them.  All technology will start evenly with what's available at the time the ship is launched, and develop from there.  There won't be retro anything.  On the other hand, with all tech coming from the RUC, and the technology running the gamut from the Knight Sabers' lithe and revealing battle suits to the chunky, crude Resemble prosthesis, it's possible it went backwards enough for vinyl records.

And if THAT makes sense to you, then maybe you'll like this 26 episode disaster area.

And you know, it was watching this thing from NetFlix that made me start to fall behind on Mysterious Girlfriend X.

Posted by: Mauser at 01:48 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Mysterious Girlfriend X Ep. 13 (last)

[Note:  Feh, I've been sitting on this since the 13th.  I've only just started on screencaps, and I'll add them as I go.  Work is getting VERY demanding -I have to come in this Sunday as well as Saturday, so I'll let the text go free and add images as I can.]

[Update: Working on it.  But my new manager is "Designated Overtime"-happy.]

This last episode was very different from what went before.  While not precisely an ending, it was a sort of Coda.  We collect a lot of background information that may not have been known to the audience, but was known to the characters.  We learn a lot more about Tsubaki's sister (including her name) and his family history.  We also see that while in many respects Urabe is like an alien, in others she is traditionally Japanese, and the two things mix in odd ways.

The open is a bit of interaction between Tsubaki and his sister, revealing a few bits of information that wouldn't have come out in the normal course of the series.  Tsubaki arrives home to find his sister napped-out on the table, drooling in her sleep.  And NO, he's not going there, although he's a bit embarrassed to see it.  She awakens, groggy, and Tsubaki points out that she's still got drool running down her chin.  She is grossed out and mortified to be seen like that, and quickly wipes it away.  Then, because the connection between the topics is perhaps obvious to him, he asks his sister if she's seeing anyone.  Okay, normally you'd think he would KNOW this from living with her, but then again, there are a lot of secret relationships in this series.  The connection is not at all obvious to his sister, who questions why he's asking, and just pronounces him weird.  And he is, because he wonders to himself if she did have a boyfriend, would he think her face was cute while she drooled in her sleep.  Poor boy is a mess.

After the credits, Urabe is walking through a shopping district when she spots Tsubaki's sister buying something at one of the stalls.  She dithers for a bit but finally decides as she's walking by to talk to her.  Urabe introduces herself as Tsubaki's classmate, and she remembers her from "that one time you brought him his homework".  Small talk with boyfriend's family member achievement unlocked, Urabe is about to take her leave when Tsubaki's sister asks her is she would accompany her for a bit.

Retiring to a nearby coffee shop, Tsubaki's sister suffers from an attack of Nostalgia.  She fondles the sleeve of Urabe's school uniform, remembering the feel of it from when she wore the same sort of uniform six years before.  Then she starts pressing Urabe for any gossip about her brother dating anyone.  For reasons I have yet to fathom, she denies knowing anything.  Still in the grips of nostalgia, Tsubaki's sister speculates that her brother must at least have a crush on someone, being 17 and all, since when she was that age, she did, and eventually dated him.

She suddenly laughs because of the confluence of recent events.  She mentions how just the other day, she woke up with drool on her face and Tsubaki asked her about having a boyfriend, and how strange that was.  But the strangeness was how that echoed her crush.  Apparently one day she fell asleep at her desk and drooled all over it, and her boyfriend snapped a picture of her.  She was mortified, and wanted him to throw it away, but he said she looked cute and kept it.

At the end of the story, Urabe asks her what happened to her high-school boyfriend, and she tells her that after graduation, he went to college in Kansai, and after about six months, they drifted out of contact.  She wonders if he still has the picture, or if he got a new girlfriend who made him throw it out.  Urabe is thoughtful, but not entirely comforted by the possibilities this story lays out for her future with Tsubaki.  She then says that she really doesn't have time to think about romance any more, she has to act as Akira's mother.  Their dead mother would want it that way.  This shocks Urabe, who didn't know that Tsubaki's mother was dead.

As they part outside the shop, Tsubaki's sister thanks Urabe for listening to her boring old stories, and then gifts her with one of the sakura-mochi she had been buying when they met.  She says that their family loves it.  Just before she goes, Urabe catches herself, and makes a point of formally introducing herself with her full name.  Tsubaki's sister repeats it and says she'll remember it.  Unfortunately she doesn't return the favor, so so far, we're stuck calling her Tsubaki's sister.

The next scene opens in a graveyard.  Not the spooky horror movie type, but the nice, neat, somewhat sterile collection of markers the Japanese favor.  Tsubaki is fetching the pail of water for washing the stone, while his sister and father wait for him.  Yes, his dad.  13 episodes in, almost halfway through the last one, and we finally see his dad.  Sis dominates the visit, telling stubaki to wash the stone, saying that she'll manage the flowers and offerings, and tells dad to get the incense.  I never imagined the incense would be so hard to light, but apparently it's necessary to burn a section of newspaper in order to get it going.  Right there on the path.  This is what that Sakura Mochi was for.  Dad says that it was mom's favorite.  Preparations complete, she tells them all that it's time to say their prayers for mom.

On the way out, she says how great it feels to have sent her message to mom.  Tsubaki asks her what she sent to Mom, and she says "I told her about you, of course.... 'Until Akira graduates college and gets a good job, I promise to be a good mother in your place.'"  It's kind of a scary bit of determined martyr-ism.  Akira (I guess I can call him that in a family setting) is shocked, "So that means you won't get married until I get a job?!"  She maintains her determined expression and says yes.  Akira protests that he doesn't need her to babysit him THAT long.  Then Dad pops up, and days "He's right Yoko."  (SD:Youko).  Ah, THAT'S her name.  "If you're interested in a guy, you can move out and marry him.  I'm guessing Dad is a bit tired of having his 24-year-old daughter running the house, and determined to be a guaranteed spinster at 30.  She turns the conversation to Akira, and asks what he told mom.  He replies that he just told mom about what's going on in his life, and Yoko demands examples.  He hems and haws and avoids an answer, but he thinks to himself that there was really one thing he told her about (and we can easily guess what that is).

After the break, we join Tsubaki and Urabe on their way home from school a couple of days later (Why a couple of days, I don't know).  Urabe finally works up the courage, I guess, to tell Tsubaki that she met Yoko (Wait, I don't think she knows Yoko's name yet) Saturday out shopping, and that they had coffee and talked.  Tsubaki's reaction is like he's scared that she told her about them.  But, remember that this is a show about secret relationships.  When Urabe answers his interrogation about what they talked about, she mentions that his sister talked about her high-school boyfriend, which is news to Tsubaki.  (He would have been around 10 at the time).  After filling him on on how they drifted apart and such, she asks him out of the blue if he likes Sakura Mochi, and he says not really.  She relays that his sisters said your family loves it, and Tsubaki says "Oh, that must have been because we went to mom's grave Yesterday." (Someone has goofed on the timeline here).  Ah, I see what she did there, she asked an innocent question to get him to talk about his mom.  And he does, at length.  Except that she died when he was so little, he had no memory of her at all.  To him, it's normal not to have a mom.  I think this makes Urabe a little sad.  So after giving him his daily dose, she asks what he's doing next Sunday, and since he's free, she proposes that they go visit his mom's grave together.

That Sunday, as Tsubaki heads out, he reflects that Urabe sure asks for some strange things sometimes, like this trip to the grave.  There are some other odd ways of thinking going on here, like how because they're NOT wearing school uniforms, it's more like a date.  I had no idea that the uniform provided so much important context.  The outfit she shows up in shocks Tsubaki, who is dressed very casually.  HE likens it to her dressing up for a party.  It causes him considerable angst that I really don't get.  He does think the outfit is pretty, but he doesn't get why she's wearing it.

At the grave, Urabe makes her offering, and SubDesu badly blows the line.  Aside from the flowers, she's brought bacon wrapped meat rolls, which according to HorribleSubs, she learned to make from Oka-san.  Oka is known for having 11 different ways of preparing bacon.  SubDesu translates it as okasan, Mom, and mistakes meat for vegetables, which isn't even close.  This is why I like getting both translations, because they both make mistakes that the other catches.  Next time I'll keep score....

After paying her respects, Urabe gets up and starts explaining to Tsubaki why she's dressed up like this.  It's because this is the first time she's "met" his mother, and she wanted to look pretty for her.  Tsubaki is rather stunned to hear that she thought it through like that.  She asks him what his mother was like, but he really can't remember her.  He can't even remember how he felt when she died.  But Urabe proposes an experiment.  She puts his hand on the grave marker, and tells him to keep it there while they both exchange saliva.  This is something new, and he balks a little.  But in a somewhat overwrought scene, as he gets to put his finger in her mouth, he thinks about how soft her lips are, and what the inside of her mouth feels like, and think I don't need that vocabulary.... (I think SD wins this round by translating it as "Moist" instead of HS's "Slimy".)  But they sample each other, and Urabe starts flowing tears.

While he got an amazing feeling from her, she explains that what she got was the impression that he may not remember himself.  That when his mother died, he was crying, but that his life has been full of love from his family members, and she wants to be like that to him in the future too.

Roll the series end theme as they walk out of the cemetery.  Disappointing that SD didn't get the lyrics (HS never tries).  Tsubaki reflects that it was kinda weird and a little inappropriate for them to be swapping spit in front of his mother's grave, but her reply was just wonderful, that it couldn't be helped, because they're going to be doing even more inappropriate things in the future.

And in a final dose of symbolism, we see that the cherry blossoms are just starting to bloom, and a butterfly is fluttering around, landing in a flower... just like the one in the sex dream Tsubaki had in the opening of the first episode....

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Mysterious Girlfriend X Ep. 12

This was the perfect episode for this series. Funny, sensitive, and for once Tsubaki gets it right. There's a lot more we learn about Urabe, and it comes to a very nice ending.

The opening is hilarious. There is, of course, fallout from the stunt in the vacant classroom at Hoshinome Girls School, as Oka's fascination with and admiration for Urabe goes into overdrive. To start, she's brought out a piece of cardboard and a pair of scissors, wanting to see again her amazing move that shredded her cardboard robot costume. Urabe refuses, insisting it's not some kind of performance. But Oka still wants to talk about it, insinuating that it must be hard on poor Tsubaki, having seen her naked, he must be imagining her naked body all the time now. This embarrasses Urabe, but it's only the beginning, as Oka shows us evidence of what she was doing between the time Urabe stopped her from interfering and the time she pointed out Tsubaki's fallen blindfold. Apparently while she did have enough of a conscience to put down the camera when it looked like Hayakawa might be getting her taste into Tsubaki, once Urabe took over the situation, what's a nosy shutterbug to do? She pulls out the photo she took of Urabe sitting naked on the school desk, and tells her what a beautiful body she has. Urabe is scandalized, and tries to get the picture from Oka, who won't give it up. Finally Urabe jumps up from the bench, and gives Oka her first exposure to her infamous Panty-Scissors. The photo goes poof. And Oka instead of being properly full of fear, is amazed. Her fascination even extending to the point of lifting Urabe's skirt to look at how she'd stashed the scissors. Poor Urabe is totally stunned, unable to deal with the diminutive sex-obsessed powerhouse.

(And yes, Mr. Duck, you must watch this. It's the funniest two minutes in the entire series. Now how can I make Draft the default status?)

After the opening though, we see that Oka was at least right about one thing. Poor Tsubake can't get the vision of a naked Urabe out of his mind, and every time he's with her, he can't help but picture what she looks like under he clothes. Walking home from school with a continuous blush, he thinks about this and how painful it is to resist his urge to glomp her. Urabe picks up on his distress, and asks him, so of course, he denies everything. He should know better, because after she gives him his daily dose, she ask if she can try his. He panics and says no, but where would the story be if people respected other people's personal limits? Using the techniques of distraction she learned from Oka in that track and field episode, she points off into the distance making a shocked sound and he looks, and with her supreme speed, she dashes around him and pokes her finger where he doesn't want it. Unable to stop her, Tsubaki watches as she tests his saliva, and suddenly, she's aroused. She ask him why, and he runs off instead of answering her.


The feeling lasts until she gets home, when she recalls the evil little thought-worm Oka planted in her mind at the opening - Tsubaki must be thinking of her naked all the time. "He really is perverted, isn't he?" she realizes.


There is probably some kind of feedback going here. The next day at school, he actually starts hallucinating that he can see her naked....


However, Urabe's impeccable aim is a little off, and she is utterly horrified as a tiny trickle of blood appears on Tsubaki's forehead. While Tsubaki thinks it's no big deal, Urabe is incredibly upset that she actually injured him, begging his forgiveness and insisting that she take him home and treat the wound so it doesn't scar.


At Urabe's apartment, she sends him to wait in her room while she gets the first aid supplies. As she gets them, she spies a picture on a table, and decides to engage in a little target practice, shredding the picture, but then, the curtain behind it falls to the floor as well (How's she going to explain that to her mom and dad, if they ever appear?). This failure of her power causes her some angst.


Tsubaki, meanwhile, sitting on the floor in Urabe's room is going through some angst of his own, simply from being there and remembering how he conducted himself on his last visit (episode 8). But again, he can't resist checking out her bed. The pillow is somewhat damp (which is pretty amazing considering it's probably been 8-10 hours since she got up), so of course he sniffs at it, and it smells sweet.


Urabe comes in just then with the first aid kit, and as she's treating him, she explains that normally she's very accurate with her scissors, but today she hurt him, and she's very sorry. Tsubaki says it's nothing, but asks if there's any reason her aim is off. She replies that she had a strange dream, and that may be why. Tsubaki asks about it, but she doesn't reply so in a rare fit of honesty, he admits to checking out her pillow and asks if that's connected to her dream. She turns red and can't face him. But then, she offers him a taste, and when he takes it, he feels dizzy and sees her naked again. (He might not have figured it out, but it says to me that the strong vision he got that got him in this fix actually came from her imagining herself naked, which is one of the things that arouses her). Feeling the urge to hug her again, he tries to stagger out, but she insists that she finish dressing his wound. But when she stops him, he sees her naked again.


After the break, picking up where they left off, seeing Urabe naked, and not wanting to make the same mistake, he shoves her away, and she stumbles and falls on the bed. Realizing that was a bad reaction, he dashes towards her but plants a foot in the first aid kit and trips. Now about to fall on her, and knowing how bad that would be, he twists at the last moment and faceplants directly into her bedpost. This is not much of an improvement.


Urabe is very concerned about his well-being, as she has been the whole time. As he explains that he changed course so as to not land on her, she gets up and hugs his face to her bosom and says that if he's about to get hurt, it's okay to throw himself on her. The moment over, she realizes she needs some ice for his forehead. (In this case, the HS sub makes more sense, because she says he got a lump on his forehead from the impact, while SD says "large scratch").


Finally finished with her ministrations, she sees Tsubaki off at the door, again apologizing for all the injuries she's caused him that day. Tsubaki brushes it off, but then asks her again about the dream. She admits that he was in it, but refuses to tell him any more. But I guess confession is good for the soul, because she tests her aim again, and the curtain behind it is spared this time. Laying back on her bed, she says that the odd feeling in her head went away after she hugged Tsubaki. Okay, substitute hugs for confession above.... She rolls over, and she smells the scent of her dream on the pillow, and admits that even though she chastises Tsubaki for being horny, she may be just as bad. Now I want to know what her dream was....


The encounter that evening surely fueled Tsubaki's dreams. He dreams that he's chasing Urabe down the alleys of the weird city that is the landscape of his dreams. She's dressed in a red bunny suit, and when he finally catches up with her, she's in the middle of a circus ring pounding out Mochi in the traditional manner, with a giant mallet and a hollowed out stump. (For those not conversant in Japanese folklore, the Japanese don't see a man in the moon, but the image of a rabbit pounding Mochi, which is made by hammering cooked rice until it's an even paste.) As she pounds, blobs of the paste escape and turn into wriggling chibi Urabe figures, and soon, there are enough to dance in rings around him, before they pile in on him smothering him (in the nicest way possible) with their enormous Mochi breasts.  He wakes up clutching his pillow and recalling how soft Urabe's breasts are.  I was thinking about that kid's joke about dreaming about eating a giant marshmallow and waking up to notice your pillow is gone.


That day at school, Ueno shows up sporting a bandage on his forehead too. Why? Because the day before, Oka insisted on cutting his bangs, and from the flashback, she wanted to do it Urabe-style, and it went very badly. Ueno asks about Tsubaki's head, and he merely says he fell. Ueno points out that the bandage looks a little old, and should be changed, but fortunately, he has a LOT of cut gauze. Why? Because in another flashback, Oka insisted on treating the wound, and had him hold up gauze while she attacked it with scissors, so he has a lot of scrap gauze. "I wonder where she got that idea?" Ueno ponders. Tsubaki declines.


Just then, one of the plain, nearly generic girls in the class, Suwano, comes up because she needs to take him to the teacher's lounge for something related to a career survey they're on the committee for. She notices his bandage is coming loose, and before he can stop her, she tears it off and replaces it with a band-aid she's got. Urabe isn't happy to witness this. Neither is Ueno, who's stuck with a double-handful of gauze clippings.


In the hallway, Tsubaki demands the bandage back, much to Suwano's confusion.

Later, when Tsubaki meets Urabe on the bridge for the walk home, she notices that he's replaced the band-aid with the original gauze, and he says the sweetest thing in reply. He says that he thought it would heal faster with the bandage he got from her. She gave it to him because she cared, so he'll wear it as long as possible. (SD: "I'd wear it forever.")


So, when they get to the parting point and she gives him his daily dose, there's a quiet moment, and he hugs her. And after another few seconds, the poor conditioned boy freaks, afraid of another attack for hugging her. But she staves off his panic by saying that this time the hug was HER idea (And obviously the urge was transmitted by the pheromones in her saliva). It's a nice change. And every little bit of progress means that much more to him.

Posted by: Mauser at 02:55 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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