When Nodoka decides that her husband's idea to take her child on a life long training journey to make them a "Man among men" is a no-go, a fight ends up breaking the married couple apart, a decision that ended up being the right choice as just a few years later it comes to Nodoka's attention that her child may not even be her son at all, but her daughter.
Genma however isn't as accepting as he decides to kidnap the child and take her on a training journey anyway. Ten years, two more kidnappings, and a curse later, and Ranma has the body she wants, but isn't allowed to have it as her father drags her into an engagement. But maybe her new fiancee is exactly who she needs to get away from her father once and for all.
Paragraaaaaaaaphs!
Pro tip of the day: err on the side of shorter paragraphs instead of longer. The paragraphs early on are long, rambling, and could easily be split into shorter ones, and should for better readability. The sentences are also prone to running on, too. Oh, and the dialogue tags are badly formatted in that they're not attached to the same person speaking.
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By: unkillablemage
Aria dreams to be a star, to stand on a stage and bare her soul to a cheering crowd.
She wants the Glitz. The glamor. The ecstatic highs and harrowing lows. She wants it all⋆✴˚｡⋆
A difficult prospect considering her... lack of humanity.
Or body.
But if a rogue AI wants to make it big anywhere? Night city is the place to be.
As long as she doesn't get caught. Easy.
Right?
Chapter 17 is where I decided I was going to be following this fic and keeping it on the list. That's the chapter where Aria, hired for infosec for a robbery job, gets around the requirement to be physically present for the briefing by
hacking into the leader's cybernetics and projecting herself into his cybernetic eyes. So we get a scene from the guy's perspective and that wonderful stomach-dropping moment where he realizes this fact, clued in
solely by the fact he had backup with eyes on the diner who
couldn't see Aria's avatar. It's a wonderful moment that really gets across how terrifying an unshackled AI is in Night City.
And the chapter 18 starts with Aria freaking out about the digital environment she had to be in to pull it off.
That contrast between Aria's naive, completely-unaware-she's-a-weirdo behavior and the fact that she's an AI and everyone is fucking terrified of her doesn't come up often enough. One of the few critiques I have of the fic is that before Aria fries herself and is forced to rely on her friends to get repairs we don't have nearly enough scenes from outside perspectives, especially when the fic is very strictly third-person limited and as such so much emotion is hidden from Aria. But man, whenever it happens, it hits it out of the park.
Then there's the more recent chapters, which are balls-to-the-wall tense as you slowly realize
this is when Aria's reliance on software kludges and ignoring her CPU damage is going to bite her. We follow her as she guides Solei, as she slips more and more into the machine instead of Aria, and you pray,
pray, that what you know is coming doesn't come. But of course it does. It's been signposted for a long-ass time.
Those are the two high points of the fic. But the rest is pretty darn good. It's a classic setup of "naive newcomer shows up, has enough personal power to not get ground down into cynicism". Aria has an effect on people, reawakening friendly altruism in people who'd long thought it dead, brings them back to the days where they had hopes and dreams and ideals. I am still waiting for the actual idol part to kick in more frequently.
One last word. Obviously, this is on the list. But the author has been posting this fic to SV to basically no response. Granted, that's because it's a crosspost from SB and all the chapters have come in the last two weeks, but dammit, I'm asking y'all to go, read, and comment so he's not screaming into the void.
Takamachi Nanoha might not have been an ordinary girl, but she still did her best to be one, going to school and making friends with other girls her age. However, her world is forever changed one night when twenty-one mysterious artifacts fall from the sky.
A chance encounter with one of them draws Nanoha into a world of magic, and she is thrust into a battle for a set of wish-granting artifacts of unimaginable power. However, Nanoha is not an ordinary girl, and her ability to make friends should not be underestimated.
Okay, the Jewel Seeds being Intelligent Devices that can communicate is an interesting concept, but the story ends up in the same place the original did by Chapter 3 and Chapter 2 is marred by a long round of exposition. Which is a pity, because I'm desperate for good Lyrical Nanoha content.
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