Seeing as how there's nontrivial overlap between the Nadia and Evangelion soundtracks since they come from the same artists only a few years apart as I understand it... That would probably fit well?
There's a "dragon breath" joke in here somewhere but i have neither the will nor skill, and have way too much...well whatever it is that prevents someone from being crass and the like, to even try to find it. Someone else is going to have to do it.
More than nontrivial. The original draft of the Eva series proposal had mention of the main characters finding the sunken remains of an Atlantean starship of the previous series (which, to make a long story short, one of them was refit to be the "Nautilus").
Asuka: Oh, yeah. Ask him if Robert Rankin did make more sense in English. Shinji: No idea who that is, but okay. Shinji: He says, "Hell no. That guy did way too many drugs in college." And apparently Mari really likes his books too.
Having partied with the man a couple of times at the Sci Fi Weekender, I assure you, he didn't stop after college. It's embarrassing when a guy twice your age can outlast you on the dance floor. At least he didn't make a prat of himself like Craig Charles did while DJing under the influence both times I saw him at the Weekender.
I miss the glory days of that con. It's been going downhill since Rankin stopped attending.
So, this is incomplete and unpolished, but I thought you lot would like to see some evidence of progress so here's the first real chapter of "Mari and the Literature Club". With some incomplete but promising commissioned art courtesy of someone who goes by "Marvellyous" on Discord.
She'd had the nightmare again. She was trapped in a game, or a book, or a visual novel. Everyone around her wasn't real, except the boy who was playing: Sometimes it was Taiku, sometimes it was just a random person playing/reading/whatever... But she was a minor character, so no matter what she did she couldn't get his attention until she started messing with the text/code and getting rid of the other girls... But then he got angry, or scared, and deleted her... And then she woke up.
There was probably some kind of symbolic meaning to all that: Anxiety about being a gaijin girl in an almost 100% Japanese school. The sense of dislocation from having no family, no identity except what she'd carved out for herself since arriving here. The constant nagging worry that nobody really saw her as one of us... And yet it was so weirdly specific, and vivid, and consistent. What did any of that mean?
"Monika? You awake in there? Your alarm's been going off for ten minutes!"
Monika Salvato shook herself, mentally, and silenced the alarm. "I'm alright, Ms Zhang. Just a little distracted."
"Alright," her caretaker replied, a little uncertainly. "But don't hang about, breakfast's about to be served."
"On my way." Monika swung her legs out of bed. "Coffee now, existential crisis later," she told herself.
A cup of coffee and a slightly ecclectic breakfast of miso soup and a toasted bagel and cream cheese helped her ground herself. Twenty minutes later, a much more clear-headed Monika shut her bedroom door behind her and finished towelling off her hair. The used towel went to the laundry basket, her dressing gown to its hook behind the door, and she sat down at the dresser to... well, to dress. White blouse, teal pinafore dress, a red ribbon at her collar (which helped shed the persistent feeling she should be putting on an Argyle sweater and a dress skirt instead) and her favourite hairbow, then some nice sensible tights...
"Fuck!" she hissed, quietly. as the seam that had been threatening to rip for a while finally let go. "Guess today's a zettai day."
Having achieved just enough thigh-gap to be noticeable if Taiku was paying attention but not so blatant that Sayori would pick up on it (she hoped!), Monika made sure her books and laptop were in her bag along with her inside shoes and headed out of the front door just ahead of the rush.
If there had been one small upside to Second Impact, it had been a substantial boost in funding and respect for Japan's social and child welfare system. Once upon a time the idea of needing such a thing had been considered vaguely improper, and anyone who found themselves a client of it... Well, they were never officially treated differently but somehow they often seemed to coincidentally get picked last for university places or office jobs along with ethnic Koreans and burakumin and people who weren't really our sort of people. But with the global climate and the global economy in a race to see which could collapse first and wars kicking off over the remaining sources of fuel and water and good farmland that sort of thing seem to matter a lot less to most people. (And rather a lot more to a few, but thankfully the Diet had taken a lesson from the parts of Japan's history they tried not to talk about and come down hard on that before it could get started.) Who your ancestors were was suddenly a lot less relevant than what you could contribute to doing something about the country being thoroughly wrecked, partially flooded and slightly on fire. And one of the things that needed doing was looking after all these orphans, whose circumstances not even the "traditional family values" lobby could blame on their parents.
The upshot of all that being that the Tokyo-3 Municipal Child Welfare Residential Care Facility (no, the staff didn't know why they couldn't just call it an orphanage either) was an elegant, well-maintained building in a quite desirable residential neighbourhood within walking distance of the school, where Monika and a hundred or so children between the ages of four and seventeen lived in modest but comfortable conditions with a team of well trained and highly motivated carers and support staff. If Shinji or Rei were to visit her at home they would have been more than slightly jealous.
Sayori's house was a couple of streets away, about half-way between the orphanage and the school, and Taiku lived a bit further up the same street, so the three of them usually ran into each other in the mornings. Normally that was a good thing, but lately... Well, suddenly noticing that Taiku Tsuna really didn't live up to his name in more than one way had made things a bit complicated.
The exotic foreign girl and the childhood friend, both with a crush on the likeable regular guy. And I wonder why I have nightmares about being trapped in a dating sim, Monika thought wryly, as the other two rounded the corner and stepped onto the street she was walking along. "Hi you two!" she called out.
"Hi Monika," Taiku replied. "You look nice today." Yep, he'd noticed her thigh gap.
Sayori just mumbled something noncommittal, and started tugging Taiku away by his arm. Monika firmly quashed a stab of jealousy, partly because she didn't want Taiku to see it but also because the other girl actually looked pretty dazed. "Are you alright, Sayori?"
"Fine! I'm fine," she replied, a bit too hastily. "Just slept too long. Need a coffee."
A vision of Sayori walking a way from Taiku towards her house, then of Taiku gently opening her bedroom door, and... "What the hell?" And then he starts a new game, but instead of his quirky childhood friend Sayuri it's Monika, the pretty and popular girl from the athletics team who wants him to join her club...
"Monika? You spaced out for a sec there." Taiku looked concerned.
"Huh? Oh, sorry. Sayori's not the only one who's tired, I guess."
Monika let the others pull ahead of her so they wouldn't see just how rattled she was. That was how it started in the dreams. Sleeping in more, general low energy, losing interest in her hobbies... Hell, everyone in the orphanage got the talk about those warning signs and what to do about them, even without the nightmares she'd be a little concerned.
And that little voice at the back of her mind saying, You're not really hurting anyone, just editing a .chr file in a VN..., it could go be fruitful and multiply with itself. Doing awful things to NPCs was one thing but Sayori was most definitely a person.
Yup, we're totally getting into mind-eff-territory here. Both for the characters and us readers.
I'm betting there's some AT-field erosion going on here.
A vision of Sayori walking a way from Taiku towards her house, then of Taiku gently opening her bedroom door, and... "What the hell?"
And then he starts a new game, but instead of his quirky childhood friend Sayuri it's Monika, the pretty and popular girl from the athletics team who wants him to join her club...
"Monika? You spaced out for a sec there." Taiku looked concerned.
"Huh? Oh, sorry. Sayori's not the only one who's tired, I guess."
Monika let the others pull ahead of her so they wouldn't see just how rattled she was. That was how it started in the dreams. Sleeping in more, general low energy, losing interest in her hobbies... Hell, everyone in the orphanage got the talk about those warning signs and what to do about them, even without the nightmares she'd be a little concerned.
And that little voice at the back of her mind saying, You're not really hurting anyone, just editing a .chr file in a VN..., it could go be fruitful and multiply with itself. Doing awful things to NPCs was one thing but Sayori was most definitely a person.
Your signature indenting style went awry here. Oddly enough, it's back in my edit box, but gone again in my preview. Seems that whatever you use got replaced with spaces, somehow.
White blouse, teal pinafore dress, a red ribbon at her collar (which helped shed the persistent feeling she should be putting on an Argyle sweater and a dress skirt instead) and her favourite hairbow, then some nice sensible tights...
"Fuck!" she hissed, quietly. as the seam that had been threatening to rip for a while finally let go. "Guess today's a zettai day."
The literature club arc will certainly be interesting, that's for sure.
