This omake was pretty damn sweet.
I put extra effort into it to try to spawn conversation in the thread. The longer this thread gets, the more likely people who would otherwise be on the fence are to give the story a shot and become readers, because it seems more popular and thus less likely to be totally cringe-worthy.
Also it would inflate LuciD's ego and possibly get him in here to call me out on things I got wrong thus further informing us about the world so we can PLOT! Which is the most fun activity after "Playing Dwarf Fortress the third time".
What is up with Yumika in your headcanon? Or at least in the omake version of reality?
I suspect that since she can morph into and act like any individual she wants, she doesn't have a 'core' personality (leaving her unable to experience genuine emotions)... but I can't remember if there is a name for a condition/entity like this.
I was trying to be vague, but yeah, for the purposes of the omake, I assumed Yumika's power is basically to perfectly shift personalities. She doesn't just
put on Evil Yumika, she
becomes Evil Yumika. She, in fact, is masks all the way down, with no real core to speak of. It's not that she's emotionless so much as that her emotions don't have a regular source, so they come out as clay to Shinohara's senses. Shinohara can
eat, because the emotions are there and real, but they don't taste right to her because they're "sourced" wrong.
When I say masks all the way down, too, I mean it. My impression is that Yumika is
100% acting. No core personality, no little man in the center, no hollow heart - it's
all masks, laying and shifting and moving on top of one another. None of it more fake or more real than the others. Kind of like a hivemind, except one person. That's the sort of Mystery I came up with for Yumika.
In reality she's probably just a succubus or something, which would be interesting in itself, but I have fun theorizing and got a bit out of control when throwing shit together.
Okay, should we get worried about SILAS being spelled in all caps? It's not a name, it's a designation. Like GLaDOS and SkyNET.
Big Sister really, really likes Silas!
Interesting choices for line breaks there. Narrative pauses inserted in phone chat?
Texting conversations are a bugger, because it's hard to make those small pauses really pop without calling them out in the text. and those go a long way to show someone struggling to come up with the words to say something, or being indecisive, or trying to invent a lie to avoid the truth, and such.
I also add those sort of line breaks myself in texts IRL. I make up for being terrible by avoiding txtspeak though.
These two lines make me want to introduce Big Sister to our girls just to see their dynamics. I especially liked Shinohara's insistence on calling BS a damned robot.
I fully support letting the Conspirators know about BS, that's why I initially wanted to hold the meeting in our apartment, where it's safe for her to show herself. I suppose this is a decent chance to vet Hana and Yumika for ties to undesirable groups like the Chaos Insurgency or CotBG.
Last thing we need is for Hana to actually be obsessed with converting all life to machine form and so she actually tries to kidnap Big Sis and do creepy stuff to her. Honestly Yumika being Chaos in that case would be the more minor issue.
Wait, what? Only Silas can give such an order, but who would he try to protect her from? It's not like she is in trouble just for being what she is.
Is that conspiracy stuff? Well, that's terribly invasive if you ask me. Especially when done by a digital relative of a person you have a secret crush on.
The not-really-canon there is that Silas asked Big Sis to "protect them like she protects him". He's not really fully cognizant of how spooky that is, but BS prefers to just do as he says so while she grumbles she does spy on Yumika and Hana.
...and you can just tell that kindness was never programmed into her. She is making that effort all on her own.
Strangely, that may be the most endearing part of the omake for me. Coupled with her parting words.
Goddamit, Big Sis, why do you have to be so lovable!?
Shinohara flipped all the Silas flags but then denied the route, so she started down the Big Sister route by default and now is rethinking her life choices.
And I love the idea of a lovable but fucked in the head robot who's really just a benevolent Skynet. I'm not a SilaSis shipper (I obviously support Emotional Tacos) but that doesn't mean I can't find Big Sis to be fluffy or cute.
