Friday Update #32: "Cross My Palm With Silver" (Patreon)

The quote of this Friday Update's title comes from an interview from famous (and infamous) science fiction writer Harlan Ellison for the film Dreams With Sharp Teeth and is about how writers should be always be paid for their work. It's something I firmly believe in, not just for myself, which is why I insist on paying (and overpaying) for any writing commissions from other artists.

I later coaxed Nimue (whose DeviantArt you should definitely check out if you like gender bender writing) into taking $50 for an idea I had after seeing a cute image of Yukine Chris from Symphogear (by the way, watch Symphogear) bashfully taking a mirror selfie.

Hey folks, sorry for the delay on this Friday Update. I originally wasn't planning on doing one this week, but I already typed of some of this up for a 4chan reply and figured I might as go all the way. As my DeviantArt page shows with its two most recent captions, I am exceptionally easy to trick into writing things as my ADHD medication kicks in.

Source: writing by myself (CaptainCaption), image by Kanta on pixiv.
This one wasn't me being tricked, but Skadi from Arknights is my wife and I love her as much as Chance the Rapper loves his wife; plus, I've had MarineLand park at Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada on my mind ever since an entertaining YouTube video about how weird and mismanaged the place is played in the background while I was working on the game, and a loose "Damn, they put cat ears on a whale?" thought wouldn't leave my brain.

Source: writing by myself (CaptainCaption), image by ikemeru19 on pixiv.
This one was someone asking for a brief "caption this!" challenge (which is usually a sentence or two), but I found myself a few hundred words in before I realized what I was doing.
Look, I operate on vibes, okay?

These are what my two brain cells do all day. Don't feel sorry for them though, because they are having a great time.

As we begin, let's keep that "trick into writing things" thing in mind as it'll be important, because I'm basically one of the kids from Mark Twain's fantastic The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that the eponymous protagonist tricked into whitewashing a fence for him. I firmly believe writers should be paid for their work, but sometime, if you put the carrot in front of me, I might just start chasing after it on my own volition, and you can't pay someone for work they tricked themselves into doing something they wanted to do on their own free will, right?

So a friend I know from the general sphere of TG writing on DeviantArt (whose name I will not be disclosing as I am not advertising for them) messaged me this absolutely cursed thought one day while spitballing ideas for a story they had been planning to write of re:Dreamer Zach using the player editor to instead turn his body into the tall and muscular female body of Barghest from Fate/Grand Order (hot lady knight simps, represent!):

Of course, I, being the oversharing rambler that I am, mentioned this to everyone in the server:

I was not expecting most people to overwhelmingly like the idea:

It got to the point that it became a server joke, a funny "haha, wouldn't that be weird?" thing that was brought up fairly often, but y'know, mentioned in the type of way when someone talks about their kink to another person while trying to gauge their reaction to it:

And then a Sustainer requested it, meaning that I was going to have to do it someday:

I apparently need to remind people of this as this is only the fourth time someone has used the perk that's explained on the tier benefits on the page and when you become a patron, but Sustainers can in fact request things, although what you can request is based on how comfortable I am with it, how much you are asking me to do, how long you have been pledged, if it'll be expensive, and so on. I'll do my best to work with you to get something realized, but don't go asking me to write an out-of-place furry escapade when you've only been a Sustainer for a month.

I got weirdly motivated to start fulfilling this request on Sunday morning out of pretty much nowhere, much to the fanfare (and confusion) of the server.

These two messages by the same user sum up my thoughts on it pretty well.

So, before I get into the spoiler-laden explanation for what this "route" is, I need to give 2 disclaimers.

• There is not going to be any incest in this route or the rest of the game. Zach likely has an Oedipus complex to some degree (I mean, he basically turned himself into a younger, bustier version of his mom), but those are so intermingled with AGP brain worms that he'd feel revulsion if anyone ever explicitly mentioned that his hypothetical perfect woman looks so much like his mom; furthermore, his dad travels for work and the internet has more than enough fan fiction about trans women wanting to fuck their dads.
• I am currently aiming to make this "route" 20-30 minute long, but it'll really just be an idle daydream from Zach. When the sprites for Zach's mom are made (and if Sandra or another Sustainer throws more money at this insanity), the route will be expanded to a longer route about an hour in length that can happen in canon.

Okay, with that out of the way, let's get into the spoilers (if you do not want spoilers, scroll past the quoted text until you see the placeholder image for Zach's mom):

As the above screenshot shows, Zach is going to have the option to choose his mom as his re:Dreamer accomplice during the main route selection option for partner, and he'll immediately think "Why the hell did I think that?" before daydreaming about what would happen if he called her and told her the details of what happened to him. When this route is canon, Zach will sarcastically joke to Ai that he's such a loser that he has to ask his mom for help but Ai thinks that's a great idea and locks his choice in, but for now, the daydream glosses over that detail.

Upon proving that he is who he says he is over the phone, Zach's mom rushes over to the campus on the north side of Portland, OR, which is 30 minutes north of the house in Lake Oswego, OR. She's understanding and sympathetic towards Zach at first, but once Ai forces herself to be introduced and his mom finds out what re:Dreamer really is, she snaps Zach's phone in half, not realizing that this means it's game over for Zach changing back. Luckily, Zach's memories stay intact because getting his phone destroyed isn't something that the memory wiper would trigger on (it only triggers on uninstallation from the phone or the game being discovered by someone who shouldn't know about it while in range of the phone microphone; I have a lot to say about this latter point, but that's deep into spoilers for the game and beyond the scope of today's Friday Update).

Even though Zach told her he had no idea what he was getting into with re:Dreamer and admits that its immoral, Zach's mom is still mad at him. Partly out of punishment and partly out of not believing Zach could finish school keeping his body a secret, she disenrolls him from university and forces him to get a job at home as she teaches him how to live as a woman; plus, she always secretly wanted a daughter instead, and with a "mother knows best" attitude, she'll try to convince Zach he always wanted to be a daughter too (not gaslighting through gaslighting, but by being so much nicer to her daughter than she ever was to her son).

"Zoe" (as a bit of cosmic irony, this would have been the name Zach would have been given had he been born female) is first introduced to anyone who asks that she is her mom's niece and Zach's disappearance was him abandoning school to go on another sabbatical, but her story starts to develop cracks pretty swiftly, and a small number of people end up either being told who Zach really is and what happened to him.

As time goes on and "Zoe" spends more time living as a woman, and depending on player choices, she'll either be happy with her new life because she never realized she was an egg and is discovering this new side to her, kind of likes it but feels like shouldn't, is relatively neutral about it, dislikes what happened to her but doesn't see the point of trying to change her fate, or actively hates what's happened to her to the point that she tries to humor notions of being FTM before realizing how steep of an uphill battle that is.

And we're clear.

As a reminder, here's the World Information entry for Zach's mom:

Source: suiroh (shideoukami) on pixiv.

Samantha Taylor, Zach's mom, is a stay-at-home housewife who holds down the fort while her husband travels for work and her son is off at college. She's an overprotective mother with an unspecified anxiety disorder that has only been exacerbated since she's been at home by herself.

For as much as Zach fears her, she was actually far more frightening before he was born, and married life with a single child has softened some of the razor-sharp edges of her character.

While she'd never incriminate herself, she was madly in love with his father in college; however, she wasn't alone in having romantic feelings for Zach's dad. What set her apart from the competition was that she was willing to take extreme measures in love to win his heart.

In other words, she's a yandere who "disposed" of the trash around her beloved (or at least she gives that impression).

While Samantha Taylor's body isn't as well-endowed as her daughter's (largely due to Zach's edits in re:Dreamer's character editor), the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree. Zach inherited her distinctive red eyes and black hair, as well as a good portion of her natural attractiveness. She's 157 cm/5'2" (contrast with the slightly taller 160 cm/5'3" height Zoey has) with a youthful appearance that has only recently started to fade.

Zach often worries that he shares more in common with her than her eyes or hair color, such as missing a few gears in his head that more "normal" people have. Now that he has a female body, certain things in his physiologically female brain have been rewired, a change that is only going to become more apparent as Zach adapts to his new female body chemistry. Zach's typical smart-ass personality and sarcastic jokes have started to become a scary-ass personality and chilling outbursts.

Zach's mom is going to be an important character, but much like Ai, she's been tied to a phone for as long as the game has been going. This, of course, is because her sprites are noticeably absent. I thought about having Myumi draw some soon as his queue with us for new outfits is nearly finished, but c'mon, I just have to have TiltSHIFT (Zoey's sprite artist) draw her because they're a mother/daughter pair who are written as being very similar in appearance.

Unfortunately, TiltSHIFT is going to be occupied with making those replacement CGs to the placeholder ones currently in use for the next few months, but he's progressing at a steady enough pace that Zoey's mom should see real sprites in the next, say... 8 months?

He may be glacially slow at time, but his art is damned good.

In all honesty, I am having a lot more fun writing the mom route than I thought I would. I usually take a 3-to-4-day break upon a release to unwind, chill, and not do much for the game beyond urgent tech support, but something about the writing for the 0.10.8 release got me fired up, but I didn't take that at all this update cycle. I just got right back to working.

I'll full admit there was slump with the inexcusable 4-month delay for the 0.10.0 release kind of took the wind out of my sails... and my lungs, as I recently got diagnosed with viral asthma from a cold in November 2022 and have started a long steroids course to fix the persistent coughing I've had for over half a year now, but as some might know, I can write like a demon if the creative fire burns enough in me. For examples, re:Dreamer got its first release from being a concept to a brand-new game with about 70 minutes of reading in less than 3 weeks, and I wrote most of Student Transfer 2.0's Connie route in a month and a half.

I'm feeling that same boundless creativity right now, and I've done so, so much for this update when the development period is barely halfway done. The mom route (as it stands without the sprites for Zach's mom) is nearly done with 15 minutes of a desired 25 minute length, and I still have lots of energy to spare to wrap back to Britney's route after I finish that off.

I've also handed TiltSHIFT a wildly complicated design document (NSFW link warning) for the first of the alternatives to the Keisuke Day 1 dorm room sex scene that some of you had issues with (that's the sketch above), fixed a number of issues with the Zoey sprites (mostly outfit compatibility and a broken gloom layer on the newest expression), given skips for the arcade games in the Britney Day 2 arcade date if you've played those before (huzzah!), and have been working with a paid editor to correct some things in the script (there have been surprisingly few, but the game still needs constant checking that I don't have time to do).

0.10.9 is shaping up to be a damned big release, and it drops on Friday, July 29.

Until then!