Checking In 0.18.2, Round 4

Hey y'all, the update is very close to completion (I'd say less than 2 solid days of work). I debated even making another check-in given how little work remains, but I figured that 2 weeks of radio silence justifies one.

So, pretty much right after I posted the previous check-in, I ran out of Adderall for an entire week because my pharmacy really dragged its feet on filling my prescription. While I did get work done in that period (I had multiple 11-hour days) , a lot of it was what I loosely call "coffee fugue states" where I'd overload myself with caffeine to compensate for the lack of my ADHD meds, and then it'd be a dice roll whether or not I stayed focused, and if I did, what I would stay focused on, and I wouldn't really be aware of what the outcome was until 6 hours later when I waned out of the stupor.

I'm going to be honest with you folks: I'm a damned impatient person, and making a VN is a lot slower than just typing things, and sometimes I just want to put words to a text editor in faster ways.

In descending order, the best work/output ratios this game has are:

• Plaintext posts for Patreon (clack thock bang on keyboard = fast output; there's a reason why I can spend an entire day doing nothing but typing and feel like I got a ton done).

• World Information entries (this is because I have a big master design document and don't like retconning things, so I have to check a bunch of things before I commit to making something canon).

• Author's Notes (just text and 1 character's sprites to worry about means things are written quickly, and I usually don't have to think very hard about what I write).

• Art touch-ups (although this can vary based on what the task; for instance, fixing expressions takes a lot longer than fixing an outfit).

• Audio (this varies, because sometimes I quickly find exactly what I am looking for, sometimes that search takes a while, and sometimes I have to edit files to make them work or to make the music loop properly).

• Regular scenes (coordinating the writing, coding, C.H.E.A.T.S. branches, character expressions, animations, backgrounds, SFX, music, and other audio takes a lot of work, but I truly think it's worth it for how much all those parts being made together to work in harmony lets the presentation punch well above its weight class by being far more than the sum of its parts).

• CGs (it takes an astronomical amount of work to plan the scene out, make the CG references, give them to the artist and discuss it to make sure things are understood, check the artist's work to give feedback, polish and adjust the final CGs, turn them into PNGs, code them into the VN, and reference the files as I write the scene since I don't have the memory of their parts like I do with the sprites).

So, during that unmedicated period, my ADHD did kind of fly off the rails, and while much of the overall trajectory of my focus was on work, it often wasn't what I wanted to work on or had planned to work on.

For instance, I had a relevant Author's Note to explain a throwaway line of Z trying to be clever (yes I use Z here because the gender can be ambiguous) and why Samantha wasn't enjoying her child geeking out about phones with a phone store employee.

But then that spiraled into:

• Explaining what a burner was, since some readers might not know that term.

• Me talking about how nobody I know (even the really weird libertarians who are uber-concerned about privacy to the point of destroying their smart TV's circuitry before disposing of it) used burners because they suck so much and that anyone in America who cares about cellular privacy who isn't doing something illegal or having an affair just uses an Android instead.

• Me complaining about the issues with my Pixel 8 and why they were bad enough to prevent me from switching my phone from my aging iPhone 11 to it.

• Explaining that phones were now on my list of "items I must try out in person before buying" alongside shoes, headphones, and computer mice.

• Me pausing and looking up if "computer mouses" was a valid pluralization, as I vaguely remembered seeing it before, finding out it was, and explaining it ("mouses" is less common but acceptable for the computer peripheral, while "mice" is the only acceptable pluralization of the animal).

• Me yapping about the mice I've used (historically, Razer DeathAdders, but I recently got a Razer Basilisk).

• Talking about how I used the Basilisk's thumb clutch as a reverse "dead man's switch" where the mouse won't operate unless I hold that down, which I added because until recently my CBS hand would frequently tremble and jerk my mouse hand (my coordination has improved in recent months, but my right arm and shoulder are just now in a ton of pain most days).

• Complaining how HRT shrinking my hands meant reaching that thumb clutch has become harder, so even if HRT is responsible for my improved coordination, that clever solution wouldn't have stayed viable.

• Me joking that I should probably put it back in anyways since my cats chew on the mouse cable and push it around (and making the obvious joke).

• Me gushing about how cute my cats are but how they can also be very distracting since they keep crawling on my keyboard, napping on my mousepad, covering my arms and preventing me from moving my right hand, and figuring out what the mouse cursor is because they love swiping at my monitor to chase it.

• (Halfheartedly) joking that I should try an ambidextrous mouse, as I'll likely need on in the future and it can serve as a decoy for them now.

• Finally snapping out of the fugue state from how ridiculous that proposition was and explaining why this even happened.

Yeah, that's not what I would call productive work. Things like that happened a fair bit until my sister shared some of her old Vyvanse stash with me until I was able to get that Adderall prescription filled (although the Vyvanse had its own issues of making me work nonstop without breaks and hurting my hand with RSI and me forgetting to eat until I almost collapsed from hunger).

With the update ~90% complete, I set the game on "auto" with the default character-per-second and autoplay speed settings and timed how long it was with the "zoey_fully_realized" branch and got a runtime of 1:38:22 with a word count of 27,927.

Your mileage might vary based on your own reading speed, but that's fairly acceptable output for a bit over 2 months of work that took place during a move and me adjusting to a new lifestyle with new and more responsibilities; however, 37:08, or 38%, of that was the notes system, with one particularly long notes block being a whopping 2,971 words and lasting over ten minutes.

I personally think that block is entertaining, but I'm biased because I wrote it and selfish because I feel compelled to share myself while I still can, but even if I can blame unmedicated ADHD, coffee, and anxiety for that, I shouldn't. Making this game is therapeutic for me, but it needs to stop being my fucking therapy (or at least it needs to stop being my open therapy session). I had my selfish moment(s) of that oversharing therapy with the year+ of very personal Friday Updates, the 4th Anniversary Route, and a lot of the Author's Notes for the new Keisuke sentō scene. I need to stop yapping and ranting and just get over myself. Yes, my life is weird, interesting, and just kind of fucked, but it's not so weird and interesting that it deserved beating the dead horse of those points as much as I have, and it's probably not healthy for my mental state to focus so much on it.

For the sake of y'all and because I find the stats interesting, I do try to track my hours and publicly post them. If you're in the re:Dreamer Discord server (invite), you can search "from: captaincaption in: redreamer-chat has: image", "from: captaincaption in: redreamer-chat hours" or something similar to see those stats. You'll see that I'm hitting a good average for a 40-hour workweek (although this varies). It's just that my output is slower than it used to be (100-hour weeks were fun but very much not sustainable), more erratic than it used to be (depression, dysphoria, panic attacks over my declining health/fear of death, living on my own and doing more chores and I still don't have a great schedule for that), and more polished than it used to be (my presentation game stepped up hard sometime in early 2023, and while I love what's been made since, it took longer).

Making a VN by myself is just kind of slow, and there's always more work than I expect even for simple tasks. Something needs to change in the formula, be it my hours, my ability to work, or my quality, because at this rate this visual novel is never getting done (well, more than the usual statement on that).

I am working on improving my ability to work as I believe that is a higher priority than trying to force myself back to workweeks of over 60 hours since that's just trying to squeeze more out of a lemon when the person making lemonade isn't able to make it as well as they used to, I still have open wounds and cuts that already hurt by working on this game, and I don't want such a sour taste in my mouth.

I am on new antidepressants (which I sadly don't think are doing all that much), I am going to therapy, I am masturbating a lot less (I don't know how much scientific weight that "porn burns out your dopamine receptors" argument has, but it was clearly very unhealthy for me at the volume I was consuming), I have made my peripherals cause as little hand strain as possible, my workflow is set up to incentivize me to work by having it feel like a passion that spurs my imagination and creatively and not merely a job or something that I clock my brain out for, I'm following a schedule better than I have in years (thanks cats!), and I'm lightly exercising to improve my mood and self-perception to improve my health and keep the dysphoria more at bay (but yeah, it's always going to be there when my brain oscillates as it does).

I'm sure that as I keep putting my mind to it, I'll find more new ways to reduce stresses and things that turn what should have been a productive workday into a lackluster one or me having a mental breakdown and retreating to bed to shut my brain off, but I'm going to be painfully blunt with harrowing honesty: I am very sad, scared, and frustrated by my health and how few answers I have to treat the symptoms or deal with it after almost an entire decade; increasingly terrified of my death and possible senility/illiteracy as my health gets worse; frequently in severe pain in ways that remind me that my brain is rotting; trapped between simultaneous feelings of wanting to live more than anything and wanting to die more than anything; sad, hurt, and furious over how bad the last few years have been for me (especially the last 18 months) and how badly those I trusted treated me (and angry at myself for trusting those people or letting myself be treated that way); and still confused beyond belief when trying to answer the simple question of "who am I?" and frustrated that I either don't know the answer or that the answer keeps changing.

I may not know who I truly am, but I know I'm a sad, scared, and angry person who is very broken. I don't feel "brave" or "inspiring" or "strong" for enduring so much pressure and weight on my shoulders. I'm not Atlas. I feel cracked and even shattered by life, and I can only hold myself together so much given what's happened to me, what is happening to me, and what's still to come. I can only make so much peace with everything, but I think as a weird ADHD/OCD/et al bohemian that there's always going to be a bit of erratic chaos to my creative output no matter how much I try to minimize it.

All chaos and modesty aside, I am good at what I do (or at least I'm much better than I used to be when this project started) and I'm loathing any idea of sacrificing quality I know I can hit for quantity. This game has hit its stride with its characters and overall "character." I have firm plans for every route with the exception of chunks of the mom, alone, and "split" routes and like them enough to follow them. I like what the current style of the game is, and others have noticed how strong the presentation in this visual novel is (hi Natalie!). I want to maintain that high standard even if it's locking me into an unhealthy and unrealistic "I will get this game done my way or die trying" mindset, but I know some concessions have to be made.

Despite how unique the C.H.E.A.T.S. system is and how much it gives the game its specific flavor and fits in with the design ethos (loosely stated) of "players should be able to read the story they want to read with a character that feels a bit murky because identity and gender work like that until you observe and choose who you are and 'ambiguity' is a core keyword of this entire game," I am in the process of dialing back its use. It takes so much work for that system to shine, most players "fire and forget" with the system and miss out on extra content I put that work into, and as neat as it is it's ultimately just a bit of a gimmick, and I now have more confidence in my writing skills and don't feel like I need to fine-tune the game to be so personalized when I'm making a story that is already so personalized.

This doesn't mean that I'll be decommissioning C.H.E.A.T.S. by any metric, but it's going to be used less because it just doesn't make sense from a production standpoint to focus so much on an optional feature. I need to let the "therapy" answer feel like the big meaningful choice of the game (outside of the route choice) and not fine-tune the customized experience so much.

Another is the overall degree of polish. I refuse to budge on some things like making the backgrounds fit as best as I can, having fluid animations and matching SFX, and high polish to the sprites and the use of their facial expressions, but do I really need to spend so much time doing stuff like looping a song? Sure, it does make the scene more poignant and works with the themes and emotions of the writing, but I have 250 songs already and very few of them are "forever" songs that won't be replaced someday. Does this line of dialogue really need an Author's Note to clarify it and risk me going on an unnecessary tangent? Likely not, but in moderation it's fine. Do I really need to make this scene have variants, either from C.H.E.A.T.S. stats or menu choices? No, but I like what the "therapy" answer does for the game and I'm kind of stuck with bPoints as that was an ongoing Sustainer's request.

And with that segue, let's finally talk about this update now that it's almost done!

Fair warning, there are some spoilers ahead.

Like, a LOT of spoilers. Look how long this post is and how many images it has.

I mentioned this previously, but this update features a Sustainer request from a long-time patron and server member and with a fairly simple prompt of "give me a cameo of a carrier store employee meeting Zoey" that I was free to be creative on.

I chose to focus on three key areas:

1. How Zoey/Z/Zach responds to someone assuming they are (also) transgender.

There are different reactions for all the variants of how Z too their mom saying "I always wished you were my daughter and was disappointed you were my son," but I know most of you are here for the route where Z realizes that maybe they are a daughter after all.

2. Zoey/Z arguing over the spelling of the name Samantha wants her daughter to have.

There's more to this scene, but it both shows how weird it is for a parent to push not only her preferred name on her child but the spelling as well while also humanizing such overbearing behavior.

3. Z and Zoe geeking out about shitty cellphones.

There's more to this as both Z's are excited ramblers, Zoe is a former carrier store employee IRL, and Z knows enough about smartphone to have built their own, and Samantha has almost zero aptitude for technology and gets increasingly annoyed as the conversation continues because it's one of the few STEM fields she has nothing to contribute to.

I'd like to think I know my audience after almost 5 years at this, but while the writing ends with Z and their mom leaving the carrier store together on most of the player choices for how Z is now thinking of themselves, the one where Z is starting to think of themselves as Zoey has a very different outcome.

This is the first time Zoey has been called that name (or at least a form of that name) by somebody who isn't Ai or her mom, and like her reaction to realizing she might've been her mom's daughter all along, she tries to run away from her building feelings of panic and euphoria to find somewhere quiet to think.

After Samantha catches up to Zoey, she gets read like a book.

Samantha takes the opportunity to tease her daughter about it while revealing more (at least to the player) about how she and her husband interact with each other. It's an endearing disrespect for Zoey's boundaries even if it still does frustrate her.

Still, even if the ratio of it is completely off, Samantha does love her family, and she asks her daughter how she is doing, not because she's a glutton for knowledge who flexes her intelligence by wringing information out of people, but because she's a concerned mother who wants her child to be happy regardless of who they are.

The problem is, Zoey still doesn't really know who she is.

This is something I both personally understand and deeply relate to our unreliable narrator with, and I'm way further into my journey of realizing and accepting that I'm not who I thought I was. Zoey has only had a single day, to say nothing of everything else that has happened, like realizing that magic or something similar must exist as it's the only way to explain the transformation of her body and then suddenly being stuck in that body that's the opposite sex of the one she's always had.

That's an entirely unique experience whose closest real-life analogue is someone being intersex, and even that is not much of a match beyond the confusion of identity and bodily perception.

But... Samantha does understand, and it's not because she's a super-genius, a mind reader, or even that she's a mother talking to her child.

It's because she too knows what it's like to feel like she doesn't "deserve" to be a woman, to be consumed by this toxic notion that femininity and beauty were things associated with weakness and which should be avoided, to be bullied or shunned for her appearance and unable to find any pride in it, and to undergo a warp-speed reinvention as a woman because of necessity (for Zoey, because she's now stuck with this body and knows she isn't the guy she thought she was; for Samantha, because she fell in love with her husband at first sight and was so desperate to get his attention and affection that she forced herself to embrace her femininity and beauty).

It's a touching and unexpectedly vulnerable scene for both women, but Samantha also treats it as a pep talk and even comes up with a suggestion for Zoey to help her explore her recently-discovered femininity, and it's not a clothes store like Zoey assumes.

This is the second Sustainer request of the update (or the third, if you count the entire mom route as one, because it in fact started out as one and got expanded due to reader demand).

Beyond that prompt and asking for the specific stuffed animal to be an axolotl, I was left to my creative devices as Lilith never followed up with me when I asked her for more details, and I decided to take it in a few directions.

Firstly, I tried to advertise "hey y'all can throw me money to get your ideas in the game and not many of you have done that" in the Author's Notes but then realized as I was almost done with the pitch that the feature is Sustainer-only and you're either already pledging to the Patreon at the necessary tier or reading an unlocked release.

As a word of warning, this update marks going back to the normal release system of staggered releases with patrons getting early access and will be Sustainer-only for at least a month. I usually try to skip that if there was a long delay between releases, but I just moved into an apartment and am selfishly going to be begging for money a bit more than usually to make sure I can afford things. The game is still ultimately going to be free, but I'm putting that incentive of early access there to try to boost revenue as it used to hover just below $4,000 and it now hovers just over half that.

Okay, but actually firstly is Samantha actually having a pretty good reason for taking her daughter here.

She also brings up how Zoey has clearly been interested in going to one of these legally-distinct Build-A-Bear Workshops since she was a kid.

Samantha insists that Zoey never went because she suddenly decided she was too old to like stuffed animals and that they were too "uncool" and "unmanly" for Zoey to keep partaking in, but she doesn't quite hit the nail on the head with the underlying cause of that.

She decides to change tactics in a rather forceful way.

Literally "forcefully." And trust me, y'all. The animation here looks great.

Samantha is unapologetic and thinks she made the right call.

Zoey wholeheartedly disagrees, but she ultimately did get forced into doing something she's always wanted to do and decides to go along with it.

Samantha points out that Zoey knows too much about how this store works to not have looked a lot into that subject, intending to tease her, but this makes Zoey snap.

Zoey had a very good personal reason to never enter one of these stores, and realizing her mom is just going to keep disrespecting her boundaries, she reluctantly decides to share that lest her mom dig it out of her.

Zoey and Grandpa Kevin had an especially close relationship and stuffed animals were a common gift from the doting grandparent to what he and everyone else thought was his grandson. Zoey and Kevin knew her 9th birthday was going to be the last one this man who helped raise her (and that she always secretly considered to be her "real" dad). He'd made it no secret that he wanted to get his grandchild a really special gift she could hold and think of him with by trying to get Zoey a dog (this was before Zoey developed her fear of dogs), but Samantha rejected the idea out of hand due to her OCD. Zoey came up with the great compromise of going to a Building-Bears Workshop and building a stuffed animal with him that would last forever, but she never got the chance because she had to call it off when he kept getting sicker and sicker from his lung cancer as December 7th approached and was only holding on due to his stubbornness and refusal to sour the month of his grandkid's birthday by dying just before it.

Zoey made the right choice as Kevin wouldn't have the mobility for a birthday party at a mall at this point, but Zoey never working up the resolve to ask to go with him before his health got so bad is one of her bigger regrets with her grandpa. Samantha bringing such a personal secret out of her daughter in such a forceful way really hurt her. While Samantha apologies, Zoey doesn't accept it and stays visibly angry and upset.

What should have been a fun and lighthearted bonding experience for the daughter and mother loosely focused on Zoey finding a side to herself she had tried to abandon starts off on a sour and bitter note with Zoey's thoughts focused on painful memories of the past and the "parent" she wishes she could have gone to this place with instead of her mom and how much her losing him left a hole in her life that she knows her mom can never fill.

You know, "fill?" Like stuffing fills an empty stuffed animal?

This isn't exactly the "fluffy wholesome bonding time" that the patron requested, but she never got back to me and this is really the only way this scenario could work. Sustainer requests are not you putting a gun to my head and forcing me to put your exact idea into the game, they are me working with you to put your idea into the game in a way that is satisfactory for both of us; when I don't get the chance to work with the person making that request, I am left to my own devices.

Still, the visit does pick up after that, as Samantha...

...Distracts her daughter by whistling...

...Unexpectedly engaging after Zoey mentions politics by quipping back (Samantha is almost stubbornly apolitical)...

...Goading her daughter into talking about politics (and her sabbatical that clearly influenced her politics) (Zoey's overall take is that people are so selfish for not only not trying to fix the world, but not even trying to fix the world around them)...

...Very unexpectedly opening up about why she doesn't get involved with thinking about politics (it inevitably forces you to hate some people)...

...And then immediately blindsiding her daughter in a way that re-focuses her on the visit.

When I outline it all like this, this is clearly manipulative behavior, but it goes over Zoey's head... at least, in the moment.

For now, Zoey takes the bait and explains why the cheetah isn't a good choice by illustrating its issues, focusing mostly on its tail.

There's a lot more to this, but Zoey's clear passion for the subject pleases Samantha, as this was the side of her daughter she wanted to bring out of hibernation, but it also amuses her because after this Zoey tries to lie and say she only has this knowledge because she was such good friends with a girl who liked tailoring and sewing, but she immediately gets caught in her lie.

They eventually decide to only get one stuffed animal and share it, but Samantha's own enthusiasm prickles Zoey a bit.

Samantha suggests the axolotl as a compromise, and Zoey goes over to pick it up.

YES THAT'S RIGHT THERE'S A SPRITE FOR IT!!!

Caithiel (who has been crushing it with so much fan art for this game that he has his own Dropbox folder for fan art) previously drew K-Bear, Zoey's teddy bear gifted to her by her grandpa on the day she was born, and he offered to draw axolotls for the game and adjusted their line width to better fit TiltSHIFT's existing art style, and in 3 variants you can find in that Dropbox link.

He looks a bit Pikachu-ish, but I was planning on referencing how Build-A-Bear lets you make a Pokemon anyways, so it works.

I also made one for K-Bear, but now that I know how to do this, I could add this for any Pose A outfit and any future stuffed animal.

Anyways, Zoey gets goaded into revealing she instantly personified the axolotl as a "he"...

...And explaining why "he" would work well as a stuffed animal and she grows attached to the idea of getting the axolotl Samantha wants as the two banter.

It's not how to see how Zoey is acting very... affectionately toward this demo unit of the stuffed animal that she just picked up.

Zoey eventually caves, but much like the spelling of her name, it isn't enough for her mom, as she wants to choose the color.

Zoey tries to counter by asking her mom why she cares so much, but she counters back by showing how it's a relevant choice.

And now that Zoey has come up with the backstory, she has to get Alex.

But that's still not enough for Samantha, who wants to get a vote on the name as well.

Zoey unintentionally gives the perfect counter.

And here's me explaining the joke.

Now Samantha wants to try him out. Zoey at first watches her carefully, but they soon gush over him almost like he's a human baby.

Yes, of course I also made a sprite for Samantha with the axolotls.

Once again, I am drawing attention to how Zoey's "autistic" personification of the stuffed animals is sort of like her being a protective mother in her own right.

Notice the plural.

So... I myself always had a bit of a protective instinct, and while it's not on Z's level, I did play with a number of stuffed animals as a kid and very much cared for them. I'm a genderfucked person who realized that I am not the man I thought I was, and while that's been a whole dramatic saga, one of the parts that's usually been annoying is how I get pseudo-PMS symptoms (i.e., back pain, cramps, hot flashes, irritability, stronger and unpredictable emotions).

I also recently adopted two kittens.

Pequeño on the left, Ashton Cougar on the right.

They do this a lot, but I still love them.

uy/y,;8mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Pequeño says hello to y'all too.

My cycle has two notable peaks, and while I don't have these organs, one is correlated with menstruation, and the other with ovulation. The former sucks, but sometimes, the latter is amazing.

During it, if I'm fem (genderfluid, remember?), whatever protective instincts I have fully become maternal instincts. I don't just love these cats: I would kill to protect them and die if anything happened to them, I love them like children, and I turn into a sappy, smiling mess just from looking at them and become completely incoherent when they crawl on me. They're my handsome and special little boys and I love them so much my head spins, and I don't even care how embarrassing that is to say because it's the truth.

If Zoey is anything like her protective, overbearing, and loving mom (she is, whether she likes it or not), she is going to be floored the first time her menstrual cycle lines up with ovulation. I have to agree with Samantha: that's gonna be fun to write, seeing her be protective and maternal with her stuffed animals and either not realizing or not understanding why (sex ed was one of the very few classes she's ever gotten poor grades in).

Anyways, this is where the current writing ends, but I know what's next.

The actual Build-A-Bear experience is actually rather brief if you don't put any bells and whistles on the stuffed animal. Now that they're done bickering over what they're getting, the only remaining scenes for Zoey and Samantha are declining to get a sound chip (Zoey will mention Alex is probably this universe's version of a Pokemon), getting him filled at a "soft" level (and Zoey getting embarrassed as she has to hug Alex in front of an employee before he gets stitched up), skipping the clothes, and Zoey finally standing up for herself and putting her foot down on the spelling of her name on Alex's "birth certificate."

They check out, and Zoey is clearly happy with her purchase and even how she and her mom bonded, even if they were weird and awkward about it.

But then her mom offers to fix up Zoey's other stuffed animals once they're home and done with shopping (the last stop being clothes), and she somehow knows the name of the stuffed animal Zoey messed up trying to make after Kevin died when she offers to remake him (but admits she'll probably have to start from scratch).

The fun grinds to a screeching halt. Zoey realizes just how much her mom has manipulated her today into being the daughter she wants rather than the woman Zoey wants to be. The subtle nudges. The insistence and pushiness. Zoey never getting the final say on anything. The lies and omissions. Her mom getting Zoey to open up by showing just enough vulnerability to make Zoey feel safe. The ways her mom gloated about doing this right in front of her, and she didn't even realize!

This is exactly what her grandpa had tried to warn her about: her mom trying to live through her. And the audacity of her to say she's going to replace the stuffed animal Zoey tried to make as a nine-year-old kid shortly after her grandpa died?! The one she made with tears in her eyes because she kept fucking it up and wishing her grandpa was still here?! The one she tried to dedicate to the memory of her grandpa and to make up for the fact that they never got to make one together?! The one she felt so ashamed of for making subpar that she tucked him deep in a closet and tried to forget about him because he wasn't an acceptable representation of her love for her grandpa?!

Is Zoey her own person, or is she the person her mom is making and "replacing" Zach with? Was last night just manipulation from her mom?! Was Zoey's revelation about who she was not genuine or something her mom forced her to have?! Did she think Zoey was too stupid to pick up on how much better she was treating her daughter compared to how she treated her son?!

Did her mom know what she was doing when she broke Zoey's phone?

It doesn't matter if Zoey's on the right track or if these are baseless speculations. There's too much doubt for it to matter. The fun is over. The day is over. Zoey snaps at her mom and uses the "freaky glare thing" thing on her that she didn't know she had for the first time to accuse her of opportunistically orchestrating this entire sequence of events from the moment she figured out how Zoey's body transformed. They are going home, now. Zoey wants time alone in her room to think things over, over who she is, without her mom around to manipulate her and pull her strings like she's a puppet. And her mom can keep that stuffed animal they just made together. Zoey doesn't want him in her room putting wrong ideas in her head.

And that's where this update ends: Zoey and her mom heading home with Zoey in a bitter, angry rage and trying to think about how she's going to push her mom out of her life again just after she was stupid enough to let her back in. It might not be wholesome, but it is cathartic, and it's how these characters would act together. Zoey can't trust her mom so easily, nor should she. There are too many wounds and too much baggage to fix that relationship in a day, and there are too many unanswered questions for Zoey to reinvent herself in a single day.

I wanted to get to de-escalating things with the first in-game appearance of Mr. Taylor, but it just didn't work out with the timing and this update needs to get out the door so I can get to the queued Keisuke swimming pool sex scene as I've been sitting on the CGs for months now. There will be a day soon where this route with these stats doesn't end on such a low note, but that won't be this update, which I need to get back to work on.

Until next time!