"The orchard was fine but only blooms once every hundred years."

"Oh, that's not really often enough."

"Yeah no, reserved for powerful spirits and bodisatvahs and such. And like- The heavens in Chinese myth are much more about proper order than being good to people but it does not speak to very good pre-redemption character."

"The grand theft immortality? Yeah, I could totally sympathize with swiping one peach but all of them and the other stuff is a bit much."

"Mm... I'm not doing it justice at all."

"Well, I'll get there in the book itself sooner or later."

"What else is there to talk about?"

"Dunno. Uh. Fuck. I need to write a list for next time. I won't be able to read it but you will."

"I- Uh- Uh- I got this new dungeon-tac game the other day, except it turns out it's more of a visual novel situation and the dungeons are all predefined but it's decent on the characterization front. Tropey, but well executed."

"Tropey how?"

"Anime tropes. Like, I signed up for a tactical puzzler and got an anime. You've got the quiet shy competent girl with white hair, and the tsundere with red hair, and the blonde who's a refined British lady and technically old nobility, and the genki girl who can't be sad for more than ten seconds, and the delinquent buff guy who carries a spiked baseball bat, and the pink-haired forgetful airhead, and the chuuni younger guy who wears edgy clothes and calls out his attack names... But like. They were so clearly tropes and yet managed to be somewhat interesting, and importantly, the story wasn't centered around the point of view character it was mostly about this whole esper community having their own personal journeys. Also they all had partnered power armor that they shared control of and were guiding the whole time inside."

"...sounds like that would work for some powers but it must've really constrained the selection to give every partnership their own tandem power armor and have that make strategic sense. I don't think I can fly with or render invisible a suit of power armor big enough for both of us."

"Oh, that was the worst part of it, the cop-out. Unexplained dungeontech that allowed any esper to also power the suits in addition to whatever thing they had."

"That is a cop-out. If it's the only one in the story I'll accept it as a premise but it's really pushing it, someone just loves mechs."

"Yeah. To be fair, mechs are really cool."

"They don't appeal to me particularly but then again I'm sure many things that I like do not appeal to others particularly."

"Yeah, fair. They are of course wildly impractical given current technological limitations."

"I'm sure someone who likes the idea is working on it. Maybe they will find what they need in clockwork bird corpses."

"I read up on some of the development of stuff like that actually- Mostly the problem is battery life and being safe to, like, bail out of if something breaks suddenly. Also weight. There's a lab in California that has, like, power loader arm rigs for harvesting crews mostly sorted out."

"That's neat. I wonder if I can live-capture a clockwork once we've got the core..."

"Mechas make more sense in a dungeon than, like, open warfare at least. You have to maneuver well, sometimes in three dimensions, through a difficult to access portal that you can't fit a tank through..."

"Sometimes in four. Cricket's little and fragile so he needs to drag around an escort, when he does a dungeon."

"Very Flatworld that that's... Possible..."

"Flatworld?"

"I think it might have been called something else? Book about a sphere who goes to a two dimensional land and stupefies all the squares and such."