Where had Astrid gone and what experience she had face during her years of running away ? I don’t remembee she reveal much even when her brother ask her
Only if you seek him out and are comfortable revealing that relationship to the world. While my mc has an ever greater dislike of his sperm donor, the more he learns about the guy he is also determined to keep the familial relationship a secret to the point where he is encouraging his mom and the Ambassador, even though he also has no great love of billionaire Republican donors.
Yes, Ambassador Liu is almost certainly a Republican, like his father, given that the latter was the human ambassador under what must have been the Bush jr. Administration when the mc was little. And given how most American ambassadors are big donors of the political party and administration appointing them…
If and when the relationship between Isabella and the Ambassador were to progress to something more serious I guess my mc would have to sit the guy down and discuss some ground rules, but that will likely be a book 3 concern, right @daydreamsincolor?
Believe me my mc has thought about it, seeing as how she got off scot free due to her corrupt family, when Reyna is (un)dead, Jaime was murdered, Kol was blackmailed and the mc has basically got a life sentence and an early grave to look forward to.
Problem is Davina is and her family could make public the fact that, in the end, the mc summoned the demon and they have a lot more resources and connections to tar the mc with than the mc has resources to hit back with, as for my mc Xander is beyond useless even when it comes to that and I doubt he or his own fancy lawyers would lift a finger for the mc should we go to war with the Conti’s. 
Heh, good one.
My mc has severe issues with all the possible (would-be) father figures in his life. He dislikes his own father, of course, his possible future father in-law (aka Alty’s dad really doesn’t like him) and if Ambassador Liu and his family number among the Republican donor class then it is likely there won’t any love lost there either. 
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@daydreamsincolor Is Marcela an RO?
Only a side one, they won’t have full plots.
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Yeah that could definitely be a problem. The way my MC sees it though, is that even if the Contis want to fight over this, it’s gonna be a real blow to their reputation. Coming after a standing keeper would probably be an issue too, considering the fact that MC has literally saved NMC from certain doom, while Davina played a part in its possible destruction. No matter what resources Conti has, I doubt he could risk getting into a public dispute with a keeper when elections are so close.
I’d like to hear more about Jaime. I know he wasn’t really a major player in the grand scheme of things, but my MC would at least like to learn a little bit more about him, considering he literally died in front of them. I know he was compelled (or at least I think he was) but I’d still like to know how he even knew Reyna in the first place.
Also would it be ok if I tried to make a Delacroix family tree? There’s just so many people that are important to the plot and part of the family that I’d like to try making a family tree of some sort to make things easier.
Wow felt that but in the opposite way. My MC has no mother figure in their life. Their own mom is dead (and problematic 
), they have no chance of having a future mother in law, considering the fact that Seraphina’s mom is dead, and their father is now dating Ebner.
I think the NMC elites just see a mother and decide “yes, let’s kill her”. The only people I can recall off the top of my head who actually have a mom are Astrid, Altair, Thalia, and some MCs. That’s a lot less than half of the people MC meets. Yikes.
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Why do you think my mc was pertinently against his mom, Isabella moving to NMC? 
On the other hand, if my mc does end up with Alty in the end, Danica always seems to really like the mc, so, assuming everything ends reasonably well my mc will have no shortage of motherly influences in his life.
Speaking of both Isabella and Altair, while trying to dissuade Alty obviously goes nowhere, I feel it would be natural for my mc to call his mom after his first big fight with Alty and tell her what insane magical experimentation Xander and his company are unleashing upon his cute boyfriend. maybe in mechanical terms that could lead to a -1 on the Isa and Xander relationship scale? 
Well…it’s one reason my mc can get a little bit jealous of Leon on occasion as at least Leon’s dad seems genuinely to be trying his best as far as he can see anyway, as he doesn’t know the full details of the tragic Dalton family history. But even if he did, again, at least Leon’s dad seems to be trying, whereas any “relationship” my mc and Xander have is likely to due Isabella blackmailing them both into an extremely uncomfortable hour every couple of weeks.
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Right! I actually unlocked her secret and read some blog posts about it. Even visited her dreams. I didn’t get much information at all, and everything was left pretty vague. I felt like there had to be more, but then the book ended and I was disappointed. I’m hopeful that it’ll be addressed more in detail in book two. We know Reyna and her Evil Squad treated Astrid badly, but in what way? Were they emotionally manipulative or outright verbally abusive? Give me more tea, Asta! Also, I’m sure I missed this too, but what did Reyna do to Astrid that made Altair compel her to forget it? Was it simply because she didn’t want to remember bad memories after months of negative build-up, or was there a breaking point where she said “hell no”?
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I’m with you on this one. Especially if Astrid’s our RO, I feel like she’s the kind to open up to MC about what Reyna and Evil Squad did to her. Even if she isn’t, I wonder if MC could ask Davina what the deal was. She seems weirdly fixated on MC so maybe MC could agree to play nice with her and not expose her in exchange for giving us the details about Reyna.
Alternatively MC could just blackmail Davina and say “I’m gonna expose you and your whole crazy family if you don’t tell me what I want to know”. I think we’re at a point in the story for some MCs to stop trying to be the “hero” and start doing what they have to in order to make sure they can protect themselves and their friends. My MC, for example, is constantly 2 seconds away from tracking down Davina and blasting her into next week. Maybe that’s just because my MC is kind of unhinged at this point though 
.
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@Eric_knight @Fay @augustus27
Thank you for the input re: Astrid!
Part of Astrid’s past not being dealt with in book one was her being compelled by Altair to forget most of it, part was her being reluctant to share it because it was traumatic, and part was due to me not having an adequate trigger warning strategy 
Now that I have a proper strategy (warning ahead of time and giving a choice to skip the scene), Astrid’s past will be addressed by the end of book two!
Thanks for the input!
Of course! If you end up making one, I’d be happy to share it on Tumblr if you’d like!
I have plans for dealing with Davina in Astrid and Seraphina’s routes, but MCs not on those routes don’t have much interaction with her…Did the Davina statue garden scene help provide some closure/if it were expanded do you think it could?
@idonotlikeusernames
Re: Ambassador Liu, he’s a career diplomat. The position of negotiating affairs with the supernatural beings living in your country is too important to be given to mega-donors.
Yes
No. MC can just flirt with her once.
Thanks for the suggestion!!
Cyrus’ dad will finally have his positive moment in chapter eight!
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@daydreamsincolor I really liked his story, especially Lucas’s story, which although it’s very sad and very interesting and developed and made Lucas the character I most liked and created An affection for the character after playing the first game and the demo of the second and analyzing the whole story that is shown between him and Roxana I think it is clear that she used it in the beginning To generate the mc So that he could be part of the experiment of making a keeper
Just a few flashbacks that focus on the MC and Roxana and not seeing how their relationship went, left me with a doubt and even a hope the question I want to ask And that when Roxane went out with the MC’s father to seduce him she created some feeling of love for the MC’s father or from beginning to end she just used him?
Everything leads us to believe that she never had feelings for him but I would like to hear it from the creator if you cannot answer now you Intends in the second game of the saga or an eventual third Do you intend to explain this relationship and how Roxana felt about the MC’s father Or do you already think that you already make explicit what Roxana felt for Lucas
Obs:Sorry my bad english
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Okay I’m screaming because I had an MC named Marcela and thought it was no big deal when in-game Marcela was first brought up, but after meeting her she literally has the exact same description ahhhh 
Well at least they can form some cool Keeper band called The Marcela’s or something
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Noo, I need to protect her. If Davina was a part of it she better hide her location because she’s gonna catch MC’s hands once they find out what she did to Astrid.
Really hoping his positive moment involves a Nephilim MC punching him in the face. Might ruin our relationship with Cressida but her dad’s kind of crazy. (I mean who threatens to mind control a college student??)
I love this idea. Their first song should be Help I’m being hunted by a group called Frostbite that wants to kidnap me, this is not a joke it is a cry for help save us lol. They’ll also have so much in common, like being hunted by Frostbite, having been kidnapped at some point, and being thrown into being a keeper with no training.
Yikes that fact that this has happened to 2 separate people really raises some questions about the NMC government’s competence.
Another meme because my feels are off the charts
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Would that stop Trump? Unless this is an alternate history where the US is currently under either the Hillary Clinton or the Jeb Bush administration The latter seems more likely, as career diplomats or no, his own father was still a Bush jr. appointee, and even among career diplomats these days the Democrats and Republicans seems to prefer different ones. Guess we won’t really know unless we meet the Obama era former Ambassador some time too. .
Even so, just like we in criminal law have our stereotypical reputations because sometimes there, sadly, is a grain of truth to them, so do career diplomats have a stereotypical reputation as being one of the preferred pastimes for the otherwise idle rich.
Yikes, now even Monroe is proving to be a better father…there goes even commiserating with Cyrus about how awful their father’s are for my mc. 
Re reading that alternate history story segment again, it really seems only the positive influence of a living Brant Delacroix would have made Xander into a halfway decent father and boyfriend/husband, it seems…without that influence he seems to be stuck in CEO mode 100% of the time. Which is even stranger considering the Brant to mc meets is, if anything, even more of an asshole than Xander himself.
Not really, for my mc it simply reinforces that Davina is still free and rich and able to afford far better clothes than he can for himself. In other words it simply confirms the distasteful status-quo.
Davina may be lonely and miserable now, but she put herself there (I mean when you murder your own friends, well you’ll have less friends, obviously), in time lots of people will forget most of this and in a decade odds are she’ll have some sort of decent life back…for the mc on the other hand they could be dead already as even being an experienced keeper (aka Akira, and he was the one my mc would most liked to have met sometime) seems to be an incredibly dangerous routine.
Fortunately for her the best professional support can be bought and it seems her family still supports her too. Don’t expect my mc to be very supportive though.
Her invasion of our privacy, for which to my knowledge the university also has not punished her in any way and why much more of the mc’s records are now out there in public than of apparently any other magi is still an ever ongoing danger to us.
Hmm…I get the feeling that our “normal” world hasn’t really changed that much and is still pretty crappy too, so I’m going to personally go with a “Jeb won” for my personal headcanon, unless the author wants to explicitly contradict that.
It’s a very late 2010’s vibe though, but politically I’m going to go with Jeb won in 2016, because you know Trump would have seized any chance to spread his brand of crazy to the magical world and he has zero respect for career diplomats or any other career civil servants.
Although whether, Jeb, Hillary or Joe the undercurrents that gave the US Trumpism will still be present in the non-magical world just more or less effectively suppressed depending on the administration.
A flicker of light in a sea of darkness
I love Astrid so much, and I stand by this statement. Y’all only hear me gush about Leon, but truth is I have his relationship stat on 80% and Astrid’s on 81%. She’s the bestest best friend you can have, and I am terrified of knowing what Reyna and Evil Squad did to her
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The scene is a nice addition if the MC previously met her. If they didn’t, it raises even more questions. Davina’s just being, well.. Davina. She’s as cryptic as ever. I’d like to talk to her more, maybe not in this particular scene, but later? I’m really curious about her motivations… if she had any.
And that’s precisely the reason why I’d like to know what happened. She is a great friend, but her insecurity is worrying, and I’d bet this whole mess with Reyna didn’t help either; the thing is, pretending nothing happened probably won’t help her in the long run.
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I mean I wouldn’t worry about it too much. I mean, if the world can have Nephilim and Cambions then why not assume that politics might have changed a bit too. Plus the author never really specified what year it is, so it could be 20 years in the future for all we know.
That’s possible but I doubt Davina would forget it herself. If her story about being compelled is true then she has quite a lot of trauma to work through, and that’s gonna be rough for her. If she voluntarily helped Reyna then she still has to deal with the whole “my demon possessed friend murdered my other friend right in front of me then got murdered (possibly) by a bunch of college students”. Neither of those are exactly easy to get over, especially without much support
This is actually a really good moment for Astrid to have some of that sweet sweet character development then. Especially because just ignoring all the traumatic experiences in her life seems to be a pattern for her. Like with the Gorgon attack, she just decided to not acknowledge that after it happened, even though I don’t think it’s normal for people in NMC to be attacked by monsters. Plus, in the first book she didn’t change much even if you romanced her. But now she has an opportunity to actually change by starting to acknowledge the not so great things that have happened to her.
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I’ve been wondering about something. Is there some way to check whether someone was indeed compelled? Some magical tests (even inaccurate ones)? Anything? Even though Seraphina could potentially read Davina’s mind, we learn that it really doesn’t work because Davina is proficient in shielding her mind. It seems to me that the easiest way to get away with crimes is to say at court “yes, I was responsible, but I wasn’t myself, I was compelled”, and that closes the case. That’s a terrible hole in a judiciary system.
I second that.
Yeah, as I said before, her attitude isn’t healthy. What’s worse, she is perfectly aware that her technique of dealing with problems is denial. Maybe MC could call her out on this someday? That could potentially lead to some kind of change for her.
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Speculating by the pop culture references in book one and book two, plus the fact that the characters are 18-20 and the author said they’re Gen Z kids, I think we should assume the KotSaM series takes place the mid to late 2010’s.
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There might be but I doubt MC would have access to those results. Conti is already corrupt and protective of his niece so getting any results from any tests they would have conducted would be out of the question I assume.
Oh definitely not. Davina is a horrible person and my MC will not be convinced otherwise. In fact, my MC is always 10 seconds away from getting violent whenever they see Davina, so she’s by no means a good person. I’m not sure how much the professionals will actually help though, since she seems reluctant to tell anyone the truth about what actually happened.
True, but it’s also been stated on the authors Tumblr that some things come to NMC later than the human world. For example, NMC is still a decade behind in memes, which are essential to pop culture. So it’s possible that they’re just way behind in terms of human trends and have their own things instead.
Plus there is a direct ask on the author’s tumblr where she says she purposely never reveals what year it is. I think she said that she did this because she wanted everyone to be able to imagine what time period/year the story was set in on their own (don’t take my word for it though, I could have gotten the reason wrong). I don’t want to dig through all the asks to find it, but I’m sure if you went deep enough it would be there.
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Yeah, I saw it. She left the year ambiguous but my point about the Gen Z thing still stands
Gen Z is born between 1995-2015. The numbers are uncertain and some claim Gen Z ends at 2010, 2012, 2014. They all seem to agree it ends somewhere in the mid 2010’s. Most of the ROs are 19-20. Some are 21. Do the math and you’ll get the year. Safe to assume it’s around the 2010’s. If you headcanon they were born in 1995 it’s gonna be set in like 2014. Unless you headcanon that they were born in 2015. But wouldn’t you think the human world would be more advanced then? Especially the tech and fashion. Everything that has been mentioned about the human world either via MC or the characters make it seem like the year is around the late 2010’s, since it all seems so old-fashioned. Not surprising since the first book was written in like 2015 iirc. The human clothes option also gives us clothes that are close to this decade’s fashion style and trends, and we all know how different fashion is from each decade (hey remember ugg boots?). Not to mention the memes MC kept mentioning in book one, referencing to mean girls and the Mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. Unless MC also has a knack for dead memes, which seems strange since they grew up in the human world. I’d say the year could vary, but in my opinion it’s pretty difficult to imagine keeper taking place in 2040, since everything established about the human world seems pretty old-fashioned. But that’s just a theory I have from what I’ve gathered by replaying the books and scouring the blog, it’s still left vague and ambiguous.
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