Not sure if this is doable, but...

[Bob Schroeck]

Woohoo! Welcome back! We were getting worried.

[Labster]

I am not, despite what the Yorkie Horde is saying, dead.  Nor am I on hiatus.  I've been re-watching Haibane Renmei while RL interrupts me a lot (including looking for a new place).  "Single Cocoon Occupancy" is still in the works, just slowly.

Nice title.

I googled "Yorkie Horde" and came up with this image.  Yeah... Tintin and I are going to stick with fox terriers.

The times we live in are extremely interrupting of our attention (and sanity points), so I wish you the best.

[robkelk]

Thanks for letting us know. And don't worry; your invitation to take part here is still good.

[Annie-nee]

I am not, despite what the Yorkie Horde is saying, dead.  Nor am I on hiatus.  I've been re-watching Haibane Renmei while RL interrupts me a lot (including looking for a new place).  "Single Cocoon Occupancy" is still in the works, just slowly.

Nice title.

I googled "Yorkie Horde" and came up with this image.  Yeah... Tintin and I are going to stick with fox terriers.

The times we live in are extremely interrupting of our attention (and sanity points), so I wish you the best.

Ok.  Now I'm terrierified!  Shayna (my Yorkie) agrees.

She'll be in "Single Cocoon Occupancy" as a rather central character, but I've renamed her 'Fizbin' (a la the Star Trek episode "A Piece of the Action")

[Annie-nee]

I've been thinking through where the characters will be down the line, things that would occur a few months after the story starts.  One thing stuck in my head is having Hikari getting a bunch of ear piercings, dying her hair bright purple with pink streaks, cute-perky-goth witty shirts and torn jeans, a leather duster coat (think Mal from Firefly), and the clunkiest boots imaginable.  Kana changing her hair to a pixie-cut and a white t-shirt, jeans with a wallet chain and a Leatherman-type multitool on her belt, and socks + Birks.  Reki starts carrying a sketchbook everywhere, and art supplies, and I mean everywhere.  I have to fight the idea to have Nemu actually being fully colorblind and being a walking visual nightmare due to her trainwreck-level clashing outfits.  "Rakka will be Rakka to the very end." like Reki said in ep.13.

My one question is, how truly out-of-place are halos and itty-bitty wings in this universe?  I don't intend to start on the absolute start date, but a few months (maybe 6, possibly 8) after that.

The idea of having them trying not to be kidnapped by The Government(TM  ) and dissected etc. like in every single aliens are found on Earth movie (ET for example) is just too hard for me to do, and too cliche, as is the idea of them trying to walk down the street with a throng of on-lookers following them like little kids and a soccer ball.  Will they turn heads, yes, of course, but they are in NYC, specifically they're living in the East Village (MIB had it right.  "Travel only at night, but if you have to travel in the day, stay in the East Village" I think is the line).

They have the idea of wing covers (my SI apartment manager will make them for them) and hats are an easy thing.  But having them always wearing wing covers and hats (like in summer...) defeats the purpose (and I can't just have scene after scene with a wing cover or hat "wardrobe malfunction").

So, having them as a curiosity absolutely, that's the whole point.  Will people accidentally see a wing or a halo, sure.  I intend to focus on getting them used to a world where there isn't a Day of Flight, where they're there for good, and they have to learn our world, dealing with unresolved issues from when they were in Glie/Guri/however you pronounce it, etc., not having them constantly paranoid.

But I don't know where in the timeline to start so they're not always the center of attention for everyone in Manhattan they see?

[robkelk]

Oh, tricky...

We have a few events planned that will draw attention to them and away from everyone else, but none of them are in the first half-year of the stories. (Somebody in Ottawa might show off her wings and halo in June, but that's later than you need it to happen.) That doesn't mean we can't come up with something else, of course.

But there is one possibility for covert bodyguards. We have Napoleon Solo, Illya Kuryakin, April Dancer, John Steed and Emma Peel scheduled to show up in a residence on the East Side between January and March, and locals will recognize the names, but we have no stories to tell about them yet. Mind you, they might not fit into the style of stories that you want to tell.

I'd say "go for it, and explore the issues that they have"... with or without help from the other displacees. We can work out some way to help if you need it.

[Labster]

I mean, if you wanted them to not be noticed you could have chosen Portland, Oregon.  (Even moreso if we brought NBC's Grimm in.)  I kid, of course, since it's much easier to write places that you know.  (I saw a thread in /r/AO3 today about some commenter telling the author about all of the inaccuracies he had about his setting in Poland, and of course the author added "I've lived in Poland 35 years."  Thankfully, all of our shows are a little older, so the fandom will be more mature than that.)

The idea of your graywings being kidnapped by the government for experiments is essentially out of tone for the setting, because the overall idea is to be set in a real-world deconstruction.  And the real world... how do I put this... the real world is far stupider than fiction.  It's somewhat annoying, because it forces plots to be somewhat dumber than the best stories.

If I saw a haibane on the street, I would honestly assume they were just in coming off a film set.  I live close enough to L.A., so I'm probably biased that way, but it's an Occam's razor explanation.  The haloes would be harder to explain.  Do you know that one bit in Negima where they hand out magic wands to normies and just tell them "It's CGI" (outdoors!) and it just works? "It's a costume." I've heard that New York is a place where people try hard to ignore all of the weird people on the streets, so most people simply wouldn't notice?

On the government itself kidnapping angels to experiment on them?  Having lived through most of the Trump era, I feel like the baddies in government are just too stupid to do something like this.  I think it's more likely they try to deport them back to Glie (no, really).  Or another tack -- like my Vice President recently said about UFOs: they're probably demons.  You said it yourself that people project onto haibane what they want to see.  I think a bunch of people in the U.S. government would see them as angels, and then go on to use them to as a clear justification for $literally_any_policy.  Now, don't get me wrong, our setting's Academy City would absolutely kidnap haibane and run experiments on them, but Academy City comes from fiction.

If it is a problem that you eventually want to get rid of, Yukito/Yue from Cardcaptor Sakura can probably show them how to hide their wings (and halo) like he does.  Even if their true form is really cool.

[Bob Schroeck]

I have to agree -- I think it's far more likely that J. Random Bypasser is likely to think "Oh, there must be one of those conventions in town" or "some crazy show or movie is filming nearby". And that's even before you factor in whatever Malleable Causality might do to fit them in (like how no one in Lake Wobegon pays much attention to the faunus). Of course, this opens up just as many story opportunities...