My building is 1950s/60s vintage in coastal southern California, which means it was built with zero insulation. It was a good idea back then, but not really viable now as temperatures have increased a lot since then. So my complex is in the process of being renovated, which means no hardening the walls please -- the contractors will find it much harder to work.
I've sort of taken a different approach than Rob here with regards to the ownership. We started with a pot of money, with which we're expected to handle all of the renovations. Between Alicia and I managing the finances and builders and materials, we've managed to get higher quality with lower costs. So if the business is well handled, Ciel is smart enough to just leave us alone while we make his property more valuable. Greed is good. Also he's getting one Hell of a tax break for low-income housing.
I'll note that according to canon (the AQUARIA pre/sequel), the gondola guild actually tried to get Alicia to join the back office while she was (will have been?) only age 19 and still one of their biggest tourist draws and the only undine at one of their companies. This still seems like complete madness to me -- which honestly happens just about any time I try to apply logic to Aria. But she's a good enough manager to run a small company well.
And then Sonomi will arrive, and won't have much else to do for a while, and she'll help manage the building too. I'm not really sure what to about her company and fortune. Will it just pop up later, and they expect her to return to work? Or is Ciel still running a toy company, and need an experienced toy company executive?
Oh, uh, back to the apartment building. A security system with cameras and the like would be good, and the Good Neighbor System would be helpful. Sakura's Shield is probably enough to defend the building, especially if someone would be kind enough to teach her ritual magic. I think I'd prefer magical protection rather than mundane. Six of my residents lived in the Martian equivalent of Colonial Williamsburg, so they're actually not that interested in hi-tech stuff. (Except maybe that pipe organ that controls the gravity on Mars, which logically means... never mind.)
As far as the entire house being non-combatants... hmm. Most of the residents are people with minimal fighting skills. The undines all know some basic oar-fu, so as to deal with customers who won't take no for an answer. I assume it's similar to naginata styles, and why am I thinking about Sumire Kanzaki now? Maya is a wildcat with 1e D&D housecat stats, which is to say "can kill a first level character in one round with good rolls on claw/claw/bite". Sakaki and Kagura aren't actually warriors, but are athletic enough to defend themselves in a fistfight. Kero and Yue are guardians by nature, centuries old, and really useful in a fight. They each have a bit of magic, and can draw on half of Sakura's deck each. (And no, Brent, you can't ship Weiss/Yue because he's already taken... sort of.) Eventually I'll have Will Riker and Geordi LaForge around, and they're real military officers.
But the big question is our magical girls, and Shaoran. We have our three youngest characters with the most combat experience, strange as it was. And none of the rest of us, mostly adults, wants to see them fighting. They should not have to do this, this is our job as adults, right? And we don't want them to get in a situation that they don't really understand, even precocious as they are. But the dynamic is unbalanced, as any one of them is more powerful than the rest of us adults combined.
Can they stand doing nothing? As the Thomas Fire burned a swath across my hometown last winter, I thought about what I would do if I was Sakura. I'm a giant otaku, I know. She had cards that could have helped, like Watery, Windy (wind suppression), Earthy (firebreaks), and Rain. What would it feel like to see people's houses burn down and know that you can stop it, but maybe you're not supposed to? This is where the whole idea of Cinder entering the plot came to me, out of tragedy, and our of Sakura's desire to do something.
It's an uneasy equilibrium for me as a writer because I don't know what she should do. I know what she wants to do, but I'm not sure if it's the right choice. It's close to the same choices made in Sailor Moon, choices that thirteen year olds should never have to make no matter how many times they've been reincarnated. But that's more clear because if they do nothing, rocks fall everybody dies. But the case of people losing their houses, versus an eleven year old taking it upon herself to firefight. I don't have an answer for the morally right answer, and I feel like Tomoyo would have that answer, which makes her really annoying to write as she has information that the author doesn't.
I've sort of taken a different approach than Rob here with regards to the ownership. We started with a pot of money, with which we're expected to handle all of the renovations. Between Alicia and I managing the finances and builders and materials, we've managed to get higher quality with lower costs. So if the business is well handled, Ciel is smart enough to just leave us alone while we make his property more valuable. Greed is good. Also he's getting one Hell of a tax break for low-income housing.
I'll note that according to canon (the AQUARIA pre/sequel), the gondola guild actually tried to get Alicia to join the back office while she was (will have been?) only age 19 and still one of their biggest tourist draws and the only undine at one of their companies. This still seems like complete madness to me -- which honestly happens just about any time I try to apply logic to Aria. But she's a good enough manager to run a small company well.
And then Sonomi will arrive, and won't have much else to do for a while, and she'll help manage the building too. I'm not really sure what to about her company and fortune. Will it just pop up later, and they expect her to return to work? Or is Ciel still running a toy company, and need an experienced toy company executive?
Oh, uh, back to the apartment building. A security system with cameras and the like would be good, and the Good Neighbor System would be helpful. Sakura's Shield is probably enough to defend the building, especially if someone would be kind enough to teach her ritual magic. I think I'd prefer magical protection rather than mundane. Six of my residents lived in the Martian equivalent of Colonial Williamsburg, so they're actually not that interested in hi-tech stuff. (Except maybe that pipe organ that controls the gravity on Mars, which logically means... never mind.)
As far as the entire house being non-combatants... hmm. Most of the residents are people with minimal fighting skills. The undines all know some basic oar-fu, so as to deal with customers who won't take no for an answer. I assume it's similar to naginata styles, and why am I thinking about Sumire Kanzaki now? Maya is a wildcat with 1e D&D housecat stats, which is to say "can kill a first level character in one round with good rolls on claw/claw/bite". Sakaki and Kagura aren't actually warriors, but are athletic enough to defend themselves in a fistfight. Kero and Yue are guardians by nature, centuries old, and really useful in a fight. They each have a bit of magic, and can draw on half of Sakura's deck each. (And no, Brent, you can't ship Weiss/Yue because he's already taken... sort of.) Eventually I'll have Will Riker and Geordi LaForge around, and they're real military officers.
But the big question is our magical girls, and Shaoran. We have our three youngest characters with the most combat experience, strange as it was. And none of the rest of us, mostly adults, wants to see them fighting. They should not have to do this, this is our job as adults, right? And we don't want them to get in a situation that they don't really understand, even precocious as they are. But the dynamic is unbalanced, as any one of them is more powerful than the rest of us adults combined.
Can they stand doing nothing? As the Thomas Fire burned a swath across my hometown last winter, I thought about what I would do if I was Sakura. I'm a giant otaku, I know. She had cards that could have helped, like Watery, Windy (wind suppression), Earthy (firebreaks), and Rain. What would it feel like to see people's houses burn down and know that you can stop it, but maybe you're not supposed to? This is where the whole idea of Cinder entering the plot came to me, out of tragedy, and our of Sakura's desire to do something.
It's an uneasy equilibrium for me as a writer because I don't know what she should do. I know what she wants to do, but I'm not sure if it's the right choice. It's close to the same choices made in Sailor Moon, choices that thirteen year olds should never have to make no matter how many times they've been reincarnated. But that's more clear because if they do nothing, rocks fall everybody dies. But the case of people losing their houses, versus an eleven year old taking it upon herself to firefight. I don't have an answer for the morally right answer, and I feel like Tomoyo would have that answer, which makes her really annoying to write as she has information that the author doesn't.
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto