Subject: My Responses
Author:
Posted on: 2016-11-06 06:19:00 UTC
The reason for Lapis and Aiko starting off as enemies in this mission is best explained by the co-written interlude "Child's Play", which I should've provided as a primer: Aiko was jealous that Lapis got to become an agent before her, and Lapis retaliated but took it too personally. I guess we could've made that clearer if we'd intended for this mission to stand out on its own, though.
Splitting the party was a decision that we all agreed upon while writing the fic, and as noted in the dialogue, the in-universe justification was that Lapis and Aiko were fighting so much at the time that they had to be separated until things calmed down. We were well-aware of the risk of continuity not being covered as effectively, so we assumed that each of the teams would relay charges that they covered to the other team offscreen every once in a while. It's why Lapis, Ami, and Aiko were all able to recite the charge list in full without having to cut each other off to fill in what they missed.
This mission takes place after "Witches Get Stitches", which occurred in December 2015 (and Cupid's first date happened in early 2016, and this mission takes place at the same time as said date). Looking back, one of the failings in this case was that we'd already had "Girls' Night Out" technically finished and in the process of beta reading by the time "Witches Get Stitches" was even conceived in my head. I guess I should've expected this insertion of a mission into an already pre-planned series of events to cause a bit of a continuity snarl, and modified Lapis' language use and personality for both missions to make the flow a bit more consistent.
The magical regeneration changing Lapis' personality and the waterbending abilities are both derived from the Steven Universe continuum and Lapis' gemsona. Armenus is stated to be a variant of Canon!Lapis Lazuli's gem "species", if you can call it that; it's been established that Lapis has incredibly powerful hydrokinetic abilities, and lapis armenus (the mineral) is closely related enough to lapis lazuli that it made sense for Armenus to be a Lapis variant. It's also worth remembering that regeneration both allowing a complete recovery and changing the gem's personality is something that happens in canon as well. If there was one thing I did wrong it was probably having Lapis transition into her Taking the Bullet for Aiko more suddenly than readers would've liked, especially given that the entire MO of this mission was to resolve the conflict between the two of them and put them on the road to repairing whatever relationship there could've been between these two. I can say with confidence however that Lapis' story is far from over, and that her next appearance will hopefully smooth out her development as well as deconstruct the resurgence of her abilities - her waterbending is, after all, still rudimentary.
I'm glad there are things to like about this mission, and I agree that Seung-Li and Violet were awesome to work with. If anything, Lapis' character arc does have potential now for further growth and ironing out the kinks in said growth the next time she shows up. Unfortunately, it'll be a while before she does, since I've decided to shift my focus away from my DIC team now that this leg of her character arc is complete. With luck and a fair wind, my next few published missions won't have so much exposition or sideline arguments - especially because they definitely won't be sixty pages long!