Hello, everyone!

Over the past month I had a bit of a think about what to do for what would be the last public update of the year. I wanted to deviate a bit from my routine of writing alternate endings for stories that are mostly already written and try a thing folks weren't quite expecting, give you something more to look forward to heading into the new year. So I made the somewhat bold decision to explore a previously greyed-out choice that occurs near the beginning of our story, soon after Kyou uses the penlight on Nozomi while they're cleaning the classroom.

That first choice leads to most of Penlight's darker storylines, as Kyou leaves school the next day to get chased down by Hiroko and inadvertently discovers just how powerful his device really is. But what would happen if he's in less of a hurry to head home? What if he decides to stick around in the hopes of catching Nozomi without her friends to interfere? She'd have to hear him out, right?

All of that is to say I've written the script for the first two scenes of the Villain storyline's "stick around" route and added a new CG to go with it. There's a lot more to come from this, but I think we're off to a decent start ^^

In other news, the big CG from last month, on Hiroko's Gullible story path, has now been updated with finished art so if you were holding off on reading it before, now's the time!

I'll naturally be exploring the possibilities this new route opens up in the new year, so have a good holiday season and I'll see you then :)

What's New

• WRITING: Wrote the first two scenes for the new path on the Villainous storyline, stemming from the choices "use the penlight on Nozomi" then "stick around"

• ART: New CG for the second scene of the new Villainous storyline

• ART: The sketched CG from Hiroko's Gullible story path has now been replaced with completed artwork

• Word count is now around 438,500

• LOCALIZATION: Various edits and corrections to the existing Spanish script

• Some typo and grammar corrections