Suddenly A Succubus Ch. 31 - Reflection

Now, this opening section may have been a little jarring for some of you. I mean, explicit sexual content? Is this really the book series for that?

I am, obviously, being a sarcastic little ass. The idea for this book came to me pretty early on in the planning process, and I was immediately excited for what it represented. Vee and Amara are stuck together and have no choice but to finally talk out their issues, Nick and Tessa have to work together to free them and that's a dynamic we've never seen before, and I finally get a chance to showcase Chloé a bit more. All good stuff!

It did mean, however, that there simply wasn't a place to put in all the sexy fun people are used to from this series. While I absolutely think this was the right call, I was aware going into this book that some of my audience might be less than thrilled about it (I assume this would mostly be random, anonymous commenters on other sites). I put a small warning at the beginning of Ch. 28 on Literotica, but who knows if that will help at all.

Anyways, I hope it was fun seeing more of Chloé. Last time we got a good picture of her immediate context, and now we get a better look into her history. I thought it was pretty clever to use the scene of her masturbating to give random facts about her transition, if I'm being honest.

However, once her fun ends, it's time for her to return to the real world. Last time we spent time with Chloé, we saw that she's not the mot observant person in the world. That being said, she's not oblivious, and she has noticed that her friends have been a little distant recently. That being said, one issue I ran into when thinking of Chloé's role in this book is what direction her thought process would take her. In my mind, she wears her heart on her sleeve, and she's not the person that's going to jump to conspiracy theories the instant something slightly strange happens.

Plus, it's helpful to think of the context. Nick and Amara were there when Amara's tail grew, Tessa was already a witch, and Vee was already an angel. Chloé, and pretty much everyone else on campus, live in a world they think is identical to ours. Think about your own friends; if they started acting strange, would you suspect secret magical shenanigans?

This was one reason I was excited to bring Chloé in, she represents the average person. Her problems are completely mundane, she's just trying to ask a guy out and do well in school. She's got some family issues, but overall life is going pretty well every since she came to college.

But, since she's such a trusting person, I struggled with how I wanted her to approach and interact with the world around her this book. My initial outline actually had Chloé dealing with a completely unrelated problem, one that was completely mundane and not related to her friends at all. I thought it would be a neat way to show how big the world was, and that not everything ties directly back to the main characters and their magic struggles. But, when I started writing, that idea just didn't feel right anymore. Thankfully, I had a secret weapon waiting in the wings.

Who else in this book is totally normal? Perhaps someone who's looking into all sorts of strange things happening around campus because she wants to be a journalist? In my head, Naomi and Chloé are perfect stand-ins for the average person in this world. I'm not going to spoil where the story is headed, as they'll be a continued presence moving forward, but I'm happy with the decision to pair them together.

Naomi is incredibly suspicious of everything she sees and hears, and pairing her with Chloé is the catalyst that causes our adorable little nerd to start questioning things herself.

Once we finish watching Chloé try to check in on Amara, we actually get to do the same!

We're back in Amara's POV this time, and I'm happy to finally have the chance to POV hop between Amara and Vee. I couldn't do it earlier in the book, the plot structure didn't quite work out that way, but now we're grooving. I loved diving into Vee's head last chapter, and I love showing the different thoughts both our girls are having about their situation.

Quick note, before we get to the big conversation, but I'm so happy with my Vee for Vendetta pun. I've been waiting to drop that for months!

So, it's finally time. After 2.5 books of misinformation and fighting, Amara and Vee start talking. No beating around the bush, no more hiding, this is it. This is the scene I've been building to for ages, and I couldn't be happier with how it played out.

It took a lot of work to get the conversation to its current state. Over the course of the last few books, I've been constantly thinking about this conversation and making notes about specifics points I wanted to come up. The trick, then, was finding a way to link all those points while still having the conversation feel natural.

I could go on for hours about each specific line, about how much I think it adds to the scene and how happy I am with it, but I think this Reflection should be shorter than your average novel. Needless to say, I think every line matters, and I thought for way too long about the exact phrasing for everything they both said.

In the first half of the conversation, both girls have pretty significant moments of realization. They both begin to see how much they have in common, and that was a really beautiful thing for me to put to paper.

Every conversation needs to end, though, and I'm nothing if not a sucker for drama. We have a quick interlude to fight another strange creature (which they finally name later in this chapter!) and the fight ends on a bit of a downer. Amara tries to fly, again, and is again confronted by her guilt.

I was very happy with where the fight landed in their conversation, and how it shifted things once they were alone again. The tone has shifted immediately, and I think this is the first time we get a sense for how their friendship might work moving forward. It's not there yet, obviously, and there's still a lot of difficult emotions to dig through, but we see a tenderness here that we haven't seen since Book One.

Quick interlude, but I'm using this book as an excuse to invent a new word. Amara's thoughts are directly my own here; vulturic sounds cool as fuck and I refuse to not invent it.

When we arrive back at Vee's place, we get the last leg of the conversation. Seeing Amara fly pushes Vee to ask about it, and Amara finally gets the one chance she's been waiting for all these weeks; a chance to explain her transformation to Vee.

I was initially a little worried about this part of the scene, as Amara is just recapping events we've all seen already. However, she adds some extra context, and we also get to see Vee's reaction to everything. Surprisingly, she seems pretty interested in the whole affair, and keeps inching closer to hear more of the story. This was the biggest reason I didn't stick this part behind a montage or whatever, I wanted the audience to see the girls talking, to see them reacting to everything in real time.

Importantly, we also get a lot of context from Vee as well. She has a lot of thoughts and opinions about the last few months, but we haven't seen most of them. Plus, we're hearing her thoughts now that she has the benefit of hindsight and extra context. She shares feelings she had just after the fight that I don't think she would have dared speak aloud in the moment. The very idea that her entire worldview might be wrong is pretty scary, and I even had a few beta readers admit it wasn't an angle they had thought about before.

All good things must come to an end, however, and this conversation needed to stop eventually. I'm happy with where I ended it, I think it was the right place to give both girls time to think about everything.

Sadly, there are still real world problems that haven't been addressed yet. Amara has finally lost her sense of taste and hunger, and Vee's wards are starting to lose the fight against the entropic forces of Purgatory. Thankfully, there's a safer place in the apartment, but, oh, what's that? It only has one bed?

Cards on the table, this entire book exists because I'm hopelessly in love with sappy tropes like this. At first I thought it might only be a chapter or two of silly Purgatory shenanigans, but then I realized the narrative potential this setup had. Hopefully you all are just as in love with silly tropes as I am!

They don't share the bed, though. That would be silly. I mean, there's perfectly good floor right there! Sure, Vee is shivering a bit, but I doubt that's gonna lead to anything.

Nyx <3