Haizao

Thank you for being my first review!

Destiny was already pregnant when they got The Engineer.

Or the uteverse, rather.

Some people can turn into kaiju or kaiju-sized with their powers. Oddly most of them are born in Japan for some reason...

Getting her feet sawed off. Also the woman standing by while her husband does evil.

So far it's in its second century. It started around 2000. I'm going with being a bit fuzzy on specific dates, since I want the sense to be timeless. Maybe slightly futuristic. (As if society stagnated around 2020... which it has in the US.)

She's fighting against a duo and her roommate just got killed, so no AI backup.

Heroism and Villainy are timely concepts. For example: Christopher Columbus wasn't a hero until the 1940s when Italian immigrants gave her the PR treatment as discoverer of the "New World" (though really it was the native Americans, possibly the Chinese and Japanese, and then the Vikings). The reason for this was to rehabilitate the image of the Italians in the US and Canada during a time when Italy was Fascist and the US was going to go to war with them. In reality, Columbus was so genocidal to the Native Americans, the Spanish sent him back to the Caribbean as a way to keep him out of their hair. Yesterday's assholes become tomorrow's good guys and vice versa.

This story is shaping up to be quite good. There's intrigue, strained family dynamics, and the potential for extraordinary violence. There's definitely some Fantasy of Manners worked into this, genre-wise, and if things keep going as they are, I imagine there's going to be a great deal of intricacy to the plot. The writing is well done, though for ease of reading I'd recommend splitting paragraphs a bit more often. Serena comes across more as an exile than a rogue - the latter has connotations of robbery and being an intentional outsider to moral and societal norms. I understand the specific use but in common terms, it does indicate she would be more prone to violence than she is as of Chapter 13. These are small issues, however. Overall, a great read so far, and I look forward to more!

Diablo 2. The hapless old guy cursed to carry Baal's stone out of the tomb of Tal Rasha.