Something you might’ve noticed is that the tone of the story changes halfway through. Story-wise that’s because they finally reached their new home and began their lives. In real life, that’s because I wrote a draft of this story that abruptly stopped at that point because I had no idea what to do after that. I forget how much time passed, but it was at least several months before I picked it up again.

It's an interesting contrast, but I'll be more thorough if something like that comes up again in my writing.

Though there were some significant time skips toward the end, I feel like there wasn’t much of interest actually going on during those times.

It’s possible I could’ve written things out more, but I simply don’t have the patience to write something that’s several hundred chapters long. I wouldn’t have been able to break it up into separate books, either, as, once again, I do not have the patience for that. Once I’ve written a story, I’m usually done with it for good.

IOI is the sole exception to this, and you could consider that one an experiment I’m doing to see if I actually can write more than one story in the same universe. No progress on that yet, though. I don’t have enough ideas to even attempt writing it right now.

Another reason for me to speed things along toward the end was because the end goal of the story was for the kids to become adults.

Another reason for the timeskips in this story was simply because I got comfortable with the idea of using them frequently after my previous story. In that one, the protagonist was always rushing toward a specific goal as fast as they could, so a jump in time also meant a jump in progress. It ended up not being the case here, where I wanted to write something much slower.

An issue with this story’s timeskips was that they only really started around chapter 20 or so. Sure, there were skips of weeks or months in the previous chapters, but never entire years. The first huge timeskip occurred pretty late into things, which made it feel jarring, especially when it happened again.

Had I at least set a precedent for that happening, then it wouldn’t have been as bad, but it was still an issue. The better alternative would’ve been to write out this story across maybe at least twice as many chapters to reduce those skips or at least spread them out more, but god I really just cannot imagine myself finishing something so long. This already came out to around 75k words as it is, which is already huge.

As I mentioned earlier, I didn’t have the patience or the attention span for something like that. I’m fighting against depression and ADHD here. Still, I am slowly learning how to work with whatever’s going on in my brain to produce longer and more coherent stories.

Dialu is not only the longest story I’ve ever finished, but it’s also an older project of mine that I managed to pick back up and complete! I have literally never finished an older project before. Every single story I’ve posted on this site has been completed in one go, with the exception of this one. That’s nearly always because I hyperfixate until I lose interest, regardless of whether or not I have a complete story. As I mentioned earlier, I’m gradually figuring how to work around that.

I wanted to lean heavily into a lot of isekai tropes here, while also trying to make them different.

Adventurer’s Guild: Seems like there always has to be one of these, doesn’t there? The Slayer’s Guild here is basically the same thing, except there aren’t any dungeons to explore or ancient and powerful relics to discover.

The original draft of this story actually had my own take on the seemingly obligatory Adventurer’s Guild explanation, but it was never going to be relevant, so I cut it out.

To briefly summarize it, it had a score system going from 1 to 100. People were judged on 5 individual categories that each had a maximum of 20, so added all together they would reach 100 if the person had the highest possible score. But a person’s score could easily drop if the quality of their work dropped. There was no permanent placement at the top of the ranks.

The 5 categories were: Physical ability, magical ability, knowledge, mission completion, and client satisfaction.

There was a lot more to the whole explanation I wrote. I wrote a whole chapter about it, after all. But it was just as much of a slog to actually read as all the other guild explanations in other isekai stories.

I get why it pops up so frequently, though. It’s fun to think about how you would set up such an organization.

Also, why are they called adventurers when hardly any of them except for the protagonists do anything except for kill monsters for a living? Most of them could just be called hunters.

Bandits: It's a really common trope in isekai for bandits to attack. And they always only want one thing. So I mentioned that these bandits were only after their supplies and nothing else.

Cheats: The characters do get special abilities from the gods, but the abilities are much more personal than just “you can cast any magic” or “you’re super strong”.

Genderbend: Michelle doesn’t just go “Oh I’m a woman now, I’d better start acting feminine and wearing makeup” and then learning really stereotypical feminine behaviors and skills while still insisting she’s a man. She instead ends up on a journey of self-discovery about her genderfluidity, and other than some feminine clothing, which she doesn’t even wear all the time, she makes no effort to act any specific way.

Gods: They always show up in isekai stories pretty much from either accidentally killing the protagonist, summoning them, or being evil. I had mine fail to prevent the summoning, and instead then spent a lot of time making sure all the thousands of Earthlings at least had a chance in this new world. The slavery thing was prevented, the gods directed the Kingdom’s soldiers to the base to take care of them, and the gods also personally met every single Earthling to give them a Gift. Also, the gods in this world are more about maintaining how mana flows than by doing anything that requires worshipers.

As a side note, I thought it might be more interesting to just have the gods be whatever random species instead of sticking to things related to their elements. The idea of the God of Earth being a giant bird is particularly fascinating to me. Roumazi could’ve been a mermaid or something, but I wanted a foxgirl.

Happy Ending: This one is more complicated I think, because I didn’t neatly have everyone achieve their dreams and become the best there ever was and all that. This is more of a “life goes on” ending. The store is still going just fine, but interest in more interesting equipment is still low. The kids are grown up and going their own ways. Michael still isn’t entirely sure about his identity. Sarah’s books have only achieved minimal success.

Basically, this was a much more satisfying ending for me than to be like, “The store pioneered designed armor, Sarah completely changed how people think about writing, Nipha and Luna became the new queens, Diamond and Izara also got together, Michael accepted himself, Liz ended up in her own polycule, printing technology was revolutionized, Elana completely got over her trauma, the family achieved first place in the tournament, Michelle became a model for her looks, Diamond and Izara got married.” I don’t know, all this just sounds like such a cheesy and complete garbage ending. I hated even writing this much. If I wrote an ending like that, I would simply delete it. To be clear, none of that is canon. Maybe some of it eventually happens, maybe it doesn’t.

Harem: There is a relationship between four women, but they are all with each other, rather than everyone being in love with some guy and instead being only friends or possibly even enemies with each other.

Magic: There are tons of different magic systems out there, but for this story, I decided to go with the six elements setup (air, water, earth, fire, light shadow). But I felt that was too boring by itself, hence the modifiers. There also exists a sort of additional null type of magic in the world, but that can only be achieved through enchantments or Gifts. I only implied the existence of it in a few small ways. Gifts being able to do otherwise impossible things was one way, the Empire ripping souls in half was another.

I didn’t elaborate on this because I felt it was more interesting to not explain every single little thing, and also because I wrote this magic system pretty loosely in the first place. You could sort of consider it a seventh element that no one has.

In hindsight, I probably should’ve said something, but oh well.

Monsters: I didn't want to lean too heavily on goblins, slimes, orcs, and all the other typical fantasy monsters out there, so I instead made ordinary animals be monster versions of themselves.

Nobility: It’s super common for isekai protagonists to get involved with nobility in some way or another. Usually by serendipitously rescuing a princess. So I had Luna instead just unknowingly befriend Nipha in school.

Overpowered: The characters do end up pretty powerful by the end, even having Gifts and fusion magic, but they are by no means the most powerful people in the world or anything like that. Even with fusion magic, Michelle still lost against Worra.

Past Life Memories: It's really common for past lives to have little to no relevance whatsoever on an isekai story, to a degree that you wonder why it's even an isekai in the first place. In this case, I tried to make them struggle to adapt. The entire first year in the new world was basically Depression Town for them. And then they started a store, hoping to emphasize their ideas from Earth, but the results were lacklaster. Not entirely devoid of hope, however.

Quests: There will usually be some ancient mystery or grand evil scheme that needs to be prevented. That’s fine, but like Sarah, I prefer smaller stories. Or more specifically, I like to focus on characters rather than action. I do have some ideas for stores that have more action, so I guess I’ll see how they go when I eventually get to them.

The quest in this story, if you can call it that, was to raise Luna and Diamond in this world that was different from their own in many ways. That’s it.

Race/Species Advantages/Disadvantages: So it's pretty common in not just fantasy settings, but a lot of stories where there are multiple species of people, be they elves, aliens, or whatever. I tried to really dial that back for this story.

Elves have "precise hearing", basically able to differentiate sounds really easily, but I did not give them the disadvantage of being physically weak like a lot of stories do. As an aside, a lot of stories have bows be favorite weapons of elves and that elves have good eyesight. In real life, bows require a lot more muscle than the typical lean and willowy elf even has, and bows also can't actually shoot as far as human eyes can see. So unless you specify that the bow, the arrows, or the wielder have some kind of magic that helps in some way, then it doesn't really hold up to real world logic. Bows require a lot of muscle to actually use, so they aren't something a physically weak person can make do with.

I am aware that people don't care about this and just want to have fun. I don't shit on other peoples' stories for lacking realism, especially in something like an isekai. But this is my story so I am allowed to complain about stupid nonsense.

Beastkin have enhanced hearing, enhanced sense of smell, and claws, but I did not give them the disadvantage of having weak magic like a lot of stories do.

Humans generally have the advantage of being neither good nor bad in everything, average. I chose to give them a sort of natural survival ability instead, and are able to function just fine with little to no mana in their bodies. They would still be physically tired after spending all their mana, but not as much as someone of another species would.

Something that's pretty common about depictions of humans is them reproducing rapidly, spreading fast, being ruthless and warlike, destructive and full of bigotry and hatred. These are more commentaries about who we are as a species in real life rather than trying to create some kind of villainous horrible people.

Awakened have Astral Hands and broadcast telepathy, in addition to whatever natural gifts they might have, such as claws or a keen nose.

I didn't want to focus on advantages and disadvantages too much, so that's why they didn't really come up in the story. They're just sort of there for flavor more than anything else. I didn't bother coming up with traits like this for any of the other species that appear in this story, simply because they weren't main characters.

And one last thing about this is lifespans. Everyone pretty much as an equal default lifespan no matter who they are, and can extend it by increasing their mana pool. Elves in this story don’t automatically live for several centuries and humans don’t die in less than one.

Racism: Why does every single isekai story have to have racism? Just no. Instead, the characters were hated at first because they were from Earth. And it should be speciesism, not racism. I know English is a messy language, but when people refer to race in a fantasy story, they nearly always mean species. Maybe I'm getting annoyed at pointless things, but it still bothers me.

Religion: Pretty much every isekai has one main god that is worshiped and then a bunch of side gods. I think that’s a common thing in stories because people are so used to the idea of monotheism, that when writing polytheism, they still end up having a main god.

To a minor extent I did that as well with the Goddess of the Cycle, but I never elaborated very much on her role in things. Had I gone into it more, I probably would’ve said that she guides the possibilities of creation and destruction rather than doing that herself. So she wouldn’t have created the world or anything like that, but more like just pointed it in a direction where it would flourish. I felt like I was going into unnecessary detail about the gods and their roles, so I just cut this out.

Revolutionizing Something: A lot of isekai protagonists somehow end up revolutionizing some industry. They’ll introduce things like soap, shampoo, Japanese cuisine, water pumps, double-entry bookkeeping, crop rotation, whatever. And so they come off as geniuses and make lots of easy money. I hate that. Side characters in tons of isekai stories only exist to be stupid and weak, just to show off how great the protagonist is so he can save them with his high school knowledge and unearned strength.

I get that a lot of isekais are complete power fantasy stories, but it just feels so insulting and unearned for the protagonist to succeed at everything so easily. People in medieval times weren’t completely helpless morons, you know? At the end of my story, they were starting to get noticed for their specialty products, but it was still pretty unpopular for most people. And Sarah didn’t completely change the way people thought about writing or anything, she only gained a small number of regular readers.

Saving the World: The group returned to Earth and prevented everyone from dying by sealing off the barrier before things could get apocalyptic. It was all Roumazi’s work anyway. The others didn’t even need to be there, and Roumazi could’ve just left it to one of her siblings instead.

Setting: It’s really common for fantasy stories to take place in a medieval European setting. That’s not inherently bad, but I want there to be more variety. That’s why Efrinteu’s architecture that I only briefly mentioned was generally based on Mexican architecture. And it’s also why there is plenty of magical technology in this world that could be described as modern.

Slavery: I didn’t want to write about this, so I only mentioned it. When the Empire was going to do that, the gods were like, “No, fuck you,” and personally intervened. Basically, I put it in there just to slap it away, because I despise how frequently it comes up in isekai stories.

Tragic Past: Isekai protagonists tend to always have a sad past. This is an easy way of gaining the reader's sympathy for a character, while also making it so that the protagonist doesn't have a lot of attachments to their previous life. I didn't really do anything differently for Michelle and Amber. In Michelle's case, her sole attachment to Earth, Luna, came with her.

Virtual Reality: Stories involving worlds based on VR games tend to have the game world become real somehow, and it will usually keep a lot of the game’s characteristics, such as NPCs still being around or a stat system. So I went in the opposite direction of that trend, and instead had the game be based on the real world of Torneltha.

I’ve talked a lot about tropes here, and I could keep going on about them, but I would just like to say that they exist for a reason. People enjoy them, so they keep popping up in numerous stories. That’s fine. This whole thing might sound like I’ve been saying all tropes are bad, but that’s not what I’m getting at here. I’m just saying that I’ve read far too many crappy isekai stories because I have a horrible addiction, so I wanted to try my hand at some of these tropes myself.

Basically, everything I write is a story that is bigger than and beyond what I am currently capable of. But with every story I write, I also get a little bit closer to being able to write what I envision. There’s no other way to improve except by doing.