Fire Girl - Volume 2 - Chapter 11.5

VOLUME 2-1

Afterword by Hoshizora Meteo

I somehow managed to make a sequel volume. (Phew)

This novel series is still being developed as I haphazardly bluff my way through writing, but if it has managed to alleviate your boredom and satisfy your urge to read print books even a little, then I’m happy.

Eh, you still can’t make a final judgement with just the first half of the volume? Ah, yes, you’ve got a point there.

The stage of this book was a southern island, but I plan to make the stage of the second half a winter adventure on Nutella.

And Ameno will also finally get to go to Nutella. The whole idea of this novel series actually started from an idle conversation with Takeuchi Takashi-san that was basically about ‘Robot girls sure are nice~’. To think that the essential robot girl in question would only start taking a serious part of the story in the fourth book… I can tell it’s going to be quite hard going ahead. (Liar, liar)

The number of characters has also considerably increased.

First, the former club member Inari Sunao, then the club members from the neighbouring Hiyoshizaka High, and lots of others, etc. The main members surrounding the protagonist Hinooka Homura have also been gradually established, hopefully creating a proper school-like atmosphere.

I said as a joke to my illustrator and character designer BUNBUN, “In the second volume, I’ll be adding fifty characters all at once, so I look forward to your help”, but I let out a delighted shriek when he kept tossing me designs one after another at such a fervent pace that he likely would have made designs for a hundred characters if I left him to his own devices. I was once more deeply impressed by how he was able to create and draw all the transformations, Exploration Club outfits and changes of clothes so well and with so much variation.

I also have to give thanks to the painstaking work of Rounin-san, who was once more put in charge of background illustrations.

However, though I called this an ‘adventure in another world’, this novel series seems to be stuck in hills and fields and hasn’t really visited those kinds of fantastical places yet. But I think that I’ll be able to write the kind of setting expected for this genre in the next volume, for sure. Please look forward to it. I most certainly am.

I want to release the second half of this volume in winter (to fit with the season within the story, I guess?). I beg your patience and respectfully ask you to wait a while.

When we published the two halves of the previous volume at the same time, I later learned that there were mix-ups between the two books for a lot of people. This time, that definitely shouldn’t happen. Probably. The first half of this volume has a summer-themed front cover, while the second half will have a winter-themed front cover.

Now then, it seems the time has come to for me to face this pain-filled reality… Kuh, please settle down, my aching molars…!