My wish gets partially granted this week as the other characters from the OP finally make an appearance. Now all we need is an overarching plot and we're golden.
The new characters are Flam and Hal, who are are pretty different than Huey and Dalian and both their relationship and their methods. While Huey counteracts Phantom Book magic by reading books pulled from the library, Hal loads books into his Nanoha staff and burns everything to oblivion. There's also the distinct feeling from their detached put-downs of each other that they're just using each other to achieve a shared goal (compare to Dalian's largely harmless insults towards Huey). The whole "opening the gateway" sequence this time around was a bit more disturbing as well (Flam's scream will now haunt my nightmares). But when it comes down to the wire the goals of the two pairs are the same: to prevent the misuse of Phantom Books. This is placed in direct contrast to the third pair who are shown in a brief scene and make an appearance in the OP as well; for whatever reason, they are actively handing out Phantom Books and are most likely going to be the main antagonists going into the second half of the show.
The main point of this episode seems to be to show how the different key keepers handle similar situations that Huey and Dalian have been put through so far, and it widely succeeds in this point by showing their differences. Also, it's made clear that each bibloprincess has a different gateway to the library on each of their bodies; Dalian's is through her chest, Flam's is through her stomach, and I assume that the unnamed third girl's is through her eye. Changing the perspective for an episode definitely freshened things up, and I can't wait to see what happens when all of the groups meet each other. I feel like this is the final cue before the story finally moves into a wider plot, but I'll just have to wait for the next episode to see if my feeling is right.
Images from NicoNico.com.
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