Chapter 18 should be out within a week — it's done, but, I want to give myself a bit more time in case I come up with ideas. This chapter was hell on Earth to write, it was a mixture of pressure (pressure for the backstory's conclusion to be good), stress from retail hell, and the fact I had to, unlike everything before it, write/plain it 100% from scratch because I had only a vague idea of how it would play out. Thankfully it's finally over. And after this, I can at last begin posting things that are a bit more... spicy. Sorry it took such an insanely long time.
In the meantime, I finally decided on the names of Kari's parents, so I'll be editing the chapters in which they appear so they're called by their actual names and not "Kari's mom/mother/dad/father" all the time.