That's up to you, Tom.
Personally, I believe it makes more sense to be completely under Melisson's spell there rather than being able to resist. Considering precedents in regard to Melisson's abilities, she supposedly should be able to snap your minds like dry twigs.
Blas wants to interpret the role of his memorychip. It's important to him that Nyton not be entirely helpless in such situation. He also wrote a LOT of stuff in his every post so far so I really don't mind giving him some allowances on the level of his memory chip. After all, his two first posts were massive reads that mostly went along with my criterias, and besides Nyton was always pretty good at more abstract character exporation.
You guys already have your safety nets with Kotori's intervention... so I really think you ought to just explore the 'what if' storyhook and write the story you want to do with it. That's how I stand on the matter of resisting or how much your characters are self-aware in the third person sense.
As for timeline, again, that's up to you. They could be unrelated just as much as they could be related depending on what ideas inspire you to write.