Drunkard's Walk Forums

Once again, I'm making the new chapter available to you loyal folks who hang out here before it goes anywhere else. Your only charge for this exclusive access is the request that you post your opinions, good and bad. As the story heads toward the final wind-up in chapter 15, I'm curious to see how people react.
www.eclipse.net/~rms/dw2-14.html
It'll go to RAAC, the FFML, the BGC-FFML and wherever the hell else I normally post it tonight some time.
Have fun!


-- Bob
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"Flan on!" -- The battlecry of the Human Dessert

Yahooooo!!!
Checking my e-mail right now...
BTW, Bob, expect the C&C on 13 and 14 plus
a whopping four (maybe five if I get into the
mood) Dance posts on the FFML pretty soon.
Off to go reading....

Yep, the the current tale's in the run up to an ending with some klicks on a twisty road to go.
Treatment of a 33SP, let alone a true being of flesh and blood of that age would get any decent person's back up and if it was me the inflicter of such would be punished in as deserving a manner that I could think up.
A slight glitch in the matrix is present too, Bob. A certain phrase of "Be healed!" seems to be a missing from the page.
--Rod.H

Wow! I really enjoyed this. I just got done reading it, and now I have to get on with the day, so I do not have the time to post a full review just yet. I do want to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the movement and setup in this chapter, and what a lovely cliffhanger at the end!
Thanks for writing this! I look forward to the next part eagerly.

No time to comment properly just now -- I shouldn't have spent the last hour reading rather than going to work -- but one quick typo note.
The "If I had a boomer" song and the "Be healed" comment are both enclosed in angle-brackets. Since you didn't convert them to HTML entities, their contents don't show up in most web browsers...

I also should have spent the last hour in the shower and on my way to work, instead of reading, but..

YAY! good stuff, minor typos, flog your pre-readers, Kilroy is your friend!
--- Kokuten Daysleeper, Retired Epicced Officered DorfWire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979

...yeowza.
Damn good work, Mr. Schroeck, damn good work.
Case in point: I'd realized what Jennifer would be my first time through #13--the "-sp" designation and various comments made it sickeningly clear--
--but the revelatory scene still brought me perilously close to vomiting right here on the college library floor, and wouldn't that have been awkward?
(That was a compliment. No, really.)
I see you also put some stock in the Armstrong + Mason = Largo theory. Makes a lot of sense to me (and whatever canon may be, I'm dead certain that it's what the ADPF authors intended us to think).
OTOH, Armstrong G728 was a completely non-humanoid model, and you have Doug saying there doesn't seem to be such a thing. Or is that just another infonugget he missed?
Minor and possibly imaginary nitpick: while I also can't remember where the Tasmanian Devil's quote comes from, I'm convinced it's "Why for you...". (Might be multiple differing instances, especially considering Taz had his own daily 'toon for a while.)
Hmm... does the neurophage thing mean that the "telepathic" interchanges between Sylia and Largo are just plain radio transmissions? Amusing thought.
And on the "Who the Heck is Quincy" front...
...absolutely nothing.
Well done.
--Sam Ashley
"This is what we call the 'denouement.' That's French for 'when we beat up the supervillain.'"

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BTW, Bob, expect the C&C on 13 and 14 plus a whopping four (maybe five if I get into the mood) Dance posts on the FFML pretty soon.

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Oh, very cool, Elsa. Can't wait to see the Dance stuff.
Hope you liked the chapter...


-- Bob
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"Flan on!" -- The battlecry of the Human Dessert

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Treatment of a 33SP, let alone a true being of flesh and blood of that age would get any decent person's back up and if it was me the inflicter of such would be punished in as deserving a manner that I could think up.

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Don't worry. Even though it's (currently) going to happen off-stage, Sylia's making sure that Sheng will get his.

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A slight glitch in the matrix is present too, Bob. A certain phrase of "Be healed!" seems to be a missing from the page.

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Whoops. Fixed. Thanks for the catch. I was doing some last-minute back-and-forthing between HTML and Text this morning, and this must have been caught in the crossfire.


-- Bob
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"Flan on!" -- The battlecry of the Human Dessert

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I do want to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the movement and setup in this chapter, and what a lovely cliffhanger at the end!

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Thank you. I've had that line of dialogue sitting waiting for its moment in the sun for something on four years now. I'm glad it finally got out there.
Anyone want to make bets on what the first word of the next chapter will be?


-- Bob
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"Flan on!" -- The battlecry of the Human Dessert

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The "If I had a boomer" song and the "Be healed" comment are both enclosed in angle-brackets. Since you didn't convert them to HTML entities, their contents don't show up in most web browsers...

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As noted above, the bracket issues have been fixed. Thanks!


-- Bob
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"Flan on!" -- The battlecry of the Human Dessert

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YAY! good stuff, minor typos, flog your pre-readers, Kilroy is your friend!

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Thanks. Were the typos you saw something other than the angle-brackets stuff mentioned already? Last thing I did before posting was a spell-check...


-- Bob
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"Flan on!" -- The battlecry of the Human Dessert

Very good.
Only one minor nit, but it's only my opinion.
I keep parsing 'fangirl' as 'fang girl'.
Perhaps a hypen would fix this.
fan-boy
fan-girl
fan-child?
fan-booma?
--
The tears you do not see in my eyes are not of pain but of joy.
--- Paraphrased from my mothers response to my stepdad's maraige proposal

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...yeowza.
Damn good work, Mr. Schroeck, damn good work.

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Thank you.

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Case in point: I'd realized what Jennifer would be my first time through #13--the "-sp" designation and various comments made it sickeningly clear--
--but the revelatory scene still brought me perilously close to vomiting right here on the college library floor, and wouldn't that have been awkward?
(That was a compliment. No, really.)

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No, I know exactly what you mean. That's precisely the response I wanted from the reader. A mean little trick, I have to admit -- leading the reader into imagining and feeling exactly the same things Nene is. But if I hadn't done it that way, the entire scene -- and Nene's moment of satori -- would have fallen so flat... For those couple of paragraphs, I had to make the reader be Nene, at precisely the most horrifying moment of her life.
It will probably come as no surprise that this scene (both parts of it) was what took most of the last two weeks (counting the time my computer was dead) to whip into shape. It went back and forth between me and the prereaders several times, and how they stood it, I don't know; I only could bear to read it so many times because I was maintaining a purely mechanical point of view on it.

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I see you also put some stock in the Armstrong + Mason = Largo theory. Makes a lot of sense to me (and whatever canon may be, I'm dead certain that it's what the ADPF authors intended us to think).

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It does make the most sense to me, too.

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OTOH, Armstrong G728 was a completely non-humanoid model, and you have Doug saying there doesn't seem to be such a thing. Or is that just another infonugget he missed?

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The clever answer is yes, Doug missed that.
The cleverer answer is that Armstrong's particular model has been phased out by 2036, and is no longer listed in the materials he consulted.
The true answer is that the source materials I had when I wrote that passage something like four years ago didn't include any non-humanoid boomers, except for dogbots and a couple other trivial things. I just wrote what I knew of at the time.
Take your pick.

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Minor and possibly imaginary nitpick: while I also can't remember where the Tasmanian Devil's quote comes from, I'm convinced it's "Why for you...".

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The sound file I have is very clearly "What for...". You may be right that there are multiple versions, but I don't know of any other sound clips.

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Hmm... does the neurophage thing mean that the "telepathic" interchanges between Sylia and Largo are just plain radio transmissions? Amusing thought.

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I hadn't considered that, but it does make the most sense, doesn't it?

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And on the "Who the Heck is Quincy" front...
...absolutely nothing.

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Of course. That's in the last chapter.

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Well done.

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Thank you!


-- Bob
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"Flan on!" -- The battlecry of the Human Dessert

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I keep parsing 'fangirl' as 'fang girl'.
Perhaps a hypen would fix this.

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Yeah, I can see that. Okay, next time I revise the chapter, I'll throw that in.
Thanks!


-- Bob
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"Flan on!" -- The battlecry of the Human Dessert

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For a long time I wouldn't sing where people could hear me,
because I thought I was simply awful. Some friends I made during
a subsequent stop in my journey home succeeded in disabusing me
of that notion, but that would be years later. While I was in
MegaTokyo, I was still convinced my singing could kill insects
and stun small rodents. Even so, I would sometimes sing when the
mood struck me and when, like at that moment, I was alone and it
was thus (in my opinion) safe.

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Hm -- well along those lines, is it possible by any chance that Doug can sing himself to use his powers? If so, it's just going to make holding him somewhat more annoying.

Well, once again Bob has managed to Outwit my finely tuned plot detector. Kudos on that.
Be honest, though... Did you kip the "Be healed" bit, or was it already written and you were laughing at how close, yet so far we really were?"I was an Otaku before those kids came along and changed the meaning of the word."
-- HM "Howling Mad" Wilson to more than one team-mate.
Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky?
That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry-
NO QUARTER!!!
-- "No Quarter", by Echo's Children

re: Be Healed
I wrote that scene something like 18 months ago. I did indeed laugh when that showed up in the speculation.


-- Bob
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"Flan on!" -- The battlecry of the Human Dessert

Wow.... That was yet another stunning chapter. It was.. creepy for lack of a better word in the Jennifer/Nene scene. Also like all good stories the ending leaves me wanting more. I'm looking forward to the scene where Doug wakes up and tries to puzzel out what "went wrong" with the boomers at the end there. Like some of the others I noticed a few minor typoes and I'll pass them along when I do a reread if they havn't turned up by then.

Shawn Earl

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It went back and forth between me and the prereaders several times, and how they stood it, I don't know; I only could bear to read it so many times because I was maintaining a purely mechanical point of view on it.

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I just want to state, for the record, that Bob's very first version actually had _more_ impact than the final one IMHO, but it got toned down a hair in the editing process...
Offsides
Drunkard's Walk Forum Moderator and Prereader At Large

Just a quick note since Bob mentioned it - Chapter 14 is out on the RAAC newsgroup NOW, and will be part of tonight's RAAC archive update. Regards,
Jeanne Hedge
http://www.jhedge.com

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I just want to state, for the record, that Bob's very first version actually had _more_ impact than the final one IMHO, but it got toned down a hair in the editing process...

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And for those of you who are curious about these kinds of things, the difference ultimately boiled down to a single word.


-- Bob
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"Flan on!" -- The battlecry of the Human Dessert

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Just a quick note since Bob mentioned it - Chapter 14 is out on the RAAC newsgroup NOW, and will be part of tonight's RAAC archive update.

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Wow, fast work, Jeanne! Thanks!


-- Bob
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"Flan on!" -- The battlecry of the Human Dessert

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well along those lines, is it possible by any chance that Doug can sing himself to use his powers?

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It's been covered before, over in The Game, I think -- the answer is "no". Doug singing in his first combat in Hot Legs was just him having a good time, not trying to get a power. in game there was one incident where he "sang" himself up a power, but he was wired into a psionic amplifier at the same time, and that was the critical difference.


-- Bob
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"Flan on!" -- The battlecry of the Human Dessert

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Well, once again Bob has managed to Outwit my finely tuned plot detector. Kudos on that.

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I have to admit I'm curious. What did you think was going to happen?


-- Bob
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"Flan on!" -- The battlecry of the Human Dessert