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Well, I’m back, and I may even be writing again. I’m not going to say what’s been happening, because that would just bore you all – and me. Suffice to say I suspected it before, but now I know that Hell is dually purposed as a carpet shop. You’ll finally realise how many rugs you’re standing on when cackling demons start pulling them from under your feet. Something is off with the universe lately, but perhaps it’s settling itself. Except, there’s Brexit to look forward to. Of all the things I hate, I hate that I’ve become one of those insane people who keep shelves full of bottled water… just in case. All we need is a second referendum, then the people of this country will vote ‘No Deal’ like lambs to the slaughter. Ah, well. For as long as it’s possible, I may as well potter about in my own AU’s.

You obviously haven’t checked the reviews page for The Price recently. I haven’t read the second chapter yet, but I will get around to it at some point. and @pippychick, you do not need to read The Woman in the Statue if you don’t want to. As wonderful as it would be to find out you enjoy it, if you really love how incredibly mean-spirited that original ending is, I don’t want to ruin something you enjoyed (in fact, I actually warned JayDee that by making my story canon, he might piss off people who loved the original ending). Feel free to pretend WitS doesn’t exist.

The road back starts when you realize what your mind is telling you and what everyone else telling you are so different that they cannot be reconciled. Kevin in a sense sees her in a manner similar to that of her creator. Its really a profound moment when she sees what she had allowed herself to forget. That a human of all things helped plant her feet on the road back. An interesting note on Wrath. Eparlegna is saying without meaning to is that Kevin is scared. Because at the root of lashing out is panic and anxiety and primal fear. A potent flammable cocktail so easy to set a flame. Well to be fair. Dead Space 3 had nowhere else it could go. Brethern moons harvesting earth and all. It wasn’t like it there would be some last second rescue. Issac got tentacled in the end. lol.

I don’t know if I said this last time, and I know it’s been years and all, but for whatever this is worth, I am so sorry for what you went through. No one deserves that. I am glad that I managed to be somewhat accurate with Luzurial’s reaction, though, and that is exactly what Eparlegna wants: for her to feel worthless. It’s one of the reasons I wrote the car scene the way I did. It’s actually a reflection of, or an answer to, the dialogue just before the final rape in Whore of Heaven; I even mirrored some of the wordplay deliberately. In that scene, Eparlegna tells her that she is a whore and he is her master, and that a whore is all she has ever been and all she will ever be. Here, well, Kevin gets to tell her what she needs to hear, and what he knows is true: that she is not a whore; that she is something beautiful and amazing, and that nothing Eparlegna does to her can ever take that away. Thanks! I’m not entirely sure where the idea for the Wrath construct came from. I just suddenly had the idea for an eyeless, skinned polar bear-type thing. Of course, I also threw in a Megatherium-style body for the giant claws and the tail. It seemed appropriate. The Charnel Spider is wearing human body parts rather than being made of them, but it certainly has the look of a Necromorph. As for the series, I personally enjoyed Dead Space 3, though definitely more as an action game than as a horror one. I definitely understand why a lot of people didn’t like it, though.

I actually teared up writing “Please touch me.” I did some research on what rape survivors go through, and something that came up is that often they don’t want to be touched, but that’s not a universal reaction. I thought it would be pretty emotional if Kevin had read the same thing and was trying to keep a respectful distance, all while what Luzurial really wants is a hug. The eyes were my personal favorite part. In Whore of Heaven you describe the demon’s eyes somehow radiating both red light and darkness. It took me a while, but I finally managed to visualize that. I figured it was kind of like old footage of nuclear bomb tests. In order to actually see the fireball, the aperture on the camera clamps way down when the explosion happens and darkens everything, so instead of the whole screen going white, we see an orange to red fireball that appears to suck the light out of the entire area. That became my model for how Eparlegna’s eyes worked. I mean, have you ever tried walking up stairs backwards? It’s not easy, especially when you’re distracted by fear. Yeah, he knows he shouldn’t, but in the end he just can’t not ask. Kevin’s temper is kind of his advantage here. Eparlegna is terrifying, but as he keeps saying stuff that degrades and insults Luzurial, Kevin’s affection for her prompts anger and it starts to burn through the fear. There’s just this running thing about Eparlegna and Lucifer. Their styles just kind of clash… Oh, I knew even when I was writing it that I was not topping the Charnel Spider for sheer creep factor. Nonetheless, I’m kind of fond of the Wrath creature. The fact that it basically kills itself is kind of based on the idea of anger very often being self-destructive. That line is simultaneously cool and sad to me. On the one hand, I just like the way it reads, and she just melted aluminum with her bare hands, which is just objectively badass. On the other hand, it shows that even when she’s enjoying having accomplished something, she still sees herself as broken, as a lesser person after what Eparlegna did to her in the last story. Necessitated by the genre I suppose. The target audience for Whore of Heaven did not come here to see a badass female action hero...you know...being badass. I’m curious, did you? During Flaying Solo, I mean. I recall you said during Whore of Heaven it was a fairly detached process. Kevin avoiding touching Luzurial’s wing stumps actually pops up a few times in the story. I never explained his thought process on that, but I figure that he doesn’t know if touching them will cause her physical pain, and figures it will likely remind her of her past trauma, so he tries to avoid doing it. That’s actually the Punctuated Pounding trope (minds out of the gutter, people), albeit with bullets instead of fisticuffs. I actually went back and forth about whether to keep that line or not, but in the end, I realized that it didn’t matter whether or not Kevin should say it, because the fact of the matter is that he would say it. As for Eparlegna’s mean-spirited “imagine her going back to Heaven looking like this,” bit, that’s a direct callback to your story, where, while anally raping Luzurial, he asks her to imagine standing before God and telling Him what she “let” Eparlegna do to her. It’s just another little bit of his sadism, shaming her for something that’s not her fault. Fun fact, before I actually sent you the first draft, in my very first concept for the chapter, he was actually going to chase the group out of the building and they’d have to escape by driving into a tunnel. It would even have had a funny little moment with Chloe Liu talking to other PPD agents (“You lost it? How did you lose an eighteen meter dragon!?”), but I also realized that it would have started the endgame too early, and wouldn’t have allowed the breather that Part Seven provides. The car scene was originally planned to be from Kevin’s point of view, and then I realized how much better it would work from Luzurial’s, specifically if I implemented the mind reading ability as a way for her to see the truth. It’s definitely a big step in their developing relationship, since he’s now seen her at her lowest point and, unlike what past experience has taught her to (wrongly) expect, it doesn’t change his opinion of her at all. It’s where the terminology changes a bit too, and Kevin picks up the designation of “her special mortal.”

Hello, all. FYI, chapter 6 of “Little Rose” is up. Not because I did a ton of work on it, but because a lot of it was already written, back when I first started working the story and was writing pieces in no particular order. For the same reason, chapter 7 probably won’t take that long to finish. SWP1, hope you’re feeling better. And I like your idea, except I’m going to make it all night instead of all day. Also, you’ve helped me figure out what the titles of the last 3 chapters will be: Chapter 9: Franny's Birthday, Part 1 Chapter 10: Franny's Birthday, Part 2 Chapter 11: Under the Stars

Everything I’ve read up until the end of part 8 in draft form is AWESOME. So I think he pulls the next parts off, but I guess I’m biased