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Re: “Tribal Warfare” From Fairy-Slayer on February 17, 2020 I think this is my only other paleolithic story. Although I have an idea for another one that I might write up one of these days. They were definitely spying for nefarious reasons. Pamarr and Cova really aren’t the type to go check out another tribe’s dudes. They pretty much consider non-Foothills types to be lower than dirt. I felt like the rape scenes would be more engaging if the warriors weren’t just faceless, all-the-same barbarians. The theme of this story, if it has one, is that barbarism is in the eye of the beholder. So much of what the Tall Grass view as good citizenship or praiseworthy behavior isn’t necessarily viewed that way by others (ourselves included). You’re reminding me of one of my junior high teachers, who talked about going to Catholic school and sometimes getting whacked on the back of his hands with a ruler for bad behavior. Then he’d come home, his mom would see the marks on his hands, and she’d yell, “You made those holy women angry?!” and beat him again. Lothar? That guy from Defenders of the Earth? In any case, thanks for the review!

Re: “Tribal Warfare” From JayDee on February 17, 2020 I had to Google that reference to understand it. It's like they won some kind of reverse Darwin Award, where instead of taking themselves out of the gene pool, they got themselves forcibly thrown into it. I was trying to create some contrast between civilized and barbaric, and how easily the two can be confused. Thanks for the review!

Ahh, sorry. Almost certainly wasn’t worth your time. Beg pardon! These wacky cave people not understanding natural selection! No problem!

Oh no, I wouldn't beat them or anything like that. (…unless they really were acting under orders, but their flippant attitude really seemed more like they just were going to do what they wanted.) Punishments need to be constructive… and creative. There are way too many people who love to say, “My parents used to beat the crap out of me all the time and I turned out okay!” followed by *glug*glug*glug* before bitching about being fired from every job they've ever had and how their exes and children have permanent restraining orders against them. "Lothar of the Hill People" was a recurring sketch on Saturday Night Live back in '89-90, with Mike Meyers in the titular role. https://snl.fandom.com/wiki/Lothar_Of_The_Hill_People It looks NBC has managed to keep it off YouTube for now.

Okay, I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to do this week, because I don't really know. But what I'd like to do is finish chapter 5 of “Delta Delta Delta,” because (1) that's the story that has gone longest without an update (chapter 4 was posted back in September), and (2) then I'll be able to start posting chapters of a new story. That will be "Keene's College Weekend," a sequel to "Keene's Really Good Week." Young cheetah-boy Keene spends a weekend visiting his sister, Kiri, at college and gets up to all manner of sexual hijinks with Kiri and her roommates. After that, I'd like to finish chapter 5 of “Wishful,” then the 10th and final chapter of “Make It All Better.” Once that story is completed, I'll start posting chapters of the next new story in the queue, which will be a Loud House fanfic (although not the “Enter the Sandboy” sequel; that one still needs work).

Lucky you that actually get review notifications. Myself I have seen forum notifications to my gmail account but never any review notification at all. It was a very good conversation in the stairwell...but still not quite the same as soul searching talk with the main characters in the previous chapters. No worries there…I was kind of assuming they were driving a military vehicle and not just some random SUV, A future version of a gatling gun when they wanted to step out of the vehicle would also have been quite effective. Maybe those kind of weapons are banned in the future. If you google gatling gun one of first hits if it legal own such weapon...insane if you ask me. I am too lazy to do the numbers...but if we assume the height of the LTV is limited compared to how close they parked the LTV to hostiles shooting at them the base of the triangle should be huge since they hit the upper body on a shot that was mostly horizontal. Of course nothing wrong with them using the LTV to park very close...but then Gibbs shot become less impressive if it was just a point blank shot. The shot hitting the lower part of the wall behind the shooter would be cool and keep Gibbs shot as more fantastical. I saw your talk with JD about it and my comment is that by now it is starting to become habit that you explain what JD should have meant with his scenes. The more sinister author would have had Luzurial sacrificing the captured since she has learned she sometimes must make hard choices….but that is not kind of story you are telling. Reminds me of a LARP scenario when a friend was “this plot will make the players have to make a choice between killing an innocent elf and making progress in the fighting the big bad”...the veteran players was like “oh...we have already done this mistakes and it cost us a quarter ofthe world’s elven population…off with her head”. Took the friend that had written the plot very by surprise. Glad I could help. I loved that movie when I was kid.

Well, you can tell I’ve been away fro a while when I forget to check the email address I set up to use with this site, and as such miss a review notification! Many thanks to @Thundercloud for sending me a PM to let me know about this. Anyway, on to his review! Thanks! We are indeed in the endgame now, which is why things are more action-focused, but I did try to balance it a little and have some level of conversation going on, like with Luzurial and the agents in the stairwell. I was, however, very intent on making sure everyone gets something to do. I should have made this clearer, but the LTV is actually somewhat armored, with ballistic material for the windshield and light armor on the outer surface. It’s just that the Gungnir was designed to pierce armor, hence the hypersonic round made of a dense material (tungsten carbide). You are right, however, in that they could have shot out the tires to slow the vehicle down or something like that, but I guess the allure of the giant gun made them focus on using that. The tower is surrounded by flat ground, you’re not wrong about that. However, Gibbs is sticking up out of a hatch in the LTV’s roof, so he’s up higher than the cultist shooting at him from the ground. His Gungnir round thus comes in at a downward angle. Yeah, that was one of my favorite lines to write. We’ve seen Luzurial be cool and we’ve seen her be sympathetic, but angels in the sacred texts are usually described as being terrifying, and I wanted a moment where she gets to be that way. I was thinking of reaction lines after that, and when one of them was something like “Oh my God” or “Jesus Christ” that was when the response popped into my head, and I loved it so much there was no way it wasn’t going in there. Burning a hole through the cultist also led into the discussion of divine fire itself… Credit must be given to JD here. That line about Luzurial’s eyes glowing, but then her regaining control of herself, made me so curious about just how powerful she is that it led to this idea. I’m also glad that you liked the moment between the caged women and her. It is a bit of symmetry, how she couldn’t do anything to help the women 75 years earlier, but now she can, and I liked writing their reactions as well, all sort of forgetting everything for a moment and clustering around the angel. Freyde’s reaction in particular, when Luzurial reassured her in Yiddish, was sort of a microcosm of what all of them are feeling. Well thank you for suggesting that power! I remember when you first brought the idea up, I was like “Oh, man, this is a cool idea, but it seems so weird just to use it as a one-off,” and then I realized “Well, then I’ll just have it pop up again!” Thank you! I wanted Calista to have something to do here instead of just being a hostage, and then when I was coming up with the trap I had this image pop into my head from my childhood. See, I grew up on Don Bluth movies, one of which was The Land Before Time. In that film, in the scene where the T. rex first appears, there’s a part where Littlefoot and Cera hide from it in a thicket of...some plant with thorns, and believe it or not, I had that image, of the tunnel of thorns, in my head while writing Calista’s crawl to disable the trap, except that in this case the thorns are growing in toward you. Thanks! Hopefully it ends up being a fun read!

“Tribal Warfare” is posted. Summary: When the Tall Grass tribe finds an enemy’s daughters spying on them, their chieftain orders her male warriors to punish the girls…all night long.

And now we have what is becoming a tradition: a jumbo-sized review from @JayDee! Sorry about that, but thanks! I had a lot of fun writing Gibbs, and I honestly didn’t really enjoy killing him off, but as for why, well, you said it perfectly yourself right here: Pretty much. Humanity is fighting a demon, and in Whore of Heaven you made it very clear how smart and powerful this demon is and how outmatched the people going up against him are. I know this is 75 years later, and that I had a bunch of casualties in Chapter 8, but nonetheless I felt like it would make Eparlegna look nonthreatening if none of the PPD agents were killed. Granted, I have failed to make him as threatening and clever as you did in Whore of Heaven, and that’s on me. I wish I knew how to fix it, but I do have limits as a writer, and I seem to have hit them. Still… Hopefully I can at least deliver on that! Jumping back top some earlier things… I did rather enjoy writing a lot of that section, including the jokes (the angel sitting in the back thing is a favorite of mine) and the Gungnir shootout. I wanted to give every character at least one cool thing to do in this story, so Gibbs has that bit where he shoots the hybrid through his own gun, Abdul torches the Charnel Spider with an oxymethane explosion, Kevin shoots Eparlegna in the balls, and while Calista sort of assisted with Kevin’s moment, she gets a bigger one here, crawling through the fractal impalement trap to disable it. Chloe, Leary and Cole will all have moments in the final chapter (Chloe has one I’m particularly fond of) and of course Luzurial has multiple moments throughout the story. The fight with Tank Top is something that was kind of tough for me to write, because as you said, he really doesn’t stand a chance. Even in her weakened state, Luzurial is stronger than he is, she can read his mind and while he may have a decade or so of training, she has eons of it. The only way I could really think to have him hurt her was to have an environmental hazard throw her off slightly. Still, it accomplished the main goal of the segment, which was to show her searing light attack and introduce the concept of divine fire, that Luzurial at full strength can release enough energy in a single attack to make a hydrogen bomb look small. I’m not loading Chekhov’s gun or anything… Yeah, that was what I was talking about earlier. I know I’m not as good with the planning as you were in the first story. That’s one of those times where things just kind of work out by accident. I had an idea of how tall the building was (300 meters), and I figured out how tall each story would be (4 meters) and just divided. The fact that it came together like that was just one of those neat little bits of happenstance. This is sort of meant to build on the stargazing scene from Chapter 7, where she and Kevin are talking and it comes up that she can’t unmake her mistakes, but she can learn from them. Here, she’s doing her best to ensure that she’s fully regained her energy after burning a hole through Tank Top down in the lobby, as she can’t afford to be at anything less than her best when she runs into Eparlegna on the top floor. The bit with the women she hoped she could save is just another of my attempts to take the character you wrote in WoH and try to build on her using the experience she went through. And the person who wrote the original story isn’t such a prick. Why, they let me write this thing! I wanted to get at least a little of the horror stuff you did in Whore of Heaven into my story, and the tortured heads of those who defied him spiked around his throne was my attempt at that. It’s not as scary as I wanted it to be. Maybe in the future, after I finish the story, I can enhance the description somewhat. The pillars are an in-universe callback to WoH. Eparlegna is trying to weaken and/or kill the mortals coming up to him, but he wants Luzurial to reach him, and as such he’s deliberately made things a little familiar for her, to bring back memories of old times. You were employing very economical storytelling, and as such you kept things to really three PoVs: the narration, Eparlegna and Luzurial, with very minor bits from Shondra, Molly and Bernice. You could have created a minor character to represent the caged women, but unlike those other three, she wouldn’t have had anything to do, so her presence would have felt superfluous. I had the advantage of a pre-established character who was going to do something in the scene, and since she was going to be sitting in the pen for a bit before the PPD agents and Luzurial showed up, it made sense for her to interact with the other women. This is one of those moments I wish I had a good way to translate things reliably. See, Freyde (from the Yiddish freid, meaning “joy”) was somewhat nervous, so Luzurial says “Fear not, daughter of Abraham. All will be well,” in Yiddish, the idea being that, as an angel, Luzurial speaks all languages. Thing is, I don’t know anyone who speaks Yiddish, so I didn’t really have a way to translate that. Google translate is good for one or two words, but for entire sentences you want a human being. I was still pretty proud of the way Freyde and the other holy women react after that, the tears and the mix of nervousness, awe and humility at being in the presence of someone like Luzurial. That was exactly the idea. Thermite burns really hot, so much so that people handling it on TV always have reflective suits to protect them when they’re anywhere near the stuff. This close to it, the radiant heat is enough to burn the skin right off parts of Calista’s body, hence why Luzurial has to rush over and heal her before she can freak out looking at her arms and hands. I’m actually not sure Luzurial even could have left her until after the fight, given how bad the burns were. Thank you! I was trying to figure out what “the traps of Hell” you mentioned in Whore of Heaven would look like, and I hit upon the idea of a basic spike trap, but I wanted to make it somewhat more magical, and that was when the idea of spikes sprouting out of other spikes until there was no open air left came up. It did seem like something that would be designed in Hell, something that could, perhaps, be more efficient in how quickly it kills, but is designed to make those caught in it suffer more. Thank you for yet another awesome review! I hope I don’t let you down.