InBrightestDay

Alright @InvidiaRed, @JayDee and @kagome26isawsome, I’ve finally posted my story! It took way longer than a 2,700 word story should have (sorry about that) but it is up. Social Distancing

You kidding me? It’s always an honor to work in this shared universe (the Angelverse?) with you! I also figured that the events of MRaD came just before WoH, given that the fics were posted so close together. It was what inspired me to include Michael in WitS to begin with, actually. It didn’t. As the National Guard (including the LTV Private Flynn was in) advanced into the area within Eparlegna’s barrier, they were swarmed by id constructs. They dropped several waves with automatic fire, and were holding well, but that was when the Screamer attacked. An avian horror forged of Wrath, the Screamer resembled a giant vulture, its black wings spreading twelve meters across, hooked thumb talons sprouting from feathered flesh, its beaked jaws bristling with tooth-like projections of sharp bone. Its name came from the weapon it employed as it attacked, swooping low over the soldiers and releasing a piercing , deafening shriek, a focused beam of sound that shattered glass, rattled the metal frames of the vehicles and stunned humans in its path, leaving them easy prey for other monsters. After its second pass, the Screamer landed in the middle of the National Guard formation, knocking stunned soldiers away with the hammer blows of its beating wings. Moving on its feet and wings like a bat, it moved to the LTV and tore the driver’s side door off, dragging the screaming redhead out. The Wrath construct made to seize her in its beak, to rend her flesh and scatter blood and viscera across the battlefield, its snakelike neck drawing back and striking, jaws spread wide...only for the Archangel Luzurial to step in front of it and catch its jaws, holding them open as it tried to bite. Private Flynn scrambled back, and the beast tried to scream, but Luzurial slammed its head into the asphalt, blunting the sonic attack. One of its wings reached for her, the thumb talon meant to slash at her, but she kicked it aside. Still, she could not reach the machete she carried and slay the beast, forced as she was to hold its head with both hands. Of course, she didn’t have to. About ten meters away, Colin Gibbs had managed to rest his Gungnir on some wreckage while the rest of Chloe’s team fought off other id constructs. Luzurial held the Screamer in place, and he fired a single shot, the hypersonic projectile piercing one of the monster’s eyes and erupting from the other side of its head in a gory explosion. Or, you know, something like that. I didn’t just make that up, by the way. What you just saw was a deleted scene from The Woman in the Statue, which would have followed the bit where battle is joined. I cut it because I realized that the important part of that scene was Luzurial’s big decision to trust humanity and not try to generate any incarnate virtues. It would have been more detailed had I actually written it into the story, but I figured I’d explain it here anyway. Moving on! Okay, so… You just almost made me spit my drink all over my computer while laughing. I may have to include this in New Year’s Visitation now. No problem. I always like seeing your work.

I promise to have all of your stories reviewed by the end of the day! Mine is fighting me. I wanted to make a funny/sexy story where Cody learns that being trapped in the house with Yua for months might not be so bad, but then the idea turned a little more melancholy and leaned more toward Yua’s fear about being an immortal creature in a relationship with a human who’s vulnerable to disease. I think sexy might be off the table (sex scenes take a long time for me to write anyway, and you guys are getting these out fast), but maybe I can make it sweet instead.

I am absurdly jealous of how fast @InvidiaRed can write. It’s going to take me longer before Social Distancing, my Yua/Cody story, is going up. In the meantime, for those who don’t want to dig through his profile to find it, Invidia’s story is here.

I did get a hint of that, but wasn’t sure if I was reading too much into it. Ah, sorry for the mistake there. If I’d played Dark Souls, it probably would have been a lot more obvious. So does that mean there’s a spider girl in there that everyone feels really sad for? I may not have played the game, but the Fair Lady (and the way players feel for her) is something I’ve definitely heard about. I mean, maybe a little, especially since he was reacting to...you know...grass. Anyway, we’ll find out more about him next time, I presume!

And we have a new review for WitS Chapter 9 from @Sinfulwolf! Thank you! What you just described was very much what I was aiming for, wanting to keep the emotional core of the story intact, but still keep the pace up so that it felt like we were moving into the finale. As for the bit of Whore of Heaven I expanded upon...well, you’ll see next chapter. Working on the conclusion (like, I was writing it, paused to reply to this, and will now go back to writing it), so hopefully the tale remains enjoyable!

Thank you guys so much! I do always try to think about why things happen in a story and use that going forward, and I think Thundercloud has a good point about JayDee’s sheer style.

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!

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.

Yeah, she’s a rather complicated character. Dealing with both the amnesia element and the demon sharing her body is a heck of a challenge for a writer. For what it’s worth, I think you’ve done a fantastic job with her. Well it freaking worked! And wipe that evil smile off your face! I knew about the extensive testing, but I did not know about the name. That is a very weird thing to learn, and it does make me wonder what the inventor’s thought process was. Would the heroes actually wait that long to tell her? I mean, I know she’s an enemy and all, but I feel like someone would say something after like a month. It was really cool! It has some great descriptions (the house exploding into splinters is a visual image right out of an action movie, and the dome of black energy the Obliterator releases is a creepy yet cool image), and that quick thinking Jennifer and the demon do to save their lives there is really neat. I see where you’re coming from. It’s basically the same reason I broke WitS Chapter 9 into two parts, because what I have as Chapter 9 now is over 11,000 words. There is definitely something to be said for not making a chapter too long. Obviously this is up to you as the author, but I think keeping Chapters 9 and 10 in the story works. In my opinion, reading G.S.P. is less like reading a novel and more like reading a comic book series, with each chapter as an issue of the comic. Therefore, we have story arcs, but plots can come and go every few issues. The through-line for the story is the cast of characters we’re following, watching the G.S.P. grow together as a team and so on. So taking an issue or two to develop Avalanche works, in my opinion, given this story structure. Again, this is ultimately up to what you think is best as the author. I’m just giving my opinion. Wow. Well, thank you! I did love the scene, and I agree with what you said there, that if he just quit being a superhero, he would still be a superpowered rapist loose on the streets. I think having them deal with him in a more definite fashion was a good move to make. Anyway, it’s on to the finale now (for both our stories, amusingly), and I seriously doubt I’ll be disappointed. You’ve shown a real talent in handling the superhero action scenes!

Another review of WitS Part Nine, this time from @InvidiaRed Thanks! Luzurial has spent most of the story interacting with Kevin, Abdul and Calista, and I wanted to have some interaction between her and the agents, and this little beat in the stairwell served both to do that and give us a brief check up on how Luzurial is feeling. Thank you! I was trying to think of magical traps that weren’t just “zaps you when you walk into it” type things, and I came up with two, one of which will come up in Part Ten, and the other of which was the fractal impalement trap. The name comes from the fact that the secondary set of spikes emerge from the primary spikes at right angles, and then the tertiary spikes emerge from those at right angles, and the quaternaries from those and so on and so forth, a fractal pattern in other words. Well, he’s doing a modified version of something he did in Whore of Heaven, not precisely harvesting faith, but sort of related. You’ll see what he’s going for in the final chapter. Hey, the cultist hit the LTV, and Gibbs hit the cultist, so while there were some misses, some shots were on target. For the curious, as InvidiaRed has noticed, the Gungnir asynchronous coilgun is named after the spear wielded by Odin in Norse mythology. Thanks again for the review!

It’s been far too long, but ladies and gentlemen, The Woman in the Statue is officially back! Expect the tenth and final part in a couple more weeks, but for now, let’s get to the first review of Part Nine, from first time commenter but apparently long time reader Symbalistic. Thank you so very much for the review! It’s wonderful to know that you’ve been enjoying the story. That means a lot to me as a writer, especially when it comes to a personal project like this one. Hopefully the finale will be fun for you to read as well.

OH MY GOD YOU GUYS I FINALLY UPDATED!!! *Ahem* I mean, Part Nine is up. Due to length, the story has unfortunately ended up with ten parts, so we have one more to go after this.

Okay, listen, I read, and this precisely how I’ve defined this in the past, enough of this story to know what happens, and then avoided being really depressed by not thinking about it. The combination of the chapter and talking about this is keeping the story in my head, and if we talk about this any more, I am going to be very tempted to go over to the Depravity Repository, copy Metroid: Last Mission, paste it into a PM and send it to you, so that that way it can live in your head too. And yes, of course it’s a Metroid story. Deschrimung wouldn’t be a Predator worth his salt if he didn’t get himself a Samus trophy. I’m sorry; that was kind of mean. My feelings are a little off-kilter at the moment. Moving on... I actually wondered that myself. Her description is striking enough that I figured she had to be from somewhere, but I couldn’t place her. Yeah, in any of the following stories he’d sneak up on her and stab her through the face with his wristblades. I mean, it’s really similar, just more mean-spirited. Sorry for talking about that again, speaking of which... Honestly, that criticism wasn’t fair. At a guess it was probably bleedover from the other story. I was probably wanting Lara to put up a better fight because of my feelings about Samus. Don’t tempt me! Actually, if I did this, she would probably be tall to pass for a man, with relatively small breasts (again, easier to pass as a man), and I’d probably follow the Anne Bonny example and have her have joined the crew after falling for the captain of the ship, with him getting killed by either a xenomorph or a Predator partway through the story, forcing her to try and rally the crew… Shit, I might write this. I’ll just add it to WitS, The Spider House, Sigrid and Reynard’s story, Aldreda and Elis’s story, New Year’s Visitation, The Arena… This might not happen for a while. Game mechanics! Actually kind of makes sense. I wonder how many pulse rifle rounds you have to fire into a Predator in the AvP games to kill it.

Oh my God that’s amazing! I’d already read the chapter in question (the Lara Croft one) by the time I said that, so there wasn’t really any way to avoid it, but I appreciate the thought. As for the copying thing, I don’t mean you were plagiarized, merely that a commissioned Deathstalker fic (a tie-in to the Gogedheh series, referenced several times in My Enemy’s Enemy) very much seems to have taken inspiration from that chapter, with several plot elements being reused and certain imagery as well. The ending bit with Gogedheh, while not written precisely the same way, is nonetheless so similar to a bit with the Predator in that story that it was the exact moment I decided these two were linked. Yeah, that’s...that’s the guy from the story I’m talking about. Yeah, he counts her in the other stories, so I did too. Yeah, that was a fun thought. Don’t worry, I’m sure he’ll find a way to one-up her! Yeah, I actually saw that a while back. That’s a nice piece of work.

The first movie is, in my opinion, honestly a decent entry. It’s not R-rated like both franchises and a lot of the characters are kind of bland (excepting Sanaa Lathan as protagonist Alexa Woods and Lance Henriksen as Charles Bishop Weyland), but it’s nonetheless got some pretty fun action scenes, well done creature effects and the third act is awesome. Yes, Celtic employs plasma bagpipes that play Amazing Grace as they fire, and wields a telescoping shillelagh in close combat! No, in all seriousness the three Yautja were given nicknames in the script, some of which made sense by the final film (Scar is the only one to kill a xenomorph and ritually scar himself with the mark of his clan, thus earning “blooded” status; Chopper has two long arm blades instead of the usual dual wristblades, so he can...you know...chop people up) but Celtic’s name seems to have been a reference to something that didn’t transition from script to finished film. Maybe he was supposed to have Celtic-style weaving line patterns on his bio-helmet or armor or something, but the final design didn’t end up with those. As for Gogedheh getting kicked in the crotch, kicks and blows to the crotch actually are a recurring element in the Deathstalker stories, having happened five times that I can recall, though only once to Gogedheh. Something actually did, but it’s difficult to explain. See, it wasn’t actually anything you wrote (let’s just say you might have been copied, sort of). When the review of the chapter in question goes up I will either be comically mock-indignant with you or genuinely depressed, it’s hard to call. You did actually call Alex a fallen angel, amusingly enough. Oh God I didn’t realize it was a PUN! I mean, it’s from the creator of Dreneparssa and Eparlegna, so I probably should have guessed. Funnily enough, though, “Rehtegog” sounds like a pretty good demon name for one of your stories. That carried over into Multiverse Trophies, where he does seem to be fending off guilt (or at least that’s how I read it). As you say, as the requests went on any semblance of guilt vanished (once the character goes as far as he did in that second story, there’s really no coming back). That’s weird biped tortoise, thank you very much! It’s just so specific. “Fourteen inches and vibrating, got it. We got those modeled on humans and, for the kinkier, horses.” “No! Like, neither of those will work! They need to be donkeys!” “We don’t have those… If you want donkeys specifically, I’m going to have to go to the farm and take measurements and photos and the farmer’s going to think I’m really weird...” “This is totally important!” “I mean okay...” I kind of want to put Jane Maybelline into a fic now, but I don’t know if I have a place for her. Yeah...uh...weirdos. By the way, Uma Thurman is apparently seven inches taller than me. Not that I find that attractive or anything! It does indeed! It was natural enough that I didn’t even notice it at first, not until I started to make the “your princess is in another castle” joke. Maybe it was because the guy on the Pringles can looks vaguely like Mario? I mean, not exactly, but...he’s got a mustache. He’s killed three of those now, by the way, and his apprentice is killing her way up to a fourth. Don’t know what “are we learning yet” meant, but yeah, she did, and that is the best she has ever done against a Predator. Fun fact, there are literally no stories I can find on the internet where Samus fights a Predator other than the ones by Deathstalker, so that only ends one way...so far (I may have unintentionally caused a thing to happen; fingers freaking crossed that it doesn’t go horribly). Oh, and… You’re welcome!

I may yet. It’s hard to say, though, given how difficult Gogedheh’s actual strength is to pin down. I mean, Deathstalker consistently misspells “scraping” and “scraped” as “scrapping” and “scrapped”. Nobody’s perfect. Oh yeah, I noticed that. From my reaction post concerning Multiverse Trophies: Now, I admittedly have not read Five Women. One Night., but looking at the chapter titles I get the idea. A Yautja (Predator, for simplicity's sake, from here on out) arrives on Earth who specifically hunts women. He tracks and kills five of them, Lara Croft, Beatrix Kiddo and Miho from Sin City among them. I should be able to follow this without having any questions. … I don't know what the circumstances are precisely, but somewhere, somehow, JD is responsible for this. So yeah, that answers that! Funny you should mention Eparlegna. Roundabout Becoming the Hunted (wherein Gogedheh wades through the cast of Mass Effect) he pretty much turns into Eparlegna. Morally speaking, and in terms of what they do, they’re essentially the same guy at this point, the only difference being that Gogedheh does this stuff when he’s mad, while Eparlegna does it because it’s fun. On the vocal mimicry, absolutely. I don’t remember Predator 2 as well as I do the first film and Predators, but the City Hunter may have broken someone’s wrist in that. Celtic does it in the first AVP film (a redshirt pulls a gun on him, so he grabs the guy’s wrist and very quickly snaps it). You make a very good point concerning the height difference. Just because the Yautja in the films all tend to be around the same height doesn’t mean there couldn’t be larger ones. As for the internal testicles...maybe you didn’t want to have to describe his balls so you decided they were inside? I appreciate that, though I don’t know if anything in here is going to do what the other stories did (Becoming the Hunted features a torture scene so long and detailed that I didn’t feel anything, emotionally speaking, for a good 15 minutes afterward, or as I put it to Deathstalker...), and there is, like, plenty of entertainment value!

Thank you so much for the recommendation!

Uh...yes! That’s exactly what I meant. They...play matchmaker for one another and then...go on a double date. It’s definitely not something else. And now onto JayDee’s review of Moonlit Snow! Oh, shut up, you! I’m genuinely curious, how did you expect the ending to go? Thank you! This is in large part thanks to you asking that very question. I think (though I can’t remember precisely) you may have even offered me the idea that there were those who felt the prejudice, but had to be careful not to offend the church. It was only while writing the bandit fight that I realized that Hopkin could serve as a representative of the less devout, who would just openly insult Lady Aldreda over her albinism, which brought up the idea that she can pretty well handle blunt insults like that, but that the more “polite” ones hurt worse because of how she just has to take them. The tactical stuff was part of my research into medieval combat, which was where I got both Lady Aldreda’s swordplay moves and the knowledge that plate armor more or less makes you immune to a sword (unless it’s stabbed into the chain mail in the joints), but a mace is still dangerous. As for the Serenity moment, I just loved the idea of it so there was no way it wasn’t making it into the story! I didn’t end up settling on precisely why Hopkin and his bandits started doing this, but they’re definitely somewhat lower class people (hence Hopkin’s “m’lady” as opposed to “my lady”) and my vague idea was something like what you suggested, and a failed harvest seems the most likely thing. Either that or his restaurant chain, IHOPkin, recently went under. The whole “stealing due to hard times” thing is actually what’s behind Aldreda just letting Hopkin and Mack go. She gets the impression from their amateur status that these men may be jerks, but they’re probably only doing this out of desperation, so she wants them to have a second chance. On the “m’lady” thing, Elis is also originally from a lower class background (farm work), but he addresses Aldreda like that so much that when I wrote him saying it as “m’lady”, I kept imagining him donning a fedora. I figure he may have picked up the more formal manner of saying it due to being around Lady Aldreda for the last three years. Thank you! That was another thing picked up through research. Some of the videos I watched were analyzing Hollywood sword fights, and one of the most common things that came up is that movie choreographers love big wide swings because of how cool they look, but in actual combat that’s a bad idea for exactly the reason Lady Aldreda gives. The videos called it “telegraphing”, but given the setting I obviously couldn’t use that term. Yeah I was trying to come up with a word other than “fireworks” and I thought of how when several of them go off in a cluster they can almost look like bouquet of flowers. That was exactly what I was going for. Elis is kind of like the kid with a crush on his teacher, albeit because of her rescuing him she’s more than just a teacher, she’s his idol; his personal hero. There is absolutely that desire on his part to grow up faster, to be the man he thinks she’ll want. Which, of course, leads directly into… That was another thing that came up in research, that there was this swordplay treatise where it was recommended to “end your opponent rightly” by throwing the pommel of the sword at them. Every video I saw said this had to be a joke, so I had Lady Aldreda use it like that, and then decided to compound the joke by having it actually used to end the fight. To an extent yes. He’ll be a more proficient fighter and more adult, though I’d imagine he’ll still look up to Lady Aldreda. That’s kind of a thing in my writing, I guess, where the woman is the man’s protector or teacher or mentor. People seem to be enjoying it thus far, though, so hopefully it will continue to be fun to read. I believe there’s a different thread for that.

I kind of go back and forth about whether or not to ever write a scene with someone under 16. Course, I’ve yet to write anything with a character under 18, so… Actually, “a character under 18” might happen next year. I know what my entries for the next two parties are going to be. In an inversion of the pattern from this year (where the Halloween story had sex in it and the holiday story didn’t), next Halloween will be Fury of the Storm, another yōkai story with a blizzard theme and no sex, while the holiday story doesn’t yet have a title, but it will be me, um, revisiting my roots in terms of adult fiction, with a hopefully-sweet Christmas story about sibling love, which means exactly what you think it means. The younger brother might be 16 in that one, though I haven’t decided yet. Of course, with Aldreda and Elis, it really was mostly that I had plans for the characters and thus wanted to wait until their main story was going. And now, on to your reply for the review of Memories. I really enjoyed it. I love stories like that, where the whole thing looks different on a second read. Well, usually. Every Daenerys scene in Game of Thrones looks different now, but in a way that makes me not want to watch the show again. It seems very in character for her, not pushing the guy, but still offering it. His response is also kind of why I love stories like this. “I’ll wait for you, no matter how long it takes” is an idea I’ve always found very romantic, and knowing the personality of this vampire, I love thinking about her very tsundere-ish response to it. Oh, I totally got that. No, he’d be under punishment by the time of that story. Shit-talked his boss a bit too much. Well, as George Lucas once said, “They’re cliches because they work!” I started explaining why this makes me feel the way it does, but I got rather nervous about upsetting people, so I’ll just say that overly sentimental or not, it really, really affects me. I’ll get to your review of Moonlit Snow soon!

You’re not wrong! What’s going on is that, while the definition of albinism in mammals is pretty firm (it gets murky in other animals because melanin isn’t their only pigment) there are multiple kinds of albinism, medically speaking, differentiated by the genetic mutations that cause them. Oculocutaneous albinism is the most common kind and there are different types of that based on what genes are mutated. As for the red eyes, recall that I said Lady Aldreda has oculocutaneous albinism type 2. What you’re thinking of is type 1. OCA2 is caused by a mutation of the OCA2 gene (named after the thing the mutation causes!) on Chromosome 15, a gene that codes for melanocyte-specific transporter protein. I could explain the biochemistry a bit more, but what it amounts to is a drastically decreased production of melanin, but the body does still make some, and melanin gives the iris its color. Large amounts of melanin result in brown eyes, while very small amounts, like in OCA2, result in icy blue eyes. OCA2 is the most common form of albinism, occurring in either 1in 20,000 or 1 in 15,000 births (sources vary slightly) OCA1, on the other hand, is far rarer (1 in 40,000 births), but is probably the most iconic form of albinism, caused by a mutation of the TYR (tyrosinase) gene on Chromosome 11. People with OCA1 don’t make any melanin, not even in their eyes. As a result, the iris is transparent, and you can see the red blood in the retina through the iris, hence the red color. I actually wanted Lady Aldreda to have OCA1 in my initial planning stage, as I thought the red eyes would look cool, factor into the negative reactions to her and contribute to her exotic beauty (there probably would have been a bit during Elis’s description of Aldreda talking about her striking ruby-colored eyes) but I ran into a problem. You see, melanin doesn’t just color your iris or help keep your skin from being hurt by the sun. It’s actually important in the development of multiple parts of the eye, including the iris, retina, optic nerve and eye muscles, so a total lack of the chemical has adverse effects on vision. People with OCA2 may sometimes suffer from problems with bright lights, but people with OCA1 have it far worse. You’ve heard of 20/20 vision? Well, people with OCA1 can have 20/200 or even 20/400 vision. They’re not blind, but it’s a pretty severe impairment. This wouldn’t necessarily hinder Lady Aldreda’s melee capability (she could compensate for decreased vision with her other senses), but I also wanted her to be good with her crossbow, and she needs sight for that. Thank you again for the compliment, and I’m sorry for the biology lesson I just gave you above. Well, given that this is sort of a retelling of the story, when you mentioned the Great Fog of ‘64, I figured it might be a reference and did some research. By the time you mentioned ‘39, I knew what that was about. Oops! Had that backwards...

On an amusing note, @GeorgeGlass reviewed Moonlit Snow at almost the same moment I reviewed The Ninth Reindeer! Thank you so much! I did a lot of research for this, and by extension for the other stories that will feature Aldreda and Elis, and most of it centered on medieval and early Renaissance weapons, armor and combat, so learning about stuff like the different types of swords and armor and so forth. The sword training was based on stuff I learned there, including both Aldreda’s “hand behind your back” thing… ...and her advice about using shorter movements and not going for the big wide swing because it shows the enemy what you’re doing. the videos I watched referred to this as “telegraphing”, but since the telegraph obviously doesn’t exist in the setting, I had to explain it some other way. Finally, I also learned about both some swordplay (the bit where Aldreda alternates left-right-left-right-stab is an actual technique, meant to do just what it does in story: lock the enemy into a repetitive set of movements and leave him unprepared for when you change things up) and about how different weapons interact with different kinds of armor, such as how her plate armor would render Lady Aldreda pretty much immune to swords or axes, but weapons like maces and certain polearms could still really hurt her. Yeah, that was a joke that only emerged during research, with a number of medieval combat videos talking about it. Apparently it pops up in an old German treatise on sword fighting (starting with “to end thine opponent rightly...”), and since it, as you said, unbalances your sword and makes it more difficult to fight with, and since the pommel itself is unlikely to hurt someone wearing armor, pretty much everyone is certain it’s a joke. One video I watched suggested that this might have been, for all intents and purposes, trolling, an instructor giving his students a ridiculous idea because it would be freaking hilarious to see them try to do it during sparring. As you suspected, its inclusion here is Lady Aldreda playing a bit with Elis when he tries to rush his training, only for him to take it seriously and actually make it work! Thanks! I mention it during the overview of the dinner she goes to, but Lady Aldreda gets varying reactions to her condition, with one reaction being to make open, insulting jokes about her being a corpse or some sort of undead, and I imagine for that she tends to get bitingly sarcastic in her responses. That was definitely a challenge. Unlike After Party, which used the “like reality unless otherwise noted” idea, this took place in its own world. I could get away with certain things being similar to reality (a feudal system like medieval England, and hints of countries analogous to East Asia), but I had to craft a unique religion, and it was hard to figure out how much of that to explain. I should probably clarify that Lady Aldreda isn’t a vampire. That was just a mean-spirited jab Hopkin threw at her. I was trying to generate some level of mystery for the audience about what exactly her deal is, and I figured some people might assume she really is a vampire. I explained it to an extent during the dinner overview, stating that she was “born without color” and that her condition is rare, one out of tens of thousands of births. She’s not a vampire; she’s albino. The scientific term for this is “oculocutaneous albinism type 2.” OCA2 occurs in roughly 1 in 20,000 births, and the lack of pigmentation results in Aldreda’s distinct look as well as her problems. Her lack of melanin means that she sunburns at the drop of a hat, which is why she doesn’t really go outside during the day and covers her skin when she does. This also leads to her visual problem. Albino people often suffer from photophobia (sensitivity to bright lights) due to a phenomenon called ocular straylight, wherein light scatters inside the eyeball; it’s the biological equivalent of a lens flare in a camera (which even happens the same way, with light scattering inside the camera). Because of this, she operates better in softer light, like moonlight or starlight, and between the photophobia and the ease with which she sunburns, she does most of her work at night, and as a result has developed very good night vision. Thank you so much! Pretty much the entire story was written to lead up to that scene. I meant it to be sweet and romantic, and I’m really happy it seems to be working for people. Thank you for the review!

@Thundercloud gives Moonlit Snow its first review! I did briefly consider having Aldreda and Elis have sex, or at least share a kiss, but there were two reasons I didn’t do that. The first is that I wanted JayDee to be able to read this, and they don’t read anything with a character below sixteen, so Elis is just one year too young. Of course, I could have just made Elis sixteen, but that brings me to the second reason: as you guessed, I have plans for these two. Thank you! It’s a very G-rated romantic moment, but I felt like it could still be very sweet given what it means for the two of them. I’m very glad it worked! Also very glad that worked! I was trying to write Elis as believably feeling like a fifteen year old, not quite a little kid anymore, but not really a man yet either. Hold that thought… So I didn’t know about Lucky Luke, but I did figure something like this might happen. “Dalton” is from the Old English meaning “valley town” (a valley being called a dale, and thus “dale town”), but plenty of English names were derived from the place the person lived in, so I figured it might sound like somebody. Sorry about that. Thank you, and now we bring back that thought you were holding above. Much like After Party was an introduction for Yua and Cody as a couple, who will later have their own story, Moonlit Snow is one for Aldreda and Elis. There will be three more stories set in this world, one starring a human named Reynard and a giantess named Sigrid, and the other two starring Aldreda and Elis. The first one will take place when Elis is twelve and he first meets Lady Aldreda and, as you might expect, won’t feature any sex due to his age. The second, longer one will happen when Aldreda and Elis have to stop a huge supernatural threat. That one will take place when Elis is twenty and Aldreda 32, and that’s when the sexual relationship will happen. Since Moonlit Snow is in between these stories, I figured I could show them inching toward that eventual relationship, growing just that little bit closer to one another. Thanks for the review!