Nerys Dax

The Apprentice Review reply to magenthasouth: No, this isn't abandoned. I broke my wrist and couldn't type, so that's the reason for the delay. I also don't stock chapters when I have inspiration, so that's why my updates are irregular. When I write a chapter, I post them immediately whether I posted the day before or not. So, that also means that at times when inspiration is less, there are no updates at all. However, I can promise I will finish the story. I hate abandoned stories too. I have several WIP's I'm following which hasn't been updated in more than a year. So, I suppose my three months ain't that big a deal. XD Hopes this reassures you a bit. xx Nerys

The Apprentice Review reply to mrequecky: "Finally found time to read the new chap and I liked it a lot. I am kind of twisted about Dumbledore though. I think he is a good guy in this story. He cannot do anything against Voldemort cause he is bound as a keeper, right?" I'm glad you liked it. And you're right about Dumbledore. He's bound as a Keeper. However, that doesn't excuse everything since he did "jail" Gellert. I think he doesn't try that road with LV, because he doesn't think Azkaban will hold LV. He might be right about that though. Azkaban is no Nurmengard.

The Apprentice Review reply to Lady T: "Thanks a lot for the lovely, long chapter, I thoroughly enjoyed it, especially the witty banter between Fred and George." - Thanks. The twins are a hard couple to write for me, so I'm glad you enjoyed the way I portrayed them. "The way you write reminds me so much of Rowling's own style and you mostly stay true to the characters, which doesn't happen very often in fanfics, so that's a big plus." - Thank you. I try to stay close to canon even when I go AU on it. And when I do make changes to a character, I still want that to be logical. So, at times I look at the canon character and think: ... well, how would she/he react under these circumstances? What could make her/him change? What can I add to her/his character that is not in complete contradiction to canon and is something that could have slipped under Harry's radar (since canon is in Harry's POV)? I do always take great care to find a justification for changes I make to canon, because if you can't find them, you might as well write about an OC. However, there is always the issue that for every reader of the Potter serie, there exists a Hermione. So there are many views on what she is and isn't, which makes life interesting I suppose. "It's not easy to write a pairing like LV/HG and make it seem believable, but you pull it off, somehow" - Thanks once more. I actually like this pairing because it's so unlikely and implausible. It's what makes writing it fun and a challenge. "I hope next chapter will be up soon, cheers." - Well, I know this wasn't soon. But eh... chapter 27 will be posted today when I am done with the replying. Thanks for reviewing, xx Nerys

The Apprentice Review reply to Soniab: "So much action in this chapter. I really do love your writing style. Everyone seems to have secrets, secrets they are not willing to part with." - Thank you. Yes, they are fond of their secrets. LOL. "Is Harry going to defeat Tom in your story? I truly hope not, but I am just a humble reader and admirer." - Mmm... you don't honestly expect me to give that information up, do you? Sorry, I think I'll keep that a secret. Muahahaha! Thank you for reading and reviewing, Love Nerys P.S. I am a Tom fan though. Just reminding you of that.

The Apprentice Review reply to Rena: "Awesome story only took me 3 days to finnish! Lol although from the sound of things the one on fanfiction.net is different so I guess I'll go read that while I wait for updates on your other stories!" - Yes, it's very different. It's up to you though, but I personally recommend picking a version and reading that one first. I know from other readers who read both that they got confused by it. But eh... it's not that I don't warn the versions are different. It's because FFnet allows no smut and my smut is often plotrelated, so I can't just skip it. I need to find alternative methods to get the same info across. And that takes some puzzling. "Though I do hope that you are able to start writing for this story agian soon but I don't know what story I would want you to update sooner this one or MoM2...nope too hard to decide they are both just so good! Maybe you van update them both at the same time" - LOL. Well, you nearly got your wish. MOM2 was updated 18 june and The Apprentice will be updated today. Oh wow, that's longer than I thought. sniggers. Well, there was a puppet update in between. "That Tardis reference was priceless I started laughing so hard!" - Another Doctor Who fan. *High-fives* Thank you for reading and reviewing, xx Nerys

The Apprentice Review reply to Mr. Galion: "You can thank Serp that I am now a loyal follower...." - Done the thanking. And welcome to ship Tomione. May it sail forever. grins. "I love your writings." - Thank you. "Looking forward to an update!" - I'm posting a new chapter today. Thank you for your review.

The Apprentice Review reply to hero_jaejoong: "finally an update...seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.." - hihi. Sorry for the long wait again. Stuff happens. Alas. "a fantastic chappie" - thanks

The Apprentice Review reply to Danyealle-sama: Well, I placed the replies here now. Hopes this helps you out.

The Apprentice Review reply to Summer Leah: "Uh oh! Another great chapter. This is my favorite of your WIPs, so I'd love if you updated it more often! That said, I love all of your stories, so I'm happy as long as you keep writing." I'll definitely keep writing. I enjoy it too much. Tomione is my secret or not so secret obsession. ROFL. Well, he's a lovely instrument to help you unwind and release pent up frustration. XD I'll do my best on the updating front, but no promises here. I can say I will finish the story and not abandon it. Thank you for reading and reviewing. Goes on to second review: "I just re-read this after getting your review reply to MoM part 2, and you're right; a new chapter is LONG overdue!! This is probably my favorite of your stories. I can't wait for Hermione to return to Voldemort!" Well, her return will take a couple of chapters I think. But they will interact before that. *grins wickedly.* I'm sure you'll enjoy THAT.

The Apprentice Review reply to QueenRuby: "I could really use some HG/LV action right about now. Loved the update and the glimps of a possable dark Hermione. I really Really REALLY wish updates came faster. *Makes Puppy eyes* Please!" Yeah, you and me both, QueenRuby, you and me both. I miss having them together. But it won't be long now. I'm glad you enjoyed the update and the slowly changing Hermione though. I'll do my best with the updates, but I broke my wrist, and despite that the bone is healed now, the ligaments are still inflammed. So, I am only allowed to type 15 min in a row and then my fysio wants me to take a 45 min break. You can imagine that doesn't help the chapters to progress fast. And of course, NOW, I have tons of inspiration. LOL. Eh, my golden pup does those puppy eyes all day long. I am immune now, IMMUNE! *pats puppy, because he wants to* Okay, so I am a softy. LOL. Thank you for reading and reviewing.

The Gold Puppet review reply to Summer Leah: “Finally! Very, very hot.” – thank you. “I do prefer a dominant Tom, and I loved this chapter because he does win at the end.” – Yes, we debated on that for a while and figured it would be too soon for Hermione to get away with something as big as she is trying to pull there, yet. But we do plan to have a dominant Hermione in this fic. Not that it automatically means Tom will roll over and become submissive. That’s not his style. We’re thinking more in the line of a relationship were the positions of power switches. Can't wait for the next chapter!” – we’ll do our best. But you know… the bridge is open, the bus left too early, the alarmclock failed to sound, etc. *winks*.

The Gold Puppet. review reply to magentasouth: “I had thought this story abandoned.” – Nope, we won’t abandon it. Sometimes updates may be scarcer than at other moments, since we don’t hold chapters behind. We immediately post when we finish them, which means we haven’t got a reserve stock to post from in times when we have little time to write. Still, 18 chapters in a little over six months, I think that’s not bad. XD “The characters are nicely developed, Tom is neither too fluffy or too two dimensional. Hermione is not insipid (as many people seem to find it easier to write her in connection with LV.)” – We’ll do our best. And yes, insipid Hermione annoys us too. Though, at times, she isn’t particularly using her brain in puppet either. However, for that, we blame Helga Hufflepuff. Winks. “One point I will make though - I'm confused in all resurrection fics why Lord Voldemort never simply uses a muggle method to kill harry,” – Ermm… Lord Voldemort, the epitome of I HATE MUGGLES, using a muggle method? Sorry, but that sounds very unlikely and OOC to us. As for other methods, he’s planning another method now. He wants to incapacitate Harry till he can have someone else kill Harry for him, He doesn’t dare to do it himself anymore. In canon you can already see his hesitation at the clearing in the Forbidden Forest. It goes wrong so many times, it frightens him. And James Bond villainy or not, LV is the type who loves to watch his enemies suffer. The cup surely got that part right. So he fell for that hook, line and sinker. Plus, his arrogance is unmatched. So, he may recognise his snakelife self was behaving stupidly, but surely, that doesn’t count for HIM. He’s perfect. *winks* “coyote syndrome.” – Oh, don’t worry, we have coyote syndrome too. *winks* “Course if harry were dispatched so easily, it would remove a significant driver of the plot.” – exactly. “What else is he motivated by, other than developing and dominating Hermione?” – Well, world domination, getting rid of his enemies, being all-powerful… the usual. “Is he mortal now?” – This is a huge spoiler, but since you’re asking: no, he is not mortal at the moment. And yes, he has no more Horcruxes around. And that is all we will say about that. “Either way - this fic is absolutely delicious and I cant wait for the next update!!!” – Thank you. We will do our best to update asap, but it won’t be as quick as we updated from jan to march. My wrist isn’t completely healed yet, and Serp hasn’t gotten herself fired yet (as I told her to do so we could write all day long again). XD Serp: And of course, I told Nerys that I'll get myself fired after she learns how to type with her feet, too. ;-)

Hi everyone, It took some searching, but I finally found a place on this forum where anon. reviewers and people who don't want to sign up to this forum can still read my replies to their reviews. I'll be using this place as soon as my next chapter update is done. So I can alert my readers with a link to this place. I hope it's allowed by the mods to post it here. It was the only place on the Harry Potter subcategory where the above criteria fitted. If this isn't the right place, please let me know, and I will try to find some other method to reply to my reviewers. xx Nerys

Ermm... all I can recall at this point is that in the books she informed us that it was a skull with a snake leaving from it's mouth. How that snake moved around and how the skull looked was (I believe) not stipulated further. But I could be wrong, it's been a while since I last read the books. Seeing how Jo seems to draw a lot too, she might have given the movie makers a sketch of what it looked like, but this is pure speculation on my end. I haven't seen an interview where they discussed the making of the Dark Mark in the movie. They could easily have put that together themselves.

I chose no in the poll, because I haven't deleted any reviews to date. This includes a crazy flame on FFnet from an anon who called him/herself "go fuck yourself in the **" (** meaning arse since FFnet censores the use of such words). Seeing how the story on FFnet didn't include any graphic scenes, I concluded the person reviewing that particular chapter had read the story here and apparently was unable to leave said message on AFFnet - be that through sheer stupidity or through mod blocks. But really, all I did was laugh when I read said flame, because it says more about the person leaving it than about my story. And I do enjoy sharing fun around, so I left it online for other people's amusement as well. However, I can imagine myself deleting spam/troll reviews as some of the posters before me have done in order not to clog up the database of this site.

I totally agree with the poster above me, Danyealle. Nothing to add.

*Gigglesnorts.* 600! Wow, no, I don't need that many words for an AN. LOL. I just feel the least you can do is respond when someone takes the time to review your story, since so many people don't bother to give feedback. Previously, I just replied to the email address if it was given, until a friend of mine warned me against that - seeing that by replying you give out your email to unknown individuals. Her boyfriend's computer crashed when he replied to someone who let a nice review behind in his online RPG, he then got an email back saying, "thanks for your address, good luck buying a new PC." The email had some virus, troyan, or whatever, and all his systems crashed in no time. Now, she works at the Microsoft Helpdesk, but even their techs were unable to get the pc starting again. So... after that horror story, I got a bit more careful about responding via email. However, I do know most of my reviewers, so I only have to reply in the chapter to those I don't know. XD And thanks for clearing it up, and once I start editing my old stories, I can delete the ANs contents altogether since the people who I posted them for would have read them by now.

Okay, I got confused by this thread as well, because I couldn't find in the TOS anything about not allowing to respond to reviews in an AN (just that you weren't allowed to post ANs as chapters, which I support, because they really annoy me when I think something's been updated and it's just a "sorry, haven't had time... blah blah blah") at the beginning or end of a chapter; but if I understood the previous response of DemonGoddess to JJ, you can still reply to your reviewers like that, which I kind of hope, seeing we alas have no other method on this site to respond. Wow, run on sentence. *high-five* As for the possible limitations of the word counts involving a chapter, how is that going to work with stories already posted? I have a lot of chapters that go above the 5,000 words, especially when I get further into a fic. Do we need to repost our stories? Are the chapters going to be deleted that are too long? Or have you found a method to just split said chapters that are too long? I was just wondering about this, because if the latter is the case, I need to check and edit one of my completed stories, because the format is that I switch POV from one character to the other between chapters. To show that "reality" is something that's biased and perceived differently by both individuals. Anyway, I am glad to know it now, so I can keep my future chapters' word count beneath 5,000 words. It's not that big a deal to upload what was originally one chapter into two parts online.

Well, adding codes via the summary only is possible if you have enough letters free to use. I tried adding a code to one of my stories, because I noticed I forgot one and I wasn't planning on using another per se. So I tried insert and even that didn't work. I now placed a warning at chapter one and at the beginning of the chapter the additional code has occured in, but it's a shame you can't just edit that later into your summary when you have reached a word-limit.

Hmmm... as much as I love the books, I also dislike them alot. It's not so much the lack of plot, but there is only so much perfection you can add to the lead character before it starts to p*ss me off. I swear if one more man says she is selfless, I am going to pull out my hair. Because SHE IS A SELFISH B*TCH. It was something I loved about Anita in the earlier books. Finally, a female character strong enough to make herself number one, to not pick the guy's safety/happiness over her own. But in the later books, you know when the plot became irrelevant, Anita's selfishness grew beyond limits, and it's getting ridiculous how many people put up with it. I know it's the Ardeur. But please, everything is becoming the Ardeur's fault. At some point a person has to take responsibility of being a succubus and act like she knows she is. But not Anita. Anita just whines about it, denies it, and then, fucks everything in range, because she didn't take precautions. And after she fucked those she didn't want to fuck in the first place, we get the whining and the angst a second time. I have to say at some point I started to like Richard again, because please... he is the ONLY ONE who ever disagrees with Anita Sue. And that woman so needs a firm kick under her butt. Always the angst, always the complaining... by God, if I have to hear one more time that she doesn't want to add another man to her life, I am going to scream! Because we all know it means she will have sex with him later at a less convenient time, or she will have to have sex with one or more men not of her choosing. How many times can that woman keep making the same mistakes over and over again. She never thinks about the Ardeur and what it means to her or the others around her. She keeps risking Damian (and Nathaniel). She wants JC and every other man to be exclusive to her, while she fucks away. She is worried about becoming Belle. Well, news-flash Anita, you are Belle already, for the exception that Belle doesn't whine about having to have sex with gorgeous men. No, I think Asher and JC should dump her and come to my house; I'll be more than happy to share and have both of them there. XD Am I alone in hating Micah? He's such an undeveloped character. He never comes of the pages as real to me. She made a book that bares his name as a title and still he is too flat a personality. He's faultless, invisible, and just .... ugh. And now Anita is converting a serial killer? The Ardeur will save Olaf??? Ermmm... okay, fine, the Ardeur the wonder lotion for everything! If you're stuck in your plot, we'll blame it on the Ardeur and we're done. Okay, I am going to stop ranting now. Otherwise I'll write a novel-length of complaints. It's just that I really liked the books a lot, and I am sorry the quality dropped and Anita became a person I disliked instead of a person I could sympathise and empathise with.

I read both series way too many times, and I think you have quite a lot of liberty with what JC did in London, since Hamilton only wrote that he was there and that he "liked it a lot" (According to the character London in Incubus Dreams, who added, that he liked that JC liked it, which probably means he used the Ardeur frequently then). I don't recall her saying exactly when he was there, so you can be creative with that either. But I do know that it has to be in a time when he was "with Belle" not when he left her. The first time JC left Belle he travelled with Asher and Julianna around Europe, and only left for England when his mother died. I don't think he was much fun (ardeurish) then, and considering he had to leave in a hurry to help Asher/Julianna, I didn't get the impression he was there long. And whether he was in London then is also up for debate. It's not stated clearly anywhere. The second time JC left Belle he went to the States almost immediately, as you can see in the memory that gets shown when Auggie is there. Right now, I think Hamilton claims JC is around 400 years of age, and he had come to the States 100 years after Asher got tortured, because that was the price Belle made him pay for saving Asher. After that he left "Because he couldn't stand to be hated by them both." We don't know when that was precisely, only that you probably have to look at moments in European history when a lot of witch hunts were done by the church. I can't recall Hamilton ever given us a clear indication how long JC has been in the USA. But I wouldn't worry too much about sticking to canon with AB, since Hamilton herself often says one thing in one book and then another in the next. Not surprisingly though, if you see the pace in which she has to bring out these novels. But some of the inconsistencies are a bit annoying; for instance, Damian is not of Belle Morte's line in later novels, but in Blue Moon he tells Anita he is of Belle Morte's line. Oh well, just a little pet peeve of mine. XD The first time he left Belle's court was together with Asher and Julianna, and they travelled together through Europe for around 20 (I am doing this by heart, not having the books here, so don't pin me down on it) years. JC left the two to go to England to be with his dying mother (which means he couldn't have been a vampire long then (his human mother who was born on a dirt floor still being alive in those day and age; so think 400 years back and then add a very generous 40 years up to it), which has to mean he and Asher became Master Vampires pretty damn quickly, otherwise Asher couldn't have had a human servant and JC said he wasn't Master enough to help Asher himself then. Again, I think an inconsistency LKH didn't take into consideration (not blaming her though, I wouldn't be able to write so many novels in such short timespan and not make errors too). Anyway, he left for England, but I doubt he was much fun then. And he had to go back soon, because Asher and Julianna got in trouble. I am guessing you could write him being in London on Belle's orders. Perhaps someone to seduce, so she could add the UK to her territory? Someone in the royal courts? Belle loves power, so... I hope it is a bit helpful, since you don't quite say what it is you need precisely. Maybe you could be a bit more specific if this wasn't helpful.

Okay, I'll send her a copy of what you said. Thanks for looking into it. Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a security issue on her end. She had them before and that time it also showed first on your site for some reason. The weirdest part of all is that I send her a link of a story on AFFnet the other day, and through my link she could acces the site - but if she typed the address herself she got a blank page. Strange.

This is the answer I got back from Serpie. So, I hope this is enough information. If it is her operating system, would installing windows XP a new not help?

Okay, I have send her an email with your questions. Thanks.

I am asking a question for someone else (Ssserpensssotia). She no longer is able to access the main site and was wondering if you could help out. She gets a blank page and the following: "root 43 (some times 34) disabled encrypting disabled." It says the page is loaded... or rather... "done but with mistakes", but all she sees is a white screen. Thank you for your time.