Free Falling (Anareth and Shalyn)

[Anareth]

Okay, so I'm fishing. But we had a great time writing this one, so any comments/questions/queries/cries of joy or pain are appreciated.

[Anareth]

You know, I'm not usually a review whore, but I *can* see people have looked at it and you can't ALL be put off by PG-13. This isn't conventional, so we WOULD like some reaction.

[maiken]

I liked it..i'll reread it and try to critisize it, by I loved it!

[Anareth]

Thank you, Maiken!

(See, I'm not THAT hard to please!)

[Kath]

I enjoyed it when I read it last week.

Pretty well written and plotted... nice to see the dragon-rider bond being stretched a little. Even soulmates are going to have off-days (or months) with each other, and it's good to see the consequences being explored.

What sort of comments are you fishing for?
Technical/Grammatical? Plotting? How well the readers feel it fits in with standard canon?

[Shalyn]

I enjoyed it when I read it last week.

Pretty well written and plotted... nice to see the dragon-rider bond being stretched a little. Even soulmates are going to have off-days (or months) with each other, and it's good to see the consequences being explored.

What sort of comments are you fishing for?
Technical/Grammatical? Plotting? How well the readers feel it fits in with standard canon?


Yes.

[maiken]

Thank you, Maiken!

(See, I'm not THAT hard to please!)

Well....*dodges flying object* :D

[Anareth]

Not overly concerned with technical/grammatical, at least for my parts. That I don't have problems with very often. That, and this is patched together from e-mails into WP then copied and pasted, so I'm sure there are some formatting issues anyway.

I'm more interested in people's reactions to the ideas. First, because it addresses the issue of stand-ins indirectly, a mating flight gone wrong, there is the issue of a queen being THAT angry with her rider...personally I'd also like some reaction to the characters. I may end up using S'dil more often, as this is the deepest he's ever been, and Ronika has turned out to be more useful than expected in Weyr plotting.

So, basically--does anything make you scream "No way!"? Is there an internal inconsistency that we missed? Good idea? Bad idea? Hate everyone? Like some characters, hate others? Impressions of the characters? Thinking "That could never happen?" Thoughts, please! We like thoughts!

[Anareth]

Don't feel too sorry for them--this is NOT the good-guy Weyr in our timeline. (Imagine if T'kul had them sabotage Ramoth's eggs instead of stealing one.) But I have to admit I even started liking S'dil a bit as I wrote him, and feeling sorry for him.

You know, I don't know what happens with Leslina yet. Laurie? I don't think we've even settled who the new Weyrleaders will be!

[Shalyn]

Well, Devcca, because you ask...

When we left Leslina at the end of Free Falling, she was comatose. She never came out of her coma, and Ronika finally did the merciful thing - she had the Healer inject Leslina with a lethal dose of fellis, and took her *between*

Why not just take her *between* you ask? It just seems wrong to drop a living breathing person *between*. Instead, she got the equivalent of the Mercy Draught, and was then sent on her way.

The new Weyrleaders will be a new story.

[Kath]

Not overly concerned with technical/grammatical, at least for my parts. That I don't have problems with very often. That, and this is patched together from e-mails into WP then copied and pasted, so I'm sure there are some formatting issues anyway.

I'm more interested in people's reactions to the ideas. First, because it addresses the issue of stand-ins indirectly, a mating flight gone wrong, there is the issue of a queen being THAT angry with her rider...personally I'd also like some reaction to the characters. I may end up using S'dil more often, as this is the deepest he's ever been, and Ronika has turned out to be more useful than expected in Weyr plotting.

So, basically--does anything make you scream "No way!"? Is there an internal inconsistency that we missed? Good idea? Bad idea? Hate everyone? Like some characters, hate others? Impressions of the characters? Thinking "That could never happen?" Thoughts, please! We like thoughts!

Okay, detailed thoughts follow:

Para 2: "Cuamanth had said it was because Zialeth had stopped speaking to Leslina,..."
This sentence is rather ambiguous, in temrs what you're referring to with the "it". It could be (i) Karath's hatching going wrong, (ii) the information coming via dragon-speak rather than normal channels or (iii) Leslina going slightly crazy. I'm fairly sure it's the latter (as the others don't really make sense as an option) but the ambiguity is still there.


Zialeth Blooding. This seems to occur very close to the moment that Ronika finally gets through to Leslina. Unless there's a causal link (e.g. Leslina trying to contact Zialeth, waking her up and getting rebuffed, and the newly awake Zialeth realising that she's woken up in heat), this seems too much of a coincidence. If there's no direct link, then it seems far too unlikely for Zialeth to be blooding straight away - it would be far more likely that Zialeth would start blooding some other time, either before Ronika had had a chance to take action, or at some point later that morning - not necessarily that much later, but even a lag of 10-15mins would be a bit more believable. This could be achieved with only a minor change - like something which would spell out a bit of a time lapse "Thirsty for a drink after a full morning's work in the dusty storeroom, but still with one corner of the room left to clear, Ronika suddenly heard Cuamanth's desperate summons..."

Characters - so far, Ronika is coming across as competent, but rather bossy and a bit of a know-all. But she seems to have enough experience to back up her actions. Leslina is half-way to dragonless at the start. She seems to have the strength of will to dominate the relationship between herself and her dragon, so why didn't she force her way back into her dragon's good books with an honest appeal for forgiveness? Guilt. She wants to be punished, because she knows she deserves it. That's the impression I'm getting, at any rate. Whether it's what you want is anyone's guess! You could flesh things out here a bit more, keeping the omniscient point of view. That's one thing which doesn't seem so clear either - whether you're writing it as omniscient, or just flicking between different 3rd person povs.

R'sio's section. I think I've spotted a slight continuity error. Anareth's hatching (the sabotaged one) hatched before Karath's, right? The flight occurs after Karath's hatching (because Ronika knows how badly that one went), so must have occured much longer after Anareth's clutch hatched. R'sio seems to have been musing about Anareth's clutch rather than Karath's (if not, text needs clarifying), but why is he thinking that the surviving eggs will be a disaster? They've hatched, right? As have Karath's. Shouldn't he be casting aspersions on the quality of the hatchlings instead of the future of the eggs themselves?
R'sio seems like a rather fun, nasty character though - puts me in mind of Toric in the early books.
I guess we can blame Formanoth's short dragon memory here - not knowing/caring that his rider has left the easy access of a queen's weyr. Is he punishing his rider a bit too? R'sio seems to have been in on the plot as well.


Back to the flight. Well, the closest we have to this scenario in canon is Kylara/Meron. Assuming Wirenth's absence, Kylara would have had a partner to keep her busy, but presumably the (un)lucky bronzerider wouldn't have. Had R'sio not fallen, I think things would have worked out similarly to that hypothetical - Leslina making do with a substitute, and R'sio, well, doing whatever many of the other bronzeriders would normally do at this stage, but perhaps with a little more urgency and less help from a willing woman!?

After this point, it ends damn well, with a nice helping of sympathy for S'dil, Podrinth, the bronzes, the weyr... I'd be curious to know what Ronika's feeling though, beyond the grief. Does she worry that she didn't try hard enough to get through to Leslina?... that she subconsciously wanted something to go wrong?... that she might have averted disaster if she'd been a bit more observant?

[Shalyn]

Thanks, Kath! I do tend to write "skinny" - I definitely need to flesh that out more. Now that you've pointed out my skinny-spots!!!

*muses on this one* must see what else I can do....

[Anareth]

Sorry 'bout that. And he IS brooding more on Anareth's because a: that's my queen and as such I think a bit more about her than Sarah's ;) and b) that's the one where HRW had a direct hand in it.

Though I have to ask, how much would he know about the Weyrlings from that clutch, as they're not flying yet and of course the NRW Weyrleaders are most definitely NOT on speaking terms with R'sio and Leslina. So I probably put it in the future tense (they WILL be a disaster) more to convey that even if they're alive they're never going to be very good, but that he doesn't have any way to confirm that. Stupid lack of a clear conditional tense in English...it probably would have made perfect sense in Latin!

R'sio *was* in on the plot, in that he knew that something was going to happen, and after the fact what it was. In his case I think it's less guilt/punishment by Formanoth than self-absorbtion, a little guilt, anger at Leslina for getting him into this, anger at himself for being in this, anger at NRW for it being their fault...basically right now he's being totally self-absorbed, his dragon's been LETTING him, and hence the failure of both to notice, as opposed to Zialeth's active punishment.

You know, even *I* feel sorry for S'dil, and up to this point he's been nothing but a 2D, bad guy bronze NPC we used for one open flight and as backstory for one of my characters! And now even I'm thinking maybe he's not so bad. (You know, if we ever open HRW to RP, I think I have my first character.)

I'm curious about Ronika's real feelings, too, but you'll have to ask Laurie. ;)

[Shalyn]

I think I'll just have to add some meat to those skinny bones there! As Kath said, flesh it out some!

Last night I was feeling icky. Maybe tonight.

[Miss Scarrlet]

You know, it might not be a bad idea to do just that. NRW, despite its evil plots, is coming out kind of goody-goody lately and never make any mistakes (we're always the victim.) Having a weyr where the people are evil to balance it out would be an interesting story-kicker. :) That or open it up as a 'free RP site'- not neccessarily always RP'ed at, but available to use in plots to everyone (w/ approval for big plots of course...)

Let me explain about Karath's clutch (Mine), mentioned as being problematic. She clutched around 30 eggs, and fewer than half. imncluding the queen, did not hatch. Some wished to blame this on the sire of the clutch, but it was actually the result of timing forward, and the trauma following to both queen and rider. :)

I really enjoyed the story, because I know these characters more than most who are not in our club. And I know who the new HRW Weyrleader is. Mwahaha. Great writing, Anareth and Shalyn!

[Anareth]

I would hardly say we're goody-goody (MY characters aren't, anyway) but it's kind of hard when you're RPing to be the bad ones. Usually that's the gamemaster's job. Though playing at High Reaches could have its upside, if we had enough people it wasn't the Jen and Laurie Show all the time!

[HarperBrandyAlexander]

I liked what I read. The events that happened in that story did seem to make a lot of sense. I guessed what would happen at the end, but it was a very well rounded, well done story. I guess I would have liked to see some of the backstory what made the Weyrwoman so distant from her dragon... but I suppose you have to be a North Ranges member to do that! Lol.

Anyway, that was really a good peice of writing. I would like to see more writing from NPC's in your club in the future.

[Anareth]

Well, there's a story in here from some PCs ("Brothers in Arms") which includes some of my PCs, some NPCs, one of Laurie's PCs, and just for fun my PC from our sister Weyr Southern Boll. Also, Mir (who plays our senior Weyrwoman) and I just finished the copost that became a monster, which hopefully will be posted somewhere soon!

[Brightwing]

The monster is posted at dragonslair. http://www.dragonslair.co.nz/writing.php?pen=bloodrunscold to be precise ;)

I liked this story, and having had a chance to re-read it now I picked up a few more details...

When I first wrote Ronika in a backstory of mine I portrayed her as ambitious, probably slightly pampered (a Kylara-type without the intense sexual drive, just political ambitions) who looked down on everyone outside of High Reaches Weyr (especially Kasienka). She would hate Senrali just because she got the Senior WW position Ronika wanted. I'd imagine she'd take over the position of Senior WW at High Reaches with enthusiasm and gusto.

That's just how I imagined her, anyway.