Identity 4.0 - Prelude to "Monsters and Demons"

The chapter four prelude on Fanfiction.Net

I noticed FFN is now sporting a mobile website domain for use on phones and other mobile devices. Kind of wish they'd had that when I went on vacation, but still, pretty cool. As much as people rag on FFN and it's culture from time to time, I have to say overall I'm pretty satisfied with the site's layout. Maybe that's coming from a perspective of familiarity, but having considered uploading to MediaMiner, I find FFN much easier to work with. But then, maybe that sentiment stems solely from the lack of a "Document Manager" type system where I can see what I upload looks like before I post it. Or the lack of OpenOffice support (granted, RTF is fine, but...).

Anyway, as usual, commentary below.

As is customary, the prelude to a chapter is short, and I'd hoped this would be where I gain a little time, especially with chapters 5, 6, and 7 already having extensive outlines, but alas, I'm still looking at only a fraction of chapter four, act six completed, so I have catching up to do. Even still, the chapter as a whole is very, very solid in my feeling, so I'm not too concerned with posting what I've got so far. I suppose in this way I've made the acts all stand on their own much more, as a consequence of posting them in these small installments.

On balance, I do have to realize that this is kind of taking an abrupt jig in the plot. Water spewing over Jusenkyo, you say? What does that mean? How is that possible? What does it have to do with fighting the Sorcerers? In truth, it may not mean a whole lot, and I say that in the sense that I've said before I take a lot of inspiration from Babylon 5, and one of the big things about that series was how episodes that seemed unrelated to the main story arc still contributed in some way to changing outlooks and opinions, to character growth. What I can say is that this chapter means to do the same. There's a lot to explore here, between how these characters who are so physically strong confront weakness, the lack of power to change their circumstances. It looks at the nature of humanity and how we perceive ourselves in relation to others. Without a doubt, there must be a confrontation here, and how it ends will have repercussions for conflicts to come.

Originally, I meant for a catapult to be the means to break through the Maze, but I had conceptual issues with how you tie a rope to something a catapult would launch. For this reason, I...watched an BBC show on a ballista on youtube and decided that that would do the trick. Even though it was a Roman ballista, it seemed like something appropriate here, too. In retrospect, the inviolability of the Maze is much like how I made dimensional areas difficult to penetrate in Echoes, subject to specific rules. The Maze, too, will only have certain people and things able to penetrate it.

What about Shampoo and Ukyo, you say? Akane and Ryoga? Stay tuned for acts two and five.