Loved Two Become One discussion

Hope ya'll enjoy this. There is no input directly from the main character but I felt that seeing behind the scenes a little would help give context to what's coming up. As is always the case, comments and critiques are always appreciated.

Why do you have the parts split between two threads? Unless they are, by themselves, self-contained stories (though hopefully with continuity between them) I don't think that's really called for. Especially with how short they are.

Mid-read review: As she was accepted among all of the clicks <Almost certain you want "clique" here.

Mom's radar was peaked --> piqued

I'd been about average until that year and hadn't grown but maybe an inch since. <Seems like an awkward phrasing to me, but it might just be a regionalism. I'd phrase it along the lines of "...had grown maybe an inch since then."

Dad made a pit stop for no other reason but to make me wake up and stretch my legs. <I'd change "but" to "than". Not sure if yours is grammatically correct or not.

are only but a memory of the past, swept away millions of years ago yet we're still here. <I'd remove the "but" entirely. No need to add in a word, either.

Yeah, I should have put the threads together but I had to go and show that I'm a noob at this. Thanks for the error alerts also because I can never seem to catch them all. How do I go about getting rid of or combining threads? Or is that something the moderators do?

Well, posting a reply to your story thread is easy enough: should be the same way as you replied to this thread, just starting from that one.

I'm not entirely sure how to delete a thread. If there isn't an option actually available, you can probably report it to a moderator and request its deletion.

After that, all that's left is renaming some thread titles so they refer to the entire story instead of a single part.

Thanks I try it. And I hope it isn't much trouble for a moderator to fix it.

Some other words that were replaced with their homophones...
Hare should be hair, finally should be finale.

Still looks like a good story, but be careful not to make ZJ too OP.

Yeah I ran some of my ideas by Kristen Darken and I figured I needed to dial this character back some.
Hopefully I can put enough limits so she won't become too OP.

Well I just completed part 1 and hope that everyone enjoys it so far. Some big changes coming but no spoilers.

P.S. If you find any of my homonym menisci, please point them our...along with other errors or needed clarification.

Re-read the first post to remind myself on where you left the story, and I got hit by the numerous errors again. There were a lot of repeated segments of sentences (ie:" they had they had said") and spelling errors (the most notable being the final word of the first post which is "sa" instead of "said".)

The other thing I wanted to mention is a little less concrete. I was having trouble keeping track of who was saying which lines, what the environment they were in looked like, etc. It just felt like there was a noticeable fuzzy area in my "read-o-vision" (the scenario I envision as I read stories). I wouldn't know the finer details of how to properly write dialogue without going "____ said, ____said", so maybe you should drop by the workshop forums and ask some questions? I would't know how helpful they are due to only visiting this little corner regularly, but it could be insightful.

Thanks for the tips shadeofred,
When anyone reads these in the fab lab, just remember that they're a work in progress. I've done a lot of work on Part 1 (adding about ten thousand words) in the fan fic section. But that's to be discussed in the Worn Wrench forum. I hope that it'll be ready soon and that it'll be worth another re-read because several things have been addressed. Just trying to clean it up so it's ready for final review.
I'll try to fix the issue you mentioned about knowing who's speaking. Just keep in mind this part 2 may change as much, if not more than, Part 1 before it's ready for publishing. So I hope you can bare with me on needed changes. And don't be shy about pointing any glaring errors out.

Ugh, now I feel like a big poopy head, doubled. Just got through posting another section of part 2 and it isn't rainbows and kittens for this character anymore ... Oh well she's gotta get to school somehow. Anyway, one of the defining character moments is now up for critique. Tell me if it flows right and if I put in enough daggers to the heart ... so to speak.

Ok, by Friday I'll have a look at it.
And don't worry about tormenting your characters. It gets easier the more you do it.

Ahh, the voice of experience ... I always feel sorry for your characters.

So do, but they should know better than to be my characters. and I've actually eased up on them since I first started writing. They have a fighting chance now.

Since I have four stories all with the beginings and end written and stopped at "bad stuff goes here" for the middle, I'm leaving this discussion to the experts.

I think that the story is actually proceeding nicely, aside from her mother's death, but I would comment that it is much simpler for those reading the story if you make each addition a new post, rather than editing a previous one. I'm not sure you meant to do that, as you then went and added a new post to advise that the previous post had been edited, but in that case you still have to figure out where the previous action left off.

Still, the story itself is quite good, and I hope she gets reunited with the rest of her family.

Eventually... ... but other surprises are in the works, along with new characters.
And that all I have to say about that.

You did a really good job conveying the magnitude of emotion, imo.

Hate to be a broken record but you had the wrong homophones in numerous places after the "relived moment".

Ex: Dawned -> Donned

Thanks for the catch shodeofred,
I've developed a love-hate relationship with spellcheck over catching words like that. If you find more please tell me. I posted more last night and got rid of the note about my previous addition. Hope everyone likes it.

That managed to be both hopeful and profoundly depressing. I do hope the MCO office in Llano ends up a smoking hole in the ground, they clearly have been killing manifesting mutants wholesale.

Oh definitely so, but don't forget about an infamous scientist who seems to run out of test subject on a regular basis. But many things have yet to see light ... they just keep crawling out of my brain and they seem to have a knack for messing up this character's day...

If Zoey ever meets Ayla they could create the geatest technology company in human history. And render everyone else obsolete.

Curious as to why you specified that the blanket zoey was wrapped in was "synthetic so as not to irritate her tail". Am I just forgetting something you mentioned earlier or was this something else?

Shower scene with mother and first t-shirt probably, it mentions irritation from at least that t-shirt rubbing the tail

Also during power testing in part 2, after they found that she was a WA, they tested her sensitivity:

They'd been told of our Vi's sensitivity to touch and wanted to test a few things. One benefit to all of that pain was that we also discovered, for some reason, our tail had no problems with synthetic materials. That, of course, prompted another shopping trip much to Mom and Maggie delight, and Dad ultimate horror, when they found out.

Kind of going with the converse of Fey's allergy to synthetics. Natural materials have the opposite affect as well. I figure it has to do with her energizer trait trying to pull from the material but forming a kind of vacuum when it can't, equaling pain. Whereas most synthetic fibers are made with polymers that are usually non-conductive ... So in other words I'm just making it up as I go along.

If Zoey ever meets Ayla they could create the geatest technology company in human history. And render everyone else obsolete.

Yeah, but she'd have to convince Ev to spill the beans ... so to speak, as she chooses when to share her knowledge. Now if Ayla went for Jason ... that has some scarier implications. I haven't put any limits on how many Dev/Gag he can 'link' with. He's only limited to a certain, undefined for now, area as a limit to keep the Whateley labs somewhat safe. But he not only 'links' with them, he adds his own rating, I'm thinking about a 2 in either trait, to theirs. Scary things can happen when the tech crew truly works together...

Pioneer wrote:

If Zoey ever meets Ayla they could create the geatest technology company in human history. And render everyone else obsolete.

Yeah, but she'd have to convince Ev to spill the beans ... so to speak, as she chooses when to share her knowledge. Now if Ayla went for Jason ... that has some scarier implications. I haven't put any limits on how many Dev/Gag he can 'link' with. He's only limited to a certain, undefined for now, area as a limit to keep the Whateley labs somewhat safe. But he not only 'links' with them, he adds his own rating, I'm thinking about a 2 in either trait, to theirs. Scary things can happen when the tech crew truly works together...

Well that puts her in a moral quandry. If you could effortlessly advance medical science thereby saving many lives and improving many others but you choose not to. Does that make your inaction evil?

Well that puts her in a moral quandry. If you could effortlessly advance medical science thereby saving many lives and improving many others but you choose not to. Does that make your inaction evil?

Not in the least. Think of how much radiation research has advanced cancer treatments ... and killed how many due to weaponization? The whole point that Ev makes is that she'll only give what mankind is ready for. Ask yourself: If I could build something that could simultaneously save and kill millions, would I? Loophole faced this same question with the limitless power her suit taps into. And that would be a firecracker compared to what a race millions of years old could produce.

In a sense, Ev is taking that burdon off of her host by limiting what she's willing to give. What good would a true cure for cancer be if humans used the same tech to shatter the planet? Or, would you give an infant a loaded gun?

And remember, not everyone can even use her technology, only a small percentage of the populace in fact. They may not seem rare in the story so far, but that's because it's taking place in an area that her race has visited before. Whatever Zoey makes with her own gadgeteering ability wouldn't have to be given so much scrutiny, but even the Whateley faculty agreed with Loopholes decision to withhold her work.

Ofcourse all that is undercut by the Alien Pyramid in the Hive Sories which has given the US military plans for an animater breeder reactor. I wonder if the G2 team remembered to factor that in when extrapolating what the Whateley universe would look like in 2016.

The downside of the way you've been edditng existing entires is that the RSS feed can't see it. It would work much better if you replied to your story instead, that way ever time you add content it will show up on the feed as a new post.

Ok now I get it. Every one of her gadgets needs one of the cubes. Functienally this makes them devises seeing that ne one can replicate them. It also places a nice limit on her power.

So first off, I wanted to say that I'm really liking Zoey's character design. Would love to see an artistic rendition of her..... but lacking that, I'll try to imagine a girl with cute little fangs and a jellyfish in her hair. (Her vi)

Now onto the part you probably find annoying by now.... spelling and grammar! This particular paragraph was a just a bit over my tolerance level.

"After I ate, I absently looked over my testing data sheet. According to Donna, Doc speculated me to be at least an AV-5 ... or going into the unknown due to the action of my WA trait. Like Donna had been muttering about, they thought that my AV and WA trait had fussed fused in some fashion and so that the place where spirits holdholed up within me was almost infinite."

Parts in italics are very awkwardly worded.

I like your caricter and plot ,now all we need is EVs sisters spirit of move into Zoeys hollow.

Thanks for the encouragement and for pointing out the errors. I was falling asleep by the time I reached that portion and it needed work. As for an artist rendition, the profile pic I used was the rough of it but it's depicting her in a couple of years.

Next, others will eventually be able to replicate what she makes but it'll be many years down the road. That's why Donna couldn't understand them, as her power lets her know just what a device does and how to operate it. If someone was able to come up with a material that was psi active and a way to power the gadget, they could hijack Cubic's work.

As for her powers, I'm trying to place enough starting limits on her that she doesn't begin at Champion or Lady Astarte level. Eventually she may get to their weight class but, as with all heroes, there is a huge learning curve to overcome. If there is anything We can improve, please let us know.

I have noticed that you do have a problem where your spellchecker sometimes chooses the wrong word, but that is not unfortunately uncommon and it is usually easy to figure out what you meant.

I really hope they and the MCO miss each other, and if they don't miss each other I hope that the MCO's new ally isn't working for the Bastard.

Hi! I just got a chance to read this one, and I really love the story! It's interesting, exploring the pseudo-avatar ability with an alien symbiote, I look forward to seeing more detail in their interactions within themselves (Yay weird pronouns!). They are literally closer than lovers or family, they are united as one and that is a very deep well to explore.

The typos, homophones, word substitutions and other minor errors tripped me up a little, but didn't really detract from my enjoyment of the story itself. That's one of those things that, as you write, gets better and better so long as someone lets you know about them. You pick it up. If you're looking for a proofreader I'll happily help out, but I'm not incredibly fast about getting things done.

All in all, this is one fanfiction I mean to keep up with!

--Angie

Thanks Angie, I always like to hear when someone likes the story. Part 1 has been put through a pretty thorough ringer since I posted it in Fan Fic. I hope it reads better if it gets published when I finish Part 3. If you find errors in Part 2, please let me know so I can correct them asap.

Sorry Pioneer, rather then keep putting you through the wringer I decided to try and hurry up the story transfers from he old site.

I can switch if you like and go back to putting you through the wringer?

I just got the first part of Part 3 up in the labs, hope everyone enjoys it. Please tell me if I put enough lead-up for these characters or not. And as far as putting anything I write through the ringer goes : I figure I'd much rather read it here when it's constructive than at the bottom of a completed Fan Fiction post.

Why is it in a new thread?

I think that choice is better than some of the other options. At least they are making progress with figuring out how they want to present the story on the Forums.

And on the story side, it doesn't look like our opponent (Var'Ak) is the Bastard himself, but it wouldn't surprise me if he works for him. I would suspect that the MCO guys aren't going to be a problem beyond this story, given that Var'Ak has already corrupted Peter and taken him over.

Might want to change Rubik's name to something other than Merry. Merry the cyberpath already exists in canon and having two characters with the same name and both having tech-based themes is a bit confusing.

Yeah, I thought of that too, but no spoilers.

So I've just read the entire tale to date - a very interesting read, despite the homophone abuse that almost everyone else in this thread has bashed you over the head with

Zoey's Gadgeteering ability is probably closer to Devising, given the gadgets require her sapphire energy cubes to work, so can only be operated by the d'Vra and their relatives. Meanwhile, there's evidently more than meets the eye with Donna and Jason, given they appear to be be descendents of the two remnants of the tribe once visited by Ev's kin - something backed up by Jason assisting Zoey with the construction of the replicator, his VR system overloading her with energy (mercifully just about avoiding another burnout), and Donna's ability to use the replicator.

However, that means that they're likely to be secondary targets of Var'Ak, so if Var'Ak and his pet MCO goons arrive in the neighbourhood it would be prudent for them to be elsewhere at the time (or be securely in the house with HEMI 'persuading' them to bugger off - although even then, Var'Ak may have means at his disposal that could make HEMI seem redundant...). Added onto which, given Jason's also 13 years old, and Rubik may be a few weeks coming on teenage by the time they get to Whateley, all three may end up being registered. And hopefully by the time they eventually reach Whateley, someone can get word out to Zoey's dad and Maggie (who at that time should seriously consider resettling, given the local MCO's attitude - especially towards collateral damage - will likely mean that if they can't find Zoey they'll turn up and forcefully ask questions).