Well, I've been wanting to do this for a while. I don't think
there's too many Moldiver fics out there, probably because it's
difficult to come up with a challenge for her to face.
Yeah, not too many. As the auther of the last to appear on the
FFML (even if it was a spamfic), I suppose I should C&C this
one.
Lesee, Moldiver belongs to Pioneer and whoever they got the
rights from. I know it aint me. The basis is the dubbed anime.
Aww, c'mon; at least use the sub! ;)
Nowhere was this more true then in the year 2047.
So you're starting two years after the OAV episodes...
"Not a problem, officer," she replied. "Its a good thing I
was passing by when it happened." Moldiver was a tall,
athletic woman,
"tall"? Mirai? As she's portrayed as average in the anime,
even while transformed, I assume this is a hint that the
shape's been changed in the intervening two years?
with curves in all the right places. Her waist length brown
hair was tied back with a ribbon and a helmet with a blue
visor covered the upper half of her face. She wore a
long sleeved white and red sailor blouse with shoulder armor
over a black spandex turtleneck. Her pants were pink with
red high-heeled boots that came just up to above her knees.
Do you really need the description, especially at this
length? One reason I ask is that I'm tempted to quibble
with some of the details, except there's no real point.
Most of your readers have probably seen the anime; those
who haven't can be satisfied with a much shorter description.
He returned the salute and then watched in amazement as she
rose into the air, glowed, and then vanished into the distance.
Two years after her first appearance, during which time she's
apparently kept herself busy, policemen are still amazed?
It might actually be more effective if he's very blase about
her.
One of the advantages to being able to move at near light
speeds is that its
"it's"
difficult to be seen and nobody noticed her as she landed
need a comma after "seen"
Re: not being noticed at speed; she can't move anywhere
near her full speed in the atmosphere and expect not to be
noticed; she'd generate huge amounts of noise and shock
waves.
"So how did it go?" came her brother's voice over her ear piece.
Why is Hiroshi monitoring her this closely? In the latter
anime, he doesn't bother.
"Fine, I guess, and the pants and boots aren't all that bad,"
Mirai replied as she fastened her bra. "And the lack of a
time limit is nice, but I hate having to take my clothes off
to use the mol unit."
Oh; I guess the description above was _supposed_ to deviate
from what we know? Okay, but why did Mirai allow Hiroshi
to design the pants and boots? I'd think she would have
insisted on doing it herself.
Suggest adding "still" in front of "hate having"; presumably
she's been bitching about this periodically for two years.
Fortunately for her, her slim figure and natural poise made
her an ideal model and pageant contestant. Taking the crown
was good for a few months of keeping the creditors away.
A few months? At Mirai's spending rate? No way! ;)
For a moment, just a moment, the temptation to become
Moldiver and just take what she wanted reared its head. Her
hands began shaking and moved to her pocket
<clip>
it gave Mirai the strength to push the temptation away.
'I'm Moldiver to help people,' she thought to herself.
'That's why I have the unit. To help people.' Her hands
steady once more,
This just seems wrong to me. Mao, maybe, but not Mirai. My
interpretation is that part of the attraction of shopping
to Mirai is that it IS hard to get the money. I don't think
freebie clothes would have any appeal to her. My suggestion:
the thought briefly crosses her mind, but her reaction is
more one of dismissing amusement.
she slung the satchel over her shoulder and headed for the
shrine to pray as she had every day for the past two years,
for the safe return of Kenchi Misaki, the first human to go
beyond the confines of Sol, and more importantly,
her soulmate.
Interesting that he's still gone. I wouldn't think that
was expected in the OAVs; the leave-taking was what it was
because of the danger he was going into (IMO), not because it
was expected to take years. I thought the expectation was
that he'd be back within months. If so, there should've
either been word, or more worry. For your story, I'd
recommend that you add, somewhere, a comment about how long
his mission was expected to last.
Six months later...
Ummm... why bother with additional delays like this?
I'd recommend you just cut to the story.
"Moldiver Mark Three?" Mirai asked skeptically as she
<clip>
"Yep," Hiroshi said with a smile. "After Machinegal nearly
found out who you really were,
Is this a reference to some event we know (i.e., two years
previously), or something that just happened that you're
not telling us about? If the latter, suggest you add "last
week" or something like that.
I decided you should probably have some other
way to evade detection. So I added a field that bends
light around it, making you invisible."
Constantly? Or optionally? Suggest Hiroshi amplify a little.
"Well that's fine," Mirai said. "Until someone points an
infrared or ultraviolet camera at me."
<clip>
"Mirai...if infrared or ultraviolet was a threat, you would
have been found out a long time ago.
<clip>
The suit is a transdimensional manifestation that only
registers on the visible portion of the light spectrum."
Another quibble on Mirai's characterization: Mirai knows this
perfectly well. While not the engineer either of her
brothers are, she's no slouch on science herself; in most
other company; she'd be considered a genius.
"However. You can only use the field for eleven minutes.
After that, the unit automatically shuts off for one hour
to prevent overheating and fused circuits." He pushed his
glasses up his nose. "I finally figured out how that
other Moldiver generated that molecular wave beam of his and
you now have one.
Why give Moldiver these additional powers? You already
complained in your preference (correctly, IMO) about how
hard it is to come up with opponents for her. I assume the
details about time-outs will figure in the plot?
"Yeah, its weird how he just disappeared last year," Mirai said.
"That reminds me," Hiroshi said. "Nozumu wrote us from M.I.T."
While mildly amusing, the "other Moldiver" reminding Hiroshi
of Nozumu, is hardly credible if they're still in the dark.
"Oh?" Mirai asked. A year ago, the youngest Oroza sibling
had been discovered building his very own mecha. Proud as
could be, their mother had packed the young genius off to M.I.T.
<clip>
"No son of mine with this sort of potential is going
to squander his gift by sitting around this house," she had said.
There are easier ways to get rid of Nozumu, if that's your
goal here (as I assume) then this, which has minor plausibility
problems on two fronts: Nozumu would still be underage;
MIT's rep worldwide is still, if anything, greater in 2047
than it is today; the mother being so completely in the dark
about Hiroshi's talent. Hasn't Hiroshi done anything else?
Also, this doesn't even get rid of Nozumu; since he knows how
to make Amagi's teleportation device, he can easily shuttle
back and forth if he wants to.
If you want to get rid of Nozumu, just leave him out of
the story. It's hardly a stretch that this kid spends all
his time researching other matters two years later.
"Hard to say," Hiroshi said. "It was a short note. Sounds
like they're keeping him pretty busy."
NOBODY keeps Nozumu "pretty busy", not even at MIT.
And your characters are acting like they've never heard
of email here. Why don't they get full-video instant
messaging instead? Use your imagination!
Six more months pass...
Again, what's the point of this? It's distracting, because
your readers suspect you're not sure what you're up to.
"Come on! It's all over the news!"
<clip>
Constellation of Draco. All we know at this point is that
message contains audio and video elements and is on the same
hyper-wavelength radio frequency used to communicate with
the Sakigake during the launch sequence."
It would have sufficed to simply say "and is from the Sakigake
via hyperwave" or something like that.
The newscaster vanished to be replaced by the image of a man.
He was tall and broad-shouldered. His black hair was cut in
a military style. The picture was a good two years out of
date, Mirai knew, but she drank it in anyways.
Hyperwave takes multiple years? And the only way Mirai could
know that it's two years old requires that she know from how
far away it originated, which she doesn't.
"This is Pilot Kenchi Misaki of the Dimension Jump Project >SZZZZZKK<
Contact, repeat, First Contact >FSHHHHKKKK< Heavy Damage. I-"
There was the sound of explosion and a tortured, animalistic howl.
">PSHHHHNNNKT< completly destroyed >RRRSKKKK< requesting assistance.
FSHHHHKKKK< Moldiver > >SKZZZZNIKT< " There was another explosion
and the sound of someone shouting in a strange language.
Okay... this is alarming, but I don't know how you can draw
any conclusions from this...
All over the world, most people were in a state of shock,
prompting one journalist to note the similarity to the state
of things nearly fifty years ago when terrorists had flown
two jetliners into the World Trade Center in New York...
Extremely implausible, for a number of reasons:
1) the comparison isn't valid at all, to anybody on Earth,
since whatever happened happened light-years away. AT MOST one
person is dead, and they don't even know that for sure. And
there's no evidence of an attack; it could be (and probably
was, on the evidence you've given us) an accident.
2) No Japanese journalist would use that event, forty-six
years later, as a point of comparison for anything. Outside
the U.S. and Europe, the recent event just hasn't registered
the same way. Not that Asians are dancing in the streets;
it's more that, for most of them, the catastrophe seems
remote. [There was a recent article in the New Yorker about
the reaction in China, where there are videos for sale
liberally mixing the actual news footage with clips from
disaster movies and "Wall Street".]
On the net, it was a whole different story.
<clip>
Newsgroups posts ... flooding bandwidth with everything
from shouts of joy that humanity was not alone in
the universe, to conspiracy theories that Misaki had never
made it and the message was a stunt by ZIC to garner more
funding to everything in between.
This, OTOH, is exactly what WOULD happen... assuming people
in 2047 still use text-based newsgroups.
While no riots started, most cities were on tactical alert
and ready for anything.
Uh... why? Religious nuts protesting the notion of "first
contact"?
they said that the S.O.R.T.A. had confirmed that the
transmission came from the star Altais, a star of medium
brightness a hundred point twenty-three light years
Do you really mean "100.23"? Or do you mean "123"?
A quick web search tells me that Altais, aka Delta Draconis,
actually exists. Two points for you for research!
the video portion of the message was all but irretrievable.
However, they had discovered a series of mathematical symbols
encoded directly into the transmission itself.
Hello? Who did this? Presumably Misaki himself; who else
could have?
When decoded, the symbols spelled out a date, time and
the coordinates for the crossover point where Pluto crossed
Neptune's orbit to once more become the outermost planet.
The date was for two months after the arrival of the transmission.
This, OTOH, rather implies that this message is from someone
other than Misaki, which begs the question: how did it get
embedded into his audio/visual message? Note that the problem
is time, not "how" per se; since Misaki's message appears to
have been generated at the moment of first contact, for
someone else to insert, using steganography, a message into
the video would require simultaneous action at the very
point where "someone else" is themselves trying to figure
out what's going on.
Within hours, the United Nations directed that the Robert
Goddard, a large scale cargo vessel that traveled between
Earth and the very small colony on the Jovian moon Gaymede,
was hereby drafted into service and recommissioned
as the Sol Alliance Ship Saint Christopher.
The U.N. named a ship "Saint Christopher"?
At the Martian shipyards, which normally built the mining
ships that plied the asteroid belt, all production ceased
and the yard's resources were instead directed towards,
arming, armoring and stocking the Saint Christopher
for an extended search and rescue operation in uncharted,
possibly hostile territory.
??? Did I miss something? Wouldn't the natural
assumption be that they're heading towards a "second contact"
situation, probably peaceful, despite whatever accident
occurred during the first? And how can a point within
our solar system be deemed "hostile territory"?
Your readers need more info here: how fast was the Sakigaki
travelling, and how fast do Earth scientists think the
aliens might be able to travel?
Meanwhile, on Earth, a call for volunteers went out. More
then five thousand men and women in the planet's various
armed forces responded and out of those, three hundred were
selected.
Umm... why wouldn't they just use the existing astronaut
corps?
Those three hundred people would be taken to the Martian
deserts and subjected to the most grueling and demanding
training the United American Continents Marine Corps could
dream up to turn out the hundred seventy-five men and women
who would crew the Saint Christopher. And yet, in the back of
everyone's mind, was the question; would it be enough? In all
likelihood, a roundevouz
'rendezvous'
meant that the Christopher would be meeting up with an
interstellar capable craft that would take them to where, if
the background noise in the transmission was any indication,
a war was being fought. Was humanity really ready to get
caught up in an interstellar war?
Uhh... what? That's an _enormous_ leap of logic. If that's
what you want your reader thinking at this point, you need
more info up front. Like Misaki saying "The aliens I've
contacted are at war with other aliens."
Given your title, I'm going to assume that this really IS
what you want your readers to think at this point. If so,
I'd really suggest you add more to Misaki's message.
The answer was simple. If Misaki was, then ready or not, so
was humanity.
Again, this begs the question: did everybody accept the
idea that the distance Misaki took three years to travel
is traversable in two months by the aliens? And that war
is feasable over distances which it takes months, or years,
to travel?
"I don't have time for this, Hiroshi," Mirai complained as he
shut the door behind her. "Mr. Misaki is-"
Hello? What else is she actually _doing_?
"I admit, its the equivalent of taking a pocket knife when
you're going to be hunting dinosaurs, but its the best I
could do." Mirai stared at him blankly. "Think, Mirai,"
Hiroshi said. "You gave Misaki a mol-unit. An extremely
powerful mol-unit and he encountered something that
made him call home for help."
If true, why did he call home at all? He'd know Mirai couldn't
give any help, and would want to spare her the worry. The
more logical deduction is that, for some reason, he wasn't
able to use his mol-unit. For instance, he'd used the crystal's
power up.
"Oh," Mirai said, her eyes widening. Hiroshi sighed. Despite
her high marks in school, Mirai could be remarkably dense
sometimes.
??? I'm trying to think of an example of such behavior from
the OAVs, and can't. I can just see Hiroshi thinking of Mirai
as "scatter-brained", but "dense"?
"Gave you a fighting chance, I hope. Look, Mirai, I know you,
you're going to try everything you can to be on the Saint
Christopher when it sets out for the Pluto-Neptune Junction
even if it means abandoning everyone and everything you know
and love forever."
Umm... why wouldn't Hiroshi assume that Mirai would just fly
to the rendezvous herself? No time limit, remember? At near-
light, it's only hours at most.
Mirai flinched guiltily. "You've saved the world a hundred
times," Hiroshi continued in a gentler.
saved "the world"? When? From what?
and "a gentler tone", I think you want.
"But in my eyes, you're still my baby sister and..."
he trailed off.
"All right, who are you and what have you done with Hiroshi?"
Seriously, do you really want Hiroshi to be so articulate
with his feelings? The guy who wanted to get off the Florida
beach because he wasn't comfortable with his reaction to
bikinis?
Mirai, her eyes brimming with tears, hugged him.
Good.
In the end, Mr. and Ms Oroza took the relavation of Mirai's
secret life well. If you could call Mrs. Oroza hysterically
screaming, calling Mirai a freak, and running from the room
"taking it well."
It wasn't a totally unexpected reaction. After all, Mirai
and her mother had never gotten along well. A first class
Technologist like her husband, Jun Oroza fully expected her
children to follow in their footsteps, not to make
waves, and become pillars of society. Mirai's decision to
chase a modeling career had derailed that.
Interesting decision(s) about the parents, of whom we know
nothing from the OAVs except that they're absent (and, if
alive, apparently have no problem with leaving their kids
alone for long periods).
As introducing this conflict would be pointless if Mrs. Ozora
wasn't staying around in your story, I take it that the
future action WILL be in our solar system, contrary to your
foreshadowings.
Re: Mrs. Ozora's expectations, being a first class technologist
hardly implies "not making waves": the indications we've
had is that Dr. Amagi, even in his civilian identity, is
a celebrity.
Also, having Mirai choose modeling as a career is a surprise
for me; I'd hardly have thought winning a few beauty contests
qualified her. I'm curious about her motivations here;
I'd have thought she'd be bored out of her skull as a model.
battle to save the Sakigake. "...and in his message, he said
Moldiver," she said, winding up her tale. "I think he was
asking for me and Hiroshi said he must have encountered
something he couldn't handle, even with a mol-unit."
"So what makes you think you can do anything?"
A pretty good question...
"Now calm down, Mirai," her father said. "I'm not saying you
shouldn't do anything, but what about the people in Tokyo?
The ones you've spent the last three years protecting? Are
you really going to just abandon them?"
The immediacy of this question would be made more apparent
if we had more idea of just WHAT Mirai has been protecting
them against. I mean, foiling occasional thefts of antique
20th century technology is not exactly a protection Tokyo
can't live without.
company. While they had never been close, working together
as Moldiver had eliminated much of the sibling rivalry
between them.
"Close" and "sibling rivalry" are hardly opposites. And I'd
have said, based on the OAVs, that they were quite close.
"Hiroshi, my boy," a man's voice said.
"Oh, hello, Professor Amagi," Hiroshi said, turning to bow to
the white haired man sitting on a bench. "How are you?
<clip>
"Your soda, Professor," said a blond haired woman as she
joined them, handing Amagi a cup.
"Thank you, Isabelle. You remember my young friend Hiroshi,
don't you?"
Of course," Isabelle said as she turned to face them. Mirai
bit back a gasp. She knew those eyes. The last time she had
seen them, they had been staring at her through the visor
of a Superdoll helmet as they hovered in space near
the sun, with the fate of the Sakigake at stake.
Three years later, neither group has any clue about the other?
The Machinegals never back-tracked Nozumu? Dr. Amagi never
clued in to the hints Hiroshi dropped during the Sakigaki's
launch?
Amagi was Machinegal, Moldiver's mortal enemy. It all made
sense now.
<clip>
'What am I going to do?' she wondered. 'Hiroshi practically
worships Amagi. How can I tell him that his mentor is one
of the most evil men on the face of the Earth?
This really says a LOT about how peaceful the world of 2048
is, and how innocent of history Mirai is, if she thinks of
Dr. Amagi as "one of the most evil men on the face of the
Earth". I mean, theft of antique technology for his
collection really ranks up there (rolls eyes).
And it's not like Hiroshi would be all that surprised.
Remember the beginning of OAV 1? Hiroshi's already IN a
competition for 'best retro collection' with Dr. Amagi;
why would he be surprised that Dr. Amagi was a bit more
serious about it than he thought?
"You stupid girl," Jun said softly, her eyes ablaze with
anger. "After all I've done for you."
Mirai stared at her, hand on her cheek where her mother had
slapped her.
Keeping the conflict alive... Yep, the rest of the story's
at home...
shoulder, she launched herself into the air and flew off at
three times the speed of sound.
Immediately? Thus creating a very loud sonic boom in
her back yard?
"Mirai, I didn't get the chance to tell you. I reformatted
the mark three for Captain Tokyo."
"You're kidding."
"Nah. I thought I'd give it another go."
The first time through, I thought Hiroshi was talking
about the Mark IV. You might want to make it clearer that
he's talking about the mol-unit Mirai left behind, and
that he's going to protect Tokyo's antique technology
himself.
In the city of New Plymouth on Mars, the launching of the
Saint Christopher was well underway.
<clip>
pocket. "Brooke. Moldiver knows who I am and says she'll
return. Make a liar out of her."
On the boarding ramp, a young woman in the uniform of
security smiled. It was a smile that was...hungry.
The only point, as far as I can see, to having Mirai
detour to join the crew of the Saint Christopher at
launch (meaning that she left Tokyo much earlier than
she'd have had to otherwise) was to introduce Brooke,
on board the Saint Christopher without Mirai's knowledge.
Suggest you simply do that without Mirai.
Bridge of the S.A.S. Saint Christopher
Three days later, Pluto/Neptune Crossover.
This ship made it in THREE DAYS? What, did Nozumu design
it's drive systems or something? I expected this to
take months. Three days implies constant boost, I think
at a rate greater than 1 G. That's quite revolutionary
technology from today, almost at the level of the mol-
units themselves.
So far, she had found nothing. The technican suddenly stood,
voice rising in panic. "And she's not alone!"
Right. They're EXPECTING another ship; why the sudden panic?
"What?" Jeffords bellowed, his cup of coffee clattering to the deck.
And surprise? At what?
"Large ship, sir! Radar says its at least three times bigger
then us and its
"it's"
"It's turning like a damn fighter jet! It shouldn't be able
to, not at that size, but it is!"
Nobody's guessed at inertial manipulations from a spaceship
they were expecting to be capable of interstellar travel?
color. Without a word, the bridge crew took up defensive
positions all save Moldiver who stepped forward, blue white
incandescent fire forming in the palm of her hand, the glow
intensified and then a large green glowing orb
phased through the wall and vanished, revealing two women,
one of whom drew some sort of gun and pointed it at Moldiver.
While they don't know what happened at Altais, they have over
one hundred years' of science fiction telling them to BE
CAREFUL during first-contact situations. So of course they
point their weapons. Sheesh!
She was tall and slender, dark-skinned and blonde haired.
An eye patch covered her right eye and her face was
expressionless. The other was seated in some sort of chair,
her teal-green hair braided and falling over one shoulder.
"No wonder I was so glad to leave Earth," the teal-haired one
said softly. "You can stand down your men, Captain..."
"Jeffords. Edward Jeffords."
"Kiyone Mabiki."
Ah hah! Interesting...
That's quite a change for Mihoshi, too, assuming that that
IS Mihoshi. "Expressionless"? I hope you're planning to
delve into what's happened to her.
Well, this has promise. Certainly I'll be looking forward
to the next chapter. Challenging, in some ways: how does
Mol technology rate? (I'd expect Washuu to get quite
surprised that humans managed it within the 21st century
at a minimum, but you could handle it in other ways.)
Overall, my impression is that this chapter could benefit
from a rewrite. It seems too long for how much you actually
introduce, and your characters make a few unjustified
leaps of logic. In other places, you've made decisions
without any obvious reason (they don't look like they'll
play into the later story), like setting it in 2048
instead of immediately after the OAVs.
There are many opportunities for descriptions which
you haven't utilized: you give us some political
developments and some idea of where humanity
stands in space, but no day-to-day technological
innovations. You describe Mirai's suit several times,
but never try to describe the multi-leveled Tokyo she
inhabits.
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