----- Original Message -----
From: "Jussi Nikander" <jnikande@cc.hut.fi>
To: <ffml@anifics.com>
Sent: Friday, May 02, 2003 1:55 PM
Subject: [FFML] [CotS] Burned

Apparently there are people here who like Crest of the Stars, so I guess I
can get this off my shoulders... :-)

Yeah, it's a fun series.  No fics, though.

The knock on the door raised me from a fitful sleep. Hearing the
door open, I bolted up to a sitting position immediately
regretting it. The walls of the room swam around me, and I

position, immediately OR position and immediately regretted it.

saw dozens of amorphous, ghostly shapes with my spatial
sense.

Spatial sense?  What?

shapes danced around me. Also, my head was throbbing, like
something was trying to force its way out through my forehead.

throbbing like

Showing a weakness before a vassal, however, was
unthinkable. I glared at the woman as well as I could in my
condition. "Yes?"

Weakness isn't okay, but anger without a reason is?  ^_^;

"What is the matter, vassal Alis?"

Vassal might need to be capitalized here, if it's being used as a title.

was about to come to make your highness bed. I.."

highness' or highness's, I think.  Both look kind of crappy, though.

Resisting the inexplainable need to curl into a ball I answered. "I
am fine vassal Alis. You will come back later, when I have left
for breakfast."

vassal again... Another detail of how she feels would be good at this point.
You have more later on, but right now there hasn't been much description of
her problem.

I frowned, sending the pain inside my forehead into new levels.

to new levels.  Not 'into', I'm pretty sure.

and slumped down the moment she closed the door. The sudden motion
caused more spots, made my stomach jump, and bile rose to my mouth.

Bad list here.  'cause' is related to two things; more spots and her stomach
jumping.  Bile rising is seperate.  Should be 'caused more spots and made my
stomach jump, and bile rose to my mouth.'  Or you could change it to 'and
made bile rise to my mouth.'  Either way should work, I think.

Some minutes later the spots and shapes had subsided enough and I
stumbled out of bed. Whatever had caused this didn't seem to

Might be better as 'enough, so I stumbled' or something along those lines.
A stronger show of causation in the way the sentence is structured would
work better.

planet who I could trust enough. But before I could contact Jinto, I
glanced at the closet's mirrored door and recieved another shock: the
skin on my face was bright red.

I would drop the 'But before I could contact Jinto' bit.

Blinking at the image, I touched my cheek. It stung, like I had poked
the cheek with a needle. Also, the skin on the back of my hand was

poked myself with a needle. --repetitive cheek.

had he been poisoned too? I also noted vassal Alis at the door.
Had she fetched Jinto?

Again.

As I reached to touch his face, Jinto smiled at me reassuringly.
"Don't worry, Lafiel," he said. "It's just a bit of sunburn."

How did he know what the problem was?  It didn't seem that apparent from the
way she was acting.  Jinto probably wouldn't assume that she'd be confused
about what was going on.  There was a scene similar to this in the first
series, IIRC, where Lafiel had trouble adjusting to being on the planet.
Maybe I'm remembering his reaction wrong, but I don't think he'd be
expecting her confusion.  He probably didn't have enough time to see the way
she was inspecting her reflection.

He was embarrased, probably by my outburst. He was scratching is chin, a
nervous habit. "Ah, I really aren't certain about it, Lafiel."

He scratched his chin; a nervous habit.

"I'm really not certain..."

important to me (after all, it was something my father had decided, not I)

Parents, not father.  Perhaps the cat had something to say about it,
though...

"Well, I tend to tan rather easily. Usually, when I was a kid, I
didn't get a sunburn more than once in a summer. And most

When I was a kid, I usually didn't...

Still, the sight of admiral Spoor gaping in open-mouthed surprise

Admiral.

Yes, I know, I should have stopped writing when Lafiel ask about
sunburns. If I had, it might have been funny. I could not, however, write
a Crest story without Spoor in it.

Gotta love Spoor.  Veeeery nice addition to the set of blue-haired anime
chicks.  :)

Please don't start speculating whether space-adapted parahumans can
get a sunburn.

Um.  From what little I know of such things, they would simply be very pale
because the skin wouldn't pigment in reaction to sunlight.  Don't expect
freckles anywhere... Maybe their skin would be rather transparent.  That
would cause very bad burning and might damage more than just the skin, if
they had too little color to protect the deeper parts of their body.  It's
an interesting idea; maybe somebody on the list knows more about this.

That's without considering any physical differences between Abh and normal
humans, however.

This was orginally written in March 2002, but I didn't get around
posting it before. Continuity-wise this happens on Martine, after
Battleflag/Banner II.

Hm.  I haven't seen that far, but this should probably have been placed in
the first series, when Lafiel and Jinto go for a long walk on whatever that
planet's name was.  It feels misplaced here, because I have the expectation
that it would have already been a problem before this point, so I would like
to see this relocated, timeline-wise.

On the actual writing... you used 'was' a bit too often for my taste, and
sentences were a bit convoluted and passive-sounding.  Something you could
do is go through the fic and find every instance of 'was' and see if you
could tweak those sentences a bit to drop the word.  It's not always
possible to avoid, though.  For the passivity, I started using Word's
readability statistics about half a year ago to eliminate that, and my
writing seems to work better as a result.  I'll highlight every few
paragraphs, do spelling and grammar check to find the passive parts, and
then work them out as often as possible.  It seems to make a difference.
^_^

Anyway, I'm glad somebody wrote a CotS fic.  Maybe we'll see a few more in
response to the recent challenge.  :)


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