On Fri, 05 Aug 2005 11:35:04 -0400, hkmiller <hkmiller@theeddy.com> wrote:

Thanks a lot for C&C. I'm going to skip a few smaller items from the reply,
but I appreciate them too.

"All right, we're done for tonight. Everyone is dismissed," the Chief
announced and rose, an image of wise authority in his blue uniform covered in
decorations and insignia.

The phrase "image of wise authority" kind of threw me, stopping my 
reading in its tracks to wonder why the author is interrupting
a not-yet-established narrative to make authorial
observations. [...]

I have to rethink this, certainly. The idea is that he's the only one
wearing the uniform; plus I wanted to project the image of paternalistic
benevolence for the purposes of the subsequent conversation.

"She was starting to feel tired now that the excitement of the chase had 
ended."

BTW, if the main culprit is still at large, why does Tomo think the 
chase over?

Ah, thanks for pointing this out. Yomi arrived as a leader of a group
to perform a certain action, which was foiled outside this particular
story. The mopping up is not as important and can take time. The Group 2
do not have to race against the deadline to save lives anymore.

"While the operation was a success, Black
Lightning is still at large. This is a dangerous situation. We do not know
anything about him yet. Or even her. But he cannot be sure about it. He knows
that we have ways to make his associates to talk, eventually. He will hasten
to make his move."

People do talk this way, certainly, so that their meaning is not clear.  
But in most cases, while writing dialog you want to make characters
speak more clearly than real people do.

I have half a mind to oppose this point of view. But all right.

Tomo, out of energy?  Obviously she's really, really old in this fic... ;)

This is part of her reconstruction. She does not pace well and eventually
fails with worse symptoms than an average person. I don't think she's
listening to Chief all that well.

However, we are hot on their trail.  They may
consider a counterattack in order to confuse and weaken us, thus improving
their chances of escape.

Strikes me as extremely bad tactics.  It slows them down more than it 
slows the cops down; the
cops are organized enough so that no one assassination is going to slow 
them down much; all it
does is make all the remaining cops that much angrier.

I am not so sure. The original idea belongs to Per Vale and Mai Seval,
but I agree with them. The team lead keeps a lot of vital information
in his or her head. It can be committed to documents, but sometimes it
is delayed (before it goes to reports), and in other times it simply
stays in that head (it is called "experience"). An assasination makes
it impossible to act upon that information.

A woman walked from the train station to a high-rise apartment building along
a well lit street.  As she went up the stairs to the entrance, she smiled at a
young man going in the opposite direction, and came in, sliding doors closing
out the night. She seemed handsome and strong, eyeglasses giving her an air of
intellect. She carried the briefcase of a woman who went through her glass
ceiling.

Confusing POV shifts.  I think you mean the last two sentences to be 
from the POV of the young
man (otherwise there's not much point to mentioning him).

Hmm. The role of the young man is to open the door, which is probably
governed by the keypad in a large Tokyo appartment building. I think
I saw it in some of the more realistic anime shows. It is a research
weakness.

suggest something like "She carried her briefcase with authority, giving 
the impression of a woman who'd pierced the glass ceiling."

Thanks. However, the "authority" is not quite what I'm shooting for.
She walks as if she owns the place. Although who knows, maybe in Japan
the self-assurance and authority go hand in hand?

I think you need a comma before the "MSN-2" as well as after.  And is 
this detail made up or the product of research?

It is taken from memoirs of Suvorov aka Rezun (a defector who worked
in GRU; his depictions of GRU's rivalry with KGB are quite amuzing).
If I did not read that, I'd give Yomi gloves.

[] The sniper would be all but invisible for anyone
without infrared goggles.

Might want to give us a time of day here, and, if it's night, whether 
it's cloudy or moonlit.

I thought that "well lit street" was sufficient.

The window which she wanted was dark. But after a short while, a couple
emerged from the elevator and walked to an apartment door. The woman opened
it, they entered, and the light went on.

You were in the assassin's POV, but the assassin can't see the elevator 
or the hall (at least, not in most apartment buildings).

Yes they can. I gather that quite a number of Japanese appartment
buildings provice access to units from the outside. A sort of a
balcony goes around every floor.

Suggest either you spent a bit more time here describing
a non-standard apartment building layout which DOES allow her to see the 
elevator and hall, or just kill the sentence.

OK, I'll think about it.

[...] It was easy to kill the woman now, but if the man
were to take cover quickly and raise the alarm, the sniper's situation could
become dangerous.

So kill the guy first, numbnut!

It's probably even worse.

??? A highly trained man will move TO a window through which a sniper 
shot just came?  WTF?

The blind spot is behind the window sill, while her elevation gives the
attacker some view of the floor near the rear wall where the body is
likely to land.

"As you astutely observed, this is a sort of a shrine. We were best friends,
and we were together for a very long time. In fact, I became a cop because of
her. But I'm getting ahead... We were together through all the school: grade
school, high school; went to college. Never did anything separately. I would
often come to her room in the night, she lived at the first floor strangely

"on the first floor"  And why is it strange?  Somebody has to.

This is a research question again. The main character in Comic Party
lived on the first floor, in some sort of semi-separated structure.
Also, I seem to recall one-story appartment compounds built around
a courtyard, Louisiana style. However, it seems that the vast majority
of houses are two-story designs, with children bedrooms upstairs.

had a bad time. I thought and thought about it.  I asked myself, how could she
do it to me?"

(rolls eyes) And of course, for Tomo it HAS to be about HER, rather than 
about Yomi herself.

Well, yes, it's a Tomo-bashing fic after all.

"``Hi, Tomo! I'm still alive, dunno for how long. I forgive you.  Yours
forever, Mi. Ko.''

I'm not getting the signature.  "Yomi" or "Koyomi" turning into "Mi. 
Ko."?  I don't see how the "Mi"
could refer to Tomo either;.

Yes, I thought it was silly too. I have to change it to something.
Since Yomi sent it because she expected to exit relatively soon,
(and so rethought her relationship with Tomo), she might as well
sign it properly. But I daresay she regretted supplying Tomo with
an age-progressed photograph a few times afterwards.

Can you imagine? She tries to make it sound as if she went
into some Solder of Fortune operation somewhere in Bosnia or something. This
must be a joke, cruel like everything about her."

Tomo doesn't seem to be taking it as cruel, though; I'm reading her as 
pleased and excited that she
heard from Yomi.

She has difficulties believing that the picture is not a hoax.

"Definitely. Actually, Chief told me... I think you ought to keep blinds
closed."

"...keep the blinds closed"

OK, I'm not getting this. Is "ought" a modal verb, so "to" has to be
dropped?

Only a week has passed since their triumph, when everything returned to
normal, including the morning meetings at 08:00 sharp.

This is where things are a bit confusing.  You set up Yomi as 
assassinating Tomo, and then nothing happens? []

I'll get back to this in the conclusion.

Aside:  you consistently use "Chief" as a proper noun in this story, 
which is consistent with the way the word is used in 'You're Under
Arrest' (in which we never even learn the chief's name).  But some
of your less-Japanized readership will probably be put off a bit, as 
this isn't really an English language convention.

I see. I thought I saw similar use in H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine".
That's basically where this comes from. I am not trying to replace
"something-chou" here. I do not even know what his rank and title
would be in Japanese.

[...] I have received a message from the Section 9."

Heh.  Section 9?  So this is a crossover with Ghost in the Shell?  ;)   

It is more of a nod in that direction, not a real crossover. I would
like to borrow some unstated assumptions about the role and functions
of such a security service.

"A Japanese woman checked in for a domestic flight with a Canadian passport in
name of Katrin Plainwater. When the passport scan was broadcast, computers of

Suggest "..scan was checked, the computers..."  I don't think you want 
"broadcast" in this context.

Yes, this bothered me. The particular mechanism I envision is some sort
of multicast with interested agencies "subscribing" to certain
information flows.

"However, she did not come to her gate. Instead, she bypassed security doors

Confusing... why did "Katrin" do this?  How could she have known about 
the alert?  The implication is that the immigration guy wasn't privy,
so he couldn't have reacted.

No, it's not quite what happened. The alert was triggered after she
went through ID check. It's not instantaneous. I suppose that routine
checks within the agency are instantaneous, but she cleared those.

It is worth noting that Haneda serves domestic flights. There was no
"immigration" guy, just an ID check for security.
  

If "Katrin" intended all along to
use a business jet, why go through immigration at all?

She probably saw something or someone. May have seen someone running,
or a car speeding on the airport apron.

During the takeoff run, the jet collided with a fuel truck commandeered
by an agent of Section 9."

Section 9 managed to get somebody on the ground at the airport that 
fast?  Must be a lot of agents,
then, or else they're all at the airport.  Certainly nothing like GITS.

It all depends on the local geography, and where the units are located
at the time. Taxiing out takes time. It's tight, but not impossible.

and her positive identification proved impossible due to the burns caused by
the post-crash fire.

Which means that it wasn't actually her, of course, but a dead body left 
in her place...

Are you implying that it's too casual way to put it, considering Chief's
speech patterns?

Chief made a small pause to underscore the message. "Paired public keys
recovered at the crash site matched those used by Black Lightning."

Now exactly why does an assassin need public/private key cryptography?

Yomi only used it for encrypted communications where key distribution
was too difficult for traditional symmetric cryptography. The
non-repuditation was not involved.

All you really have to do to make this plot point is say that
a laptop disk recoved by Section 9 contained plans and schedules for 
hits known to have been committed by Black Lightning, with file
creation dates prior to the hit.

It's a possibility. The overacrhing task here is to identify Plainwater
as Black Lightning without letting Tomo to recognize Yomi. It turned
out more difficult than I imagined. One glance at screencaps from a
security camera in Ueda's files would let Tomo know the magnitude of
her ignorance. I zeroed in on the keys eventually as something that
at least seems workable.

I was afraid that Yomi taking alias "Plainwater" would be evident enough
for Tomo to get suspicious. It is an incredibly silly prank for a
professional. My ready excuse was that Tomo was not very fluent in
English. But now I see that it's not even evident for native English
speakers. I hope my Yomi received a chuckle out of her own cleverness.

Then she decided not to do the hit at the last minute?  Why?  You've not 
given us a reason; you leave it up to the reader.

I thought that spelling it all out would be boring (if I wrote it,
or perhaps regardless of the author).

And why get so careless about her get-away that she got killed?  (IF she 
got killed; an unidentifiable body is the usual sign that it wasn't her.)

Well. She is somewhat disturbed at that time. Firstly, what was
she going to do after the takeoff? It's not as if she had a lot
of options. She was doomed when she broke to run.

But it's a minor issue really. The main idea is that Yomi was
doomed many years ago, when she was unable to handle constantly
being pecked by Tomo. That's when it was all decided. This is why
her death did not have effect on Tomo, philosophically speaking.
It was only some walking shell. Sooner or later, it was all the same.

Granted, some spark of old Yomi has remained, sometimes to flash.
That's why she did not kill Tomo. It's basically a "Darth Vader"
pattern, only there is no reconciliation. It's more realistic, I think.

And you leave Tomo convinced that Yomi is still out there somewhere.

This is Azumanga fanfiction, not some action flick. Tomo has to
continue her ignorant existence, because this is what Yomi died for.
Look at it this way. Yomi knew that she were doomed. No matter how
clever a terrorist you are, sooner or later, you make a mistake.
She had a choice: to take Tomo with her, or go down alone.

Of course, my target is to hide necessary hints inside the fic,
so that these explanations were unnecessary. I suppose I fail at that.

For instance, try this on:  add a short scene before the last one, 
cutting back to Yomi on
the rooftop, looking directly into Tomo's eyes.  And Tomo is looking 
back at her,
having spotted Yomi on the root (you might or might not leave it 
ambiguous whether
Tomo recognizes her).  And Yomi finds that she can't pull the trigger 
when she's
looking Tomo in the eyes like that, which upsets her, and then she gets 
careless
during her getaway (or whatever she really did at the airport).

This sounds a little cheap, but more importantly see above about the
way I wish to portray Tomo.

I really like stories where Tomo is given a chance at redemption,
such as in Zoltan's case where she sees her own gravestone with the
inscription "WORTHLESS". If she knew that Yomi skipped out, it might
have been something to prompt her to rethink her life. I am not sure
it would be to the good for her at this stage though. She might lose
motivation at work now that the quest was over. Her self-image would
be shattered, and right in time for a mid-life crisis.

But doing anything like that would turn everything in the story
on its ear. It would change the focus from Tomo and Yomi to
Tomo coming to grips with the new reality. Angsty :-)

I don't think I can write it convincingly, and I don't have time
to try (fortunately or unfortunately).

Thanks again,
-- Pete

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