|Disclaimer: The playground is by Rumiko Takahashi, I'm only playing
|in it.  Keep the grounds cleaner than you found them and please don't
|feed the Troll.
|*This is a sound effect.*
||This is a thought.|
|!This is emphasis.!
|{This is a sign.}
|/This is Chinese./

Might I suggest *sounds*, 'thoughts', _emphasis_, {signs}, and "<Chinese>",
'<Chinese>' and {<Chinese>}. That's how I've come to know them, and how many
others have as well. Odd qualifiers will make it harder for your audience to
understand your meaning.

I would suggest leaving out qualifiers, using only quotation marks, and
filling in the context.

|   *This* story starts in darkness, late on a warm summer night
|without an artificial light in miles.  *This* story starts in a forest
|clearing lit by several billion stars and the thin sliver of a gibbous
|moon.  *This* story starts with a male figure stripped to the waist,
|using a bamboo handled shovel to *Shnnnck* loosen and turn earth that
|will be *ssshhpt, ssshhpt, ssshhpt* removed and tossed to the side.

Nice scene-setting.

Yes, it really is.  Which sort of surprised me; I'm usually not a big fan
of stories that talk directly to the reader (especially when they talk
about themselves) but it's done quite well throughout this fic.

|   And then the figure pauses, and looks down the road by the forest
|clearing; and looks behind at the road already travelled; and looks up
|to a sky just beginning to lighten in the east; and seems to pause.

Hmm. Might want to replace these semi-colons with ellipsis or just straight
commas.

Just straight commas here. Ellipses (sp?) generally don't have a place in
the middle of a sentence.  And it's almost never a good idea to have more
than one semi-colon serving as a junction between two phrases in a single
sentence (multiple semi-colons are generally only used with lists which
include commas in their individual items.)

|   It had been less than three days between incidents; both faces were
|becoming targets of local toughs and fast swords; he had been forced
|to kill more than 45 times in the past month. Or had he. His skill was
|great after all, he was fast and strong and capable of techniques that
|your average thug, or even ronin, wouldn't dare dream of attempting.
|Had it simply become easier to kill than not to? And what did that say
|of *his* soul, in the end.

Watch your punctuation. Consider the appropriateness of question mark
placement after questions and semicolons only to seperate sentences when
there are words to bridge the gap. Periods can be used to seperate sentences
but not to cap off questions. Admittedly, punctuation makes up a small
portion of the writing, but it's the mental equivalent of pausing and pacing
in a spoken work, and inconsistent punctuation will make a story more
difficult to read with the pacing you envisioned it to be read at.

That's a good point.  The punctuation here really makes the fic more
difficult to read than it needs to be.  And as I said, I wouldn't put more
than one semi-colon in a sentence.  Here, you need to split your first
sentence into two or three separate sentences.

|   And the traveller reached into his shirt; and pulled out an amulet
|of silver, and clay and glass; and raised it high.

Again, lose the semicolons. If you want the effect of "and" building slowly,
use ellipses. 

I have to disagree here -- I really think heavy use of ellipses weakens
prose.  Personally, I like to use commas with "and" to create what are
technically run-on sentences, but your mileage may vary.

At any rate, a very nicely understated opening scene, conveying exactly what
needed to be conveyed and precious little more.

Oh, I think it conveyed much more -- there's a very strong sense of mood
and setting for the rest of the story.

|----------------------------------------------------------------------
|
|		Is very proud to present.

Ellipsis there.

I'd get rid of the whole "credits" thing; I don't think it adds much of
anything, and I'd suggest that it disrupts the quick, flashing mood you're
trying to present.  Although in some ways this fic seems to represent a
marriage between script and prose; I assume this was intentional.

|   |Every school day, !every! school day. For more than a year. She
|was a Junior now, she was supposed to be past hazing wasn't she? They
|were supposed to be at least a little mature weren't they? Or at least
|get tired of getting beaten up all the time?|

If these are thoughts, they should be in first-person. Such as... 'I'm a
junior now, I'm supposed to be past hazing... aren't I?'

I disagree.  They need to stay in third person right where they are.
Though you do need commas before "wasn't she?" and "weren't they?"

|   Every day, for more than a year, and she hadn't lost, and she
|hadn't given up; but neither had they, and she was tired, so tired.

Ellipsis instead of semicolon. And maybe differ the punctuational pacing for
the "tired, so tired" bit.

Ellipses are an unconventional tool that don't add anything to the
punctuational repertoire.  Leave this sentence as it is.

|   This is the story of a boy who was a girl, and a girl, and a boy,
|and a girl, and a boy, and a girl, and a girl who acts like a boy, and
|a boy who acts like a girl, and a woman, and a man, and another couple
|girls, and a cast of thousands. Oh, and a Panda, can't forget the
|Panda.

Heh.

|   It's the story of a school, and another school, and another school,
|of a city, and a village, and all the road inbetween. It's a story
|of desperate battle, and deadly opponents when it gets to the story of
|monsters and villians who attempt to attack these schools and so on
|it will instead become the story of monsters and villians who turn
|around and run away again.

"and deadly opponents, and when it gets..." and so on. "And" is such a
little word, but it helps pacing enormously.

This whole sentence is long and unwieldy.  Adding "and" is a good idea, but
it's not going to make things clear all by itself.  

|   The girls all thought the whole thing was a ploy by Akane to keep
|the attention of the entire male student populace and had no sympathy
|for either side.  The populace of the neighborhood thought it was High
|Theatre (not much else happened in Nerima). Tendo Nabiki, Akane's
|sister thoguht 

thought

|   And today will be no different, after all it never is. 

How is that possible?  Today only happens once.  Also, that comma needs to
be a semi-colon.

The only problems I have with this fanfic could likely be fixed by sweeping
through with a critical eye and a good proofreader. I caught occasional
spelling errors, but nothing glaring, aside from the "Buddha" mishap. You DO
need to rethink the way you punctuate some of the longer scenes; periods and
ellipsis make seperators, in addition to semicolons and commas. I'm not
suggesting that you lose all your semicolons, but some of them need to be
replaced.

I suspect that my opinion on this subject has been made clear.


In general, this was a relatively interesting presentation of a new
alternate universe fic, but it's still far too early for me to tell how
it's going to go.  

TMS
Tmschm@mail.wm.edu