At 10:00 PM 6/15/99 GMT, Gary Kleppe wrote:

    The mid-day sun drew curls of mist from the pools in the valley.
Nearly half of them bore bamboo poles as memorials for the creatures
who had met their end in the springs, and warnings for those who would
think of following them. 

Unfortunately, people were too stupid to pay any attention to those
warnings....

Leading to a large amount of _extremely_ tragic stories.

    The Musk were never known for giving heed to warnings.  A select

Ah, case in point. :)

Hiho, hiho, it's off to the cursed springs we go!

    "This is your new mate," the Empress said.  "Your life as a beast 
is over now.  You shall obey him in all things.  Do you understand?"

And she replied, "Bitte? Sprechen sie Deutsch?" I don't understand why
the spring should give her any knowledge of Chinese.

The spring by itself, no.  The Musk Empress, however, serves a role in the
ceremony beyond a merely symbolic and ritual one, and is responsible for
making the brides of the Musk something more than simply bestial minds in
human bodies.

    He didn't _feel_ enlightened. But then, he didn't feel anything
at all, except for the buzzing, and the pain...  He liked this; he
liked being down here.  It was safe and warm, like the straw bed, like
his mother's teats, like the tiny bodies of all his
brothers and sisters...

    Teats?
    
    No.  No.  He was _human_, human...
    

Okay, then t--

*ahem*

Mind, gutter, out.  

    Take off your clothes.  His hands moved, shrugging out of his 
vest, pulling down his pants, until he was naked as her in the grove.
There was nothing here but he and her, _nothing_.  

"She" would be grammatically correct rather than "her."

Err... the mayflies eating his brain have destroyed his ability to use
proper grammar?  ^_^

Not much to say here. As before, it conveys exceptionally well the sense
of what the characters are going through, but the overall plot has yet
to be clear. 

This is deliberate.  We're going for a mysterious-horrific sort of
atmosphere, where connections between events aren't often explicitly drawn.

Hoping for more of this soon.

Well, I hope we write it fast.  :)

Thanks for the commentary, Gary.

Ciao,
-Alan Harnum