Richard Lawson wrote:
The most striking feature that Ranma noticed
about the man was his eyes.
They were maroon, with tiny red points of light
sparkling deep within them like baleful stars.
Penetrating eyes. Almost predatory.
<piku piku> In the words of Kasumi, "Oh my." Ranma's in for, er, quite a
challenge this time. Shampoo, Taro, Saffron... they got nothing that could
even come close to matching the ruthlessness of Akane's dinner guest.
There are those who feel that Ranma would kick Lecter's butt in a
standup fight, and they might even be right. The problem is that Lecter
would never give Ranma a standup fight. The poor pig-tailed fool would
never even know what hit him if it weren't for the fact that Lecter
might want to gloat a little.
"Uh, yeah. Great," Ranma replied. "So, um, what's
for dinner?"
Fell leveled a full strength smile at him, reminding
him of his need for wariness.
"That, my dear Ranma, is a surprise."
Well. That certainly qualifies as "ominous and foreboding". :)
Anything said by Hannibal Lecter is "ominous and foreboding." Especially
when he can talk you into swallowing your own tongue and choking to
death.
"Not bad," he declared as he reached for a second
helping of the appetizer. "But what's a sweetbread?"
Fell's maroon eyes gleamed.
Hehehe. No one knows sweetbread better than "Fell".
The things you learn with WebMD and the Fanny Farmer Cookbook...
Fell remained unmoved.
"But you did kill him," he said evenly.
Ranma nodded his head slowly.
"And it was in fact your intention to kill him."
Ranma sank back against his heels.
Heh. But the manga is so light-hearted and comic that the violence isn't
real and no one's ever in danger and no one's ever *really* trying to kill
anyone else! C'mon, buy into the mantra!
Yes, Richard... I hear... and obey!
Nice way to show that Ranma and "Fell" do, indeed, have some things in
common. :)
That they're both killers? Or that they have the same taste (pardon the
pun) in women?
THE END
Aww... no one got eaten? <pout>
Well...
Actually, the tension - will "Fell" serve up Ranma before the end of the
evening? Are we in fact eating the "sweetbread" of, say, a Tendo? - was
wonderful and kept the pace of this story flowing nicely.
I must say you've got "Fell"'s mannerisms and speech down flawlessly. I
felt that I was reading Harris all along. Splendid.
Thanks! I take that as a great compliment. Was it a bad thing to hear
Anthony Hopkins' voice in my head as I wrote Fell's dialogue?
(As an aside: Too bad his latest novel was *sooooooo* bad. It read like a
badly-conceived self-insert. I had to shake my head at the end - he
basically destroyed the wonderful persona he'd created in his previous
novel. And it wasn't nearly as fun to read. I'd've rather read this story
instead. ^_^)
You know, I really got into "Hannibal," at least until he made his
escape from Florence. After that it really went downhill. The only part
worth mentioning after that would be the wonderful dinner scene with
Paul Krendler as Guest/Main Course/Dinner Theatre. Everything else was
the novelization of a bad comic book.
Again, nicely done without falling into the trap of being a "shocky-gory"
story.
-Richard
Thanks again, Richard!
Jamie
--
"Why are they wearing bras?"
-Rachel Wilde, age 4,
while watching the Dirty
*ahem* Lovely Angels...
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