Excellent story.  Very well done.  I only have one issue with it:

       Akane's Dream Sequence.

       With the sudden change in character dynamics and the creation and background development so many new characters, I honestly thought you had accidentally pasted the beginning of another story into the middle of this one.  You try to cram in too much detail about characters you haven't made the reader care about and the reader zones out completely.  It breaks the flow of the story, detracting more than it adds.


----------Thoughts:

       The lead-in from Akane falling asleep to her dream is much to abrupt, which makes it confusing.  Maybe imply, or outright state, that she starts dreaming.

       The flashback contains eight pages of conversations with and descriptions of non-existent characters (Akane's children) who will, unless you introduce some exceptionally outlandish plot twist, never appear again once Akane wakes up.  While the conversations (and their accompanying descriptions) may give the reader a vague look into the changes in Akane's character, the flow of the story would be better served by a brief and none-too-specific descriptive paragraph using relative terms such as ``mellowed''.


----------Possible alternate directions to take:

       [disquieting dream]  2-3 pages with Akane's thoughts very disconnected from her dream-actions

       [vague nightmare]  1.5 pages of Akane acting highly OOC (caricature of her personality in the current dream sequence)

       [vivid nightmare]  3/4 of a page of wildly emotional stream-of-conciousness



Hope some of this helps.

-Michael Feltmate

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