hkmiller <hkmiller@theeddy.com> writes:
I just HAVE to comment on a fic with such a Lupinesque title...
heh.
Elisteran N/A wrote:
"Ranma! Wake up!" The man slapped him several times; the boy's skin
looked a little gray in the early light, and felt a bit chill from the
spray of water lapping against the beach.
Uh-oh. Actually, this is kind of like Wolfe, at least occasionally:
understating a point
so subtlely that it takes you by surprise when you realize it later. I
note at this point that
the man was earlier described as unconscious, but no such adjective was
applied to the boy.
The man felt a bit panicked,
but his hard-earned survival skills came to the fore. "All right,
Ranma, I'll just move you over here underneath the shade, and you can
sleep for a while longer."
This strikes me as so unlike Genma that I suspect that, on some level,
he knows what's
happened to Ranma.
Possibly. But, on the other hand, this is a man who took his six year
old son swimming to China -- I think even he might be feeling a little
guilty at this point.
"Ah, right, sir. I froze them here in this freezing chamber as they
"as they happened"? Suspect you want "chamber, as it happened,"
Hmm. DB pointed out a problem with the dialogue above, so I changed
the sentence a bit.
in the depths. "But what do *I* care for a flower? What have you done
with animals?"
Dr. Tofu gulped. "Sir, I... I ... no." His voice was weak and
tremulous by comparison. "I can reverse the final transition, but
animals are affected by some different mechanism. I'm close, though, I
On second reading, I'm getting more here than I did the first, but I'm
not sure that's good.
Suspect you want to be a bit plainer here: "the death of animals",
perhaps.
Hmm. I liked being a little indirect here. And Tofu's a scientist, so
he's not necessarily thinking at the same level as someone less
involved with his research.
tune that had been very popular with the Emperor when he was at
court.
Hmmm... Immortal Tofu's back. Seems like it's been a while since I've
seen that one.
Heh. He got a call from the Goddess Relief Office and went off on a
vacation with Goddess Kasumi. (An immortal has a probability
approaching unity of being tapped by the GRO, no (assuming random uniform
distribution of wishes, of course, but who doesn't make that
assumption)).
OK, this is a somewhat spamficcish introduction to a lighthearted
story
Didn't read very lighthearted to me. Ranma dying at the age of 6 may
have had
something to do with that.
That's true. I was envisioning a series of shorts (structurally
modelled after detective conan). I haven't gone and plotted them,
though, and I seem to gravitate towards longer, more serious works, so
... up in the air.
The title is a play on Gene Wolfe's collection _The Island of Dr Death
and Other Stories and Other Stories_, which contains, among other
things, the stories "The Island of Dr Death and Other Stories", "The
Death of Dr. Island", and the "The Doctor of Death Island".
His collection "The Wolfe Archipelago" also contains "Death of the
Island Doctor", by the
way.
Ah, I'll look for it. Thanks for the comments, btw, even if you are
ascribing too much credit when you compare my text with Wolfe's :-)
Truthfully, they're much appreciated.