As always, thanks for taking the time to write.

I took all of your suggestions about rewording.

Quoting DB Sommer <sommert@connecttime.net>:

"The wishes of the children involved should ALWAYS
take precedence,"

Not really. Kids are generally stupid and have no
cocept of long term planning, also tend to be
hedonistic to the extreme. They frequently don't
know what's good for them, and need adults to guide
them.

Of course, but this was Sigourney speaking.  As you
probably eventually noticed, the point of this line
was to help characterize her.

The heavy man sitting behind the large, solid desk
took a slow, considered puff of his expensive cigar
as he studied the man standing in front of his
desk.  Two reliable employees held the thin,
pleading man tightly pinioned.

I'm not getting much of a read on where they are. I
only have a couple of guys and a desk right now.
Might want to devote a brief paragraph here.

I will be.  Not sure how much expansion I'll do, but
I've already fleshed it out a bit, and will probably to
more.  It was too sparse a description, but then that's
a persistent weakness of mine.

"Mr. Lawley's here is the only signature we have on
file, sir.  I advise you to just kneecap him and
write off the loss.

Yeah, it's actually bad for business to let the guy
that took out the loan to use a scapegoat. It'll be
even worse than letting him go, as others will
start not paying on their loses and just scapegoat
their nearest relatives.

That's what Girard would have done," Etienne
LeFevre replied.  "And then there's his older
brother, the Chief Inspector, to consider.  We
believe he washed his hands of Silvester long ago,
but he almost certainly cares about his sister.
Girard always said never to let the police take it
personally."

Not unless you want a war, and no upper level
criminal organization does.  Only one wanting to make
a name for itself would.

Heh.  Again, all true.  A smarter criminal than Mr.
Renault here would have done things differently.

"I'm from Surabaya, on the island of Java, in
Indonesia.  My father's name was Soedjati Tanjung.
The same thing happened to me:  we were playing,
we heard shooting, and we hid.  Later Mother
and Father Sarkhovsky found me.  They told me my
family was dead and showed me the bodies.  They
took me to the hotel room where Aditi was watching
TV.  The next day we all four flew to Moscow
and met Grandfather.  The five of us lived in an
apartment in the south part of Moscow."

Heh. I guess they have no idea of how uncommon that
sort of thing is.

Heh.  Well, my (limited) experience is that six-year-
olds have little idea what's unusual and what's not,
and are apt to focus on strange things around them (at
least, from an adult's perspective).  If Aditi had been
watching a cartoon Tati'd never seen before, that might
well be the most clear memory she has of that day.

But now the girls are ten, so while they can see that
their experiences just before and since meeting
Mireille and Kirika are unusual, they've both spent the
last four years taking their experiences at six for
granted.  This is the first time anybody's ever asked
about them.

Mireille and Kirika, I would be dead now.  Whatever
they are, I think you should bear that in mind."

'The Ends Justifies the Means'. The road to hell is
paved with that. :)

It's not quite that.  Charlotte is beginning to think
of Mireille & Kirika as friends (they don't necessarily
reciprocate), and a lot of people are reluctant to rat
on friends who've done wrong.

Sigourney hesitated a moment, then continued in a
lower tone.  "And your... special feelings?  What
do they say?"

Ah ha. Special powers now. That's a bit beyond the
normal Noir setting.

True (though you should see some of the stuff people
post up on Fanfiction.Net).  You might, however, find
it surprisingly hard in this series to locate any solid
external evidence that Charlotte has any such...  :)

Put another way, she's here for foreshadowing and for
atmosphere, not for plot advancement.

"Great," Sigourney replied drily.  "Okay, let me
ask you this:  do THEY think they're on a mission
From God?"

Jake and Elwood were more charismatic, though. :)

Well, they were certainly better musicians...  :)

And advise Monsieur Renault to go back to playing
these things Girard Tufay's way; he'll last a lot
longer."

No he won't. He's suffering from terminal stupidity
in both what he can handle and what he should be
doing. He'll either bite off more than he can
chew, or his own men will kill him before he does.

And, since this is a Noir story, it has to be the
former...   :)

"And they came to you for it?" Simon said in
astonishment.  "That mob's old boss, Tufay, would
never have done anything like that!
What could Renault be thinking?"

Eh. It's time to turn his attention to the areas of
town they control and squeeze him as a warning to
what happens when he goes outside his unofficial
bounds.

Well, he didn't exactly get a lot of time in which to
do that.  But I think I'll take your implicit
suggestion, and add something to the effect that Simon
took some such action.

"There you go again, Simon.  You're supposed to
uphold the law!"  Sigourney glared at her brother.
 Why did he say things like that?

"My job is protecting people, Sigourney," Simon
replied mildly.  "The law is a means to that end."

Ah ha. He's probably willing to doctor evidence then.
Bad boy.

Well, I don't know as he'd go that far.  Ignore
evidence (for instance, against Mireille and Kirika),
in the interests of what he sees as the greater good,
yes.  Simon draws a clear line between criminals who
prey on normal citizens, and criminals who prey only on
other criminals, as sees his job as focusing on the
former.  Not that he'd overlook everything Mireille and
Kirika have done; should he ever come to suspect their
involvement in episode ten's mow-down of Paris cops,
for instance, he might not care so much that the cops
were crooked.

dandy.  "You take Ahmed with you and track that
dame down.  Follow her.  I wanna know when she's
stationary.

All it would take is a good rifle and better shot to
take care of her long range, but there are no good
shots amongst the criminals in Noir. :)

Heh.  Remarkable, that, isn't it?

In this case, Renault isn't quite at that point.  He's
used to dealing in beatings and cripplings, "teaching
a lesson", and is being slow to go think beyond the box.

Mireille on the ground, curled up, with six large
men kicking and cursing her.

Must be an off day for Mireille to let thugs get the
drop on her.

Mireille is pretty good in hand-to-hand, all things
considered; at least twice in the series, she manages
to outmaneuver a much larger man in situations where
her gun isn't a factor.  (We actually never see Kirika
do anything strictly comparable.)  However, we ALSO see
Mireille, in episode 19, literally fall flat on her
back, failing embarrassingly, in an attempt to go hand-
to-hand with four Soldats.

My take is that she has a weakness here:  she doesn't
reach for her gun (or at least some weapon) quite as
quickly as Kirika, partly out of overconfidence.  And
that's what happened here:  she didn't draw her gun
quite as fast as she should have, and against six, it
was too late.

You saw it yourself!  How could I possibly have
left two children in their care?!"

"Yeah!  That was SO NEAT!" Aditi interjected.

And that's exactly why. They're already too
desensatized to death

Heh.  An interesting challenge, making sure these girls
know right from wrong (or just making sure they don't
decide to deal with school bullies in a too-permanent
fashion).

"Violence never solves anything!"

Eh? Of course it frequently does, hence why so many
people readily use it.  It always has since they dawn
of time and always will. It's people that are
in denial like Sig that are in many ways extremely
dangerous. They try to make the world conform to
their flawed premise, and when things don't work,
they start blame shifting rather than admit they're
wrong and make things worse by trying to fit the
square peg in a round hole. The more accurate
saying is 'Violence doesn't solve everything'. :)

Sigourney frowned.  "I'm not saying those gangsters
weren't bad guys.  I'm just saying that Ms. Bouquet
and Ms. Yuumura aren't any better.

Nonsense. You can be bad, but not as bad as someone
else. She's really got a screwed up life philosophy.

Perhaps, but her viewpoint isn't that unusual, either.
However, Sig is NOT going to shift blame around forever;
she CAN admit that she may have been wrong.

That's not to say that there won't still be tension
between friends...

They're ALL bad, and children shouldn't be exposed
to people like them!"

Now this is true.

Heh.  Too late.  These two lost children are too firmly
stuck on that lure.

"Better'n THIS crap," Aditi muttered darkly.

They do need help. Lots of it very quickly. :)

Heh.  Will lessons do?  Say, kung fu lessons?

Hmm. While this was good, you're starting to repeat a
pattern that isn't working for me. Then again, I had
the same problem with Noir itself in that most of the
villains came across as generic, terminally stupid,
and the worst of shots. Too much bad guy of the week
for me. Also no sense of tension largely because of
it. But as I said, the original series was a lot
like that for me, so I guess you can say this is
definitely Noir flavored.

Well, THIS story's villain was not particularly
formidable or evil, but he wasn't supposed to seem so
(except, of course, to Sigourney).  Still, I'm a bit
surprised that you found the villain in "The Sacrifice
of the Lambs" lacking.

Since this is a written work rather than an episode
of the week, you can work things differently. Maybe
move the plot line along, or make a decent bad guy.
Not sure what you have in mind for future chapters,
though, and you might not be able to do it.

Well, I do have some notes down on a future story where
I was going to focus on building a formidable villain.
I hadn't been planning to get to that one for another
four chapters, but maybe I should rethink my order.  
Doing so would certainly keep the focus on this story's
new characters, whom I was going to have to rather
abandon for a while.  (My plans involved three road
trips w/Mireille, Kirika, Aditi, and Tati, including
one each to India and Indonesia, chasing the latter's
origins.)

Hmmm... the more I think about it, reversing the order
might work better after all.  Let's see what the muse
comes up with.

ANyway, it was worth reading and looking over, and
I'll try to do the same for future chapters.

Much appreciated!


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