And here we go again!

Someday I will actually get caught up on all this. :)

"Thanks for waiting, Mako-chan!" Usagi said, her blue eyes shining
with excitement. "Sorry it took so long, but Naru's a real pain when it 
comes to being classroom monitor. I had to re-do

redo (dictionary-verifiable word/d-v-w, no need for the hyphen)

Right! Will fix! ^_^

Since going to Osaka, he just feared that some of

his students were going over the rulebook of reality specifically to find 
loopholes.

Sounds profound. His students should be studying philosophy. Or yoga.

He wouldn't mind if they were doing stuff like that. Ethical questions or 
transcendental thinking might actually be an improvement - he is afraid that 
his students are going to be trying to construct a naked quantum singularity 
in the cloak room. And, considering this poor guy has had to teach science 
to both Touma *and* Ami, there is a strong chance they will manage to do it.

Teacher: "What have you done to my cat?"

Touma: "Nothing. Or possibly everything."

Ami: "There's really no way to tell until we open the box."

It didn't do
anything, unless you counted bobbing up and down as doing something. The 
trick was, it never stopped. For months, he had been waiting for it to
wind down, or run out of power, or something. It just kept going, and he 
couldn't tell how.

Mishawa: Perpetual motion machine? Masaka.

Yeah, stuff like that is what gives him the creeps. Touma built him a 
perpetual motion machine out of a juice can and a pen knife as a going-away 
present. The kid wasn't even TRYING that hard. How is a guy supposed to 
teach kids that keep doing stuff like that?

Tall
girls were not a problem for Sanjiro, as long as their hair was the right
colour. People could not help being different, after all.

That sounds halfway hypocritical. Anyway, I must applaud you for your 
subtle 'show, not tell' introduction of Touma by having him compared to Ami 
through this teacher's eyes. The fact that it also sets up the plot point 
of having him
stay over Makoto's is indeed, well, noteworthy. Kudos.

Thanks! I'd like to think that I was able to ease Touma into the fic by 
having a bit of foreshadowing before having him just pop up unexpectedly. 
He's actually going to be very important to the story later, and not just as 
Makoto's latest stalking victim. :)

Maybe it was that Miss Sakamura was just
so attractive, or that there was something in Makoto Kino's eyes that told 
him all she needed was a chance.

Definitely the former, otherwise this whole sequence wouldn't have happened 
in the first place.

Yeah, but Sanjiro is trying to justify this to himself. He really does want 
to be a good teacher, and he would like to believe that he is able to see 
when one of his students just needs a chance to get ahead. The sad truth is 
that he is only being convinced to do this because he has a crush on the 
Home Ec teacher.

Who, of course, is convinced that Makoto must be brilliant, since she does 
so WELL in that class....

Ami and Usagi had
been pretty upset when she told them she couldn't come along on the trip 
to Yokohama, but it might actually be better to spend some time with just 
them and Rei for once.

Ah. I see. Now everything's coming together; this scene was actually the 
backtracking of events before the two earlier chapters.

Yeah, I was a little worried that wouldn't work out properly, but in the end 
I was actually very pleased with it. I'll have to remember to try this 
little trick again some day. ^_^

heard very often, indeed; usually after their latest hobby had wiped out 
the local power grid again. Somewhere back in Osaka his father was still

Suggest: Osaka, his father was still

Good idea. Will fix!

paying Touma's father NOT to build things.

Heh. What a nice scam they had going, albeit unintentional.

Yeah, the Hashiba family are basically pulling a complicated and inadvertant 
protection racket on the scientific community as a whole. They have 
perfectly good intentions, but everything they do keeps coming off as just 
another way of saying "Nice place you got here... Shame if anything were to 
happen to it...."

And good thing
you're not following the fanon precedent of portraying Genichirou Hashiba 
as an abusive alcoholic.

Never saw where that came from, actually. Genichirou Hashiba was featured in 
a grand total of *one* canonical YST story (the drama CD "Tenkuden"), and 
there was never any sign that he was any kind of abusive parent. 
Absent-minded, definitely, and a bit strange, but he and Touma actually got 
along really well. If anyone in the Troopers has issues with their family, 
it would more likely be Seiji - his older sister Yayoi is pretty much pure 
evil. ^_^

Also of note is the lack of an 'English substitute for an Osakan accent' 
(probably a Brooklyn accent, since that's the accent present in the dubs) 
that leaves most fics portraying characters with Osakan accents as 
unreadable. For that I am eternally grateful.

Yeah, Brooklyn accents used to be the norm for showing that someone was from 
Osaka in the dubs - YST and Sailor Moon may actually have the two most 
memorable and cringe-worthy examples with Touma and Naru's dub voices. 
Nowadays, people seem to be leaning more towards a Southern or Texan accent 
instead - I'm not too sure if I like it better or not. :p

Only people in Hiroshima liked noodles.
Gingerly, he picked up a bit of the aonori and sprinkled it onto the
steaming mass before drizzling just a bit of mayonnaise on top for
flavour.

Green Nori seaweed flakes? Only people in Hiroshima liked noodles?

Yeah, apparently if you put noodles in an Osakan's okonomiyaki, he will flip 
out on you. They more or less consider it to be an act of vandalism. Of 
course, the people of Osaka also like to take credit for inventing 
okonomiyaki, so anything that goes against their personal view of how it 
should be cooked tends to offend them. ^_^

And yes: placing noodles into the batter is considered "Hiroshima-style" 
okonomiyaki.

Across from where the two teens struggled their way through the
works of Newton and Einstein, a shadowy figure stood on the nearby railing
of an adjacent balcony and watched.

But of course. Aren't these mysterious figures always standing nearby, 
hidden, and shadowy?

This one in particular. I think it might have something to do with the hat: 
it just compels people to become ambiguous and enigmatic the moment they put 
it on.

If Sailor Jupiter was back, she would not be walking this realm

Hmm. Talk about delayed. That is, him and his information. Sailor Jupiter's 
been back for sometime now. Where had _he_ been, huh?

Well, the way I've fused the timelines, he was still evil and living in the 
Dynasty when the Senshi first returned. He showed up on Earth during that 
gap in R where the Sailor Senshi had all gotten hit by the cosmic reset 
button, so nobody remembered they existed while he was around. He then died 
sometime during S and thus missed most of SuperS.

Fool
that he was, he preferred to think that they had been more than just 
another machination to each other.

Such a sensitive fool. Who would have thought that Setsuna would have 
enough nuts to cover the both of them? ^_^;

Ah, he's just feeling sorry for himself right now. Being dead for the last 
year has made him a little bit maudlin and bitter. Trust me, he can be 
downright vicious as long as he's not angsting over Pluto.

For a single moment, Toshitada hated them and
envied them with every fibre of his being.

The antithesis of Setsuna, this Toshitada; makes me wonder why he was ever 
assigned to this post in the first place, seeing that he's obviously not 
emotionally secure enough to handle the job.

Toshitada more or less assigned himself the job out of guilt after the 
original guy got killed. Now KAOS was a stone-cold fox when it came to being 
all mysterious and helpful. Toshitada used to be in charge of kicking the 
snot out of every single one of the Troopers at the time, what with being 
the former second-in-command of the Evil Dynasty. Emotional stability was 
not very high on his original job requirements. :p

but he still liked to think that he was
at least enough of a gentleman not to go through a girl's unmentionables. 
While she was absent.

Right. And going through a girl's unmentionables while she's present is a 
good thing?

Touma: "That depends entirely on whether she is still in them at the time."

Inside, the usually
crammed compartments were empty, chairs abandoned and straps swinging 
empty from the ceiling.

Suggest: replacing the first 'empty' with 'unfilled' and replacing the 
second 'empty' with 'emptily'; either of the two or both.

That's a very good idea - I'll need to go back in and fix that.

The question was, did it matter? If Makoto Kino was Sailor
Jupiter, what difference did that make in anything?

It's a major plot point. It makes all the difference.

Part of what I like about Touma is that he can take so much with just a 
shrug. Really, the fact that Makoto Kino is a Sailor Senshi doesn't really 
do anything to affect the way he looks at her. It's supposed to be this big 
important secret, and he just couldn't care less. ^_^

Besides which,
a girl like her probably had dozens of boys dying to go out with her.

Boys (of mostly Japanese descent): Aw, hell naw. Too tall.

Hehe - Touma's naturally drawn to athletic and energetic girls. From his 
point of view, Makoto is just fine the way she is.

Touma: "Five foot eight and worth the climb! Whatever that means....."

side with a single flourish of his hand. "Admirable your strength is, 
amazon, but a child yet is all you are. This blow shall be my last!"

Suggest: Amazon

Good point - I should probably go through and fix that.

bracing himself upright with it as he looked down at Fei Lian. Clumsily,
he fumbled for an arrow and nocked

nocked --> notched

Nope - "nocked" is actually the right word here. The verb "nock" means "to 
fit an arrow into the string of a bow", which is what Touma is doing here.

Touma Hashiba had always firmly believed in happy endings...

Nice cap-off. The reuse of the 'happy ending' theme has made the chapter a 
solid, standalone read outside of the other chapters. I like the chapter's 
individual 'feel', so to speak.

Thanks! I've been trying to drive home the seperation of Touma and Makoto 
from the rest of their team, in order to drive home the isolated feel of 
them being stranded. It's not easy, so I'm glad that it's working so far. 
^_^

In any case, you are improving: less grammar rules broken this time around.

YAY! Glad to hear I was able to recover from my dip last time. Hopefully 
some day I'll be able to reduce myself all the way down to just three or 
four. :p

As for the content itself; it's undoubtedly good. Again, this chapter, like 
all
previous chapters, was worth quite a few chuckles. Humor, plot, and good 
old storytelling are this fic's strong points, no doubt.

Well, that's a relief. It helps that I have a very strong idea of where this 
story is going, what with having about four years off to mull it over. ^_^

Thanks again for the C&C! It is stil greatly appreciated, even with the 
slight delay that we have all agreed to never discuss again. ;)

Later!

-Morgan Hudson

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