>Something has bugged me about
>Correspondence/Starcrossed/Split-Infinitive.
>
>In both Star-Crossed 10 and Split-Infinitive, Gryph gets hit by fire,
>which is what causes the malfunction. In Correspondence, he just
>hadn't pre-flighted his valk properly. So, uhh...which was it?

Actually, Star-Crossed says no such thing. It mentions that one of the patrol fighters hits him, but also explicitly says it was only a center-of-mass shield hit and pretty clearly implies that it accomplished nothing other than to shake the ship a little. Now, that may have been enough of a bump to displace the cracked coils and make the problem worse, but the fact remains that if he'd checked the spacecraft properly beforehand, he'd have known the cracks were there and wouldn't have tried to engage the drive. (Which would have made escaping from the patrol harder, aside from all the other changes it would have wrought to the spacetime continuum. If I did What If...? stories, that'd be a good hook for one. But I generally don't, because those always seem to end up taking the stance that the universe would be destroyed, even if the hypothetical case is something like "What if the Punisher had reacted to his family's murder by going to law school and joining the DA's office instead?")

As for Split Infinitive, well, you could apply the newer-story-takes-precedence rule and assume I forgot the precise details presented there and for some reason neglected to check before doing that scene in Star-Crossed, or you could take the view that that bit of the opening scene ("had damaged his port warp nacelle") was based on Gryphon's own best guess as to what had happened, based on the information available at the (somewhat chaotic and busy) time. Specifically the known facts that a) the Ferrets had been shooting at him, b) he'd felt one of them hit him somewhere, and c) the portside nacelle was the one going all crazy-go-nuts on the diagnostic panel. Only later on, when he had a chance to take a deep breath, unclench his buttocks, and examine the ship, would he have discovered that no, in fact, they didn't hit the port nacelle at all, it was already damaged, and you'd have known that if you'd handled your preflight and launch like an astronaut instead of a piqued teenager.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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