Serendipity, then. Always cool when that happens.

>>One day, someone is actually going to make use of all those lovely
>>international institutions that Megazone, Jeremy Feeple, and the other
>>fine people of the Babylon Foundation and various diplomatic services
>>have poured blood, sweat, and tears into establishing.
>
>... and only you will enjoy that episode. :)

Hey, you guys manage to make that sort of stuff pretty awesome when you choose to dip your toe into that pool. Gryphon's murder trial was pretty damned riveting, and that was basically a political fight from beginning to end. I can't be the only one who thought so. :)

(I also have fond memories of Redneck and Jeremy standing before the Supreme Judiciary to make the case against Garth Zard'al, but I haven't read those passages in a very long time, and Redneck has since retired.)

>Also, in Fuu's defense, she doesn't know Umi's groom is a)
>prepubescent and b) probably even less into this than Umi is. She
>thinks her friend is about to be dragged off to
>whothechristevenknowswhat. These people are obviously goddamn
>medievalist savages, for all she knows they still do that
>parade-the-bloody-sheets-through-the-town thing. I didn't really
>wanna go there - see the annotations for a few notes about how
>I had to grapple with that whole corner of the premise a bit - but
>jeez.

I actually should have mentioned, I was rather glad you didn't.

It would have been very easy to make Umi's fiancee some sort of leering, groping fop and/or hardcore cultural reactionary, the kind of guy nobody minds seeing get mauled by a dragon. But you didn't, you went "basically okay, victim of his culture." That makes simply applying swift and brutal violence to the situation a lot more complex.

I really don't really blame Fuu, as such. Umi's family is doing something pretty barbaric to her. But man, it was kind of funny (well, it was funny to me, and in kind of a black way) the way you had Nall parsing out legal strategies, and then Fuu goes "NO LAWYERS DRAGON TIME NAO" and he rolls with it.

>>Hell, putting just ONE guy on a door is a mistake to begin with. At
>>that point you're not a guard; you're a decoration. Your job isn't
>>actually protection, it's to give the hallway a finished look.
>
>These guys are basically mallcops.

Being a mallcop is actually harder than people think it is, but I take your meaning.

>Use your damn imagination, boy. I gave you plenty of adjectives to work with.

Oh, the fight itself was well-executed. I got no complaints there. You've been choreographing these things for, what, twenty years? I'd actually feel really weird about going after it on that level unless something really egregious had happened.

My critique was more structurally based. It just kind of seems like Nax was there just to have a fight with; you insert an unambiguously evil bad guy with no real connection to the rest of the story or purpose for being other than for Nall to prove how badass he is (which Nall has already done a lot of times) by taking him down hard. Like you got to the end, realized there needed to be a final boss instead of everyone waving goodbye to Bogan and vanishing in a spray of light, and cobbled one together.

Not trying to be a dick about this, just calling it like I see it.

-Merc
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