Leap in the Dark: Commentary, part 2

[nonelvis]

10:58pm, Red Room, Third Floor

"Donna? Donna?" Blasted woman had whooshed away, as threatened.

Now that the Doctor considered the situation, however, he realised that Donna hadn't disappeared on him so much as he'd disappeared on her. The lighting here was red, not green; there was no nearby bar; and the music was all grinding guitar instead of rumbling drums. The monkeys hanging from ceiling vines were gone as well, which was a pity; they'd brought a certain playful charm to the room.

He'd just started to search for the nearest exit when something large, scaly, and smelling of rotting lettuce shoved past him, knocking him into the wall.

In an early draft of the story, the Doctor didn't figure out until near the very end that they were dealing with a Phengarian, and the dialogue I'd written reminded platypus too much of the scene in "World War III" where the Doctor identifies the Slitheen by listing their characteristics. Out it went, and in came this description of the creature, along with the Doctor's realization what it was.

"Oi! Do you mind?" he said, and noticed a thick, spiked tail disappearing around the corner. University students in Earth's mid-22nd century, last time he'd checked, had neither scales nor tails, though hygiene could at least explain the odour. Still, even the laziest student wouldn't have had that peculiar and unique vegetable scent.

The Doctor added up all the visual and olfactory evidence he'd gathered, and arrived at a very unpleasant conclusion. He turned to chase after the creature, and made it two long strides down the hallway before there was a disconcertingly familiar winking down of the lights.




10:28pm, Jungle Room, First Floor

"This ... this is not right," the Doctor said, back in the jungle-themed room again. "This is most definitely not right." He spun in place, searching for the creature he'd  been following. "And this is going to stop right now."

He grabbed the nearest dancer by the shoulder and turned the boy to face him. "You. You're going to tell me who's in charge of this party, because someone is messing around with forces they clearly do not understand, and I am not happy about it. And you really, really don't want me not to be happy. Because when I'm not happy, things can get very ugly, and that's before you've even met the person I'm travelling with."

The Doctor gets all Oncoming Storm on some poor kid's ass. I also liked having him acknowledge that you really, really don't want to piss off Donna.

The boy stared at him blankly. "Buddy, you need a drink." He pointed toward the left. "Graham's mixing these tropical brain freeze things. Takes the edge off the jumps."

"A drink. I'm standing here threatening you, and you're offering me a drink."

"You don't like rum, there's another bar in the corner. Or Graham'll make you something else; it's his party."

The Doctor smiled. "No, I think a tropical brain freeze is a lovely idea. Perfectly lovely. Comes with a cherry and a little umbrella, does it? They're marvellous, those little umbrellas."

The creature he'd spotted, dangerous as it was, would have to wait; Graham was a more urgent quarry. The Doctor headed off in the direction he'd been pointed, where he found a throng of students massing around a sandy-haired, thin-faced boy pouring various liquids into a large blender. The blender whirred, inaudible above the chatter and thumping music from the Jungle Room, and the boy poured its contents into several plastic cups, topping them with cherries and paper umbrellas.

The Doctor pushed his way through to the bar, ignoring complaints about waiting his turn, and asked politely, "Are you Graham?"

"That's me," Graham replied, dropping a straw into a cup before handing it off to a girl in a distractingly short semi-transparent skirt. He watched her disappear into the crowd, then shook his head. "Never going to get any of that, that's for sure."

The Doctor manoeuvred his way behind the bar and slid an arm around Graham's narrow shoulders. "Graham, there's something rather important I'd like to discuss with you. Is there somewhere we can talk that's a little less like a Saturday night in Soho?"

I am often crappy at writing similes and metaphors, and half the time I write a story I have to remind myself to use them lest I just end up with sentence after sentence of "and then they did that, and the other thing." Fortunately, I had a recent London guidebook and the interwebs to help pick the right noisy nightclub neighborhood.

"Hey, are you one of those Defence guys my advisor said might drop by? I told him I was busy tonight, but he said you guys didn't like to wait."

"Yes, yes, that's me," the Doctor replied cheerily. "Department of Defence, here about, you know, the thing."

I love this sentence. The vagueness of "you know, the thing" is classic Doctor bullshit.

Graham wiped his hands on a tea-towel and nodded toward a door on the other side of the room. "Back porch is this way. Should be quieter out there." He paused on the way out to nudge a friend. "William, can you take over at the bar for a little while? I need to go talk to the DoD."

The porch was slightly quieter than indoors, if only because it wasn't big enough for more than ten people to share. At the moment, there were only four: the Doctor, Graham, and a couple pawing at each other in the corner.

"Right," said the Doctor, steering himself and Graham away from the couple. "Now tell me all about that thing. And quickly, too. I've a feeling we haven't much time."

Graham checked the communicator on his wrist. "We've got four and a half minutes, to be exact."

"And in four and a half minutes ..."

"We'll all make the next jump. Every twenty minutes. Fujiium-335's really reliable like that."

The Section In Which The Villain Explains His Plan.

The Doctor leaned back against the porch rail, trying to look casual. "And fujiium-335 would be ...?"

"You're really from Defence? I mean, that's how I got the fujiium-300 in the first place."

"Of course. Just testing. Have to make sure we're getting our money's worth, after all."

"Okay," Graham said, his voice still sounding a little dubious. "Anyway, it powers the shield generator. I was just trying to create a geon-based portable shield, you know? And I needed to pump up the fujiium, so I ran it through the department's particle accellerator until I hit the right isotope. So the machine works; I've got it running all around the House until one in the morning, but it's the side effect that's the cool part."

For someone who was such a crap physics student, I do tend to rely on quantum mechanics an awful lot for scientific explanations. This is probably because the quantum mechanics course I took was taught within MIT's chemical engineering department and was focused more in that area than in physics. There was also an enormous amount of really scary math.

Anyway, geons: I'm sure I found this page after following a few links on Wikipedia related to quantum mechanics, because I knew there had to be some semi-logical bit of handwaving I could do to explain how emission of elementary particles could be used to create a force field. The simplest explanation for particle emission would be radioactive decay, hence the need to create an unstable isotope of my fake element.

Graham slouched against the porch rail, crossing his arms to mimic the Doctor's stance. "Turns out the isotope's an unstable power source. Every twenty minutes, it decays by emitting a tachyon burst, and anything within a sixteen-meter radius gets jumped randomly through time. It's the best. The shield holds you in, so you can't go too far; you can only move along your existing timestream."

Tachyons: the science-fiction writer's best friend, if you want to handwave about time travel. And here's where the quantum mechanics comes in, because If quantum mechanics can support the concepts of particle entanglement and spooky action at a distance, then you can argue that everyone in the party is moving through a fixed timeline. If you're moving through a fixed timeline, you can't run across another version of yourself, which would have made the story way too complicated.

I blame Joe Haldeman (in the best possible way) for being a stickler for plausible scientific explanations in his students' science fiction. To this day, I can't write anything remotely SF in my stories without having researched how my speculation could actually be supported by existing science.

The Doctor stared straight ahead, not looking at Graham, breathing quietly and evenly to control his temper. The boy didn't know any better, but that was always the way on Earth: Professor Lazarus, Yvonne Hartman, countless others whose messes he'd had to clean up. This one might as well learn while he was still young, before he grew up to do even more serious damage. "Listen –" he began, but Graham cut him off.

I'm sure there are old-school villains who would have fit the bill here, too; it had just been so long since I'd seen some of those episodes that I couldn't think of any.

"So Spring Term's over, Commencement's in a couple of weeks, figure we should have one last big party before we all leave, and I thought 'Hey, why not hook up the machine? We can all time-trip through the party.' And it's been a blast so far, everyone loves it."

"Everyone loves it, do they? Everyone? Because I myself am quite a bit less in love with this than everyone, I should tell you. And here's why –"

Four and a half minutes went by much more quickly when he was angry, the Doctor discovered.




11:45pm, outside the Foam Room, Second Floor

Graham tapped the side of his communicator to check the time: about an hour into his future. Physically, he was farther away from the tropical brain freezes, but closer to somewhere even more enticing: the Foam Room. Maybe his machine was trying to give him a hint about the best way to spend the next fifteen minutes? Graham turned the doorknob, entered the room, and closed the door behind him.

And then he screamed.




11:48pm, Porch, First Floor

The porch was the only place quiet enough for a call, Graham had discovered – after he'd finished throwing up, that is.

"Help!" he yelled into his communicator. "They're dead! They're all dead! You've got to come help!"

"We have a fix on your location, sir," the dispatcher's cool voice replied. "Emergency vehicles are on their way."

Graham tried to stop hyperventilating, but failed. "Thank you," he choked out. "Come quickly." He clicked off the communicator and stared out at campus, watching for the ambulance that would be travelling across the shimmering road.

Aw, crap.

The shimmer along the road meant that the geon shield was still active, along with his machine. All the partygoers had agreed to stay in the House for the duration of the party, but that also meant that the emergency vehicles were locked out.

Now, go on, ask yourself: How did the TARDIS get in if the geon shield is locking out the ambulances?

After all my blithering about scientific evidence: I'm going with "TARDIS magic." Sigh. The things you catch long after a story has been posted.

Graham raced inside, hoping he could get to his room and disable the shield before the cops and paramedics arrived. Because if he couldn't, there would be even more explaining to do.




11:50pm, Rear Hallway, Second Floor

The rear hallway was still crammed with girls waiting for the loo when a six-foot-tall reptilian creature literally appeared out of nowhere. And while at this point in the evening, the girls were accustomed to people appearing out of nowhere, it was another thing entirely when the person in question was covered in scales, reeked of decay, had sharp claws, and in fact, was not a person at all.

The creature roared, lunging at the nearest girl, who shrieked and leaped back into the hallway, a gash on her arm where the creature's claw had scraped her. She stumbled, falling to the floor, while her friends started a multidirectional stampede, heading anywhere but here. Panicking as the creature reached for her again, the girl rolled away from the claws, barely managing to regain her footing and flee toward the Bubble Room before she could be caught.

OMG ACTION SEQUENCE. Yeah, never writing one of those again either. Too damned hard.

The creature lumbered along behind her, still hungry.




11:50pm, Graham's Room, Second Floor

Dammit, how was he supposed to remember the right shutdown sequence when there was all that screaming going on outside? And if he was starting to hear sirens over all that noise, that had to mean the emergency vehicles were only a few minutes away.

Graham hated hard shutdowns, but he had no choice: he ripped the power resonator coils out of the device, and all its status lights immediately flicked off. He sighed in relief. No more worries about having to explain the shield and the time-trips, and tracking a murderer and dealing with all that blood in the Foam Room would be Emergency Services' job. Plus now he had just enough time for a quick shot from the bar near the Bubble Room to help soothe his nerves.

He stepped back into the hallway and was nearly flattened by the terrified partygoers running past him. And when he saw why they were running, and couldn't fight the tide to return to his room, he had no choice but to join them.




11:50pm, Bubble Room, Second Floor

"Bloody hell. You would have to drop us at the only place in the universe with an even more rubbish time traveller than you are." Donna pointed the hose nozzle at the Doctor and squeezed the trigger. "And you still haven't told me what this ridiculous little project of yours is."

The Doctor snatched the hose away from his companion. "Oi! Graham is not a time traveller. We're all just ... skipping a bit through time, like a stone across a lake. Well, that is, if the stone weren't making all its hops in sequence, and the lake were really more of a giant snowglobe we're all trapped inside, and I've quite lost track of this metaphor, haven't I?"

I'd probably rewrite this sentence a bit now -- it reminds me a little too much of a similar line in "Blink."

"You tell me. I stopped listening as soon as I realised you were about to go off on one of your little tears again."

The Doctor rolled his eyes. "Tell me again why I invited you on board?" He turned toward the console screen, adjusting a large dial below it to filter the output.

"Because I'm gorgeous, clever, and good in a pinch. And because you need someone to give you a swift kick in the arse every so often."

I LOVE YOU, DONNA.

"Right," he muttered, and rotated the dial anti-clockwise. "Donna, it's working."

"What, the kick in the arse? It's been days since I've had to do that. Glad to hear it's finally had an effect."

"No, the screen. The screen wasn't working when we arrived, and now it is. I think Graham's machine was interfering with the TARDIS so she couldn't get a fix on our time and location. But now she can, so the machine must be inactive. We're at Tech in 2162, just as I thought."

"So if the machine's off, we should be able to track down whatever killed that poor girl."

"Oh, I know what killed that girl," the Doctor said. "That's why I've been building a pump. I was hoping we'd be able to tranquillise it – the Phengarian, that is, not the pump – but we used the last of the darts on that Noxdril a week ago, and Phengarians, they need the really, really big darts, the ones you'd use on elephants or small whales or what-have-you, I'd need a whole box of what we used on the Noxdril anyhow –"

... and here we reach the point where I really start to wonder if this is the right ending. I struggled with this for a long time. Would the Doctor really kill the Phengarian? Only if he had no other choice, which is why I have the line about the tranquilizer darts. Also, the Phengarian isn't a sentient creature; it's acting on instinct, its instinct tells it to kill, it's killed one person that the Doctor knows of, and it's likely to threaten more.

Still, I wonder now if I shouldn't have had him synthesize a tranquilizer instead of oxalic acid. This is going to bother me forever.

Donna snatched the Doctor's tie and pulled his face close to hers. "Stop. Babbling." She held him in place until he nodded his agreement. "Now, there's something out there that's killing people, and I want to know what it is, and what we're going to do about it."

The Doctor gently pried Donna's fingers from his tie. "It's a Phengarian. It bumped into me earlier tonight, total accident, but I thought, what's a Phengarian doing at a party? They're barely sentient, Phengarians, nothing but giant reptiles, operating on pure animal instinct. And I still haven't worked out how it got here – Phengar doesn't have space travel. They've just got rocks and deserts and lots of things with big, nasty teeth."

Donna shuddered. "That body ... it looked like something had chewed it up and spit it out."

"I'm sorry. I'm sure that was the Phengarian's doing. It was just hungry. Probably scared, too."

"But you've got some way of fixing this, right?"

"Yes, once we figure out where the Phengarian is," he said. "Reptiles are very sensitive to oxalic acid, and Phengarians even more so than most – even a negligible amount is highly toxic to them. I don't always keep it around the lab, but it's not hard to synthesise, given ordinary table sugar and nitric acid and ..."

Study hard in chemistry class, kids! Science is your friend! (Special thanks here to peebles, a chemistry professor, for telling me about oxalic acid synthesis methods and what could go wrong with them.)

The Doctor's eyes lost focus, as if he were looking past Donna to something more important. "Oh. Oh dear. I'll be right back," he said, and sprinted out of the console room.

Shortly after he disappeared, faint, agitated noises Donna couldn't quite parse drifted down the corridor. A few moments later, there was a long, loud hissing much like the sound of a fire extinguisher, immediately followed by more agitated noises that grew louder as the Doctor stormed back into the console room, cursing in a language Donna had heard him use before.

"Botched it up, did you?" she said, sighing.

"It boiled over," the Doctor grumbled. "I was paying attention to you and your silly questions, and it boiled over. I don't have enough nitric acid for a second batch."

"My silly questions? 'Doctor, are you being a pompous git?' is a silly question. 'Doctor, would you tell me what the hell is going on?' is not."

This was an early line, and probably the point where I realized I was going to love writing Donna.

"All right, all right." The Doctor ran his fingers through his hair, leaving it prickling in all directions, and started pacing back and forth. "We need something with oxalic acid in it, something like rhubarb leaves, cassava leaves, spinach ..."

The pacing stopped. "Donna," the Doctor said, looking down and to his left. "That bucket."

"The zolbert fizz. Don't tell me you're thirsty now."

"No, no ... ." The Doctor crouched by the bucket and flipped a bottle of fizz toward Donna, who caught it in midair. "Zolberts! Zolberts, Donna! This bottle's got as much oxalic acid in it as three pounds of spinach!" He twisted the top off two bottles and began pouring their contents in the petrol can. "Help me fill this!"

As platypus said, the zolberts in Act I go off in Act III.

Donna grabbed another bottle and cracked it open. "At least this stuff'll be good for something."

They quickly had the can filled, and the Doctor grabbed it, heading for the exit. Donna trailed a few steps behind him, an empty bottle still in her hand. The Doctor threw open the TARDIS doors.

The sound of terrified yells and screams filled the console room. Outside the ship, the partygoers were huddled against the wall, a few of the ones in front brandishing chairs to fend off what appeared to be a six-foot-tall lizard.

The Doctor closed the doors almost as quickly as he'd opened them. "Donna," he said, "it's our lucky day."

Donna paused on the entrance ramp, her arms crossed. "And exactly how does all that screaming mean we're lucky?"

"It means we don't have far to go to find the Phengarian. I just need a moment to prime this pump ..." He flipped a switch on the motor attached to the petrol can, and the apparatus began to rumble and shake. "Ready?" he asked.

"Ready," Donna replied, and pushed open the TARDIS doors, revealing the same scene that had greeted the Doctor only minutes before. "Oh, my God, it's a giant lizard! You didn't tell me we were fighting Godzilla!"

"Giant reptile, Donna," the Doctor sighed. "I did say 'giant reptile.' And we need it facing in this direction before I can spray it."

"Okay. No problem," Donna said, and took a deep breath, steeling herself. "Oi!" she yelled, waving her arms, but the partygoers' screaming drowned out her shout.

Frustrated, she lobbed the empty bottle at the creature. The bottle arced across the room, spinning end-over-end before connecting solidly with the Phengarian's head. The creature roared, turned to face her, and started loping toward the TARDIS, its jaws snapping.

"Duck, Donna!" yelled the Doctor, and as she dropped her head, he raised the hose nozzle and squeezed the trigger. A fountain of fizzy liquid cascaded into the Phengarian's open mouth and over its face, choking it.

Almost immediately, the creature's breathing became laboured, and it stumbled in its rush toward the ship. Its body began to shake; its forearms dropped limply to its sides. The Phengarian lurched forward three steps, then halted in its tracks while its head bobbed up and down in a futile attempt to swallow.

At last, it crumpled to the floor, wheezing, and then was still.

This entire sequence went through many, many revisions, and was much shorter to start with. I still think the death may happen a little too quickly.

The room went strangely silent. The students peeled themselves from the wall, cautiously moving closer to the corpse.

Near the back of the pack stood Graham, his face pale and drawn. He slinked between partygoers, making his way to the exit.

"Oh no, you don't," said the Doctor, marching through the crowd and grabbing a fistful of Graham's collar. He tugged the boy back toward the body. "I can hear those sirens right outside, and you aren't going anywhere. Not for a good long while, I should think."




12:05am, Bubble Room, Second Floor

With Donna holding Graham securely by the upper arm, the Doctor concentrated on using the sonic screwdriver to confirm the Phengarian's death from a safe distance. "Come on, let me go," Graham pleaded to Donna. "I don't have anything to do with that thing. That guy's got it in for me."

Donna's grip only tightened. "Are you even dumber than you look? Because you must be if you think I'm going to fall for that. Now stay still and shut it."

From the left side of the semicircle now surrounding the Phengarian, a girl's voice called out in surprise: "It's all squiggly!" A short brunette wearing anaglyph glasses and a shirt reading "CELLULAR AUTOMATA ARE PEOPLE TOO" was pointing at the body.

Conway's Game of Life joke. I actually can never get my head around Life, but virtually every other geek can, so the shirt seemed appropriate.

"Squiggly?" said the Doctor. He looked down in confusion at the sonic, then over at the girl, frowning when he noticed the glasses. "Give me those," he said, snatching them from her.

"Hey!" The girl rubbed her eyes and blinked. "Okay, not so squiggly anymore."

The Doctor put on the glasses but almost immediately whipped them off again. He turned toward Graham, jaw clenched and lips tightly pressed together in fury. "You have no idea what you've done here, do you? No idea at all."

I came up with the idea of the Phengarian having come through the Void pretty early on in the story's development, because Void = instant Ten angst, and I am a sick person who likes writing angsty Doctor stories. It also makes Graham's screwup that much more serious.

"I ... I don't know what you're talking about. We were just having a little fun, that's all." Graham stepped backward as the Doctor advanced, but soon was trapped against the TARDIS doors.

The Doctor continued, his voice low and controlled. "Your device doesn't just interfere with time. It's sprung a leak. It opened up a hole between universes and let that thing through to hunt and feed. Someone's died because of you."

Graham shifted to his left, but the Doctor slammed a hand against the TARDIS door to block him. "You'll stay right there until I'm finished," he said, louder, and what little crowd noise remained in the room dissipated.

"Let me tell you how that creature got its invitation to your little party. It had to cross an empty space between universes called the Void, and there are far, far worse horrors in there, waiting and hoping for one little crack they can exploit. I know, because I put them there. And the only reason I'm certain they didn't come through along with that Phengarian is that everyone in this room is still alive.

"There's no one else to stop this sort of thing now. There's just me, holding the universe together with Sellotape and glue. And you ignorant apes keep trying to pry it apart!"

It was pretty important to me that the Doctor be pissed off about the Void opening not because it was a missed chance to get at Rose, but because of the much greater danger that the Daleks and Cybermen could have escaped. I enjoy a good post-"Doomsday" story as much as the next shipper (well, multishipper, to be clear), but let's face it: the threat of universal destruction is far more serious than the Doctor having lost Rose.

This section, as well as the rest of the scene that follows it, is the very first part of the story I wrote. It survived from initial draft to final with virtually no edits.

"I got full marks," Graham whimpered. "The whole committee loved it."

The Doctor threw his hands up in the air in frustration. "Why isn't this getting through to you?" He looked over at Donna, who was still gripping Graham tightly. "Is the translation circuit broken again? Can you understand me?"

"I can," she said, "but you're doing it all wrong." She let go of Graham's arm, nudged the Doctor aside, and turned to face the boy.

"It's very simple, darling," she said, smiling sweetly as she leaned in close. "Stop mucking about!"

Graham cowered against the TARDIS and nodded.

"In a minute, I'm going back into that blue box for a sledgehammer, and then you're going to smash that machine to pieces so small you'll be picking them out of your fingernails for weeks, is that clear?"

Graham nodded again. "Microscopic pieces. I promise," he whispered.

"Good," Donna said, and smiled sweetly once more. She drew back and gestured at the Doctor to take his turn holding on to Graham. "See? Simple. You know, if you ever shut it long enough to realise how you run on at the mouth, you'd understand why the direct approach works. Now, where's the toolshed?"




12:37am, Bubble Room, Second Floor

"Souvenir?" Donna asked, extending a palmful of shiny rubble.

"Thanks, no."

"There's a couple good bits in here look just like diamonds. Think I'll have 'em made into earrings."

"You do that." The Doctor focussed on the console.

Donna plucked two scraps from her pile and tossed the rest out the door. "When I left Graham's room, the coppers were grilling him about three more bodies they found. They'll probably be by in a minute to look at that dead thing on the floor."

The reader has known for some time that the Phengarian killed again. Donna and the Doctor did not.

"Then it's time we were off," the Doctor said. "Let Graham clean up his own mess for a change."

Donna jangled the two crystal fragments in her palm. "Doctor, did you mean it, about there being worse things that could have come through?"

The Doctor jabbed several buttons on the console before responding. "Yes. Much worse." He spun the trackball violently, then rested his hands on the railing and sighed. "But I've closed the breach so nothing else can come through, and that's what's important."

Despite my earlier note about the Void, it is okay with me if you want to read a tiny bit of wistfulness about Rose into the Doctor's reaction here; I certainly do. Now that the initial threat has been contained, he can think about missed opportunities.

Donna curled her fingers around the Doctor's left hand. "You did your best. If it hadn't been for you, there'd have been more dead bodies in that room out there. Lots more."

The Doctor nodded, still staring at the console. Then his mouth curved into a half-smile and he turned to Donna. "Still, we did get rid of that zolbert fizz. Always hated it, myself. Never understood why it was all the rage in the mid-22nd century."

Donna crooked her neck over to the right, where the discarded drink bucket lay on its side. "Sorry to disappoint you, but we've got a couple of bottles left. I'll go put them in the kitchen for the next time we run into Godzilla." She picked up the bucket, dropped in the bottles, and headed toward the kitchen.

"Donna?" the Doctor called.

"What?"

"Those bits of the machine. You said you wanted them made into earrings? There's a jeweller on Marcassio VII who's got a way with precious metals, never seen anything like it. But I suppose that's what comes of having four hands and fingers a foot long. Anyway, fancy a shopping trip?"

"God, yes. Anywhere but here. And promise me we'll stick to one time, will you? I think all those jumps made me a bit queasy."

The Doctor threw a lever. The TARDIS shuddered, then the time rotor settled into a smooth up-and-down. "One time for now, Donna," the Doctor said, and winked at her. "One time for now."

Ending this was so hard. I needed to wrap up the angst so as not to end on a complete downer, so having them plan a more leisurely trip next seemed like a reasonable fix. As pleased as I am by the final sentences, I wonder whether I should have gone with something slightly different, since I've ended other stories with repetitive dialogue as well. Just one of those writing tics of mine I have to watch out for, I suppose.

So, that's it. My one genfic, and probably the only one ever unless I can come up with another suitable plot. Preferably one that causes me 90% fewer headaches.