First up, its available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11cXNcJPAAlEfINWw_ON_l65rUEQ0Q9O5OtEKftJft-I
I don't want to keep working this forever. Second round of feedback has been more positive, two people saying they really like it, and a third inspired to take up writing because of what I did with the accents, they want to do a german character to write their own.
Problems to fix:
- No clear mental image of what is happening in the first section. I need to better detail placement, and the aerial condor the characters are riding in, along with Thorne's description instead of having it within the footnote.
- Minor typos about Thorne's french accent.
- Fix instances of mixed tenses, considered not necessary as the mix results in a dream-like reading of what's going on. I still want to see if it improves the text fixing it.
Additions:
- During the fight with the Fish that mimic the silhouette of a man, be more descriptive about what its mode of attack is and how it feeds which leads to explaining how Yvonne's fishnets are practical with microfibres that protect her between each large 'exposed' diamond of fur.
- Additional fight scene where she's moving closer to the ZOO (Okay, so its usually referred to as the OZ, Operation Zone, but because furries... BECAUSE FURRIES.) where she meets shadow-twisted parodies of old enemies, yet to be encountered in the story.
- Better description of what caused the ruption that led to the mission failing.
- Post-Transcript Dialogue talking about the cosmology at play here; timelines are strands on a spider web, they avoid the grandfather paradox but communicating to a different divergent timeline that links to the next, and so on in a spiral, to hopefully avoid every timeline meeting the same fate.
- Fix Maylis and Ferran's accents as neither are native english speakers.
It was always going to be my intention to write Yvonne as being a superpowered character that's on the same level to what we'd consider the Supermans of the comicbook genre, and in doing so I took inspiration from Jack Kirby writing about alien worlds, cosmic-scaled enemies, the kind of stuff where heroes wrestle with big ideas and punch Cthulhu. But the enemies are nebulous, they aren't bankrobbers you can smack around, but attack in the abstract. One of my favourite stories was about Mister Miracle in the DC Reboot who tried to escape death, the god of escape, and finding himself trapped in the world instead. With the comic from page one repeating the mantra "Darkseid Is". Most stories start with the big picture fight, and down-to-the-indvidual stories a side order. The Mister Miracle arc did it in-reverse, we see the small stuff and how the larger conflict ripples through his life.
Which is why I need to also in this third draft, better nail her anxiety and regrets of what she did wrong in this timeline, before the story starts with the fresh Yvonne being stalked by her 'future self'. While also playing up and expressing what the present danger is, because there's crucial aspects of her backstory missing. Some of it got filled out with the second draft. But we are getting closer.
With the story taking shape, I can consult it for direction on the game development front, because we now have characters, locations, enemies, and an idea of what is to be done. This is an exciting time for me.