*Beep*… *Beep*…
The slow, rhythmic notes from the heart monitor resounded in the silence of the hospital room.
A young man laid flat in the patient bed. He was little more than a boy, having reached adulthood just two weeks prior. His eyelids remained closed and motionless. His pale lips hung ajar beneath the oxygen mask. His entire countenance was one of sickly pallor. There wasn’t a hint of youthful health in his image.
His mother leaned in from a chair beside the hospital bed. The shadows beneath her eyes spoke of her exhaustion, but there was little room for fatigue in her heartbroken gaze. Her delicate fingers brushed aside his brown, overgrown bangs and wiped the sweat from his forehead. His body was straining itself just to hang on.
The doctors had warned that he only had a handful of days left. His heart had been born defective, and after eighteen years it was failing outright. There was no treatment other than a heart transplant. Unfortunately for the young man, his family had been unable to secure a donation.
A tear fell from the mother’s glistening eyes as her son’s slate-blue gaze flickered open. She knew that their hours together had fallen away to only a final few.
“Don’t be sad Mama,” Alexei spoke faintly in Russian through the oxygen mask. “I’ve had a good life,” a brave yet genuine grin came to his lips. “I’m ready to accept the maker’s judgment — whatever form he may take shape in.”
Natalya clenched his thin fingers with a forced smile. A shadow of guilt passed through her gaze, as though berating herself on why she could not show the same courage as her son. He was ready to face the end, yet she could not bring herself to let him go.
Alexei wasn’t even brought up to be religious. His father was an atheist. His mother was an Orthodox Christian who hadn’t received communion for decades. The son ended up delving five different faiths for answers. But as the gilded Eastern Cross standing above his bed and the strand of Buddhist prayer beads encircling his wrist showed, he never did decide on one of them.
“Is… are they…”
“Your Papa left the airport with him nearly an hour ago,” Natalya answered her son’s feeble question. “They should be here any minute now.”
Apart from the family, Alexei had requested to see one other person before departing this world. Bringing someone all the way from Chelyabinsk, Russia to New York wasn’t easy. But as it was their son’s final wish, the parents did everything they could to fulfill it.
In that moment, Alexei heard the familiar sound of boots striding down the hallway outside. The heavy footsteps came in perfect marching beat, a lingering habit of his father’s time in the army. A softer set followed behind, one that followed a surprising similar beat to the ex-military officer.
“They’re here…”
A broad grin returned to Alexei’s lips as he exerted strength in his arms, trying to push himself into a sitting posture.
“What’re you doing? Lay down…”
“Please Mama,” his eyes pleaded. “I’ve always wanted to do this.”
With a sigh of resignation, Natalya left her chair and began winding a lever beneath the hospital bed. The bedframe’s upper half gradually rose into an incline, and soon it resembled an upright lounge chair. Returning to her seat, the mother adjusted her son’s pillows, propping his back until he sat almost straight.
Raising his head directly above his heart only increased its burden. But what was a few minutes of life when compared to fulfilling a wish?
The door handle spun, and Alexei’s father Nicolai walked in first. Following him was the man who came all the way from the other side of the world. Brown haired and tall, the thirty years old man held the lean musculature of a marathon runner. And just like in the photos, his bright-brown eyes and shaven, chiseled chin formed a visage handsome enough to match any Kremlin honor guard.
Stiffening his arm, Alexei brought it up to his head in a formal military salute.
“Fleet Commander Ataman!” His voice rang louder than it had been in months. “Comms officer Elixeievna reporting!”
For a moment, the man addressed ‘Ataman’ was caught between surprise and the urge to step forward to make the boy go back to rest. Then, as though struck by realization, he stood straight, stiffened his chest, and saluted back with a grin.
“At ease, Captain,” he then added, and at last Alexei lowered his hand.
“I’ve always wanted to do that,” the younger man wore a bright smile despite his coughs, as one of his lifelong desires had been crossed off the list.
The mother looked bewildered. But the father smiled with nostalgia. Nicolai understood, and from the door he beckoned Natalya to join him:
“Let’s give them some time alone.”
“But–”
“You wouldn’t understand,” Nicolai shook him head. “You’ve never been in the military.”
“But neither has he…”
The rest of Natalya’s protests grew muffled as Alexei’s father dragged her outside. The two young men were left by themselves, who exchanged amused smirks like two same-age boys despite over twelve years of difference.
“You know, you’re even younger than in the pictures,” ‘Ataman’ spoke as he spun the chair vacated by Natalya and sat down on it, his chest leaning forward against its back.
“Been too sick to have my growth spurt.”
Eighteen or not, Alexei was barely over five feet. The fact he had entered puberty particularly late didn’t help either.
“And it’s been what — four, five years since we first met?”
“Four years, seven month, give and take a few days.” Alexei nodded with a brief cough. “Not that we really knew each other at first. Not until the Siege of C-J6MT after I officially became your second… Do you still remember?”
The younger man put on a mask of concern as he repeated the same cry from years ago:
“Enemies behind… we’ve been surrounded!”
‘Ataman’ smirked back like a wolf hunting for dinner.
“Well they cannot escape us now! We shall have ample opportunity to force their surrender!”
“Of course I remember, Lyosha,” he used Alexei’s diminutive, a name spoken between only the closest of companions. “How could any of us forget? Seventy pilots; three days of fighting without rest. We drove back wave after wave of assaults. In the end half of us fell asleep in our seats. But we did it! We held the line against almost six-to-one odds, which nobody else thought possible!”
“And in doing so we defended not only the honor of our people, but our own pride,” Alexei nodded.
Born to an ex-Soviet diplomat father — who immigrated to the United States after the Soviet Union’s collapse — Alexei had endured anti-Russian slurs all his life. During his adolescent years when his health still allowed him to attend school, Alexei had been bullied relentlessly by other children for his nation of origin. Classmates would point to him as the ‘Red Menace’. They stuck papers to his back and vandalized his textbooks with the word ‘Commie’ in red crayon. They accused him of being a spy, and told him many times to “go back to your country”.
Some even went as far as to claim that his sickness was divine punishment for his godlessness, that his body was rotting from within just like the evil Soviet Empire had.
Alexei thought he could leave all that behind when he joined Red Alliance — a Russian-speaking player group in the game EVE Online. But hate didn’t stop at the boundary between real and virtual space. Torrents of anti-Russian propaganda preceded the start of the Great EVE War and the invasion of Red Alliance territory. The Western European alliances claimed that the Russians were cheaters, alcoholics, and criminals, that many of them held a connection to the Russian mafia. They painted the Russian players as poor wretches who drowned themselves in Vodka, who went as far as selling sisters and daughters as ‘Russian brides’, just to afford an escape into virtual reality where they dreamed of rebuilding their evil empire.
The Russians in turn never forgot. Even when the opposition made overtures of peace, the Red Alliance leaders would respond: ‘No. We remember what you’ve said. You’re going down.’
…
“So this is the charity group you built,” ‘Ataman’ looked impressed as he examined a photo of thirty-plus people, all standing around a teenage boy in a wheelchair.
“That photo was a year ago. Twice the size now,” Alexei answered with pride.
“I take it that EVE had something to do with this?”
“Quite,” the younger man’s smile turned a little wry. “I still remember how it all started — in middle school — when my heart’s condition worsened and I couldn’t attend school any more. That was when I picked up gaming and joined you all, Grisha.”
‘Grisha’ was the diminuitive of ‘Ataman’s real name: Grigoriy.
“It really saved me, you know,” Alexei’s gaze met his partner’s brown orbs. “I was unbelievably depressed back then. I never felt like I belonged here during my school years.”
“I can imagine,” Grigoriy grimaced. “In the land of our Cold War adversaries, right after that bastard Gorbachev destroyed our Motherland. If an American boy moved into my town, I can certainly think of plenty who’d take out their frustration on ‘the enemy’.”
“It’s far worse than you might think.”
Alexei sighed. He knew he probably vented this exact topic on at least a dozen previous occasions, but nevertheless Grigoriy listened.
“We Russians are at least naturally skeptical towards government propaganda. We’re a cynical people by culture, enough to realize that our existing knowledge might be false and we’re ready to question it. Who knows what falsehoods the state might have put in our heads in their attempt to make the Capitalist West look as awful as possible.”
“–Soviet Newspapers good only for wrapping our fish!” Grigoriy interjected, and Alexei chuckled at the old joke.
“Quite.”
His smile then vanished.
“But the Americans? It’s hard to imagine how politically ignorant some people can be. It doesn’t help that their media tells half-truths, sweetened with just enough facts to hide its stuffing of extreme bias: sometimes manipulative, sometimes downright malicious. So when I went to school, they would spew out the most hideous nonsense. Like how the Motherland sent unequipped soldiers to charge the front lines while machine-gunning them from behind — as if our grandparents could have destroyed the German army by being utter idiots!”
“Enemy at the Gates, the manure of Hollywood — and they just, eat it whole?”
“Like honeycakes,” Alexei shook his head in disbelief. “I was still in school when that released on video. I remember some of the boys’ reactions. Even when I tell them recollections from my own grandfather —who was there at Stalingrad— they refused to believe me. Claimed I was the one ‘brainwashed’ by Soviet propaganda. Idiot pots calling kettle.”
“No wonder you were so fervent during those first days of the war.”
Alexei could only offer a wry grin in return. Just like in the Great Patriotic War — the Russian name for World War II — Red Alliance found themselves ill prepared for the start of the Great EVE War. The Red Fleet suffered a string of disastrous defeats and was decimated in just a few weeks. Morale collapsed like a deck of cards and its players began to desert.
By the third month of the war, the organization which once held hundreds was down to just seventy pilots. But these final seventy, which included Alexei and Grigoriy, refused to surrender. They refused to just abandon their self-respect and leave.
They swore an oath: that they would recover their territory and take revenge.
They stayed behind enemy lines, and launched a guerrilla war of resistance in an online, virtual game.
They harassed the invaders’ supply lines, laid ambushes for hostile patrols, and assaulted lone enemy outposts. They fought through hundreds of skirmishes, and slowly organized themselves into the most finely-tuned fighting force in EVE Online.
…And that, was how their saga began.
They became the legendary Death Squadron, named after their leader ‘UAxDeath’. They went on to fight the epic Siege of C-J6MT, winning despite overwhelming odds and inspiring an entire generation of players.
It was their Siege of Leningrad, their Battle of Moscow. It was the pivotal moment, when the Russians found a new rallying cry and returned in numbers, when the entire war turned for the first time.
It also laid the foundation for the birth of the now infamous RedSwarm Federation: a combination between the Russian Red Alliance and the American Goonswarm Federation. The coalition was sealed by an American diplomat-spy whose day job was in the US State Department, who had watched the battle unfold and decided that there was no greater allies than the relentless Russians.
“Red Alliance gave me a place to be myself,” Alexei beamed with nostalgia as he thought of the war and its battles, when he defied his parents and woke up at godforsaken hours to fight shoulder-to-shoulder alongside his brothers.
It may have taken years off his life, but it had been worth it. To go into battle knowing, for certain, that every one of your companions spoke with their truest sincerity, that every one of them would gladly watch each others’ backs.
Alexei couldn’t help but think of that one line coined by the game’s community, the one line that both of them felt in their hearts during the countless hours they spent in virtual space:
“EVE is real.”
It doesn’t matter if it was just a virtue game or if they all flew in digital starships. The struggles they went through. The battles they fought in. The camaraderie they built to share. They might not compare to the mountains of Afganistan where his father fell wounded, or the rubble of Stalingrad that his grandfather once fought through.
But they were nevertheless real.
His father understood. His grandfather would have understood.
“But RedSwarm…” Alexei thought aloud. “When we fought the Great EVE War alongside our American comrades… that was when I truly accepted myself.”
“You did grow up in America,” Grigoriy patted the younger man on the shoulder in understanding. “Doesn’t matter where we are, it’s always better to feel that the society we live in accepts us for whom we are. And there was no place better to unravel stereotypes and truly learn about one another, than fighting side-by-side through a great war.”
Alexei smiled back as he nodded. Grisha always was a good listener, a dispenser of mature advice as well. It was why Alexei looked up to the older man all these years.
“Doesn’t it make you wonder though?” The younger partner added. “If our grandparents had fought with the Americans and British on the same battlefields, instead of coming from two different directions, then maybe the whole Cold War could have been avoided.”
“Perhaps.” Grigoriy took a moment to contemplate. Then, with a chuckle: “you were always the philosophical one. I still remember how people in our group called you a ‘dreamer’.”
“I call it ‘wisdom’.”
Alexei lit a toothy smile, which prompted Grisha to bark:
“Hey now! Don’t be going ‘old man’ on me! I’m the senior here!”
The two of them laughed.
“But that’s why, after the Great EVE War, I decided to work with my doctors to start up a charity organization.” Alexei paused as he looked down at the photo that Grisha still held, their conversation going full circle at last. “If a fulfilling online life could give confidence and purpose to a homebound boy like me, then why can’t it benefit other sick children in the same manner? If shared experiences in virtual space could bring Russians and Americans together in our post-Cold War atmosphere, then why can’t it bridge our divisions in the real world?”
Grigoriy grinned, certainly at the former. He didn’t look entirely convinced by the latter. But even then, his brown gaze revealed that at least a portion of him would like to believe it.
“That part of you,” he pointed his finger. “Definitely speaks American influence.”
There wasn’t any actual accusation or condescension in his voice, so Alexei only feigned outrage in return:
“Hey! That doesn’t make me any less Russian!”
Grigoriy laughed. “Of course not, Lyosha. Of course not.”
…
Hours of conversation passed in what seemed the blink of an eye. Before long, the two were eating food from a nearby restaurant which Natalya brought back.
Alexei always did have a craving for Italian cuisine. His Milanese Ossobuco wasn’t exactly takeout food, but the veal remained juicy and succulent as his knife cut slices off it.
“You know, when Lyosha and I first met, I thought he was a girl,” Grigoriy described to Alexei’s mother. “I mean — his handle name, his avatar, even his voice.”
“I can’t help it that I’m a late bloomer,” Alexei pouted.
His gaze did betray a wistful light, although Grisha wasn’t keen enough to notice. His mother did, but she had always misunderstood what it truly meant.
“What can I say?” Natalya tilted her head as she grinned at her son. “He’s always been the delicate type.”
“Mama!”
Grigoriy laughed at Alexei’s retort, its tone of annoyance no longer faked this time.
“I’ve never asked, but what made you pick ‘Elixeievna’?”
The older man’s question was eager and frank. There wasn’t a trace of teasing. Nevertheless the pale Alexei looked away with a faint blush.
“It’s from a story I obsessed over as a child…”
Grisha’s eyebrows shot up with interest. “Which one? I’m not familiar with the name.”
Alexei’s lips moved but no sound came out.
It was his mother who ended up spilling the beans:
“Tsaritsa Elizabeth Alexeievna, the wife of Alexander I of Russia.”
“The conqueror of Napoleon?” Grigoriy asked. History wasn’t his best subject.
Alexei finally nodded, and with a soft, bittersweet tone he began:
“Cupid and Psyche — that’s what Catherine the Great and her court called them. They were soulmates who met as children, and thought the world of one another. But Elizabeth was too gentle for the intrigues of the royal court, too serene to maintain a grip on her husband’s passionate yet tormented heart. Their marriage was strained for many years, and only in the final years of their lives was their love rekindled to find solace in one another.”
“It’s quite a romantic tale,” his mother smiled.
Alexei knew that his mother always thought he had a childish crush on the historical empress. She could not have been more wrong.
“And I can’t even call it ‘too American’ this time,” Grigoriy half-joked.
“You’re not a romantic, are you?” Alexei prodded as his smile faltered.
He already knew the answer. After all, they’d been together for years, even if they’d never physically met until today.
“Not really,” Grisha replied as he lowered his fork and put aside his food, as though to show just how seriously he took the topic.
“I do believe in love. But I think that ‘romance’ — or at least the modern concept of it — is greatly overrated. Leo Tolstoy captured it best in Anna Karenina. Passion and romantic idealism ruins lives. It’s best we be realistic about our relationships.”
Don’t I know it…
Alexei thought as he felt his heart cringe. The constant, physical pain that he grew accustomed to escalated as his emotions bubbled in displeasure.
In the end, Alexei only had one regret. He regretted the roll of the dice made at his conception. He regretted that he never even had an opportunity to fulfill his fondest wish.
If I could with honor change the circumstances of my life, I would do it with pleasure, his thoughts echoed the words once written by Tsar Alexander I, and marveled at how fitting it was.
Alexei never told his family what it was. Only that it was the reason behind his final request.
This… was as close as he would ever come to fulfilling it.
…
On that night, after a series of heart convulsions led to a brief cardiac arrest, Alexei Nikolayevich Voronkov slipped into a coma.
Upon the insistence of his parents, he was taken off life support the next day. After all, Alexei’s heart had been steadily failing for years. There was no reason to torment it in the end.
He lived for only 6,590 days, less than a quarter of the average life expectancy in the United States.
—— * * * ——
The clinking of metal brought Lucina back to the present. Her gaze was still blurry, but she could see the dim glow of the morning sun through the grimy windows. The cushy ‘hospital’ bed of her dreams had vanished, replaced by stiff wooden planks and rusty iron rails. The sterile smell of cleaning fluids switched to the stench of unwashed humans trapped inside cages like penned cattle.
So that was how I died, Lucina thought as her mind stirred.
She tried to rub her eyes, but her wrists felt the inexorable strength of cold steel as it kept her hands pinned behind her back. Her meager attempts only pulled against the unforgiving metal that encircled her throat. Her wrist cuffs had been chained to the back of her collar, and the cruel combination would choke her whenever she resisted her bonds.
The thin blanket that she sought warmth in last night no longer covered her body. Its removal could only mean one fact — the slave market was open for business again.
Lucina felt a trickle of warmth slide down her cheek. She had stopped crying weeks ago when her tears first ran out on the road here. Yet every once in a while, her eyes would shed another droplet as nostalgia and misery overwhelmed her thoughts.
The other slave girls who sat in nearby cages had already given in to despondence. Their blank gazes stared through the thin air as they had little interest of covering their naked bodies. However, despite her occasional wish that she could be the same way, Lucina simply could not resign herself to the present and abandon her past. She could not part with the bittersweet memories that her sanity still clung onto from two lives lost.
Lucina was fifteen now. For a Samaran, that meant she had entered the age of ‘Recollection’: when she would recover fragments of her past lives. Though in her case, her ‘past lives’ seemed to be singular. Every other memory that taunted her of happier days came from her own childhood.
What twisted coincidence, the young girl couldn’t help but reflect. In her previous life on another world, she was an immigrant whose state of residence and land of birth were hated enemies. Born ‘Russian’ but living in ‘America’, Alexei found himself ostracized for most of his life. It was only in his final, dying years, after his body grew too feeble for outside contact, that Alexei found the place in which he belonged.
The young man’s life might have ended prematurely, but at least his final moments were peaceful and content. Stuck as she was now, Lucina would gladly take such an outcome over her present circumstance.
Lucina was also a child born between state and cultural lines. Her mother was a Samara herbalist, while her father was an Imperial merchant. Her family had been unlucky enough to get caught up in the Iskar War, when the Inner Sea Imperium and its ally, the Federated Principalities of Polisia, declared war on the small Kingdom of Iskar sandwiched between them. The ensuing conflict had been devastating, as the armies of all three belligerents conducted every crime known to man during the brutal four-year war. The marauding soldiers who stumbled upon her father’s caravan certainly held no qualms about starting a massacre.
Orphaned at a young age and trapped in a war zone for months, it was a miracle that Lucina survived at all.
Or was it? Lucina thought as she bitterly traced her fingers across one wrist cuff. Could anyone call this ‘surviving’?
It would have been better if I had died and been reborn.
However Lucina hadn’t been brave enough to take her own life. And now? She no longer had the choice even if she willed it.
“How much is she?”
Still pretending to be asleep, Lucina felt her body stiffen as she heard a thick voice speak in Polisian. The man had tried to sound business-like, but he failed to hide the desire in his voice.
“She’s scheduled for the next auction in two days,” replied another, a slave trader whose nonchalant voice she had come to hate. “Unless you can offer me a moving sum now.”
“She has a pretty enough face, but her body is mediocre at best,” the other man judged. “What concerns me more is how thin she is. Who knows what pestilence she might have contracted from the war.”
The newcomer sought to goad the slave trader into haggling, but the trader did not take the bait. Lucina knew from her father’s work that silence was the greatest sign of advantage in negotiations. The less one spoke, the more circumstances pressured an interested second party to offer favorable terms. Worse yet, the potential buyer had just revealed that despite his interest, he had zero understanding of the goods — the Samarans’ unique biology gave them effective immunity to most illnesses; they certainly didn’t contract ‘pestilence’ in the same manner ordinary humans did.
Lucina’s attempts to distract herself were disrupted as she felt both mens’ gazes passed over her naked body. It was a bleak reminder that she — or more precisely, her body — was the exotic commodity that they were bartering over.
“I’ll give you two hundred silver rubles.”
“Two hundred?” The trader who owned her barked mockingly. “I can start higher as the floor price come auction day! Do you see that supple skin, that delicate chin? She has hardly a single blemish across her body, and her palms look as tender as a newborn’s. This girl is no common peasant. The soldiers who captured her in the woods believe she was the orphaned daughter of some upper middle-class family. I’d say she might even have noble blood, but who can tell during a war’s chaotic aftermath?”
“She’s a Samaran,” the new man voiced his doubts. “Never heard of an aristocrat willing to wed a Samaran. What ambitious man would take a bride from a people known for their apathy and dullness?”
“She’s not being sold as a labor or domestic slave now, is she?” The trader’s remark rang dry. “What does it matter if she’s difficult to ‘motivate’? If you want to pay two-hundred to buy a cheap serving wench to suck your cock every night then go look over there!”
Lucina had tried to curl up and cover her body before she could stop herself. However the cuffs that pinned her wrists behind her back only pulled against her choking collar in return.
That abhorrent fiend! The girl could only curse the trader in her own thoughts. The rune-inscribed collar that encircled her neck did not even allow her to speak. It had been enchanted to silence her insistence that she was a citizen of the Inner Sea Imperium, and therefore her captors — who were Imperial legionaires — had no right to enslave or sell her.
“Just look at that exotic white hair, that fair-porcelain skin,” Lucina heard the slave trader describe. “I can easily find a rich Patrician in the Imperial capital who’d pay a fortune for such a rare trophy.”
“But we’re not in Arcadia,” the other man countered.
“This route is frequented by Imperial merchants making their way back from the Polisian Principalities,” the slave trader replied. “So if you’ve no interest in offering me at least two thousand then Shoo!”
“Two thousand!?” The man barked an incredulous laugh before turning away. “I can buy ten virgins for that price.”
As he left Lucina breathed a sigh of relief. She didn’t want to be sold to a man who so clearly lusted after her body. However she also had no control over whom her future owner would be. The best she could hope was for a noble or patrician to buy her as an exotic housemaid to show off their status. Yet an ominous thought in her mind couldn’t help but worry if her eventual buyer might be far worse.
It couldn’t be helped, as Lucina’s fate was no longer in her own hands. She could only wallow in misery before the injustice of a world that simply did not care. However even as she cursed the events that led to this day, she also knew that she was at least responsible for one decision that landed her in her present predicament.
Glancing across the hall at the side reserved for selling adult males, Lucina felt a ripple of envy in her heart. The men had their chests bared at most, and were allowed to keep their trousers on — covering their private parts and maintaining at least a shred of dignity. Many of them would be sold as mere beasts of burden, but there were others recognized for their skills and professions. Such skilled slaves could expect better treatment and working conditions as they would be put to work as craftsmen, accountants, and even scholars.
Meanwhile Lucina, despite her fluency in three languages and years of practical education, would only be sold as a pretty piece of flesh meant to satisfy male lust.
Why did you wish to be reborn like this, Alexei? The caged girl cried inside as though she could complain to her past life.
If she had been born a boy, perhaps things might have been different. She might still have been caught up in this war and captured as plunder for sale, but at least she wouldn’t have to endure the lusting gaze of every passing man. She wouldn’t have to fear being reduced to little more than a bedroom toy, to be ravished at will by a man whom she barely knew, whose only bond with her was that he paid a hefty sum of silver or gold.
Jump to Next Chapter
Author’s Notes
- The story of Red Alliance and the Siege of C-J6MT is real. VileRat, who was killed in the 2012 Benghazi attack, negotiated the treaty between the American Goonswarm Federation and Russian Red Alliance to form RedSwarm Federation, one of the belligerents of the 2006-2007 Great Eve War (documented by EVE historian Andrew Groen in his book Empires of EVE I). Many anti-Russian statements which contributed to this conflict were pulled straight out of the book. UAxDeath is also a real character. Ataman and Elixeievna are not, for obvious reasons.
- ‘Ataman’ is the Imperial Russian rank for supreme commander of the Cossack army.
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It is unfortunate that I’ve only recently discovered you and your stories but after binging all of Daybreak on Krytyk’s site, I have come to love the world you’ve built. It saddens me to know that Daybreak is now on the back burner if not outright cancelled but I look forward to future works and stories and all the intricacies they come with. This new story seems promising and I’m hoping it will fill the void that daybreak has left me with.
The opening is too effective to match the ending. As a reader I was either unfamiliar with the subjects mentioned or had completely different opinions than what were expressed in the first part, yet by the end while I didn’t necessarily agree with all the details or opinions, I felt like I understood the point of view, and even in the parts that I disagreed, I felt some empathy for the opinion. In short it was very effective writing.
That’s the problem. I don’t know the audience you have or want, but if the audience was similar in their unfamiliarity, I felt that leaving them confused with the first part would be more in line with the second part.
The opening is *too effective* for the ending? This leaves me a bit confused. ^^;
The start is fast-paced and a bit melodramatic. The ending is a transition to slow things down and level the perspective – in: this is still character-experience-driven and just not autobiographical-summary-esque. You felt this was a bit jarring for expectations?