@Part 5: I really like how this all came together at the end. Sharaka's empathy fits into Kimberley's story in a way that Jinsen himself really can't (although he has his own sort of empathy, cold though it is). I was expecting a little more of Sharaka's reaction at the end, but considering the story is from Kimberley's POV, it makes sense that it's mostly just a vague sense of what Sharaka is thinking/feeling/doing. I really like the way you lifted lines directly from the original and that you "cited" them, basically, with the blue text. That's a neat connection to Ruwin's work. Very cool.

Thanks for posting, Huey! This was a big undertaking for a relatively throw-away comment, and it was cool to see it all come together.

Jinsen takes Kimberly in because he'd have helped any earnest person who had asked for his help. Sharaka connects with Kimberley because she recognizes too many of the girl's feelings to just abandon her.

(yeah, there's a rough start but Sharaka has every right to consider the possibility Kimberley could have less than lovely intentions)

...also, there might be a pattern of Sharaka wanting to be a mother in this story, at some level, and Jinsen at some point realizes he practically adopted Kimberley. Sharaka can give Kimberley the shelter and guidance she would have deserved seven years ago (Sharaka was also 10-12 at the time when Tharna was culled - another orphaned daughter), so she takes this opportunity. (compare and contrast with that werewolf kid )


Yeah, Kimberley has become pretty good at reading viashino expressions, but Sharaka has a hell of a poker face when she closes off her empathy. We can guess at what's moving under the surface knowing what we know about her canon and the stories Kimberley found, but we don't have anything certain either.

As with the death Kimberley's "father", we have way less "truth" here; not in the sense there's a lot of lying, but as Sharaka says, you can't expect a guerilla warrior with a violent streak to remember all the people she killed. In a sense, the relative (in)significance of the man's death in the two women's stories is the main truth there, jarring and uncomfortable as it is.


Thank you! Among other things, it was a way to anchor the final dialogue to show the similarities of the situations in the two stories, despite the many obvious differences.


Thank you for reading and commenting! I had already reread all that storyline to get Jinsen's voice as close as I could for the dialogue in the Meeting thread, so the idea took for pretty quickly once you offered the prompt. It also got me the chance of get away with telling rather than showing, which is very alright with me since I love dialogue