Tag: Chapter 11.8

Krixwell JaceLeave a comment

Hey Krixwell, thank you for what you do and dont get discouraged just becourse some people dont understand what a prediction is – i quite like your #next updates and still dont mind if you have to postpone 🙂 As for a question: Does it bother you that people told you beforehand that their will be 8 Interludes? That seems like a spoiler in itself to me. Also please do your Arc thoughts before the Interludes this time (and after) 🙂

Generally, I would’ve preferred not to know that so far in advance, yeah. Though at least this way we don’t end up with a series of “are we there yet”s as far as Arc Thoughts go. 😛

A good compromise would’ve been waiting until about now – or even better, after the first of the Interludes – to tell me about the eight Interludes.

No hard feelings, though! It’s fine. 🙂

Krixwell JaceLeave a comment

Please ignore those complaining about your postponing. I’m pretty sure they’re the minority and the majority of us know that life/college/etc come before a Live Blog you’re doing as a hobby. I’d rather you keep the tentative “next chapter” scheduling so I know when to check in next, even if that often leads me to a “next chapter delayed” announcement.

Yeah, I honestly don’t get a lot of these. It’s to be expected that I’d get some, really.

To be clear, I wasn’t seriously considering getting rid of the #next posts. I was just making a point about how postponing wouldn’t even be a thing if you guys hadn’t asked for those posts in the first place.

In the future, I’d really prefer that you just eat rude asks (or answer them yourself on this blog saying that they’re rude). 😦 I really don’t like seeing Krix deal with that.

I think I’d prefer that Sharks didn’t do that, but I might not answer them.

End of Infestation 11.8

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This was a decent wind-down chapter.

We got to talk to Charlotte and Sierra about how to continue from here, and I correctly predicted that they would both end up as Skitter’s drones, minions, employees, whatever you want to call them. Granted, I also predicted the same would happen with Bryce, just because I expected it to happen with Sierra and didn’t think they’d be separated, but I’m much more pleased with the actual outcome.

Then we had a nice little chat with Brian, in which he and Taylor agreed to let their tension be water under the bridge and move on as friends. I’m glad we got to see that.

This wasn’t the most exciting chapter, but I’m overall happy with it and its outcomes, and the high note of a cautiously optimistic Taylor capping off an Arc in which her mood has been characterized by anxiety and guilt.

Next chapter, we’re heading into a sequence of eight consecutive Interludes, which, due to the number of them and the fact that they are apparently “not connected” to Arc 11 proper, I’ll be treating as basically an Arc 11½

for the purposes of Arc Thoughts. This means I’ll be doing Arc Thoughts for Arc 11 before I move on to the next chapter, and then another round of Arc Thoughts for the Interludes when I’m done with them (but still keeping in mind they were supposed to be part of this Arc rather than their own thing like Sentinel was).

Since my predictions for all of the Interludes are pretty much the same at this point, I think I’ll leave recapping my predictions about the next chapter for the Arc Thoughts post.

So yeah, see you next time!

Krixwell JaceLeave a comment

All in all?  If I didn’t think too hard about it?  I could feel cautiously optimistic for the first time in a long while.  For the first time in weeks, months, I could feel like everything just might work out.

😀

And then the next paragraph we learn the Slaughterhouse just went public or something like that?

Oh! Nope – end of the chapter! We’re left on this high note, which is nice! 🙂

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Things weren’t perfect, but they were better.  I was on speaking terms with Brian, I was making headway on my plans, Lisa was making headway on her end of things, and in some small way, I felt like I’d finally followed through with that dream I’d had at the start of the year, of being a superhero.

Heh, yeah. A villainous superhero, but a superhero nonetheless.

I was a villain.  I’d given the order to let a man die.   Maybe my abandonment of Thomas would weigh on my conscience more after I got some sleep and my thoughts were clearer.  Maybe not.  But I’d also done something to help people, without ulterior motives.

That you did. On both counts.

Your placement on the scale is kind of… ambiguous. I think the best term right now is anti-villain, but that might wobble into anti-hero. She might already be there, for that matter. I honestly don’t know.

I’d given Sierra her brother back, I’d saved Charlotte.  I was happy about that.

You should be!

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“Go for it.  But I get some,” I smiled.

Heh, nice.

As my new minion set about figuring out the oven, I was able to stop for a moment.  Doubts and insecurities still weighed on me, but I couldn’t feel guilty for not making more progress today.  I’d done what I could to move forward on my plan to help Dinah.

You’ve done good today, Taylor. Good job. 🙂

Both Lisa and Brian had acknowledged that I was making great strides forward, and that gave me hope that I might be impressing Coil as well.

Could very well be the case. Brian does have a point, though: You need to pace yourself.

Like I do with my liveblog: Physically, it would be possible for me to do this daily (at least until I get a job). In practice, I deliberately give myself at least one day off between chapters, because if I didn’t, I would exhaust myself mentally.

The same concept applies to what Taylor is trying to do here – she’s putting herself fully into Skittering without taking any time off, and it’s mentally exhausting. As she put it earlier in this chapter, she’s not “Taylor” very often these days. She needs to take some time to be Taylor.

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“Hanging sounds good,” I answered him, feeling lame as I said it.

Careful about the wording there. 😛

“I’m gonna go sleep.  Long day.  You take care of yourself, alright?” he said by way of a goodbye as he headed for the door.

Good night, Grue!

I nodded, “You too.”

When I walked over to the kitchen, Charlotte had a box of toaster strudels in one hand and a package of cookie dough in the other.  She’d washed her face, and only trace amounts of the caked-on makeup were still there.

Nice. Maybe we can find out how she looks when she’s not a stripper clown now.

She looked worlds younger, and was like a little kid as she asked me, “Can I use your oven?”

To be fair, I think there are more reasons for Charlotte to look younger right now than just the makeup. She’s had a stressful however many days.

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“Is it cool if I drop by sometime?” he asked.  “So we can keep each other up to date, or maybe just hang out?”

These two… no, all six of them, should play video games together sometime. Though I’d imagine Rachel would want to sit out.

Aisha uses her power to make the others, except Lisa, think her character is an NPC. Alec makes people’s fingers twitch. Lisa figures out how the game works pretty much immediately. As it becomes clearer that half the players are cheating, it becomes more blatant, with Brian covering the screen in darkness, controllers falling entirely out of hands at Alec’s command, and Taylor covering all of the other players except Aisha in harmless bugs – as if they weren’t already thrown off by a dark screen, twitching hands, an opponent who knows everything about the game and an NPC that keeps attacking the players.

Krixwell JaceLeave a comment

I felt the flush deepen and hurried to interrupt him before he could bring up my asinine confession again, “It’s good.  Yes.  Let’s go with that.”

Hehe. 🙂

Good thing Charlotte isn’t hearing this, right, Taylor? 😛

“Good.”  He clapped one hand on my shoulder.  A sign of camraderie, friendship, with the subtle effect of reinforcing that I was at arm’s length.  

He’s learning.

Or was I reading too much into things?

It wouldn’t be the first time for that, though.

I could live with it.  It was worlds better than the quiet hostility and hurt I’d been sensing from him as of late.

Yeah!