What is it with the DI and the IO? Hieronymus tried to wrap his mingled mind around the new story, while his body was still busy digesting all the hamantaschen. What, you don’t remember to have seen him at Purim? He was this quiet guy in red, white and blue pretending to be Panoramix. The growing potion had worked nicely on his hair and beard, and whitewashing them hadn’t been a big deal.
Remembering something, Hieronymus looked it up. Apparently, Matthew had transferred from the "DoI" (his Wiki page got this right) while the DI had been carried over from the permission request.
What the hoot is a sitch? A colloquialism Hieronymus doesn’t know? Usually, when something is misspelled he can guess what it’s meant to be, but here he is lost.
From there on, the story flew quite nicely, soothing Hieronymus’s aching head, until Ajax contemplated the Hera of his world and Hieronymus was jarred as Ajax remember that that depiction is not universal. Yeah, it still isn’t, but since Ajax acted in the past tense, he ought to have "remembered" that.
Hieronymus’s headache increased when he encountered an infact that "in fact" shouldn’t have infected anything. Also, Zeus would probably have "done the deed" rather than done the do, and although he tried hard, Hieronymus didn’t quite understand what this sentence was meant to tell him, but he couldn’t decide whether he should blame this on bad wording or his own lack of canon knowledge.
After this, Ajax dropping the "the" in Protectors of Plot Continuum and capitalizing Being>1 when it’s clearly meant to be an adjective, couldn’t do much more harm, but then the continuity problems hit Hieronymus hard and a whole paragraph began to blur before his eyes when he tried to imagine what was going on.
Apparently, the plan had been that Matthew would kick the Stu into the reality room and Ajax would take care of Annabeth. But then, Matthew went through the portal with the Stu and watched him fade. As Matt exited the Reality Room from whence he came, Hieronymus wondered whether this was meant to say that Matt, rather than leaving the Reality Room through its door to meet Ajax at Medical, went back through the portal to the badfic from where he had come, and whether putting some more words into it would have made this clearer.
On leaving the Reality Room, Matt noticed that its walls had slash marks on its surface, indicating that it, at some point, something contained inside it had been trying to get out. Hieronymus didn’t get the reference, but he noticed that either there was one superfluous "it" in it, or the phrases didn’t match at all. Meanwhile, Ajax had apparently just been standing there with Annabeth, doing nothing, so that Matt had to take care of her as well, neuralyzing her and making her walk through a portal. Hieronymus wondered whether this meant that Matt sent her to wherever she was supposed to be, skipping the intended medical treatment, or why he neuralyzed her before making her walk to Medical, where she would certainly be neuralyzed again after the treatment. But at this point, he had mostly given up.
Well, the Post-Mission chapter confirmed that Annabeth had been taken to Medical. This might have helped Hieronymus recovering from the confusion, if Ajax hadn’t confused him again with what appears to be a comma splice. He entered, sitting on the bed was a blue haired maiden who appeared about his own age. (Is there any reason to not put a period behind "He entered"?) And then, just as Ajax left, there was chair in the corner ("a chair"?) and Ajax sat in it, although he had just let.
Far in the back of Hieronymus’s mind, the idea that Ajax, before sitting down, might have realized that the chair was still there in the corner, "just as he had left it", struggled to get attention. But it didn’t succeed before Hieronymus decided that this just wasn’t his day2 and he should go to bed again.
1It’s the second "Being" in
... Percy Jackson and the Olympians canon: Being the child of Apollo and Athena via implied sexual intercourse, Being an Olympian, ...; capitalizing after a colon is apparently correct. Also, the title
Percy Jackson and the Olympians should probably be capitalized, but Hieronymus isn’t certain whether this applies in dialogue, and he really doesn’t feel like thinking about it right now.
2There’s no sense in trying to cover this up. Despite all official denials, later that night, when the kids had been brought to bed, the Purim feast had turned into excessive drinking, at least for some of the participants, and Hieronymus got a massive hangover.
I see what you are trying to do, giving the narrator a distinctive voice. I’m afraid you are not quite there yet; the asides and footnotes don’t feel as natural as they should. But I guess you are on a good way. At least you inspired me to write a ficlet, emulating the style, rather than just post a list of errors. So, reading and commenting this was lots of fun.
HG
