Subject: Time was...
Author:
Posted on: 2015-08-25 15:27:00 UTC
... that complaint would have gone to someone's Department Head.
But this is just me whinging about Change at this point. I've said the thing that needed said'ing.
hS
In which Zeb runs into some old friends, but then things take a rapid turn downhill.
Oh, just some agents I don’t know. So, what do we have here?
Probably shouldn’t forget this: SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
I like how Zeb is so loyal although he can’t know that Rina believed him to be dead.
Apparently he’ll be drawn into an organization that may be illegal. Owen and Buck don’t have evidence, but they try to warn people anyway. I hope this doesn’t end badly.
Owen’s about to snap. Somebody take him to FicPsych asap.
And there’s one "in" too much:
He relaxed once he saw Zeb in sitting in the grass.
HG
(Because it's only halfway to being a response.)
Nita Kerys prodded vaguely at her meal. The schedule at Building Maintenance had been a bit hectic recently, so her breaks were coming at essentially random times. Two hours after breakfast was far too early for lunch, even when those hours had been occupied pumping out floodwaters from Implausible Crossovers (something about an unbalanced pressure differential, apparently). But if she didn't eat, she knew she'd be starving by the end of her shift.
A commotion across the Courtyard drew her attention. A bunch of small animals - no, those were Pokemon - seemed to be squabbling. As Nita watched, two of them fled into the grass - and then the third slammed its hands into the ground.
The tremour wasn't enough to throw Nita from her bench, but did roll her tomatoes off her plate. "Oh, come on," she muttered. "Those were the only thing I was looking forward to!"
There was a blaze of light as the fourth Pokemon shot a bolt of electricity at the third, then leapt for its throat, teeth glittering with lightning. Nita winced as the Pokemon's opponent went down.
"Sometimes," she murmured, "I wonder if we had the right idea after all. Powers like that... how can we even know whether an agent's Suvian or not, if they can throw lightning around like confetti?" She paused, chuckled. "Or like coriandoli, as that Italian guy would be quick to point out."
One of the runaways had returned, and was now rooting frantically through an armoured vest of some kind. Nita's eyes narrowed. "Wait... that dog-thing is from the DIA?"
She watched as the returning Pokemon fed the dog-thing something from the vest - then as the dog leapt up and punched the lightning-one clear across the lawn.
"That's not right," she said, half-rising from her seat. "Internal Affairs aren't meant to... even we would never have beaten up an agent in public like that! That's..." She stopped herself just before saying it, but the words hung in the air in front of her: That's what the DIS did.
Nita watched the rest of the abortive fight: the arrival of the human DIA Agent, his care for the fallen electric Pokemon, the portal out. Then, very slowly, she bent down and picked up one of her tomatoes from the floor, dusted it off, and bit into it.
Her radio crackled. "Hey, Nita," came the voice from another member of her team, "did you decide to take the day off or something? We've got krakens coming out of our ears down here; get a move on!"
Nita snorted and tapped the button. "We can sell 'em to the Cafeteria as calamari," she said. "Give me a minute, I'll be right down."
... that this is going to lead to another 'can I ask you guys to be more forthcoming with that sort of thing' post, isn't it? So I'll 'spell out' what I meant by my closing comment:
Beating people up is bad. Having DIA agents who beat people up is very bad. Saying that they will be punished/kicked out for it is good. Giving writers the impression that the DIA are prone to beating people up is bad. Giving agents the impression that the DIA are prone to beating people up is very bad.
The DIA originally existed for one reason: to bring in agents who had snapped and were a danger to themselves and their colleagues. When I wrote Crashing Down, that expanded to include, y'know, fighting off invading armies and arresting people who were (apparently) threatening to attack HQ. As I recall, they didn't even have proper cells then.
They've been creeping towards being the DIS Mark 2 ever since. Now we have a DIA who read people's emails, (some of) whose members think it's acceptable behaviour to publicly beat agents unconscious... yeah, no, I don't like that.
hS
Let me assure you that Owen is meant to be a one-time thing. Scapegrace has pretty much hit the nail on the head when she points out that he has had a psychotic break. He is not representative of DIA whatsoever and I do not intend to write DIA in a manner that will bring about a second DIS.
I tried showing the break between DIA officer and this-guy-has-gone-off-the-deep-end when Owen shrugs off his DIA vest: he willingly abandons his responsibilities and his employers' values in favour of his own plan of action.
I hope this clears up matters somewhat.
How did we give readers the impression that the DIA is prone to beating people up? Owen was one agent who lost control, and it was stated pretty clearly in the interlude (as you noted) that this was a Bad Thing. As for other agents... um. Oops?
And your mention of DIA reading people's emails... are you talking about the thread below? Because those mails were either sent to everyone in HQ, or were forwarded by other agents. Unless you were talking about some other instance I wasn't aware of, and in that case, feel free to ignore the links.
You showed that that incident got stepped on, yes. But you also showed us Zeb not being particularly surprised about being publically confronted in a massively-aggressive way by the DIA. The impression I got was that that's how he kind of expects the DIA to act - even though they're not supposed to. I came out with the impression that the rules are generally winked at unless someone goes way too far.
I hadn't noticed that all the DIA instances were people forwarding them (see what we mean about people getting impressions that weren't what you were aiming for?); it actually doesn't make any difference, though, because - for instance - Agent Des forwarded an email because, what, someone may have hacked his emails? And he clearly expects the DIA to do something about that? That's a very intrusive, very we-will-control-everything picture of the DIA right there, and it's one that I don't particularly like.
(But, y'know, I also don't particularly like the tendency for Bad Slash missions to be high-rated, the fact that people don't use appropriate disguises, and the way the Department of Floaters has ballooned up into one of the largest in the PPC. It's a good thing my preferences aren't The Law, n'est pas?)
hS
As the guy who thought about forwarding the ICEP messages, my train of thought was roughly this:
1) Having your emails hacked, either maliciously or for the lulz, is Bad.
2) Such things should be reported to the police.
3) Who is PPC police — other words, who has jurisdiction in HQ? DIA.
4) Notify DIA.
... that complaint would have gone to someone's Department Head.
But this is just me whinging about Change at this point. I've said the thing that needed said'ing.
hS
That, as Calista noted a few threads downwards, the PPC is not the same thing it was before; it changed, it grew, and so on.
But my point is that I think this way is worse.
hS
I'd imagine most minor matters end up going to department heads anyway. I just interpret this case as Des choosing to tell the DIA instead of his DH.
...I'm pretty sure Basilico would run any officer who makes a habit of treating people that way out of the department if they didn't shape up right quick.
But then, I've noticed a worrying tendency to write the DIA as either incompetent or malicious. I would disagree that they've on the whole been sliding towards DIS Mark 2, except insofar as their capabilities have been expanded to be more of a proper police force, but it's definitely something that has to be written with care.
Also, some of those concerns you mention are things I plan to write about, so I guess it's good they exist in a way because it means I'm not crazy when I see it as potential story fodder.
Your email still the same?
...he's kind of a doormat, to be honest. Rina would yell at him and put him down, and he'd just kind of back off and take it without complaint. (And, well, Owen wouldn't have started the fight if Zeb hadn't flipped out and challenged him, so...)
As for Des, I can't speak for him.
Well, okay, it is one of the points, which is that you weren't saying the DIA was like any of those things. Which is good!
But... eh. People don't look up things like that before they write. If Lacksidacksical wants to get her agent in trouble, she'll now vaguely remember 'hey, the DIA were reading someone's mail', and have her send an email which the DIA respond to. And if her agent then gets into an argument with a member of the DIA, she'll vaguely remember 'some DIA hardliners beat on agents who defy them'... you can see where this is going. It's not about the whole story, it's about what sticks in the mind.
The good news is, Lacksi's memory span isn't very good. Give it a month or three, and those ideas will have worked their way out of her head again. So to answer the inevitable 'so what should I do?': ... don't have the DIA doing scary things to agents for a while! ^_~ Then it'll all drift into the same vat of memory soup as the previous - grief - thirteen years of the PPC.
ON THE OTHER HAND: hey, that was a good story. I really got a feel for Zeb's emotions. Owen I didn't empathise with at all, but... I don't think I was supposed to. And the description of the fight - while I sort of agree with Tira about the grittiness - was very active, very much propelling the action along without feeling, well, turn-based.
hS
Is it really Iximaz's fault that Lacksi wasn't paying an appropriate amount of attention and misinterpreted things? It seems to me that Lacksi's the one who needs a talking-to, not Iximaz. I understand where the concern's coming from, but taking the attitude that people can't write certain perfectly valid stories because someone might misinterpret things in them. If Lacksi makes poor writing decisions, that's on her.
For an alternative point of reference, I didn't see the fight as a DIA thing - I saw it as a Pokemon thing. Jokes about cockfighting aside, it's canon that Pokemon enjoy battling and can be provoked to it by something as relatively harmless as a ten-year-old strolling past them. Battling, even violently, is a perfectly natural part of their lives. While the Pokemon agents may be more sapient than those found in canon, battling is still a natural part of their instincts. Factor in that neither participant is overly stable at the moment, and you have the makings of a fight gone wrong.
I can't comment on the whole thing with Des. I was under the impression that the whole hacking thing was a bit of a misfire in terms of people replying to each other in a roleplay?
Alleb chose to describe Michael getting Des' message agent to Sergio Turbo as Mia hacking the system (and not, say, ICEP technical faults — that's the explanation Pippa's Ghost and Boarder!Sergio used for a similar occurrence) and I rolled with that.
So based on that, I'm not entirely sure where the idea that DIA is reading people's mail in the first place is coming from. I thought Des was just going to report a potential hacker to them, which strikes me as pretty logical. I suppose he could have sent the message to the Department Head, but honestly the Flowers have never shown much interest in inter-agent disagreements. I wouldn't expect them to even bother to do anything about it.
DIA operatives are as susceptible to your common-or-garden psychotic break as anyone else, if not more so considering their job. Lucario are borderline-Suvian at the best of times anyway (cf. their interactions with Smash and the fact that they look like a fourteen-year-old boy's fursona), so I buy this happening the way it did. I got the sense that Owen just is not coping with life in the DIA, or indeed in the PPC at all, and has taken refuge in this sort of hardcore win-or-die bloodlusting berserker persona rather than face the fact that his job is scary and difficult and causes him as much mental harm as physical.
tl;dr: Owen is bad at his job and it's finally come home to roost a bit. Not that Lucario can learn Roost, but there you are. =]
Though, now I wonder who this Madam is...
...that I don't like Owen.
At all.
He's worse than the Librarian, honestly.
GREAT interlude though, don't get me wrong!
Oh yes: Owen is definitely a nasty piece of work. I'm glad that he was able to provoke a strong gut feeling in the readers.
Because Zeb is the only name in the interlude that I actually recognize. I had a really hard time following the story, because I couldn't stop wondering who everyone was supposed to be. It's one thing to introduce new characters, but I felt like the default assumption was that I knew who everyone was, and I don't. Poking around the Wiki doesn't turn up any hits. It also loses a lot of its impact, because I don't really know anything about anyone. It felt like I tuned into an ongoing TV show without seeing any of the previous episodes, and given that I've been following this series pretty closely, I shouldn't be having this reaction.
On another note, I'm not super fond of the overly gritty tone used for the Pokemon battle. I know Zeb is from a Nuzlocke, but it's canon that Pokemon get knocked unconscious all the time and usually can recover perfectly well. I felt like it was trying too hard to make it darker and edgier, which wasn't really necessary. Maybe it's just personal taste, but I'm not really fond of the tendency to take lighter continua and darken them just to make them seem more "mature."
Sorry for being so harsh, but I feel like this one is a lot weaker than the rest of the LMM interludes.
I'm going to have to agree with you when you say that Owen, Buck, and Tacitus' official introductions came a bit out of the blue. All three of them appeared previously in RPs found on the Other Board but I think it's unfair to assume that everyone knows about them. Compounding the fact that the RPs were canon-optional, it makes for a rather confusing set of interactions. Perhaps I should've introduced the three of them earlier in another interlude. That would've made much more sense than having them suddenly be here.
And don't worry about "harshness": I didn't feel that your post was being unfair to us. It highlighted some important issues that we need to follow up on.
Once again, thank you for your time and the concrit. It's always appreciated!
I would say that you should give them a wiki presence, so that people who want to figure out what's going on actually have somewhere to start.
This is going to be my last story posted until September 19th, so... enjoy, everyone. :)Story number 50, woohoo!