Some responses by
SkarmorySilver
on 2016-10-29 03:41:00 UTC
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On Lapis vs. Backslash: That was not planned, at least not initially. The initial argument in "The Gods Must Be Crazy" was basically to get Lapis out of the picture, give her a good reason to show up at FicPsych in her next appearance, and also give Backslash a facet to him to show that he isn't the goody-two-shoes Shulk duplicate he seems to be. It's nice to know that this conflict does work to my advantage to some degree, but I will concede that I may have overdone it in this particular mission. Lapis and Backslash are planned to work together again in the future as I noted in the Author's Notes, but Backslash will probably have more pressing matters to worry about first. Lapis IS scheduled to make one more appearance (once I get some illustrations finished up), and I can assure that her character arc is going to come to a head once I make it public, so hopefully she and Backslash will be able to interact on more peaceful terms afterward.
Lapis is actually speaking in Armenian there. I wanted to find a way to drop her ethnicity at some point, since my brother suggested a while back that it would be interesting if she were partially Middle Eastern due to her middle name, Armenus. Looking back, though, I think I may have forced it here, and I may have to tone down that particular aspect of her in the future. Likewise I may have overdone the "swearing in foreign languages" thing with my agents, because now I have three of them who do that and I guess it's starting to get a bit tiring, even for me. (Though if I end up being dumb enough to make any other agents do the same, I can assure that Falchion won't be one of them - I do know a smattering of Indonesian, but I can't speak it for squat, let alone curse in it.)
Whitney has been known to swear before when she REALLY means business. She's also the kind of person to snap HARD if she hears someone make threats against her partner, she's that possessive of those she cares about. I know a certain psychotic character replacement who learned that the hard way.
I'm honestly flattered that you feel that way about my handling of the respective continua, thank you! ^_^ This is why beta reading is important, folks - as noted in the A/N, I actually ran a lot of the canon information by my brother, who is a much bigger fan of Bleach than I am, and Matt Cipher took care of the rest. I'd have explained the plot a little better, but the badfic itself was so unreadable that I couldn't tell what the heck was going on half the time and ended up wringing a little less plot potential out of it than I would've wanted - which, come to think of it, may have been why I decided that having the agents interact with one another to a greater extent than usual would make the mission slightly more interesting.