I must assume that Sam will get less bloodthirsty as the spinoff goes on, since that's the overall sense I'm getting ... and I like the idea. I'm curious to see where this'll go, and I enjoyed the character dynamic (and did find id different from your existing ones)

Well, uh. Wow! OrangeFox, I’ve never before read a mission that had quite this vibe to it! Um . . . I’m trying to phrase this properly, because the mission is well-written, but the vibe is like, clutching at my heart and filling me with a low dread for the future? Like, you obviously wrote Sam to have clearly visible red flags, but there’s something else wrong below the surface here, something slightly off in the interactions between him and Molly that I can only describe as the same feeling as: “I could not imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that.” —Edward Smith, five years before he captained the Titanic’s maiden voyage. But I should back up a bit. When you first introduced Sam, I not only liked his attitude, he also reminded me of . . . myself. Whoops! But the “felt like he could do so much more” and the “His hand itched at his side, yearning for action” sound a lot like me, doing extra projects off the clock, getting frustrated when my teammates are slowing down . . . But rereading those opening paragraphs, I can see there are more red flags there than I caught at first, too. In “From World One college student to interdimensional assassin to potentially a godslayer” I initially read “assassin” and “godslayer” as job descriptions; DMS agents are called assassins in-universe, and “godslayer” is a reasonable shorthand description for an ESAS agent. But Sam is wearing those more as cool titles than descriptions, isn’t he? And “yearning for Sues to slay and canons to save” shows a little bit of a hero complex, doesn’t it? He puts a little too much emphasis on the power and violence aspects of his job. Moving forwards, I did catch that the flyer Sam was recruited through catered more towards “the old days attitude,” but thought that was intentionally wrong, since it was also being roundabout overly honest about the Cafeteria food. My first REAL red flag regarding Sam was when he admitted he would get any kind of enjoyment out of killing Bella and Rey. That really gives the lie to the earlier language he used that sounded like work ethic to me; killing canons is extremely against the rules, so working hard to uphold canon clearly isn’t his motivation. He actually makes me think of Nick Angel from Hot Fuzz: they’re both characters who appear to be very straightforward professionals at first, but are later revealed to be very immature, and uncritical of the systems they find themselves in.

I know I’ve already talked about Sam a lot, but just a little more: part of the . . . “mask he’s wearing,” I guess, is that throughout the mission, he seems very supportive of, and patient with, Molly, like he really wants to treat her as an equal partner. But towards the end of the mission, you give us “’None of this counted as torture . . . I don’t trust Legal to get it right’” and “’ Everything I say here gets put in the report, right?’” And those make everything he says or does suspect, but he basically knows he’s being watched read. So was he really wanting to support Molly, or were those just lines he was feeding to his perceived future audience, a role he was playing? Same with some of his other statements, like blurting out he isn’t bigoted towards transgender people when the topic hadn’t even come up. He’s performative in a manipulative way, and it’s kind of scary.

I don’t have nearly as much to say about Molly, beyond the fact that you clearly have something up your sleeve to reveal about her down the line. She seems so naïve and undissembling, and yet there’s that purple glow . . . also, when I first heard her recounting her history of partners, I felt frustrated with them all for coddling Molly over her size, and not letting her develop self-confidence to get better at missions. But after that purple glow, and the odd shifts her dialogue sometimes takes, and seeing what Sam is like . . . I’m wondering if Molly’s track record with partners isn’t just bad luck or coincidence. Could Molly be used by the Flowers to offload problematic agents onto? Does she, knowingly or unknowingly, cause her partners to die if they become dangerous? I’m both interested to see where this goes, and dreading to do so. After all, “God himself could not sink” the Titanic . . .

The only bit of critical input I can give is that I have no idea what Sam looks like (or, if he did get a description, I missed it somehow). But perhaps that’s coming in the next entry, from Molly’s perspective?

—doctorlit, buried in a forest of red flags

I've been a bit more productive since the year started, so while this mission was beta'd and published successfully, I have three more on the backburner ready for a second look.

The first is another Ocotillo DIA piece (after a year and a half, wow), standing at 12k words and featuring a bunch of assorted one-off characters brought back just for this. No canon knowledge needed at all, except for the PPC in general and maybe one reference.

The second is a 3.5k word vignette that was an attempt at being slightly meta, something I'm not sure I actually succeeded in. I don't think any canon knowledge should be needed for this one, either. Hopefully.

The last and most recent is Sam and Molly's second mission, a 23k word brick featuring some truly ESAS-worthy quarry. I don't think canon knowledge should be that necessary, considering how disconnected the fic is from its 'source' canon in general. I'm more worried about character consistency and development for this one.

And as usual, I'm contactable through either Discord or email, though the former will likely get a quicker response.