To address your comments:

I will try to keep a better eye on my paragraph breaks.

I'm glad you like both of my agents. As for Skeet not being allowed to use a neuralyzer, I'm currently intending on that being an extremely noodley noodle-incident, simply because Skeet himself genuinely has no recollection of what happened. I am however planning on having Skeet (and others) speculate on what he could have done. I might also use Skeet grabbing someone else's neuralyzer and running amok with it as his version of going flamerthrower crazy (if it ever comes up).

Going slightly off-topic here, should neuralyzer be capitalised? I notice that you did, and I remember a post (written by Neshomeh I think) saying that Bleeprin should always be capitalised, but can't remember the reason given for that and can't find it now to check. On the wiki, the page for the neuralyzer doesn't capitalise it, but I think I've seen it both capitalised and not while reading spin-offs.

The improvised cooking thing comes from my history working in a kitchen and being a uni student with a slightly dodgy cooker one year. You'd be surprised at what works if you're desperate enough to try it. According to a former university lecturer of mine, it is possible to cook bacon in a matter of seconds using hair straighteners, due to the temperatures they can reach. I haven't tried that one, but I am intrigued by it.

By 'smaller fandom' I meant one that would be able to fix itself without the canons needing neuralyzation (i.e. nothing to do with physical size, but more about the quantity of badfic it has managed to attract). In the Original Series, I don't remember neuralyzation occurring, once the Sue was dead the canon reverted to how it should be (effectively erasing any non-canonical memories).

Rather than them not being authorised to act in the more corrupted continua, I now think it makes more sense for it to be a case of, if two missions come up at the same time, and there's only them and one other team that could go on the missions, they'll get sent into the least corrupted continua. Obviously if they do end up in a situation where a canon character needs neuralyzing, they should just be able to send them through to FicPsych.

I plan on keeping to some of the more obscure continua at first (due to Skeet not being allowed a neuralyzer, and I'm imagining that the potential for accidents/misuse means that they aren't issued to newbies). Their first mission will be in the Old Kingdom, and if memory serves, there have only been 3 recorded missions there, all dealt with by DMS, and I don't think any of the agents involved used a neuralyzer.

With regards to Amelia, I see her as being almost perpetually excitable and cheerful (when she isn't being nervous and shy). I'm hoping that I will remember to have her bounce between these two behaviours whenever she meets someone new, as her scatterbrained nature causes her to 'forget' her shyness.

As for what happens when her excitement actually gets worn down, I'm not completely sure about that yet. Currently I'm thinking that the only thing that will stop her is sheer exhaustion, and that she will be irritatingly bouncy and excitable until she literally runs out of energy and just curls up asleep, wherever she happens to be at the time (no doubt expecting Skeet to return her to their RC if she's outside of it at the time).

Regarding the ignoring of OOCness, it's not that she doesn't pay attention to it, as such, but that she doesn't mind it when she's reading (yes, Amelia is the kind of person that will still read fanfic, for pleasure, while working at the PPC). She will then likley end up forwarding some of them onto Intelligence, maybe even having some of those returned to her for missions. She personally isn't bothered by OOCness, but she's aware that the PPC is, or at the very least she will be made aware of that once Skeet catches her letting it slide. As she gets more experienced as an agent, she may still think that OOCness is a silly thing to bother with, but she will actually do so.

Most of the character development that I have planned for Amelia will revolve around her losing some of her fangirlyness and becoming more like a 'typical' agent, as well as generally maturing and looking to the future. In contrast, some of the stuff that I have planned for Skeet is going to involve him finding out about his actual past (and then being made to forget it all again, because the DIO can't really allow that).

The LOs listed for Amelia are the sort of permanent favourites that she will always come back to. I'm planning on her developing new ones of those as she explores more continua, as well as having 'lust-at-first-sight' style crushes during missions. Fortunately Skeet should be capable of restraining her while he tries to find some Anti-Lustin, although I would imagine that after the first few times it becomes necessary, he'll just take the precaution of dosing her with Anti-Lustin before even stepping through the portal.

In the story, with regards to Skeet's navigational skills, I thought that concentrating on trying to reach your destination was detrimental to actually finding it. So if you get lost, but are still trying really hard to find somewhere, you're still unlikely to find it (quickly at least).

I had planned on Skeet being quite good at navigation previously, and being able to walk around on 'auto-pilot' (got to get through that maze if you work for DIO after all), but that this ability was neuralyzed out of him, to prevent him from accidentally walking back to DIO Central (as I believe that the PPC-issue neuralyzers are capable of removing skills as well as memories). So it isn't just that he's been there for a while and never learned the trick of walking around HQ, but that his ability to do so has been deliberately sabotaged. When he's walking with someone, he can rely on their ability while just carrying on a conversation with them.

The punctuation outside of speech marks, the use of full stops instead of commas, and other similar problems, is something that I was prepared to blame Google Docs for, certain that those errors weren't in my original Word document... right up until the point where I checked the original document, and found them there too. So I have no excuse for that, but I'm aware of it now, and I'll try to do better in the future.

Skeet referring to Amelia as a 'young girl'. In this case, it's not just the age difference that I was referring to, but the difference in maturity. Skeet has been to university (I don't think I’ve actually mentioned that before now, but he's sort of an AU version of me, so he has), and served in the military (something which I imagine could cause you to mature very quickly). So, honestly, yes I think that Skeet would consider Amelia to be a 'young girl', particularly before getting to know her better.

With regards to Amelia saying 'OMG', I have heard people use it in speech (mostly fanbratty type characters on TV etc. now that I think about it), and it would probably be more typically rendered as 'Oh Emm Gee'. However, I thought that PPC Agents were capable of pronouncing such things. An example of this, from the Original Series (Lady of the Fellowship):

"......WTF???" Jay managed to pronounce three consonants without vowels.

I think I also recall something about agents being able to pronounce punctuation, so that they can actually say things like 'Evil!Harry' (although I can't find that reference now, so I may be wrong).

But I guess that could look a little badficcy, or possibly even worse hypocritical, so maybe it would be better to write it as 'Oh Emm Gee' (I still think that Amelia would use expressions like this in her speech, occasionally at least).

I thought that 'ok' was acceptable in writing as either 'OK' or 'okay', is that not the case?

I was basing the background colour of the flash patch on the image, so I will change that to be black.

With regards to my lack of a beta, that is sort of a bad habit of mine. Whenever I'm in a situation where I'm going to be judged on something, but I don't have to pass first time, I do like to just do it by myself, to see what my 'natural' ability is like. I wasn't sure whether to do that for this, but decided to in the end, after checking it over myself (where I did pick up some stuff, but clearly not all of it).

I can assure you that I will always use a beta in the future.

So are you saying that if I start answering newbie questions incorrectly, I won’t have to...
I will of course continue to answer any and all questions I see to the best of my ability.

Hopefully I've covered everything, but if there is something you feel I've missed, or if one of my explanations is a cause for concern, please let me know.

Firstly, I'm glad you like my agents.

As for the semicolons, I honestly didn't realise I'd used that many. I'll try to keep an eye on them in the future, particularly when it comes to using them wrongly in place of colons.

Out of interest, where does the 'once per page' rule come from? I can't recall ever hearing that before. Is it a PPC thing, a writing for fiction thing, or just a general English language thing?

I always thought that colons and semicolons were used to introduce different kinds of lists, so a horizontal list (one made using commas) would be started with a semicolon, but a vertical list (made using bullet points or numbers) would be started with a colon. Having said that, it's been about 10 years since I last had an actual English lesson, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of the stuff I 'know' turns out to be incorrect.

Thanks for pointing that out. I doubt very much that I would have spotted that by myself, because I knew what I'd intended to write and so just read that (to the extent that when I first read your post I thought the two sentences were the same, and only managed to track down the difference after noticing they were different lengths).

It's been a while since I've read about an agent trying to concuss himself (which always amused me in the Original Series). I guess that with the advent of Bleeprin and neuralyzers it isn't really needed anymore, but it seems that Skeet is just a little old-school in that regard.

It is not a grammar problem.

What you are describing is an intensifier. They are fun things, and not a grammar problems.


-July, hoping to make people twitch with that sentence