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Newspapers and Letters3,707 words
UN+8,358 words
The Conspiracy Loom3,511 words
Of Things to Come3,139 words
Epilogue772 words

Epilogue

It was half-passed two in the morning when Jacoby pushed opened the door of his house and quickly scrambled inside, shutting the portal behind him with a forceful shiver. Even bundled up in a heavy overcoat and wearing wool-lined leather gloves and boots over his feet and a scarf around his neck, it was still very cold up at high altitude in the dead of night under open sky. Something the goggles pushed up onto his forehead had done absolutely nothing to help with. It took several moments of enjoying air that wasn't as cold as it had been outside before he noticed the flicker of firelight along the wall. Glancing over to its apparent source, sure enough he saw Alexios relaxing in one of the armchairs near the mantle, a low and pleasant fire stoked, wearing a blue night shirt and matching cap and reading a book.

Or rather, he was reading a book until Jacoby came inside. "Oh, good," the minotaur began, closing the tome in his hands, "You're back. You have any idea what time it is?"

"I wasn't aware your duties included waiting up for me," Jacoby replied, pulling his boots and gloves off and leaving them by the door, before moving on to his scarf and overcoat, which he hung from the wall.

“They don't, really, but you know me. Can't sleep unless everything is in it's place." Standing up from his chair, Alexios busied himself with putting another log on the fire while Jacoby removed and hung his jacket and goggles. Giving the log a firm poke with the fire iron, the minotaur spoke up again. "You find it?"

"Oh, sure," the griffon replied, giving both chairs and the fire a pass and heading straight for the cocktail cabinet. "After all, I was only flying thousands of feet in the air, in the dead of night, with only a pair of runecrafted goggles that only barely improve my nightvision and a hastily-made homing rune to guide me. It was just about the easiest thing in the of course I didn't find it!" Angrily, he brought out from the cabinet a tumbler and a bottle of schnaps, the former of which he promptly filled half-way with the latter. "There's no telling how far off-course it went. I may never find it. I probably will never find it."

With a huff, Jacoby seized the glass in his talons and stalked to the chair Alexios had not be using, practically jumping into it and burying his face into the claws not presently occupied with a drink. "All I wanted was to forget this nonsense with the newspapers. It’s been almost a week, and I’ve only moved back to the fifth page, and now this," he said, hovering on the border between complaining and whining. "There's nothing to be done for it now. I'll just have to start over." With a final huff, he raised the glass to his beak and drank, letting the sting of alcohol wash over his tongue and warm his stomach.

"Well, whatever," Alexios replied after a moment, heaving a mighty yawn. "I'm going to bed. Don't stay up too late. Or, uh..." A glance at the clock revealed that it was already impossible to avoid that. "Later, I guess. See ya in the morning, Jake."

"Gute nacht, Alex." Before long, Jacoby was left alone in the lounge with only the schnapps in his glass to keep him company. He raised it to his beak to take another sip, and lowered it to the end table at his side with a heavy sigh. Rising to his feet, he left his chair and trod to the front window, looking out into the night sky, and nearly endless sea of stars stretching as far as he dared imagine.

"I shot an arrow into the air," he whispered to himself, "It fell to earth I know not where. All that hard work, and now it all rests on someone else finding you." With another sigh, he returned to the cushions and coffee table. "Not the way I envisioned celebrating my Letter." Gathering his resolve, Jacoby drained the rest of his glass, unaware that hours earlier and thousands of miles away, a streak of light and sound dropped out of the sky, knocking scores of apples down from the trees they hung in.

Author's Note:

Two chapters (sort of) for the price of one. How’s that?

Besides telling my own Skitchverse story, this particular foray was also an exercise in descriptive writing, specifically in working on that whole idea of “show, don’t tell.” I like to think I did that especially in chapters 3 and 4, although I confess I had not expected Jacoby to end up quite as choleric as he did.

Work on my next story has already begun, and it has occurred to me that those of us writing in the Skitchverse should really, maybe, probably figure out some sort of chronology to all these. Maybe another time, yeah?

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PhycoKrusk

PhycoKrusk #1 · Dec 12th, 2013 · · ·

3615959
1) Where the hell have you been?

2) I had issues with the parts you mentioned myself (except the frog), even though I liked the chapter as a whole.

3) "And at the stern stood an enclosed cabin, pentagonal in shape to allow the wind to flow around it as it drove forward, that housed a large panel of navigational instruments, a long, narrow table over which several maps were spread and clamped down flat, the helm and associated controls, and at that particular moment in time, Jacoby Flynn as he guided Die Trauer Stern through the sky towards Adlerheim, pushed through the air by two whirling propellers aft of the cabin.”

… I have no idea how this could have happened. The last time I saw that many commas in a row, they were followed by a stack overflow.

Zalabar

Zalabar #2 · Dec 13th, 2013 · · ·

3616221
1) Oh, real life stuff. I'm gonna get through the rest of this and start up on your next piece by the end of the week, though... maybe Sunday.

2-3) Best thing I've ever seen for maintaining tone and timbre in a piece is just reading through it aloud. The ear picks up a lot the eyes don't.
If you need a proofer, let me know; I tend to be a bit slow, but you've already seen what I tend to do.

Zalabar

Zalabar #3 · Dec 13th, 2013 · · ·

Yeah, I said I'd read this one tomorrow. I was wrong.
Okay... after having read through the pieces, I'm struck by the structure more than the content. By plot and characterization, it's a mystery piece. Not one with a clear villain or wrong-doer, but a conflict between economic and environmental woes, and the genius of life to overcome. One life in particular, but Jacob is the protagonist, so he gets to justify a lot of existence.

The mechanisms used to explore the world and frame the story, though...
There's clearly something big happening between each chapter. The shift from four to five, for instance, has Jake create... something, fire it at the uber-storm (I think?) and lose track of it. We don't know what it is, although we can suspect it's related to the problems his people are facing, and the disruption runes he wrought.
From 3 to 4, there was the creation of the sphere itself, improving on the disruption runes, testing and experimenting.
From 2 to 3? Jake's deductive process, involving a lot of chemicals, little food, and much work.
1 to 2? Gathering the airship, the information needed, and setting sail.
Now, of the 4 steps here, 3 are vital to the plot, but unimportant to the narrative. We don't need to know that he prepared his airship or gathered the info; we need to know he's traveling to fix things. But the lack of transitional phrases makes everything a smash cut. That works for most of the chapters, but here... here we need to unpack a lot and think about it to nail down what happened here. Since the whole thing is a reaction to prior events... that's risky.

The problem is one of needed information. Again, the dialogue and characterization carries the day, but without details, the reader is left to fill in the blanks. And this is an audience that loves 'em some headcanon.

Since you are working in prose, you don't need a lot. And from your own notes, it looks like this was an attempt to show rather than tell. Transitional phrases are all about telling; they're just more advanced variants on 'and time passes' after all.

Ultimately, I am left with the impression that the epilogue takes away a bit from the story. It leaves a muddled taste in my mind's eye, instead of setting up the subsequent adventures, I'm left with awareness of a hole in this one. I know logically that it will be filled as time passes, but you still wanna go for the feels, since that keeps us exploring.

Still like it though.

PhycoKrusk