DCdevil

Why do people think she's getting away free? JP's karma comment indicates he has something in motion.

I'm going to make a guess here and propose that Matt is the narrator of the next book. Why? Mark seems to like a challenge.

Ah, right! I knew my brain was failing me somehow, but I couldn't connect it all. Lots of chapters, very fast. But now I'm in the waiting position here just inches from the finish line with everyone else.

She gave the shell back in December, but there was a wrapped gift snuck on when the guys left Australia.

If I were stuck in a Cat 5 hurricane, and I knew that my boat would be smashed to flinders if I attempted to pass the core wall again, I'd look for another way out. One would seem to be to ride in the eye, and I have personally driven in the eye of a hurricane in a car, so I know it is possible to keep pace, but then, Atlantis doesn't quite have its full power left to it. Also, I'd fear the conditions of landfall and then the danger of being left to have the wall pass over me on a potentially exposed beach (which would be the kind I'd be looking for just to beach safely). That leaves me two options: up or down. Up has problems. The plane overhead can't descend, or it won't be able to achieve liftoff again, and there are no available helicopters. Down also has problems. No submarines, as has been pointed out. There is another option, but I really don't know the math here. There's another way down. We know that Atlantis is a dive charter. We also know that insurance was set to pay out for all the personal materials seized by the pirates. From the charter way back when with the lesbian and her flirty sisters, we know that Atlantis typically carries at least 4 diving getups. We were given plenty of education about dive belts, decompression sickness, the group's training, and so on much earlier on in the story. Is a scuba tank Chekhov's gun? Will the gang take a dive? Gun, tanks, leftover rope, EPIRB, some glow sticks, and done? Problems: a quick Google search tells me that one or two tanks would be pretty limited in duration especially given the variance in different atmospheres' depths' compression. How deep would they have to go to survive the stormy seas? Surely not the 200 ft quoted for a sub. How long would they have to stay under to survive the passage of a 20 mph storm roughly the size of Texas? Would Shane be able to regulate his breath successfully after having his heart restarted? Would Trevor pass out from the pain or the blood loss by osmotic effect? Would his blood attract Atlantic species of sharks? Would the beloved chrome plated gun help in such circumstances? How would they all stay together? I dunno, but I'd probably try it myself, as terrified as I am of open water. If they could survive it, and if Atlantis was destroyed, I'd hope that the guys' novel had been saved on the internet somewhere (verisimilitudinously compared to gayauthors), and I'd feel bad for poor, newly-restored Atlantis, but I'd be happy she made her circumnavigation, at least. And hey, as for that gold carefully concealed in the hull, maybe the experimental sonar developer would be interested in a very late search of the ocean floor, not horrendously farther than he'd originally planned and with the assistance of the Ares/Kookaburra. Now, what I want to know (and bear in mind I just started reading this all last week, so it's all gone by at lightning speed for me) is what happened with Trevor's birthday, and what did his mother give Shane to hide on the boat?

I created an account just so I could come share my anguish at waiting. I'm not a patient man, but I'm trying really hard. Seriously though, I'll wait as long as it takes you, and I respect your process while recognizing the things in life that can derail the best laid schemes of mice and men. I really feel your characters' pain. I'm gay, but my partner of ten years and I broke up for two years, and Andy's anguish (as we saw it) was very familiar, even though I mentally cast myself in the Matt role of "waiting for the love of my life to get his shit together, stop hurting both of us, and remember that we were happier together even in bad times than we were apart in good ones." I'm lucky (or persistent and more of a badger than Matt) in that we reunited four yrs ago TODAY, coincidentally my birthday, and married a year ago, so I know some of these meandering paths end up where they should. Nevertheless, I'm stuck in the limbo of dramatic tension of Andy preventing himself from being happy and wanting to shake the studly soccer player out of his self-defeating crap. Thank God I only found the story last week. Cliffhanger pauses of long duration nearly anywhere before the last few, more stable, chapters would have killed me. They'd have done killt me to death. Thanks again. Great stuff, powerfully told, without much cliche beyond life's own tendency to happen according to certain eternal patterns. Dare I say, to follow established currents? I want to see the boys have their cake and eat it too. I want to see them happy, but I know there's a lot of work that goes into making that end believable and earned. Finally, as a former English teacher and sometime writer, thank you so much for writing a literate story with subtle characterization, organic development, messy situations, realistic voices, and occasionally stupid asshole tendencies in the main characters. I get sick of reading about queer saints with one perfect tear on a turned-away cheek. Ok, really done now. Please finish quickly. It really is my birthday. It would make a great present. But take as long as you need. What? I'm not allowed to have two motives at the same time?