The finale begins, and Kim is fired up to maximum snark-ness! She was so snarky in fact, that I couldn’t squeeze in all her hilarious edits. I apologize. :'(

Summary:

Dring meets Parlay on the roof of the Dhaston building. Tyle is critically injured. The model, Error, has been destroyed. But Parlay’s master plan is still in motion. He is going to connect the two planets with a permanent hex door: the hall! A massive hex door opens above Hardpan City!

Darrow and Vornis are outside the city of Hardpan now, and they witness the next phase of Parlay’s plan: the entire city, foundation and all, blasts out of the ground and starts to float toward the hall in the sky! Holy crap!

The lords ley on Jesice are worried as they see the city fly through the hall at them. Everyone else that lives on the cliff-side city is also upset and screaming from the rooftops.

Dring doesn’t know why any of this is happening either. It looks like Parlay is going to kill thousands of people for no reason. However, Parlay is ready to fulfill his promise to heal Dring’s throat damage. Once healed he can finally have the confidence to speak to Mean in person, and he can forget about Parlay and Jesice. Dring refuses and runs away, crying.

Kim’s big problem: Now before I start with the edits I must address a most pressing concern. Kim sent me an email. She told me that ‘hall’ is a dumb name. “Please rename it to something cooler” she said. “It just sounds so small and generic.”

Kim probably doesn’t know this, but I made a post on the hall’s name before. I talked about all the names people have used for spacial gateways in fiction. Portal. Wormhole. Or for you Witcher fans, “Conjunction of the Spheres.” I just wanted to build on the ‘hex door’ theme. A door opens and closes. A hall is always open.

But I don’t think something is cool just because you give it a cool name; I think something is cool because you MAKE it cool.

I’ll use a Dragon Ball example, since Kim has watched that. The character Piccolo. Without knowing anything about him, you might scoff. “What a wimpy name! That’s a kind of flute, isn’t it?” But he starts out as one of the strongest villains. A demon king, even! The hero Goku fights Piccolo and beats him at great risk to himself, but he allows Piccolo to live. Then Piccolo is forced to team up with Goku years later when a greater evil arrives. Piccolo even trains Goku’s son and teaches him how to fight after Goku dies. He learns to care about the boy, and realizes that humans aren’t so bad.

So when Vegeta and Nappa show up and murder all the other characters, and Goku’s son is about to be blasted into pieces, what are you thinking when Piccolo jumps in front of the oncoming beam to save his sworn enemy’s child?

You’re thinking “Piccolo is the coolest name in the universe.”

So I’m not changing the name. 😛 Continue reading →