Ariel suddenly burst into tears and began wailing, a high-pitched, hopeless sound. She was horny, not stupid, and had followed the same chain of logic I had, but to a different conclusion: she was the one who’d be abandoned. Again. We both scrambled to comfort her, ending up in a three-way hug, promising to stay together and somehow make it work.
When I woke the next morning, they were gone. Or maybe they were still there, together, because I was definitely gone. The satin sheets were a pretty big clue, and I had a feeling I knew who they belonged to. Sure enough, my least-favorite favorite redhead showed up as if I’d just rubbed her lamp, carrying a tray full of something she probably thought was breakfast.
Surprisingly, she was fully dressed. I wasn’t, but I’d been bathed and shaved, and all the little scars I’d picked up over the years were gone, like it had all been a bad dream.
She looked at me like she was expecting praise, and I was happy to disappoint her. “Take me back.”
“Wait, what? I told you, I resurrected you to be a hero. There’s no going back, you’re dead there.”
“Not to Earth, to the place where you really found me. The rock in the forest, in the world without people. The world with the only people I care about.”
“Take me back to Angel and Ariel.”
…and her own story is up to about 7,500 words, although the last few snippets are pretty raw and subject to revision and rethinking. Where it goes next depends on the motives of the slightly-offscreen antagonist who just messed with the wrong redhead; does she double down, or cut her losses? Is she a purely local menace, or is she taking orders? Is there something special about Virginia’s native guide that made her a target? I don’t know yet. Jumping over their first encounter left things really open.
Technologically-speaking, I’m being careful with the sync on StandardNotes. A comment in the bug I filed indicated that the desktop client only syncs every five minutes, and since it seems to have trouble detecting conflicts when you switch to the mobile client within that window, especially if that specific document is already open, I’m waiting it out, and getting into the habit of switching documents before closing the iPad.
The iPad app also has a resource leak of some kind that eventually causes it to barf when attempting a local save and then tell you to force-quit the app. Fortunately, it saves often enough that it only loses a word or two, and remembers where you were on relaunch. The symptom is that the onscreen keyboard suddenly has blank keys when you hit the shift or punctuation buttons.
Markdown formatting and simple HTML accepted.
Sometimes you have to double-click to enter text in the form (interaction between Isso and Bootstrap?). Tab is more reliable.