Slave Verse - Peter's motivations
A reader asked a big question in one of their reviews of Slave Verse, a question that unleashed a torrent of explanation. So I captured that explanation here, in case I might want to refer to it again later.
Milarca Mouse asked: "And as for your other reply, and all the 'practice' [sex] Peter's gotten, that part was a little weird for me. Why did Peter do what he did with/to Nathan? I saw that he didn't enjoy it, and that he manipulated Nathan into thinking that he [Peter] didn't enjoy it when he was with Sylar. Why this bond with Nathan? And why did he give Sylar up *to* Nathan? I've just started SV part 3, so now that's all behind them. But.. it was just a bit confusing for me."
I'm assuming you haven't read chapter 5 of Slave Verse 3: Bungalow Blues. Some of this is covered there but not as explicitly as I plan to say here...
Peter had a normal childhood until he hit puberty, at which point Nathan began to take an inappropriate interest in him. And rather than behave himself, as Nathan did in my other AU, I followed Trekker's lead in saying that he indulged his interest in Peter's budding sexuality, gave the boy pointers, encouraged him and in general groomed him.
Peter loved his brother. Nathan loved Peter. I am not of the opinion that molesters do not have feelings for the targets of their misplaced affections. I figure they run the same gamut as any other human being. Nathan never saw Peter as nothing but an outlet. He saw him as a person, his kid brother, and eventually as his lover.
Peter was exposed to this pressure too early and in a way that was forever unbalanced, power-wise. Sex was a means to power and influence and attention. He could blow Nathan to talk him into giving him money for a movie with some friends, or promise sex later in exchange for leniency in his curfew. Sex was a currency for Peter and Nathan encouraged him to spend it. It warped their relationship, but it didn't mean they didn't love each other (fraternally and otherwise).
And Peter enjoyed it. He was special, he was favored, he was cool. He was mature and experienced while his friends were still fearing they'd be virgins their whole lives. His confidence meant he scored well with women too (though his good looks and family wealth didn't hurt that any either). In my other AU, Peter was not promiscuous - he had no reason to be. He had multiple partners, but each was cherished and special and he regarded access to his body to be prized and given to only those who loved him. In Slave Verse, by the time Peter was adult and in college, he was content to have sex with anyone who wanted to. He was never callous enough to do it solely for gain, but he certainly wasn't above using sex to curry an advantageous position for himself with someone whom he liked otherwise.
Peter still saw Nathan from time to time, but their social circles were separate. Peter began settling down, dating seriously and considering an exclusive relationship. Nathan had always been uneasy when Peter wasn't willing to drop everything for him and this was a definite threat. He started sabotaging Peter's relationships, building on their previous dysfunctional power dynamic by insisting that Peter have Nathan's approval before he could do various things. For a while, it was kind of like a game and Peter adored having Nathan's attention again. It was like old times when he was in high school. If he really wanted anything, he could always talk Nathan into it. He didn't feel controlled - he felt valued.
This was about the same time his father died in canon (which would be an event that happened in Slave Verse too - Angela poisoned Arthur, but he survived elsewhere until he drained Adam). The family tragedy, coupled by Nathan's battle against Arthur and subsequent senatorial campaign, kept Peter busy and more importantly, kept Nathan too distracted to keep a tight leash on his brother.
Season 1 unfolded more or less as it did in canon. Motivations were different, but the events were the same. After that, Peter and Nathan seriously disagreed on a lot of issues. Our first major departure from canon comes when Nathan kills his father at Pinehearst instead of allying with him. Arthur never drains Peter of his powers and the formula is not destroyed. Instead, Nathan has his shiny new goons subdue Peter and he is drugged into insensibility. Nathan convinces Peter that he's had another relapse into being unable to control his powers and the drugs will keep him under control. He is kept heavily sedated for long periods.
Eventually Peter escaped. He was thoroughly addicted to the drugs he'd been on and it took him quite a while to get his head straight. He was depressive and blamed himself for being weak. He still believed Nathan that Nathan had given him the drugs with his best interests in mind. He thought he'd show Nathan that he was strong and able to stand on his own by getting clean. Eventually he did.
By now Nathan was in charge of Homeland Security and pursuing a plot similar to Season 3 of canon, but Peter is a lot more powerful and Nathan still has a lock on the formula, so he has a supply of loyal people with powers to set after those who aren't loyal. One of Nathan's early acquisitions was someone with an ability like Eden's or Kelly's, who can give people orders and they have to follow them. He immediately turned this ability on all his "goons." Peter was subdued and brought in. Nathan had tried to reason with Peter, but Peter was angry at him and felt betrayed, as he did in the show when Nathan ended up on the wrong side. It didn't mean Peter didn't still love him, or Nathan love Peter.
Nathan had already been controlling and manipulative of Peter to various degrees in their relationship. It wasn't a stretch to have Peter compelled to obedience and loyalty just like the others. Peter was told he deserved it and that Nathan knew best for him. It broke something between them and although Peter played the role he'd been assigned, he was dying inside. They had sex and because Nathan /could/ and there was nothing standing in his way, he got steadily more perverse. It was also one of the few ways he could meaningfully punish Peter without damaging him or twisting him up in some way that would enable him to resist the commands he'd been given. Peter always enjoyed being the center of Nathan's attention, being the one who could control him in turn by arousing him. It cemented Peter's power and feeling of self-worth when Nathan wanted him and was moved by him, so Peter played right into helping Nathan carry out his darkest fantasies.
As time passed, the sex became stale and Peter became more clear-eyed, more depressed and more sad about what it really meant. He became desperate, lonely and trapped. By now he had not a friend in the world. Nathan had driven them all away. Peter was operating under so many layers of commands and forms of conditioning that it was a marvel he had any sanity at all. Nathan tried various methods to figure out what was wrong with Peter (telepathy, therapy, counseling, Lydia's empathy ability, etc.) to no avail, but he did determine that it was himself that was causing Peter's downward emotional spiral. So he hit on the idea of saying Peter had rebelled against him and sending him out to flush out the last holdouts of resistors.
Peter went along because by now, that was all Peter could really do. He had only two choices: shut down/collapse/depression, or obedience. He went out and led the resistors to their doom, one group after another. One of these groups got over-exposed and he had a moment where Peter should have fled. But his own life meant nothing to him. He failed to protect himself adequately and he was captured, memory-wiped, processed and sold as a slave to one Sylar.
With his memories gone, Peter had no terrible mental burden depressing him. He reverted to his basic personality, though he still had the emotional role behavior that Nathan had ingrained into him. His morals didn't change, even if he couldn't remember the formative lessons of them. He sucked up to Sylar and manipulated him the same way he'd often manipulated Nathan, even if he couldn't recall specific instances. It worked. And also, he imagined he had a friend. Or a lover. Or at least someone who cared about him, and without any memories, he easily imprinted on the first person who showed him much in the way of affection, rough though it was. Sylar wanted to be important to Peter and Peter wanted someone who was important to him.
When Peter had his memories back, but without the commands, he realized a couple things right away - Nathan was going to find him eventually and when he did, he'd bring so much force to bear that Sylar would die and Peter would be more thoroughly enslaved than he had been with Sylar. He also knew that Nathan was probably still consulting with precognitives daily to assess threats against himself. So he had no more than 24 hours of freedom. He had to do something fast and he had to upset Nathan enough that his brother didn't think through a careful strategy of how to bring Peter down.
To kill him he'd have to get close to him and he'd have to have Nathan rattled enough that he made mistakes. Peter fell back on what he knew would drive Nathan mad: the idea that Peter had picked another partner over him, that he was cheating on Nathan (Nathan loved to watch Peter have sex with others, but that was different - that was when Nathan ordered it; for Peter to do it on his own was threatening, it was infidelity), and that he was enjoying it, teasing Nathan, provoking him, and yet was still going to let Nathan come get him and prove how much Nathan wanted Peter. It wasn't so different from Peter flirting with other men in order to make Nathan drag him away and fuck him hard just to prove who Peter belonged to. Peter loved doing that and Nathan knew it. So he didn't sense any real danger in this ploy, though it did run all through him like it always did.
Peter's always been a brat (at least in Slave Verse, not so much in my other AU).
Peter figured the only way to make this convincing was to give Nathan Sylar and besides, Peter figured he would need Sylar's help in overcoming Nathan's defenses. Peter didn't know exactly what form those defenses would take. He wasn't sure how it would all play out. I'm not saying he came up with the best plan or even necessarily a good one. He's not a strategic genius, though he was well versed in what defenses Nathan had. He figured if he could rapidly convince Nathan of his love, loyalty and desire for him, that he could keep Nathan from having commands layered into Peter's head or having a telepath check him for duplicity. If he could slow that process down and keep Nathan distracted from arranging that, then maybe he'd see an opening where he could take him down.
And he did.
Was it unconscionably callous for Peter not to tell Sylar what he had planned? Yes. Peter had a very good idea of how it might affect Sylar, but he did it anyway because in this AU Peter has lost *so much* of his humanity. He's been forced to do so many awful things. He's not right inside. He made an inhuman choice and he very nearly lost everything because of it. He's not the mature, ethical, stable, whole person you see in the show or in my other AUs. He's been broken up inside and is struggling towards this one chance he has of healing himself.
He was lucky. It worked out. Sylar is mentally very strong and more importantly, he has also formed a bond, with Peter, and fell in love with him.
In a followup, the same reader asked "That did explain some things, but I'm a little sad that a part of the reasons Peter did what he did was because he was -slightly- mentally unstable. That is a very long piece of biography there though, was that all just in your head?"
As for Peter - is he really mentally unstable, or has he had expected and reasonable reactions to the events in his life? If I'm using shorthand talking to people I don't know, I would tell them he's mentally unstable, because in two words, I can short-circuit a really long explanation of what's happened to him to make him act like he does. But in my own head, I really dig in my heels to "he's crazy" as a motivation for a character. Instead, I work out what made them crazy or why they would appear crazy to an outsider.
He's had a really messed up past and it's kind of a merger of the worst elements of the pasts of several people I've known, and those events screwed up every one of them. It made them what people might call a little crazy, or unstable. I imagine if one person had all of that on their head, that they'd be quite a bit so, even if they were, as a baseline, as stable and resilient as I think Peter is. He's going to recover from this. He's never going to get out of the basic pattern of surrendering responsibility for his life to someone else on a day-to-day basis, but Sylar is happy to act as his "master" or the dominant member of the partnership or his caretaker or big brother (though he'd be bothered to realize he's being cast into that role). I don't think it's an unhealthy thing. A little co-dependent, yeah, but we're all dependent on others to some extent. As long as Peter is clear-eyed enough to understand he doesn't have to put up with abusiveness and he's willing to push back (which he is - I think Bungalow Blues demonstrates this), then it's fine.
The bad effect of instability/Peter's past is that when he had a time crunch and needed a plan quickly, he went with one that had a high risk rate and wasn't the best. Sylar, had he been fully informed of things, would have come up with a better one. Honestly, bombing Nathan from a distance, then teleporting in and taking him out while his defenses were staggering would have worked fine. Peter just refused to contemplate a method that would have so many casualties.
Also, I was being lazy as an author. I can't have a character come up with the best possible plan unless I lay out all the existing defenses and then work out the best possible way to thwart them. There's too many random factors associated with what abilities would be existent and how Nathan would use them. I don't believe any security is unbreakable, but I didn't want to work it out in detail. So I said "this is what Peter comes up with" and I brush aside how he might not have done the smartest thing by saying "well, he's not the smartest guy, he was kind of rushed, and he had social/psychological inhibitions that prevented him from being as mercenary and practical as perhaps he should have been."
Do I have this laid out in my head? Yes. And if I don't, then as soon as someone questions it (or as soon as I question it), I start thinking about what would have had to happen to get things to that point. It's like putting together a puzzle, or a logic problem. If we have condition D, then what preceded it? C is obvious, then I think around until I work out B and then finally A. I took Trekker's story, which was chapter 1 of Slave Verse and tried to figure out what would have had to happen to create that world. Since I didn't buy Sylar's thoughts that Peter had trusted the wrong person, then it meant on some level Peter wanted to be caught and I had to think of why. And if Nathan was in charge and the world was so evil, then I had to think of what changes to Nathan's character I needed to make, from canon, for him to be the sort of person who would tolerate, or even facilitate, the creation of a slave class.
Once I get all the characters set up in my head and "modeled" correctly, I can just sort of let them act and react on their own and just write down what they'd say, because after that it's just letting them tell their own story of event and consequence and resolution.
And... as you've probably gathered from my answers to you... I write a lot and quickly. By the way, I *LOVE* questions like yours because they make me really think, and it tells me someone else is out there really thinking about what I wrote, poking it with a stick and asking "does this really make sense?" or "does this hang together?" I love that. I know my stories don't always pass that test (and sometimes it passes for person A who has had events in their life to justify/explicate my story and it doesn't pass for person B who can't relate because they've had different experiences).
Milarca Mouse asked: "And as for your other reply, and all the 'practice' [sex] Peter's gotten, that part was a little weird for me. Why did Peter do what he did with/to Nathan? I saw that he didn't enjoy it, and that he manipulated Nathan into thinking that he [Peter] didn't enjoy it when he was with Sylar. Why this bond with Nathan? And why did he give Sylar up *to* Nathan? I've just started SV part 3, so now that's all behind them. But.. it was just a bit confusing for me."
I'm assuming you haven't read chapter 5 of Slave Verse 3: Bungalow Blues. Some of this is covered there but not as explicitly as I plan to say here...
Peter had a normal childhood until he hit puberty, at which point Nathan began to take an inappropriate interest in him. And rather than behave himself, as Nathan did in my other AU, I followed Trekker's lead in saying that he indulged his interest in Peter's budding sexuality, gave the boy pointers, encouraged him and in general groomed him.
Peter loved his brother. Nathan loved Peter. I am not of the opinion that molesters do not have feelings for the targets of their misplaced affections. I figure they run the same gamut as any other human being. Nathan never saw Peter as nothing but an outlet. He saw him as a person, his kid brother, and eventually as his lover.
Peter was exposed to this pressure too early and in a way that was forever unbalanced, power-wise. Sex was a means to power and influence and attention. He could blow Nathan to talk him into giving him money for a movie with some friends, or promise sex later in exchange for leniency in his curfew. Sex was a currency for Peter and Nathan encouraged him to spend it. It warped their relationship, but it didn't mean they didn't love each other (fraternally and otherwise).
And Peter enjoyed it. He was special, he was favored, he was cool. He was mature and experienced while his friends were still fearing they'd be virgins their whole lives. His confidence meant he scored well with women too (though his good looks and family wealth didn't hurt that any either). In my other AU, Peter was not promiscuous - he had no reason to be. He had multiple partners, but each was cherished and special and he regarded access to his body to be prized and given to only those who loved him. In Slave Verse, by the time Peter was adult and in college, he was content to have sex with anyone who wanted to. He was never callous enough to do it solely for gain, but he certainly wasn't above using sex to curry an advantageous position for himself with someone whom he liked otherwise.
Peter still saw Nathan from time to time, but their social circles were separate. Peter began settling down, dating seriously and considering an exclusive relationship. Nathan had always been uneasy when Peter wasn't willing to drop everything for him and this was a definite threat. He started sabotaging Peter's relationships, building on their previous dysfunctional power dynamic by insisting that Peter have Nathan's approval before he could do various things. For a while, it was kind of like a game and Peter adored having Nathan's attention again. It was like old times when he was in high school. If he really wanted anything, he could always talk Nathan into it. He didn't feel controlled - he felt valued.
This was about the same time his father died in canon (which would be an event that happened in Slave Verse too - Angela poisoned Arthur, but he survived elsewhere until he drained Adam). The family tragedy, coupled by Nathan's battle against Arthur and subsequent senatorial campaign, kept Peter busy and more importantly, kept Nathan too distracted to keep a tight leash on his brother.
Season 1 unfolded more or less as it did in canon. Motivations were different, but the events were the same. After that, Peter and Nathan seriously disagreed on a lot of issues. Our first major departure from canon comes when Nathan kills his father at Pinehearst instead of allying with him. Arthur never drains Peter of his powers and the formula is not destroyed. Instead, Nathan has his shiny new goons subdue Peter and he is drugged into insensibility. Nathan convinces Peter that he's had another relapse into being unable to control his powers and the drugs will keep him under control. He is kept heavily sedated for long periods.
Eventually Peter escaped. He was thoroughly addicted to the drugs he'd been on and it took him quite a while to get his head straight. He was depressive and blamed himself for being weak. He still believed Nathan that Nathan had given him the drugs with his best interests in mind. He thought he'd show Nathan that he was strong and able to stand on his own by getting clean. Eventually he did.
By now Nathan was in charge of Homeland Security and pursuing a plot similar to Season 3 of canon, but Peter is a lot more powerful and Nathan still has a lock on the formula, so he has a supply of loyal people with powers to set after those who aren't loyal. One of Nathan's early acquisitions was someone with an ability like Eden's or Kelly's, who can give people orders and they have to follow them. He immediately turned this ability on all his "goons." Peter was subdued and brought in. Nathan had tried to reason with Peter, but Peter was angry at him and felt betrayed, as he did in the show when Nathan ended up on the wrong side. It didn't mean Peter didn't still love him, or Nathan love Peter.
Nathan had already been controlling and manipulative of Peter to various degrees in their relationship. It wasn't a stretch to have Peter compelled to obedience and loyalty just like the others. Peter was told he deserved it and that Nathan knew best for him. It broke something between them and although Peter played the role he'd been assigned, he was dying inside. They had sex and because Nathan /could/ and there was nothing standing in his way, he got steadily more perverse. It was also one of the few ways he could meaningfully punish Peter without damaging him or twisting him up in some way that would enable him to resist the commands he'd been given. Peter always enjoyed being the center of Nathan's attention, being the one who could control him in turn by arousing him. It cemented Peter's power and feeling of self-worth when Nathan wanted him and was moved by him, so Peter played right into helping Nathan carry out his darkest fantasies.
As time passed, the sex became stale and Peter became more clear-eyed, more depressed and more sad about what it really meant. He became desperate, lonely and trapped. By now he had not a friend in the world. Nathan had driven them all away. Peter was operating under so many layers of commands and forms of conditioning that it was a marvel he had any sanity at all. Nathan tried various methods to figure out what was wrong with Peter (telepathy, therapy, counseling, Lydia's empathy ability, etc.) to no avail, but he did determine that it was himself that was causing Peter's downward emotional spiral. So he hit on the idea of saying Peter had rebelled against him and sending him out to flush out the last holdouts of resistors.
Peter went along because by now, that was all Peter could really do. He had only two choices: shut down/collapse/depression, or obedience. He went out and led the resistors to their doom, one group after another. One of these groups got over-exposed and he had a moment where Peter should have fled. But his own life meant nothing to him. He failed to protect himself adequately and he was captured, memory-wiped, processed and sold as a slave to one Sylar.
With his memories gone, Peter had no terrible mental burden depressing him. He reverted to his basic personality, though he still had the emotional role behavior that Nathan had ingrained into him. His morals didn't change, even if he couldn't remember the formative lessons of them. He sucked up to Sylar and manipulated him the same way he'd often manipulated Nathan, even if he couldn't recall specific instances. It worked. And also, he imagined he had a friend. Or a lover. Or at least someone who cared about him, and without any memories, he easily imprinted on the first person who showed him much in the way of affection, rough though it was. Sylar wanted to be important to Peter and Peter wanted someone who was important to him.
When Peter had his memories back, but without the commands, he realized a couple things right away - Nathan was going to find him eventually and when he did, he'd bring so much force to bear that Sylar would die and Peter would be more thoroughly enslaved than he had been with Sylar. He also knew that Nathan was probably still consulting with precognitives daily to assess threats against himself. So he had no more than 24 hours of freedom. He had to do something fast and he had to upset Nathan enough that his brother didn't think through a careful strategy of how to bring Peter down.
To kill him he'd have to get close to him and he'd have to have Nathan rattled enough that he made mistakes. Peter fell back on what he knew would drive Nathan mad: the idea that Peter had picked another partner over him, that he was cheating on Nathan (Nathan loved to watch Peter have sex with others, but that was different - that was when Nathan ordered it; for Peter to do it on his own was threatening, it was infidelity), and that he was enjoying it, teasing Nathan, provoking him, and yet was still going to let Nathan come get him and prove how much Nathan wanted Peter. It wasn't so different from Peter flirting with other men in order to make Nathan drag him away and fuck him hard just to prove who Peter belonged to. Peter loved doing that and Nathan knew it. So he didn't sense any real danger in this ploy, though it did run all through him like it always did.
Peter's always been a brat (at least in Slave Verse, not so much in my other AU).
Peter figured the only way to make this convincing was to give Nathan Sylar and besides, Peter figured he would need Sylar's help in overcoming Nathan's defenses. Peter didn't know exactly what form those defenses would take. He wasn't sure how it would all play out. I'm not saying he came up with the best plan or even necessarily a good one. He's not a strategic genius, though he was well versed in what defenses Nathan had. He figured if he could rapidly convince Nathan of his love, loyalty and desire for him, that he could keep Nathan from having commands layered into Peter's head or having a telepath check him for duplicity. If he could slow that process down and keep Nathan distracted from arranging that, then maybe he'd see an opening where he could take him down.
And he did.
Was it unconscionably callous for Peter not to tell Sylar what he had planned? Yes. Peter had a very good idea of how it might affect Sylar, but he did it anyway because in this AU Peter has lost *so much* of his humanity. He's been forced to do so many awful things. He's not right inside. He made an inhuman choice and he very nearly lost everything because of it. He's not the mature, ethical, stable, whole person you see in the show or in my other AUs. He's been broken up inside and is struggling towards this one chance he has of healing himself.
He was lucky. It worked out. Sylar is mentally very strong and more importantly, he has also formed a bond, with Peter, and fell in love with him.
In a followup, the same reader asked "That did explain some things, but I'm a little sad that a part of the reasons Peter did what he did was because he was -slightly- mentally unstable. That is a very long piece of biography there though, was that all just in your head?"
As for Peter - is he really mentally unstable, or has he had expected and reasonable reactions to the events in his life? If I'm using shorthand talking to people I don't know, I would tell them he's mentally unstable, because in two words, I can short-circuit a really long explanation of what's happened to him to make him act like he does. But in my own head, I really dig in my heels to "he's crazy" as a motivation for a character. Instead, I work out what made them crazy or why they would appear crazy to an outsider.
He's had a really messed up past and it's kind of a merger of the worst elements of the pasts of several people I've known, and those events screwed up every one of them. It made them what people might call a little crazy, or unstable. I imagine if one person had all of that on their head, that they'd be quite a bit so, even if they were, as a baseline, as stable and resilient as I think Peter is. He's going to recover from this. He's never going to get out of the basic pattern of surrendering responsibility for his life to someone else on a day-to-day basis, but Sylar is happy to act as his "master" or the dominant member of the partnership or his caretaker or big brother (though he'd be bothered to realize he's being cast into that role). I don't think it's an unhealthy thing. A little co-dependent, yeah, but we're all dependent on others to some extent. As long as Peter is clear-eyed enough to understand he doesn't have to put up with abusiveness and he's willing to push back (which he is - I think Bungalow Blues demonstrates this), then it's fine.
The bad effect of instability/Peter's past is that when he had a time crunch and needed a plan quickly, he went with one that had a high risk rate and wasn't the best. Sylar, had he been fully informed of things, would have come up with a better one. Honestly, bombing Nathan from a distance, then teleporting in and taking him out while his defenses were staggering would have worked fine. Peter just refused to contemplate a method that would have so many casualties.
Also, I was being lazy as an author. I can't have a character come up with the best possible plan unless I lay out all the existing defenses and then work out the best possible way to thwart them. There's too many random factors associated with what abilities would be existent and how Nathan would use them. I don't believe any security is unbreakable, but I didn't want to work it out in detail. So I said "this is what Peter comes up with" and I brush aside how he might not have done the smartest thing by saying "well, he's not the smartest guy, he was kind of rushed, and he had social/psychological inhibitions that prevented him from being as mercenary and practical as perhaps he should have been."
Do I have this laid out in my head? Yes. And if I don't, then as soon as someone questions it (or as soon as I question it), I start thinking about what would have had to happen to get things to that point. It's like putting together a puzzle, or a logic problem. If we have condition D, then what preceded it? C is obvious, then I think around until I work out B and then finally A. I took Trekker's story, which was chapter 1 of Slave Verse and tried to figure out what would have had to happen to create that world. Since I didn't buy Sylar's thoughts that Peter had trusted the wrong person, then it meant on some level Peter wanted to be caught and I had to think of why. And if Nathan was in charge and the world was so evil, then I had to think of what changes to Nathan's character I needed to make, from canon, for him to be the sort of person who would tolerate, or even facilitate, the creation of a slave class.
Once I get all the characters set up in my head and "modeled" correctly, I can just sort of let them act and react on their own and just write down what they'd say, because after that it's just letting them tell their own story of event and consequence and resolution.
And... as you've probably gathered from my answers to you... I write a lot and quickly. By the way, I *LOVE* questions like yours because they make me really think, and it tells me someone else is out there really thinking about what I wrote, poking it with a stick and asking "does this really make sense?" or "does this hang together?" I love that. I know my stories don't always pass that test (and sometimes it passes for person A who has had events in their life to justify/explicate my story and it doesn't pass for person B who can't relate because they've had different experiences).