A:TS/1602 FIC: Ge bene Hinnom - Part 1
This has been cluttering up my harddrive for some time, and I want to get it out there before it drives me nuts. It's the first part of the 1602/A:TS crossover I owe selenak. It's unbetaed as yet, so comments and corrections are welcome. The whole story is likely to come to about 15 parts, I think, and is set in a mish-mash of the 1602 and A:TS worlds -
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Anyway: I loved this. I love the way the 1602 and Slayer mythologies are being twined together, and that "Blessed" and "Witchbreed" are being seen (accurately?) as two names for the same thing. (Is this version of Scott Summers going to be an ancestor of Buffy?)In that vein (hah!) I am quite pleased that the Master is the one harrowing the Virginia colony.
I am particularly fond of your emphasis on social class, who has to be polite to whom, the maid's aghastness at having insulted her "better" after she blurts out that the child is afraid. That's always a fascinating perspective, and not one we got to see a lot of in the Buffyverse after they moved past the rigid social divides of high school.
Some of my favorite (mostly chilling) lines:
are those children?!" He hurriedly placed Javier into a chair and loped to the corner, to undo the bundle's bindings.
"Of a sort," the stranger said
to nurse or to spit,
Javier smiled, and the stranger was not comforted by it.
All in all you do a great job of getting across the expediency and practicality with which these children are being traded--very disturbing, very like the Watcher's Council and, in some ways, Professor X's school of today. And it's well-written, smooth and pretty, and is there more yet? Point me at it!
The only remotely critical thing I can come up with is very small: in the first section, you keep calling the baby-trading fellow "the stranger," which has an odd feel to it. He would be a stranger in Javier's perspective, but not in his own, and we're seeing the scene from his viewpoint; shouldn't he just have a name?
Again, wonderful!
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*giggles*
*massages spuffy's brain*
Anyway: I loved this. I love the way the 1602 and Slayer mythologies are being twined together, and that "Blessed" and "Witchbreed" are being seen (accurately?) as two names for the same thing.
Yay!! *dances* I am so glad. :)
(Is this version of Scott Summers going to be an ancestor of Buffy?)
*taps nose* I'd say that it will be revealed in the narrative, but I'd blatantly forget to add that in - the original plans called for Scott to move to the New World at Jarvier's request (at some point after 1602), and live for long enough to sire a child before meeting his untimely death at the Master's hands. That whole plotline's been taken out, as the fate of the two boys traded ultimately struck me as being quite separate from what was going on at the Roanoke and Lucille's ultimate fate (and I'm writing about Lucille, primarily. I think. *ponders*). So, having taken that out, I may very well write a whole other separate fic covering the boys' and Javier's links to the Council and various other buffyverse organisations...
(aren't you glad you asked? *g*)
In that vein (hah!) I am quite pleased that the Master is the one harrowing the Virginia colony.
*g* The funny thing is, he actually does so in the Angelverse, which was what got me thinking in the first place. In the Angelverse, the Master is in the New World in 1609, in a convent - whereas women didn't really feature that strongly in the Jamestown settlement of 1607. I thus figured that he was in the St Augustine (Spanish) settlement.
The Roanoke colony (in our actual history) was plagued by a series of bad events, until, eventually, it vanished. All that was left was a word carved in wood: Croatan. Meanwhile, the Jamestown colonists suffered a somewhat similar fate, in that, one by one, they simply started lying down and dying, for no discernible reason.
Putting all of that together, I figured that the Master was in fact moving across the entire east coast, sampling the colonists as he travelled.
is there more yet? Point me at it!
There is now. *g* Part two is here.
shouldn't he just have a name?
Hmmm, yes, I see what you mean. *ponders* The reason Sir Arthur didn't get a name in the first scene was, well, he wasn't supposed to stick around for long! Then he got more and more scenes and, all of a sudden, he had the bulk of the narrative. I'm still playing around with the extent of the third person POV that I'm using - just how distant from or close to the character's minds to be, basically - so the whole first scene will be getting a rejigging once the whole thing is done. I'm toying with starting off with 'the stranger' and ending with 'Sir Arthur' - so, starting with Javier's third person perspective, and slowly shifting to Sir Arthur's perspective. Thoughts, comments, random bits of vegetable? :)
Many, many thanks for this lovely piece of feedback honeypie - it toally made my day!
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