Jumping to the comments to drop this thought before I return to the story.
I love how you showed the contrast between T'Pau and Leo in your writing, not just in what you said, but in how you wrote it. The descriptions of T'Pau's outfit, environment, and behaviour are mostly in a single paragraph with only a few lines interspersed in the text around it. The sentences are clear, structured, and orderly.
When you describe Bones and his end of the call, the descriptions come in scattered lines all over the section. You don't signpost it, you just describe his body language or his clothes or some other part of his behaviour that's so casual that I'm not sure if I think that Bones is making a deliberate statement or just is so comfortable around T'Pau that he's essentially in his pjs and abandoning all the rules of Southern talking-to-guests (although Idk how they would translate to non-hosting environments, let alone interplanetary calls.)
I don't know if this was intentional, using the structure of the writing to further highlight the contrast between them without making a single direct comparison, or if that's just how the chapter flowed for you, but it's incredible. I wish I could pull that trick off in my writing without feeling like the tone was inconsistent, but this only works so well here because of the established 3rd person limited POV and how readers have spent 13 chapters inside Leo's head and going from formal to informal and back is part of how he thinks about the world. Just geeking out a little over here
Comment on Signals
LittleMissM on Chapter 14 Fri 09 Jan 2026 07:15AM UTC
Comment Actions