BIG POST (you have been warned): Just finished reading the old and the new bits. And to celebrate your return and the revival of this story I shall now serenade you with a ballad of my own composition (about four chapters too late):
There's the National Guard and the FBI;
There's a van from the Eyewitness News,
And helicopters circlin' round in the sky!
Now the bullets are flyin',
The body-count's risin',
And everyone's dyin'
To know: why, Arthur, why?
You used to be such a jolly guy!
Moving swiftly on (and you can't complain because I can see you've been watching Pirates of the Carribean)...
I've loved these three new chapters, and particularly this sudden focus on Arthur. It's great to get such a close look at him, and this internal struggle which I think he felt he had gotten over himself. It's such a contrast from the Arthur we know and adore and (if you're Dionysia) smack upside the head in W@RF, and I'm curious to know why he left that job to come and work here; I'm guessing it was pay-related; intern soup evidently didn't go so well.
When chapter 16 started I was thinking 'ah at last, here comes the Fanfiction Gratuitous Prophetic/Soul-Searching Dream' but what I read was in fact very brilliant, very real-dream-like, not the sort of desperate trippy thing you'd usually get (which I guess reflects how much we've all developed from those early days of fanfiction; I read the old chapters from the original thread so I could read the replies you got with them, and it just reminded me of the excellent community we fanfiction writers had back then, with all the comments about Dave's and my stories, when we were but newblet writers with the world at our feet). Anyway, back on point, the dream was excellent, poetic and absorbing and as I said, suitably dream-like; you can imagine someone actually dreaming that. People usually write fiction-dreams and bizarre mashes of plot turned into nonsense - even J. K. Rowling did that - which is nothing like what real dreams are like; it's a stereotype. You wrote something convincing (though I have to say I'm disappointed by the lack of slapping black-skinned female mudokons encountered!
)
This sudden, strong emphasis on gyros and bits and pieces, whirring and grinding and hissing, gives the story a very unique sound, very original, and best of all it actually works. It's great, and it makes the story memorable.
Still on the subject of Arthur, I just noted the little thing about him still having 16 months left there. He's already been a year in the story and assuming he was there for some time before it began, call it three or four years he's signed there in total. Since a slig's life expectancy is only 20 years, thats like 12 or 16 years in our standards, and you suddenly feel the despair he has; he's as trapped there are the rest, as you implied in one of the original chapters.
I loved the enigmatic characters you've put in, the chronicler in particular was fabulous. When it was revealed that the glukkon was already talking to the stupid slig there was this horrible 'Oh no!' moment that literally had me putting my hands to my mouth in worry. The fact that the boss knows all about Larry already, and is using him to manipulate the other slaves... It actually reminds me a lot of the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork from the Discworld book series (IF YOU HAVEN'T READ ANY OF THESE, DO IT NOW!), the way he's sitting in this place above everyone else, manipulating them like a chess-player. Looking forward to seeing where that goes.
It's also good to see that you're still keeping the link to W@RF. After reading the old chapters I began to think you'd probably scrapped that by now since the RPG's gotten so complicated and involved, but it's great to see you're still planning; hope Arthur and Dek don't leave the RPG too soon!
My only criticism is that having the first 14 chapters in a single post is not so much a wall-o'-text as a 80-Storey-Tower-With-A-30-Foot-Tall-Neon-Sign-On-The-Roof-Reading-'Read-This-And-You'll-Be-Here-For-A-Week'-o'-Text, which is slightly offputting to new readers, which I think largely explains the low interest you've had in this so far.
Trust me when I say a 5-page-long thread is less daunting than a single titanic post for three reasons;
1) The five-page-thread contains 4 convenient places to stop and put a corporeal bookmark, whereas a post does not.
2) The five-page-thread comforts the reader with the promise of lots of non-plot replies by other posters, which means that there is much text that the reader can satisfyingly skip over, or if they're Amateur OWF Historians they can read for added pleasure. The replies create satisfying breaks between chapters, which both build tension and effectively give the reader time to breathe; reading it all in one go without breaks is much more daunting.
3) The thread allows the reader to cling on to the most sacred hope that the final page may not be very long at all (which in your case it isn't).
Gosh I've written a lot here.
At the end of the day, this story and particularly these new chapters have made me laugh, they've made me worry and they've made me sad. You are a
great writer and I sincerely hope we see much, much more of this, and indeed posts of similar quality in W@RF.