I am SO glad you decided to write a novelization of PSII. Honestly, if there's anyone who can do it so eloquently and beautifully, it's you. With that said, I am impressed by well how you have illustrated the opening scenes! All is in-character and perfectly expressed, from Rolf's nightmares, to Alis' battling of Dark Force, to Nei's timid personality.

Well done! Can't wait for the next chapter!

Hmm, first off, very powerful stuff with the Darum scene in the opening section of the story. I must say that the strong language in the initial paragraph caught me off-guard, not from any measure of shock but because it was OOC for Rolf...until I realized in the fourth paragraph that it wasn't Rolf at all narrating, but Darum (I immediately realized who it was at that point since I knew Rolf had rescued Nei from him once)! Despair leading to panic and panic leading to violence and chaos, setting the stage for the initial obstacle to the game.

(Personally, I wouldn't consider foul language in any reasonable quantity to be a reason to give a story an M rating, but that's just me...)

Getting on to Rolf and Nei, I love how you provide an in-story justification for the library sequences in the game, which of course were designed to infodump the player with basic information about the setting. Why is Rolf looking up information he already should know by heart? To try to get Nei to get bored and agree to stay home!

And now, it seems you're about to address the "Why didn't they just teleport to Oputa?" question by using Darum as an excuse...which certainly follows, especially given Rolf and Nei's previous encounters with him. Incidentally, on the subject of pacing, I'm rather happy to see that 7,000 words in, Rolf and Nei still aren't out of Paseo. In other words, you're committing the time and effort to make the word "Novelization" accurate, adding both plot and character elements to make the shell of a story that was PSII into a legitimate tale.

Nice piece of writing. Darum really deserves a better characterization, since he looks so foolish in the game because of the dialogue constraints of the game.

I like the way you portray Nei, having to deal mentally with her physical unnatural aging.

About the rating, dont worry, you can leave it as T, IMO. The movies today are filled with such language (and worse) and are rated T.

A pretty slow chapter, but hey, you managed to get nearly 3,000 words out of the prologue before you take command of Rolf, which is actually pretty impressive. I was interested to learn the Eusis's Adventure details (though the idea that after two years on the job and at age 20, Rolf is being considered as a future successor for the highest-ranking authority on the planet is a bit of a wall-banger, nonetheless you weren't the one who banged that wall), and I liked the way you laid out the mission for Rolf to make it seem like, well, an actual mission. On the one hand, you laid out why it was that Rolf was going out with so little support, and on the other hand, you had the Commander at least offer him *some* measure of official backup.

Nei's insistence on coming with was cute, too.

Was the name picked by the Commander for his personal account an in-joke? For some reason it sounds familiar, but if so I can't place where.

Great chapter! I especially liked your development of the Commander and his dilemma of whether to protect his people or stay faithful to Mother Brain (and how it carries over into his interactions with Rolf).

Wow, my favourite fan fiction writer writing about my favourite game! What else can I say?

Leaving the fanboyism aside :p, I just have to say that the prologue is very well-written. It is just one scene, but the descriptions and dialogues give life to the characters while they stick very well to the original loose script.

Keep making these coming!

Are you frickin' serious? LOL! I have to admit, you scare me sometimes, girl!:D

Anywho, very nice beginning. I have no issue with liberties taken(especially due to lack of a script), so you just do what you feel fits, and we'll see what comes of it.

So, you're tackling the full game now. Will this mean that the novel will "engulf" the events of your short stories (i.e. incorporate them), or will they take place "in between" the novel's events in the same way that they currently fill in gaps around the edges of the game's events? Either way, it will be nice to have PSII's events fleshed out.

Incidentally, on Ryuka, I always felt the easy answer was to have it be designed after PSI's "Fly" spell, where it was "keyed" to transport the user to one specific location (PSO's Ryuker (sic) did the same thing), and that the "teleport anywhere I've been before" version was simply developed sometime over the 1000-year gap...