[WarpObscura]

Thanks for it! I reviewed your Who-crossover. I'll take some time here to reply to your review... Or would you prefer it to be Review Reply'd?

It was a bit hard to delve into at first, but easier so after I figured out the

Did you mean to complete the sentence, perhaps with "names of the characters" or something like that?

You handled a number of aspects better than Sunrise - for instance, the conversation between Sommerhoffnung (Mai... yes, I know, she's actually Natsuki's counterpart) and Kan-za-ji (Yuuichi). There's a certain feeling I get when the dialogue is "real-wordly/plausible/flowing" (as opposed to "forced/artificial/convoluted"), when they say exactly what real people thrust into these unfortunate circumstances would probably say.

I daresay I did what I could, but there are some things we Muggles just won't ever experience, eh?

I assume the "Otome character who doesn't appear on screen much but nevertheless plays a significant part in the story" is Lena Sayers?

Got it in one.

There's one thing I couldn't understand from the context. HiME is set in "our" world - and maintains plausible deniability as much as it can. Otome is set in the far future. What about this story? It seems that it uses fictional countries and languages (like Kinglish) on an alternate Earth in a setting inspired by Chinese culture - is this correct?

Actually, the names are amongst the very few things that reference the idea's original roots in the Mega Man Battle Network series. Names like Choina, Electopia, Kingland, Netopia, and Yumland were originally from there, but Gothofurtoa is a modified portmaneau of "Goth" and "Frankfurt" carried out in that series' whimsical naming convention.

First, formatting. Some of it I got covered before - the separators, for example. It may be an artistic choice, but it's really hard to read with separators like these. FFN supports bold and italic fonts, centering (which can be used for titles and separators), horizontal rules and line-breaks. Next time, you can preview the document and make corrections in the browser itself before publishing, even if FFN's uploader mangles the original formatting (it does that constantly).

I'm aware of the editing features, but having to work with them every time I edit the document gets tiring very fast. I'll look into it, though.

Second, while "Quake I symbol" is funny, it's not necessary to call it that - just establish somewhere in the exposition that the KOUTASHI symbol looks like that, and then refer to it as the KOUTASHI symbol from now on. It's better for suspension of disbelief.

Crap, I should have known I wasn't clear enough to distinguish between the KOUTAISHI symbol, that is the spiral, and the alto-clef-entwined-with-the-Quake-symbol. I'll fix the thing sometime in the future.

Third, hair colors. Of course, it's probably just me... but I just regard the convention as a convention, and maintain that if those weird anime hair colors don't exist, they don't exist period. So, for example, in the Doctor Who story, I took the liberty in "retconning" Natsuki and Nina's hair colors because I can't accept that they LITERALLY have blue hair. Of course, one can assume that the convention in this story is just a convention as well, so we can recognize the characters, and they don't literally have these hair colors. Which I will. Even if the Word of Author(tm) tells me otherwise.

I suppose you can treat this however you want. In the end, this sort of detail is minor. Didn't you catch that Lampshade Hang in the first chapter? XD

And fourth, I'll probably mention this objection in a "My MEGAMI" review, but it's not necessary to decipher these wacky acronyms. "HiME" was a borderline case, but it was within the degrees of plausible. Even "乙HiME" was already pushing the borders of "no-way-they-could-have-adopted-something-like-that-ness", and the proposed meaning of "KOUTASHI" was outright silly. There's no need to decipher them, really - we don't know what SEELE, NERV and GEHIRN stand for in Evangelion (except for the meaning of the original German words), but that doesn't in any way damage the story. Some things are better left unexplained - or just ignored.

I sort of figured that out after-the-fact, but I never really wanted to play this 100% straight in the first place.

Having said all that, I'm looking forward to Chapter 4. You seem to be taking a "serious" approach, and as a rabid fanservice hater, I'm eager to see what you'll do with the fanservice-ridden fourth episode.

Well, I couldn't quite figure out how to make that particular episode work, so you'll have to wait, I'm afraid. On the other hand, if you so desire, you may skip ahead to the replacement for Episode 14, which I have made a second draft of. Here: http://community.livejournal.com/maihime/81941.html

I notice you didn't say anything about the various inline references. Any reason why?