Chapter 1 of the sequel is up.

[tocryabout]

Summary: Five years after the end of The Aphanes, Joel and his friend Paul are working with homeless mutants in Montreal. When they meet Jeanne-Marie Beaubier, who is offered work with the Canadian government, Joel and his friends become embroiled in a system that may not be as benevolent to mutants as it appears.

Chapter 1 is The Pretty Girl in Santropol, but do go to the contents page first, if only to read the note on language.

Hope you enjoy.

(P.S., man, that summary sounds Sue-ish. It's not, I swear to God! I promise the sort of spazzy bitchy incompetence you're accustomed to from my characters.)

Comments

[youngest-one.livejournal.com]

This was excellent, as usual. Jeanne-Maire is one of those characters I barely know at all from the comics, but you paint an interesting picture here. Her mental illness was handled very well; Aurora is not a raving loon, just Jeanne-Marie's polar opposite. I'm eager to learn more about her, and how she will become entangled with the government. As experienced procrastinator, I found myself nodding in agreement with her description of realizing that the paper you've put off for a month is due tomorrow.

Joel has grown noticeably, but is still recognizably the boy we met in The Aphanes. His interactions with Paul were both amusing and touching, and if you do intend to go the Paul/Joel route, I'm curious to see how you will resolve such a relationship with Joel's chose path.

A great first chapter, and a great incentive to read more.

[waterstrider.livejournal.com]

Joel has grown noticeably, but is still recognizably the boy we met in The Aphanes.

This I'm very glad to hear. Five years is a long time, and I felt like the changes made sense to me, but I didn't know if other people would feel the continuity.

You could kind of tell that Marvel was trying to be realistic when portraying Jeanne-Marie/Aurora, but (a) information on MPD/DID was pretty sensationalised back then, and (b) it was still a bloody superhero comic and they weren't telling the sort of story that had time to deal with abuse and mental illness properly. So she's been everything from normal-but-repressed to completely schizophrenic. That opens up the sandbox considerably for me, of course, so I shouldn't complain. :-P