Fantastic story. I loved the writing and the way you have the characters down perfectly in my humble opinion. Thanks for the ride!

Fascinating : ) Thank you

Oh wow, that's was brilliant! I read this because it was listed as an inspiration for Wit's End which I loved and this is fabulous. I love the building up of frantic desperation, the increasing intensity with which each scenario is tried and despairing cast aside. Rodney can't, and won't sacrifice Ronon for John. He also can't pay any price that John would find too high to pay and so cycles through it again and again and again, taking the reader on the gut wrenching journey with him. His increasing despair as he can't ever get it quite right is palpable. The introduction to the story, discussing strategy games, a bit of insight on John with a teaser at the end, makes the whole set up seem so innocent at first. By the end of the second section it is now obvious that this isn't a game, nor is it real but that the stakes are horribly high. Then we find out how Rodney got here and what chance remark sent him down this path. The next section again ends in failure, on too high a price for success. Then back to what this actually this, this game of chance and flipping back and forth seamlessly, without jolting the reader out of the story between what's happening and what can be accepted and what can't. Until Rodney crashes out of it and he'll never know how that really happened. That the end success he has no choice in after his has made so many hundreds of choices in that chair is beautifully ironic. It turns out that while he was helpless their comrades took his intel and used it to mount a successful rescue, the one thing he couldn't achieve. In the end Rodney did what he did so often, provided others with the tools needed to pull it off. He just nearly killed himself doing it which would have been another price too high for John Sheppard. A brilliant story and a terrific ride. Loved it!

Powerfull writing.

Wonderful. Rodney is such a paradox of overwhelming arrogance and fragile uncertainty, that in the end he achieves miracles and doesn't even see them. It's wonderful.

it's harsh, that he wouldn't save sheppard if it meant one of the marines died. i like that he wasn't happy with that choice either though.

That's quite possibly the best sga story i've ever read. thank you very much for writing this! You've got a nice grasp of the characters, good story too, nice psychological twist... I hope you have others stories, i'm gonna check it out right now.

good job

Very, very good. Characterizations are spot on, especially Rodney's frantic scrambling to fix everything and Ronon's easy acceptance of his potential fate. It sure is nice to see some actual science fiction in a sci-fi based story. Thank you for posting.

Oh my God.

I love you.

I know I should be more detailed than that, but everything's wonderful. The emotion, the plot, Rodney, the realization at the end, oh... everything.

Gah. Thank you for this.

OMG I am so in love with story. I am just speechlessly in love with this story.

Boy! Did I like this or what? I was kinda lost in all the scenarios, but I figured it out. Great story. Thanks.

) lovely piece. Great characterization!

You are awesome and you are cool and should be worshiped accordingly!

Awesome story, must have more soon! Please!

Wow. That was awesome. Badass. Good techno-babble, by the way. Very good. Sounds completely plausible to my scientifically uneducated mind. Wonderfully written, as are all your works (I'm a One Piece/Atlantis fan, as it were). Poignant in some parts, and I think I liked the ending especially. How it all turned out. Yeah, that was the best part. Definitely.

Couldn't find anything wrong with it... well, if I were to nitpick, I would say that Sheppard's dog tags wouldn't say LT COL JOHN A SHEPPARD. They're not written like that. It would say SHEPPARD JOHN A on first line, your military ID number followed by your branch (USN, USAF, etc) and your blood type on the second line, the third line being your religious pref... but yeah, that's not really noticeable (I'm in the military, so I couldn't help but notice). Couldn't find any typos or anything like that (was really too caught up in the story to pay much attention, though, haha )

Again, awesome job. Totally going in my favs.

What a clever story and so well written. Your techno-babble certainly convinced me. Thank you! And any story that puts Rodney through the wringer so thoroughly and keeps him so in character deserves an extra cookie.