Heya! I'm dekw (Daniel's the real name), the crazy writing this story.

It took me a bit to get this all uploaded (it came from google docs, and honestly this site's RTF formatting can just go die in a fire), but here's everything I have so far. I'm writing - I'm on and off, and kinda slow, but so far this isn't a dead story. If it is, I'll come back here and edit these to let you know! Anyways, without further ado!

NOTE: I'm not an incredibly fast writer! I just uploaded 15 chapters at once at the start of this fic, because I'd been writing it for myself on google docs for a while. That's all!

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CONTACT: My email is danielekwest at gmail dot com, and I check pretty obsessively, if I don't respond to anything here. Any questions or comments are welcome. If you find typos or any other mistakes, then feel free to let me know! If you just find my writing style confusing, that might be something you have to live with - sometimes I mess up, but sometimes it's just a bit complicated and I'm adamant about it staying. Still, I'm more than happy to try and explain anything I'm asked about.

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GRAMMAR WARNINGS AND REMINDERS: Being Canadian on the internet with a lot of Americans, I might have some inconsistencies (e.g color vs colour), so try not to pay those too much heed.

If a paragraph/text block starts with a quote and the paragraph ends with no quote, then it's the same character speaking on the next line. That comes up remarkably often, and I remember being 15 years old and thinking it was just a typo, missing a quote at the end.

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FORMATTING: Triple asterisks were being recognized as HTML something-or-other, so I've replaced them with a special unicode version (Full width asterisk or something), which the editor won't parse.

In order to preserve blank lines (such as in these author's notes), I have used the unicode character HANGUL CHOSEONG FILLER (U+115F, for anyone who wants to use it). This doesn't count as a space character, so the formatter won't remove the extra line, as it's seen as having characters on it.

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PERSONAL/WRITING: I have a lot of gripes with how a lot of shipping fic is done, whether in the length being too short, TRUE LOVE CONQUERS ALL being a cliche I hate, or other friends and important characters just disappearing - I'm pretty picky. I wrote this fic to see how I, with all my many picky annoying particularities (I don't think it's good or bad, it's all preference), would wind up writing a shipfic. 60000 words later, I'm not done something I thought would be a cutesy 20000 or so words, but here we are!

Something that seems like it's a bit unusual among writers is that I have very little 'control' over my characters. I have a subconscious (ha ha the irony, yes I know) sense of how things are going, and I kind of just envision each scene and the interactions in my conscious. Sometimes things I don't at all predict just happen, or characters just go ahead without me, and I can't really change or not write that without the story feeling incredibly dull or... unalive? to me. So very often, I can answer questions about characters as I would about a close friend, but I can't tell entirely what's up until things happens, or predict what's going to happen. As this story's mainly fluff, I don't have too many plans in particular. But Yuyuko, for example, if you were to ask me what she was thinking during [minor spoilers], I'd honestly be unable to tell you, despite that I wrote it.

OTHER: Reviews are always welcome, short or long, critical or praising. By no means do I claim to be a skilled writer; I kinda just slam words together in a way that works for me, and I know my style can be rambling and hard to keep track of for people.

If you want to suggest anything for verbal flow or fixing sentences, try to find examples! I have a hard time just taking general concepts, because there are a lot of phrases and such that need to be a certain way, for me. I welcome suggestions, but I'm often limited in the ones I can use - for example, all plot-related suggestions are basically wasted on me, because my control over my own story's events is very heavily subconscious. Often, I have no anticipation for characters' actions at all, I'm sort of just guessing based on what I know of them.

Misc Chapter Notes
(Kept from 18 onward, so far)

- Chapter 18
- This was a really really long chapter, because like none of it was planned, so it just kinda all added together. I didn't know Koishi would drag Marisa along for reminiscing with Alice part two, and I sure as heck didn't anticipate what'd happen once Koishi and Marisa were back home. Almost all of it just... well, fell into place mentally, so I worry a lot that the narrative flow on that chapter may have gone in the trashcan as a cost of my frantic writing to keep up.

- Koishi forcing me to change how the PoV worked for a bit was... quite an exercise. I apologize for any parts of the chapter here that just totally fall flat in pacing and the like.

- Chapter 19
- I had to do a lot of editing/reading/re-writing, and I'm at that point where I've read my own stuff enough that I'm convinced it's total trash and can't keep at it, so apologies for that and delays in getting it out. I love writing this, but man, I don't like reading my own stuff.

- I knew that Marisa going back to find Mima would happen sooner or later, but not this much sooner. I don't know why I was surprised - of COURSE Marisa would find a way and an excuse to just rush headfirst into what little passes for a plot in this fic. Looks like it's just plain set for next chapter.

- Koishi's PoV is weird to write without Marisa, since then the flow of her view depends a lot on what she's reading. I had trouble writing the pace of this one, because Reimu... doesn't think about things all that much. She's pretty practical, doesn't care all that much - Koishi watches for a lot of things, and Marisa's always overthinking, so there was just so much less filler in terms of thought between dialogue.

- Chapter 20
- And here, I break the big six-digits! This is now... uhhh... it's got words. I don't know. I don't know of any significance to it, but I did break that 100 000 word mark!

- This feels like the most off-the-rails chapter so far, for whatever that means to me. There's also a lot of non scene cut point of view transitions, so the pacing feels a little weird. My pacing always feels a little off to me, though. Or more than a little off.

- Patchouli kinda showed up on her own. Reimu and Alice I knew would be there, but not her as much. I don't know how she knew, so I hope my subconscious at least has an explainable reason for it somewhere.

- I didn't really know anything about how the confrontation with Mima was going to go. The spell Marisa casts is probably the farthest thing from canon/weirdest in-this-story action, but it kinda just... well, I predicted/controlled very little this chapter.

- Koishi's definitely gonna be pretty worried about that whole collapsing thing. Marisa's definitely blown herself up in a few bad ways before, but Koishi hasn't been around for it.

- I hope I didn't disappoint anyone hoping for reoccurring Mima...

- Chapter 21
- A shorter chapter, recovery as it is.

- Next chapter will be where anything relevant happens

- Feels like one of my weaker chapters (then again, everything I write feels like bad writing to me...)

- Reimu's reaction was, like many things, not entirely expected on my part. This is playing with canon outside of spell card rules - which are almost ubiquitous - where that seems a lot more serious. In one of the supplemental things (was it part of forbidden scrollery? I forget) Reimu pretty much just strikes down somebody who became a Youkai, despite him mostly trying to be innocuous about it. And it's no spell cards, no humor, just smacked down with the gohei and gone. So I guess this is sort of extrapolating from that?

- If I hadn't said it before: I hate this depression thing an it sucks. Did I say feels like one of my weaker chapters? What I MEANT was I had to get a friend to read it so that I had at least ONE second opinion that it wasn't as bad as I felt about it for no apparent reason and it wouldn't ruin my entire story.

- I'M NOT SO GOOD AT THIS.

- Chapter 22
- A more relaxed chapter, just kinda recovery.

- That whole mortality thing is a little more looming than I meant it to be, but such is the way characters are. Marisa, as ever, thinks about things a lot.

- It was a quiet fun kinda chapter, because when characters are just talking, I don't really have too much conscious control. They tend to kinda do and say whatever they want - even if that's just my subconscious.

- What's next? It seems like most of the currently open threads have been addressed or resolved. We'll find out next chapter!

- Chapter 23
- This one is a highly intuitive chapter. That means I have very little idea of what happened here, and am mostly guessing and estimating. In some sense, I'm just as left in the dark as all my readers! :'D

- Sorry for the wait; new job's been busy and I had a friend over from Mexico for a week!

- It's interesting watching how Koishi interacts with just about everyone, to me - it lets me learn a lot about my own characters, somehow. Well, not MY characters as in I own them or anything, but you know what I mean.

- Chapter 24
- Well, that's a thing that happened. I knew Marisa was gonna go play with Flandre at some point in the story as soon as she first visited the SDM. As usual, I wasn't very sure how it would go, or exactly how I write Flandre until it happened.

- I've started to feel a little less stupid about how little conscious control I have! It's something I quite enjoy, as much as I complain.

- I don't interpret Flandre's ability to destroy as metaphorical/destroy literally anything, even symbolic things, since canonically it has a clear interpretation (destroy the eye of something and the whole thing goes boom, is all). I am taking artistic liberty with her being dangerous, since there's nothing too much in canon for that.

- Koishi's still got her touch for spellcards! She's not too aware, since it's sort of a subconscious expression of self.

- The scene in the opening of this chapter was... odd, but I really liked it. It's probably more shades of a story I may write in the future, when this one finally comes to an end (see: precipice, and that one thing Yukari still has to do.)

- Chapter 25
- It was kinda neat finding out more about how the mansion works.

- Flandre's a kid, but a responsible kid on the whole, and that's something that really resonates with Koishi, I think.

- The whole accident scenario is a very real risk that I kinda thought of about when the story did. Now I'm sort of worried.

- Working around Reimu's going to be... I don't know how it'll go!

- Chapter 26
- Not going to lie, I was pretty hesitant to upload this one. As far as "reality ensues", this is about as harsh as it gets.

- I was at least somewhat aware this might happen, but... well, it was not a particularly fun chapter to write. When did I get all attached?

- Oddly, the opening of the chapter really gets to me too. This entire chapter was just a whole load of not fun.

- Hope and uncertainty remain. Where it goes... well, I should know more than I do as the writer, but alas, I don't.

- Chapter 27
- This is where after having a rough winter (as they always are. Seasonal depression stacks with the more typical clinical variety, so it's not fun) I hesitate on posting a new chapter because I'm obviously so rusty that it's all garbage.

- There's not too much to note offhand here, I think.

- Chapter 28
- Okay, I'm sorry for the huge delays here. The stack-up of Seasonal and Major depression has been thoroughly kicking my butt. I've been stuck down hardly getting anything done for a while. Even when I *did* finish this chapter, it took me a while to work up the self-esteem to post it.

- Things may be slow for a bit. Winter's proving hard to function during. I'll keep at it, though - I'm quite attached to this story!

- Chapter 29
- Well, things aren't dead. Truth be told, I wrote this one a while ago, I just figured I was so rusty that I'd have to re-write it all and scrap it and it'd be awful etc etc. As it turns out, I don't hate my writing quite that much. Still, I kept putting it off, until now. This might be a recurring theme, whenever I'm not doing so well, but that's me and my stupid brain.

- Koishi here is making me a little uneasy. I think things may get a fair amount worse before they get better.

- This was supposed to just be my fluff fic...