Welcome to my story. In light of a guest review that elaborated on a certain problem with this story, I thought it might behoove me to add this as a forward.
"Kalinysta 5/12/13 . chapter 1
Well, while I like the idea behind this very much, and I appreciate your attention to grammar, spelling and punctuation, I have a very hard time believing that a group of teen/pre-teens who have lived on a planet under the Goa'uld as slaves, and are basically illiterate, have suddenly figured out how to fly a spaceship! Come on. That's like saying a bunch of teenagers from the local middle school go and steal the space shuttle and figured out how to fly it.
"The first rule of writing is to follow Gene Roddenberry's maxim of Make it Believable.
"Now if you had a Jaffa who decided to save these kids who flew the Al'kesh into Earth's airspace and then was killed in the crash... that would be much more believable."
Actually, Kalinysta, if you had read it more closely than you did, you would know that I was saying something even more outlandish; the youngest of that group figured out how to operate the Alkesh all by herself and taught the others how to do it. She then became fluent in English in seven days, French in two days, and memorized every book she read. In other words, Aylala was deliberately written with qualities that allow her to act as a dues ex machina. Dues ex machina means "god from the machine" or in martial terminology, "ghost in the machine", and by its proper definition, the dues ex machina is something that is introduced at a crucial point to solve a plot, such as in Ancient Greek theater, a god lowered onto the stage that makes an alteration to the plot, usually to get the protagonist out of trouble. The purpose of writing a main character as a dues ex machina, or a character that literally has the capacity to manipulate the story as he or she wishes is to obey Horace's statement in Ars Poetica, that a god from the machine must never be used to solve a plot.
The alternative, as is used here, is to make the main character exceptional in skill or ability, a variation on the "superhero". If you continue to read, you might realize that this story is largely written with Greek mythology in mind, and not only does Aylala function as a dues ex machina, but a dues ex machina is, in fact, scheduled to make an appearance in this story to help Aylala out of a jam, a plot device akin to a superhero being saved by his more powerful (or perhaps already deceased and therefore ghostly e. g. Kal-El and Jor-El, Jor-El probably being the best modern example of a dues ex machina) father, or a Greek hero being saved by a god. I chose for Aylala the bow and arrow as a weapon of choice, first for its current popularity in current pop culture (e. g. The Hunger Games, the Avenger Hawkeye, Arrow) but more for its heavenly associations; Artemis/Diana, the huntress-Orion, the Hunter-Apollo, the god of the sun-Cupid, the god of love…yes, Cupid's use of the bow was a tremendous factor in my decision. Bastet is another example of a bow wielding goddess.
My thinking in giving Aylala her skills was to give her abilities beyond the realm of what we would consider possible, and yet to give them a mundane quality, to give her a combination of gifts of and skills that interact in such a way that they make her a genius; superpowers that real people could really be born with in the real world…perhaps outlandish but not outside of the realm of possibility. Who is to say what such a person could be capable of and as a point of fact, Gene Roddenberry has often used children in his stories in such a capacity. One of the questions that the characters in this story are constantly asking is "How can this girl be able to do what she does?" Well, if there was an easy answer to that question, I doubt that Aylala would be as interesting as she is.
