48. Lightning

He was a man in blue with shining medals on his chest, and he walked like one not long for this world – staggering blindly, drunkenly; shaggy, matted mop of black sagging in his eyes; blood running in thin streams down the coarse planes of his hard-set jaw.

He struck quickly, precisely, and in a wave of his hand a city block bellowed ash and flame and smoke. In a snap of his fingers, fast as lightning and just as beautiful, the world exploded in red, orange, yellow hues.

And then, dropping his hand to his side, he slowly plodded on.


Ah, I have a response to an anonymous reviewer, nik, who left a pretty brutal review in response to a comment I made on my last chapter.

Listen, I don't think I deserved quite the stern talking to or "excessive quotation marks" you gave in your review. I understand the manga quite well, thanks, and I understand Arakawa's reasoning very well, too. That will not change the fact that there are certain things about the story that I don't like. Certain directions that the story goes when I would prefer they head another way. I accept Arakawa's decisions and I love her characters and plotlines to death, but that doesn't mean I have to swallow everything she feeds me. Yeah, I do tend to side with Ed because he is my favorite character, and as a fan I have a direction in my head that I would like to see him go. I do not, for instance, like Ed/Winry. I do not like that Ed/Winry is happening more and more in the story. It is an opinion that I am allowed to have. This is fanfiction, which probably means that every author on this site wants to change something about the series as it is. I don't appreciate having my knowledge of a series that I have spent a lot of time in impugned for a simple statement of opinion.

If you guys would rather I kept my opinion to myself from now on, you really need only say so.