Everyone,
This story has been deadfic for so long I doubt anyone's actually reading it, and that's my fault, so I'd like to start off apologizing for that. I got caught up in a lot of things, so it's been forever and two weeks since I even thought of updating this.
The main problem here was that I was unable to determine where exactly I should go with the story, and the hesitation resulted in the entire thing collapsing on itself. Superfluous characters that I now feel detract from the storytelling have already been placed in, as well as plot elements that don't work with the outline I had on closer inspection. Part of this was due to my inexperience causing me to try and fit the chapters I'd written to a new storyline instead of going with the one I started out with.
Since the resulting train-wreck has made this fic astonishingly hard to work with at this point, and my own mass revision of many things, including how I write, I figured out a solution.
This will be the last update for this incarnation of the fic. I am going to take some time to work out what I want to do with the story, and then start over from Chapter One with an entirely new fic, after which I will delete this one. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but I do so in order to shield anyone that was reading and liking this story from my own mistakes in writing it. Here's to hoping my second try will be a more enjoyable read than the first.
Thank you for your patience and reviews. I will endeavor to do better with the new version than I did with this one.