[Haruhi] In Your Dreams

[Arakawa]

Great chapter. Just a couple of observations:

Spoiler: ShowHide

but it's so unexpected you're just kind of dumbfounded until what's happening really kicks in.

Really not sure about this use of the expression 'kicks in'. Maybe if 'the realization of what's happening' or something was 'kicking in', rather than just the actual event. Or maybe 'until your mind adjusts to what's happening' or similar.

The kitchen's fully stocked with everything I need, although it takes me a bit of hunting and fumbling through cabinets to actually find all the equipment I need and get the hot water going.

It bears observing that Haruhi could probably have just materialized hot freshly brewed tea >_>;;

Oh well, her mind is clearly on other things right now.

Sure enough, she's got her hair up in a ponytail today, to which I give an approving nod.

This is probably a bit late for Haruhi to be checking that, since Mikuru appears earlier:

The answer is a bit of a surprise when it comes, although it shouldn't have been. Sakanaka is waiting outside expectantly, looking a bit nervous as Tsuruya and Mikuru come to a halt behind her.

Given that Mikuru's ponytail would be at the front of Haruhi's mind, it feels a bit odd at that moment that she doesn't even mention glancing towards her to see if she's followed the instruction at this point.

(Of course, if Mikuru is facing Haruhi head-on (... well... and not moving her head around at all during the entire ensuing conversation...), whether or not she has a ponytail wouldn't be visible, which complicates things... I don't know. It just feels like this huge concern has temporarily dropped from Haruhi's mind if it's not even mentioned until several paragraphs down.)

Given all that, probably the most natural point to mention the ponytail would be when Mikuru follows Sakanaka into the room.

"I'll get right on it," Koizumi nods, heading back out the door -- and passing Mikuru on her way in.

EDIT: now that I've taken another look, doesn't the above contradict this earlier:

She nods, heading inside along with the two upperclassmen [i.e. Tsuruya and Mikuru]. "Um... sorry if I'm intruding on your meeting," she starts off.

The whole scene seems inconsistent on when Mikuru is in the room, when she's entering the room, and when Haruhi would logically glance to see if she's wearing a ponytail.

[Halbarad]

I've been lurking on these forums for awhile, mainly for reading KBDH, IYD, and looking for recommendations. Thought this time I would make some comments:

Thanks for delurking, and for the feedback!

Although this can be hand-waved, I don't ever recall Haruhi ever being at Mikuru's place before.

Actually she has. She dragged Mikuru out of her apartment when she was trying to hide there during the shooting of the movie.

Also, if this is Mikuru's home in the far future, I would think that there would be some futuristic gizmos around the dream apartment that Haruhi couldn't identify that would further key Haruhi into thinking that the rooms were out of place for Mikuru's dream.

Well, the main tipoff is that Mikuru is in an arcology-style building - probably several hundred stories tall, and far larger than anything that exists in the real world now, particularly for residential space.

As far as futuristic gadgets go, think about the modern era - how many things have been introduced (as household objects that you'd keep for decoration or what have you) in the past 30 years that someone from before then wouldn't recognize? About the only thing is a desktop computer, and those are even falling out of vogue for more portable devices. Everything trends towards miniaturization and being unobtrusive (at least with modern tech), so extrapolating that to Mikuru's time you wouldn't even -see- the really futuristic stuff they have, which fits with the cybernetic implants concept pretty well. So the gadgets are probably there somewhere, but not in a way that they'd pop out and scream at Haruhi that they're from some far-flung future.

Silly Haruhi. You should remember your own advice. You can't involuntarily show signs of nervousness if you don't want to.

Case of easier said than done. None of them are exactly expert at this (yet, anyway.)

When I say this aloud to myself, putting emphasis on the word "not" sounds out of place to me. I suggest not italicizing or boldfacing "not" here.

Kind of inclined to leave this in; it seems natural enough to me. YMMV case, I think.

Thanks for the input, though!

[Halbarad]

Really not sure about this use of the expression 'kicks in'. Maybe if 'the realization of what's happening' or something was 'kicking in', rather than just the actual event. Or maybe 'until your mind adjusts to what's happening' or similar.

Missing some words. Should be "the realization of what's happening" etc, corrected now.

It bears observing that Haruhi could probably have just materialized hot freshly brewed tea >_>;;

Oh well, her mind is clearly on other things right now.

Partly that and partly she doesn't know what Mikuru has in mind for her to do. If Mikuru's asking her (or her double) to make tea, it makes sense that she'd literally need to make the tea. If she just wanted it materialized, she could have done that herself. Not to say that it couldn't happen, but Haruhi hasn't seen any of her puppets manipulate the dream directly, so why would Mikuru's?

Sure enough, she's got her hair up in a ponytail today, to which I give an approving nod.

This is probably a bit late for Haruhi to be checking that, since Mikuru appears earlier:

The answer is a bit of a surprise when it comes, although it shouldn't have been. Sakanaka is waiting outside expectantly, looking a bit nervous as Tsuruya and Mikuru come to a halt behind her.

Given that Mikuru's ponytail would be at the front of Haruhi's mind, it feels a bit odd at that moment that she doesn't even mention glancing towards her to see if she's followed the instruction at this point.

(Of course, if Mikuru is facing Haruhi head-on (... well... and not moving her head around at all during the entire ensuing conversation...), whether or not she has a ponytail wouldn't be visible, which complicates things... I don't know. It just feels like this huge concern has temporarily dropped from Haruhi's mind if it's not even mentioned until several paragraphs down.)

Given all that, probably the most natural point to mention the ponytail would be when Mikuru follows Sakanaka into the room.

"I'll get right on it," Koizumi nods, heading back out the door -- and passing Mikuru on her way in.

EDIT: now that I've taken another look, doesn't the above contradict this earlier:

She nods, heading inside along with the two upperclassmen [i.e. Tsuruya and Mikuru]. "Um... sorry if I'm intruding on your meeting," she starts off.

The whole scene seems inconsistent on when Mikuru is in the room, when she's entering the room, and when Haruhi would logically glance to see if she's wearing a ponytail.
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Did some considerable reworking of the scene, although pasting it would involve repasting the whole thing. Tsuruya's no longer present - she never does anything in the scene anyway, so there's no point to having her there. Mikuru still comes in right after Sakanaka, and so Koizumi doesn't pass her on the way in - but Haruhi does focus on Mikuru after he does.

As far as not paying attention to the ponytail early, Haruhi is a very focused person in general, so I can see her avoiding the distraction of checking out Mikuru while she's talking to Sakanaka. She's been distracted thinking about her all day anyway, and putting off the moment of truth isn't that big a stretch (to me at least).


As always, thanks for the feedback!

[Halbarad]

And chapter 10 is ready for review. The end is in sight!

[JonBob]

Not much to correct:

Spoiler: ShowHide

I can't really be thrilled about that, but honest is what we were searching for, so I guess I'll have to hope that's for the best.

honesty

Other than that, just some nice family moments, some cute Haruhi/Kyon moments, and some interesting Mikuru moments.

[Brian]

Thanks for the correction, JonBob. :)

[Arakawa]

Just the one typo ("bee down"):

I know the phone lines have bee down, so it's not entirely his fault he couldn't call, but still.

Something I found implausible. We discussed this on IRC, just putting it up for posterity.

Spoiler: ShowHide

Not sure, but it seems to me that what Kyon shows them from the end of Disappearance and the subsequent conversation should be more than enough for Mikuru to piece things together about there being an older version of herself involved. If that's intentional, then the next bit of Kyon narration could be tweaked to make it a bit more easy to determine that it's a relief for him not to have worried about letting slip that information. Not understanding that point led to a lot of confusing speculation for me about how the memory transmission mechanism works and how they understand it to work... editing that bit is not particularly essential, though.

[Brian]

Hmmm.

Spoiler: ShowHide

I think Kyon's thoughts about Haruhi handling what he's not supposed to really covers that angle already, personally.

[Halbarad]

Thanks for the feedback, everyone.

[Brian]

Aaand ... a chapter eleven.  Drawing very close to the, er, close of this one. :p

[JonBob]

No errors that popped out at me, so... comments!

Spoiler: ShowHide

I could just imagine her leaping into the middle of the pack, flinging oversized goons in every direction with incredible martial arts...

I like this shoutout to BDH

Hmmm, so that's how Koizumi sees the brigade (through the lens of a gangster movie)? Mikuru is the wicked vixen, Yuki has powers but is predictable, and Kyon is the one in charge, but doesn't really know what's going on. That would make him mostly powerless and Haruhi the train itself?

Cliffhanger! Imma guess... Ryouko!

Edit:
Oh right, there is one thing that caught my eye, Haruhi's dream and pre-dream. It just feels out of place in the fic, since the transition is a bit abrupt. I had to stop and re-read a bit to establish whose PoV it was. Also, since that part was fairly abrupt, it caused me to have to evaluate where I was at for each subsequent scene change, even though the rest are just Kyon.

[Ristridin]

Spoiler: ShowHide

"I guess that might be," I admit. Without my phone to check the time, I've got no real idea how long I've spent -- but surely aunt Yurie is done by now? "Alright -- I'll clean up here, then."

Aunt Rena maybe?

[Brian]

Oops, thanks for the catch Ristridin. :)

[Arakawa]

Spoiler: ShowHide

but Matsuri is still her more quietly reformed self. They share a side of the kotatsu while their mothers parcel out food.\

Got a weird random backslash at the end there. Also seeing it in the HTML source as a raw backslash, so should be straightforward to figure out where that came from.

She did tell me that she wouldn't be able to make it to the dream tonight due to some other business she needed to take care of.

Umm... I'm curious how Mikuru managed to tell Haruhi that, in waking life. If they're under a sufficient degree of surveillance that Haruhi displaying knowledge that Mikuru is a time traveler would lead to trouble, wouldn't explicit mention of making it to a dream be enough to give things away to the time agency as well?

And if she communicates that in coded form, what was the nature of the code?

I may be misremembering how things went in the last chapter, but this strikes me as a plot hole.

Post-IRC discussion: realistically speaking, Mikuru would not say in in so many words. However, it still sounds like a plot hole the way it's phrased. Maybe

She did manage to let me know that

or

She did manage to warn me

Other than that, things seem to be coming along. With the way the fic is laid out, far too little has been revealed so far to comment on how it's looking to wrap up as a whole. Looking forward to the next chapter.

[Halbarad]

Got a weird random backslash at the end there. Also seeing it in the HTML source as a raw backslash, so should be straightforward to figure out where that came from.

Easily fixed.

Post-IRC discussion: realistically speaking, Mikuru would not say in in so many words. However, it still sounds like a plot hole the way it's phrased.

Changed to: 

She didn't say it outright, but she implied that she wouldn't be able to make it to the dream tonight due to some other business she needed to take care of.

Thanks again for the commentary, and I'll probably get this chapter posted later today.