I still think, however, that if she saw someone about to be torn in pieces in front of her very eyes she'd dive from cover and risk herself to try and save them, even if that meant exposing herself to extreme danger, I don't think she's cold enough to just watch from cover as innocents are murdered thinking "now is not the time for me to intervene, what a shame."

Here we come up against one of the challenges of a shared universe multi-character round robin storyline. Given that situation, the options boil down to:

1. The hero does nothing - this damages the hero's "heroism standing" and may tarnish readers' views of the character.

2. The hero leaps in and somehow impossibly saves the day - but this robs the story of a fuller resolution, and may "steal" the resolution away from other heroes more involved in that particular bit of the narrative and more "deserving" of getting the win in this case (see Dr Strange arriving to solve all the problems in Avengers: Disassembled).

3. The hero leaps in and gets taken down so other heroes get the credit for solving the situation - this can sometimes punk the hero that tries and fails, showing them as ineffective and requiring another hero to pull their fat out of the fryer. It can be made to work, but it has to be done very carefully.

That's why in this case I'll probably go for my usual fourth solution: find a reason why the hero isn't there to be presented with that dilemma in the first place.

Even this comes with baggage. If the hero's not there just because he or she is at home with their feet up, or because they're not smart enough to know where they should be, those can also damage the character. But if the hero's off on a mission of their own, taking forward a different part of the storyline, then there's every reason they're not able to intervene and the problem goes away.

> Or that new alien race I added may have something for her to do at the time. Or maybe Lisa. Or she could be given a singular task that will leave her as a casual observer, or possibly in the dark, about what's going on.

That's why I was wondering about Lara meeting the aliens. If she's embroiled in first contact then she'd definitely in Option 4. And I admit thatm of all the elements in the Saving the Future story so far, the aliens are the ones I haven't thought of a way to integrate yet.

> > On an entirely different topic, how's the Archive repair coming along? > The Search has been fixed for a few days now, if that's what you mean. It had an obnoxious typo so it wasn't searching the dates correctly. > If you mean links from your web site, the message numbers are now 2 digits longer. If you have a URL that ends with something like "rpy=parodyverse-20080615002456" just add "00" to the end. That's how the older message numbers were patched for the new system.

That's going to be challenging for me to update on archived pages.