Definitely - the latter contains no sympathy for the character, which is something I can't really do.





That's a tough call sometimes though. I've fallen into the trap before of using a character that's not the same name as a poster, and that I've seen used before in your stories so I thought it was probably ok to use, except that was absolutely not the case. And it wasn't even an issue then that I changed anything significantly, just that I use the character, period, and it wasn't entrusted to me.





I kind of made a change to that with Keiko Takashi in World Class for a little extra realism. If someone's holding a gun and trying to shoot her, she'll hide behind something. She'll try *not* to be shot at because in a more realistic universe, that's highly dangerous.

Because of her training, instead she'll be so patient and silent in her hiding spot that the shooter will eventually feel compelled to check if she's still there, at the very least to stop wasting bullets if there's nothing there. That's how she disarms them.

Her best weapon is patience. One of my favorite bits to do is her surrendering so that the armed people relax and figure she's captured and neutralized, and then she hurts them all a lot.

The other touch of real-ish I like to add is she explains to someone once that because she's relatively small and lightweight, she has to end a fight very quickly, because the longer it drags on, the higher the probability that she'll be injured or killed.





*They* probably would, because while it's fun to speculate about their design, they don't have the knowledge the writers do. Anna and Nena don't have a quantification of what exactly this power barrier will do to them, and the threat of death is very real. So they probably wouldn't take the chance.

They are essentially complicated machines, and they do have to worry that one little thing critical to their systems that was overlooked would sentence them to instant death. Or almost as bad, for them, to be stuck in a non-responsive state. It's not whether it would happen that contributes to their decision to leave, but the fear that it might.

Now as for if they're capable of doing something to help in the way out, like grab Hallie's essence just before she dies, that's another topic altogether.

I believe so far, Lara Night is the only one of my characters that has any kind of actual experience of what the barrier does to her powers, so she's less fearful of what potentially might happen. She knows it won't kill her outright. I suppose the question might come up why she doesn't evacuate people to her own universe; the answer is she doesn't really know if she can even take passengers there, and she doesn't want to obliterate friends by accident while experimenting to see if it works. That's Al B Harper's job.





She has to keep busy somehow while waiting for those with more spectacular abilities figure out what do do about the powers outage.