Mission on Mimban Eight

[klcthebookworm]

Previous Installments

Introduction, One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Outline for Mission on Mimban

What Happens in the Chapter

Chapter Eight opens with a detailed look at the state of Star Wars medicine before bacta was invented. The female Imperial doctor rebuilds Grammel's right forearm, presumably damaged in the explosion Luke sent down the corridor, and really the only thing he has lost was his ability to sweat there. His head took more damage."He ran a hand over the dark suture that ran from the upper part of his partly shaved skull down by his rebuilt ear to disappear like a fishing line into his lower jaw." The doctor asks that Grammel spare the stormtroopers from execution for the prison break. Grammel doesn't like it but he can't argue with her figures on what the Imperials need to conduct a search for the escapees. They both share the opinion that the escape must have had outside help.

The next scene picks up with our protagonists after seven days traveling toward the temple. They talk about how long it will take to reach the temple. Leia promises Halla a reward from the Alliance. Halla is not interested in joining outlaws. Both of them turn to Luke to say who is right. Luke is spared actually answering when the crawler hits a bog and starts sinking. They end up accidentally driving on the back of a wandrella, so naturally the giant worm monster gives chase. It catches the crawler, so everyone abandons it. Luke and Leia split off from the others, and the wandrella ends up chasing them into a "ceremonial cistern", which turns out to be a fathomless hole in the ground. They find a spiral vine ladder down into it and climb down to get away from the monster. The ladder ends but there is a ledge with a vine handrail.

While Luke and Leia are clinging to the ledge, the wandrella lifts its head over the wall above obviously "searching with senses unimaginable." The ledge ends in an opening and the pit wall, which is large enough for them to hide in. The wandrella starts coming down after them. Luke realizes he lost his blaster pistol while running, but he pulls out the lightsaber while Leia screams. And the wandrella overextends and falls down the bottomless shaft, tearing off everything they used to climb down to the alcove.

Halla, the Yuzzem, and Threepio look down at them from the surface. They can't construct a new ladder from the vines here, but Halla tells them their alcove is actually a Coway shaft. The Coway are related to the Mimbanites in the town but live underground and "not the least bit subservient." They use Thrella wells (the abyssal cistern Luke and Leia lured the wandrella into) and natural sinkholes to reach the surface. Halla proposes Luke and Leia follow the shaft while everyone else looks for their egress at the other end.

Leia discovers Halla is right by finding the tunnel in the back of the alcove. They have plenty of concentrate, water is plentiful, and Halla promises light will be available. They should meet each other in a couple of days, three at the most. They head into the tunnel.

What I Liked

So of the six incompetent stormtroopers up for execution, "two of them are permanently maimed [...] and the others all scarred in various way beyond my ability to repair." Hin, Kee, and Luke's explosions did not play around. It would be nice to have some ratio of Imperials to civilians on Mimban, but Foster didn't want to give any hard numbers on that.

Foster saves his most evocative language for the fat or the gross. It went rocketing past, a seemingly endless white waterfall of faintly glowing flesh. Leaning out, they saw it shrink to a dot, a pinpoint of brightness before it finally vanished into the abyssal depths. I believe we're in Luke's POV for that bit and again with water imagery from our desert farmboy. I'm beginning to believe Luke's last mission happened on a planet with one and he actually got to see it so now everything is getting compared to it.

What I Found Problematic

"Days passed, became four, then five, six." That this is a sentence in this chapter pisses me off about how time was handled in Chapter Two all over again.

The wandrella seems like a knock off sandworm from Dune. Maybe they figured they could get the creature cheap from David Lynch's production. But really what I want to know is how the hell Threepio kept up with Halla and the Yuzzem?

I've got problems with Mimban's topography, or rather how it is described in the text. We started off crashing in a swamp, hiking through that jungle swamp to the town, fleeing the town through jungle interspersed with bogs that can claim the vehicle, and now we're headed down an artificial pit into a cave system. Look, I live in Louisiana so I am familiar with swamps and just how fast we are losing our wetlands. This underground tunneling doesn't happen here because it would fill up with water. To have a swamp you have to have a high water table. I Googled "jungles and caves" and found a company in Belize that offers outdoor adventures including jungle hiking and spelunking. Does Belize have swamps? Yes, the coastline is swampy. I can't really find how far inland the swamps go before the ground changes. We should see in the text that the terrain is changing, so there is rock that caves can go through under Luke and Leia when they find the Thrella well.

After Leia has frozen in terror and screamed in horror, now she sags against Luke so we can get her perspective on how satisfying it is to cling to him. She was utterly drained, and the comfort she derived from leaning against him was worth any feeling of impropriety. Why do you keep shoving Leia into this helpless role, Foster? Do you honestly think this is all she's capable of? Do you honestly think that of all women? I'm not irritated that you head hop into Luke in the next paragraph without any signals that this is happening (which we got when we switched from Grammel's day to the protagonists' trip). I wish you'd stop trying to get into Leia's mind at all since you're so bad at it.

And Luke gets to hold her after doing nothing but forcing her to keep moving. He didn't defeat the wandrella; gravity did.

Alcove is defined as

1. a recess or small room adjacent to or opening out of a room: a dining alcove.
2. a recess in a room for a bed, bookcases, or the like.
3. any recessed space, as a bower in a garden.

Foster, you used this word and then this alcove is so deep Leia disappeared and found a tunnel in the back. This was not the word to use.

What Changes in My Fic

Frangi (teagrl) introduced me to a new term last night: Grudgewriting. The way I understand it is you at least found the premise of the story to have some worth but the execution of that premise pissed you off enough to respond via fic. I was categorizing this under the Fix Fic trope but recognize that doesn't cover the sheer anger the canon work caused by its existence.

I don't know if I need hard numbers on the Imperial forces. I do have the feeling that this is information Mara would seek to gather for Rebellion Intelligence, but I have no idea what to put in Google to start the search for realistic numbers. "How many soldiers do you need to occupy a civilian population?"

I'll probably keep in the wandrella chase, it's not too bad for a complication. But Hin or Kee is picking up Threepio as they flee the thing. Oh wait, Threepio is not in my version. One of them must have grabbed him in the canon though. Do I want to keep the wandrella's pathetic death? It's kind of sad that our protagonists don't do anything to defeat it. But it does set them onto a new path.

Plot events time. Helping Writers Become Authors further explains this breakdown.

• Hook 1% mark = Crashing onto Mimban
• Set-up 1% - 12%
• Inciting Event 12% mark = Finding the Imperial mining outpost
• Build-up 12% - 25%
• 1st Plot Point 25% mark = Luke and Leia agree to find the Kaiburr crystal with Halla
• Reaction to 1st Plot Point 25% - 37%
• 1st Pinch Point 37% mark = Meeting with Grammel
• Realization 37% - 50%
• Midpoint or 2nd Plot Point 50% mark = Prison break
• Action 50% - 62%
• 2nd Pinch Point 62% mark
• Renewed Push 62% - 75%