Chapter 4 started out very thin and sketchy, but grew fast. I wanted to do something to kind of nod at the whole 'school days' genre, and then get Anastasia out of it. So I fairly quickly got the idea of her leading a patrol with her math teacher under her command, and showing him, herself, and the reader that school was pretty much out, for her, now. I didn't really want to have her gunning down any more pre-industrial natives quite so soon, but riding around shooting gross alien beasts seemed like something the Morandau would do. At first I kind of thought of something bear-like, but then I wanted Anastasia to do something to show she was smart and not just a good shot, so I had the idea she might deduce the beast's presence from some subtle clue, like the flight of birds. Suddenly the birds got bigger and I didn't need the bear.

Once you've got a big flying monster, it obviously has to pick people up, and this would be great because it would introduce a dramatic situation in which Anastasia's shooting ability would clearly not be an instant solution just in it itself. To give the game away a bit, my plan for writing this thing is basically to dream up as many hair-raising problems as I can, figure out what the most bad-ass solution possible would be in each case, and have Anastasia do that. There is also an overall plot and some thematic ideas, and even some other major characters, but my plan for turning notes into chapters is mostly to go Houdini.

So I felt committed to the roc attack problem, but took a while to figure out how to solve it. How do you get a character down safely, when an alien flying monster is trying to drop her from yikes high up? It seemed straining credulity to give her a parachute — Anastasia isn't Dora the Explorer, with the right thing always handy in her backpack-backpack. Jetpacks were also out — the Morandau have technology but it has to be a scarce resource. So the options were either getting the creature to land somehow, or finding a way to survive a long fall. Getting it to land was less problematic in one sense: there's no natural way to do it at all, but since it's an alien flying monster, any number of deus-ex-machina excuses could be made to serve. The trouble is that this makes the escape less impressive. It's bound to be anticlimactic. So I felt that this ignominious escape was a better fate for the math teacher.

Exactly how this worked out seemed easy to invent. Dang is it ever handy, in a story with this many guns in it, to have a heroine who can shoot like a demigod. That's going to be tricky not to over-use. But I really like the picture of 9-year-old Anastasia doing her roc trick for the first time, surrounded by anxious Morandau adults with enough firepower to melt the roc if it gets too close, popping a shot at a distant circling roc with her little kid's carbine. Some big scary adult asks her if she thinks she hit the tail properly, and she just nods with big nine-year-old eyes, too awed by the attention to speak. Even a .22 could puncture the tail-bulb, I figure. So the roc starts to circle down. I can imagine how a lot of her character starts to grow from there. This episode will be recalled in Chapter 5, in fact.

Then how do I get Anastasia down? I figured she had to fall, and shooting herself free from the roc seemed a good way to start that. A little bit of googling convinced me, though, that it's actually very hard to survive a fall into water from any really impressive height. To have any hope at all, it seems to be really important to land feet first, and perfectly vertical. Getting Anastasia to do this after falling from the grip of a roc was just getting silly. I even thought about using revolver recoil as a sort of retro-rocket, to spin her around, but since the only reasonable target would be above her, the angles were just not going to work. Getting this kind of episode to make sense, as physics, is important to the kind of story I'm trying to tell. Firstly it's supposed to all be real science, but even more importantly, it's supposed to be grittily realistic. It's not going to work if Anastasia has to be incredibly lucky already in chapter 4.

I was about to abandon the whole falling thing, and have her somehow climb up on top of the roc and ride it down, when I realized that I had never really said how thick the toxic vegetation on the tarn was. I had written the stuff in there already, just so she would be jumping into a pool of OMG BURNING POISON!, but I realized it might just as well be twenty feet thick, out in the lake, as the three-foot layer I'd been imagining. And it could be just as conveniently soft but strong and springy as it had to be, and nobody would really mind because whoa, she deliberately jumped into the golden tarn from two hundred feet. So, ta-da.

Although the most exciting part of the chapter has Anastasia just saving herself, the chapter is supposed to show her as a confident natural leader, and that means showing the right mixture of control and nonchalance. The stupidity with horses facing the wrong way on a narrow path was just something I couldn't seem to avoid, when I thought about where the characters were all supposed to be. I like how it gets dealt with, because my limited military experience taught me that stupid shenanigans are an embarrassingly common side-effect of anything unexpected, even for the best-trained professionals. A young officer can't afford much loss of dignity, so that's the time to step off the scene and let the sergeant straighten out the mess. Anastasia doesn't have to think this through. It's just common sense, to her. I've known a few people like that, and this part of her will be based on them.

The action part of the chapter doesn't even get going until half-way through, and I'm a little concerned that this leaves too many pages of talk and exposition between the story's violent beginning in chapter 1 and this next installment of adrenaline. But chapters 2 and 3 seem fairly intense in their own ways, at least to me, so I'm hoping that readers who don't actually care about differential equations will stay awake until the rocs show up. The undercurrent about elitism is an important theme of the whole story — it will turn out to be the theme of it all. I hadn't originally conceived there to be any eliter inner circle within the Morandau elite, but my reluctance to give every single character the same name pretty much forced it on me.

The last thing I wanted to do was make Anastasia Morandau into math-is-hard-Barbie, but it seemed right to make her an engineer with little patience for useless abstraction. The topic of boundary conditions started out as just some realistic texture for an advanced math class, but even though the chapter only actually refers to temporal boundary conditions, the idea of family lines within Morandau as fixed boundaries seemed to make it all fit together. I hope that the concepts of initial and final boundary conditions are explained enough for a reader who hasn't studied differential equations to get the gist. It's just supposed to be a sort of suggestive flavor — there's no intent to teach math, here. I wouldn't want to get snatched by a roc.