Aug 15, 2021
I've been holding back a bit from commenting on my own stuff because I felt like it would be weird to comment a bunch on my own story, but I've thought about it, and to be honest... I've come to realise that there's not actually anything weird in talking about what you've written :)
So, I'll start giving my thoughts on some stuff.
One thing I thought about while writing this chapter in particular was time. It's something a lot of stories get wrong or do kind of weirdly, at least out of those I've read.
Someone will be described as having twenty seconds to do something, and then their solution on how to accomplish it will involve way more stuff than anyone could reasonably do in a that short amount of time. Or maybe it's the other way around or someone will described as doing an action for like, minutes, when it's something that realistically would be super weird to do for that long.
So, how does all of that relate to this chapter?
Only in one way: I tried to make the times I mentioned somewhat make sense(aside from the amount of magic the mc can use obviously being a made up number because magic doesn't actually exist so I can't test that).
It takes me seven seconds to run up the stairs I have at home once. If the stairs in the building were the same size, and the building was about the same size, maybe it would take about 14-15-ish seconds to just run up the whole way. She'd probably be running slightly faster than me, but she also needed to get to the entrance and enter the building in the first place(and she would have been faster in her enhanced state, but she can't use that type of magic since she made an illusion recently). I then figured that she'd need about 7-8 seconds to scan each floor for people too, and that's how I arrived at the total figure of the fight so far taking 30 seconds after the princess left.
As for the actual magic fight, considering lightning is rather fast I figured the whole thing has to be more about reaction time than any actual time spend on the magic itself(the protagonist already comments on how she wouldn't be able to keep up without knowing in advance in the chapter). With that included I was thinking a single attack and defence might take two seconds, so I just wrote the fight so they exchange blows somewhere around 12-16-ish times for about half a minute of fighting so it syncs up with what Alena is doing.
That said, this story actually still does the thing where too much happens to be realistic in a short span of time because I don't think anyone can actually think nearly this much in thirty seconds. Why? Mostly just because I felt like it.
