- Read A Day of Faces for free here.
- Read this specific chapter here.
- Read all the writing notes here.
This is the chapter in which Furey finally takes the gloves off. She’s been a controlled, simmering background player for the most part, with only occasional, brief moments of actual action – most notably at the end of Arc 3 on Hong Kong’s Peak.
‘Limbic system’, while still from Kay’s perspective, is essentially a Furey chapter. This is where she shows her quality, and demonstrates why she’s good to have along. That we see the action from the point of view of two people who are from a very different world (literally and figuratively, I suppose) makes it all the more entertaining, I hope – Kay’s experience of watching Furey at work is much like ours.
The action in this chapter is very much influenced by the fluid, pseudo-one-take style of Netflix’s Daredevil show, which I happened to be watching around the time of writing. I’ve also seen Furey compared to Agent May from Agents of SHIELD, which isn’t too far off, either.
From her introduction, I’ve had some comments about her unlikely name. There is a point coming, I promise – it’s just taking a while to get to.
Action is a weird thing in written form. It’s inherently reliant on the language of motion, so suits movies and TV and games perfectly. It can work in comic book form in the hands of a skilled artist, with your brain filling in the frames in-between. Translating that into prose is mostly about avoiding it simply becoming a sequential list of exciting things. Keeping the POV with a single character, Kay in this instance, actually makes this easier as all the action is filtered through her personal experience. That makes it as much about her reaction to what’s happening as it is about that actual action beats.
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