POB can be a wordy fellow, so no need to curb my natural tendency to verbosity. It may get pared down in beta (especially this last 1K :-)

And astolat's original, which this is just a sequel, was nearly 20K words, so yeah, has to be a bit epic :-)

Also, my wp counts funny - some punctuation marks get counted as their own word. Very odd. So no doubt that figure's quite a bit inflated.

But yeah, it's looking like the longest thing I've ever written, which seems odd. Could explain why it's taking so long to finish! :D