Quoting Adrian Tymes <wingcat@pacbell.net>:

But, how about adding one or two sentences to the
last paragraph which echoe your first paragraph?

 "Even from three stories up, Kagura could see
 Chiyo's blissful smile, surrounded by a fan-shaped
 ochre area, rising from Chiyo's head like a second
 set of hair and still spreading..."

or something like that.

I tried to invoke that with the rain in Kagura's
eyes.  I was also thinking to lighten it a bit by
leaving Chiyo's fate not explicitly stated.  (Tomo
survived the same fall.)

So she did.  I didn't get any sense of Chiyo's fate
being indefinite, however, probably because of the
overall tone and the sense that Chiyo is trying to
join Osaka here.  Even if Chiyo is acrobatic enough to
land like Tomo, would she try?
  

If I had to pick one of the girls to be Chiyo's
closest friend at the end of the series,
I'd have picked Sakaki or possibly Yomi.

Eh?  Chiyo may spend more time with Sakaki because
their paths to and from school happen to be similar,
and she may intellectually relate to Yomi more than
any of the others, but Osaka seems to be far and away
her best friend.  (Yomi has Tomo, Sakaki is a bit of
a loner, Kagura is a bit more, and Kaorin wishes she
had Sakaki.)

Except that at the very end of the series, Chiyo has
been spending a LOT more time with Sakaki than the
other girls, since Chiyo is hosting Maya.  Sakaki is
spending practically every free minute over at Chiyo's
(granted, not talking with Chiyo, but still...)

I'm not saying, mind, that Chiyo thinking of Osaka as
her best friend can't be plausible, just that it
surprised me.  You might want to expand a bit on it,
say by having Chiyo think about why she thinks of Osaka
as her best friend (I wanted to offer a more concrete
suggestion here, but none came to me, possibly why I
find it so surprising).

A moment of silence passed.  "That should not be
possible," observed Sakaki.

Here, for instance.  This is the kind of thing Yomi
says.  Sakaki just stays silent at moments like
this.

Good point.  Yomi just said the line previous,
though...but perhaps I could shuffle it so Kagura
says that line and then Yomi makes this observation.

That should work.

Yomi shook her head.  "I should go with Tomo.

Struck me as a strange decision by Yomi.  She wants
to spend MORE time with Tomo?

Again...for all the pain Tomo is on the surface, deep
down, Yomi and Tomo are best friends, and were since
before the series started.  The going never gets
rough during the series - that's part of its point -
but if it ever did, and if they were given a choice,
they would be there for each other, first and
foremost.  Tomo might make wisecracks if she were the
uninjured one, and Yomi will probably complain once
Tomo is conscious, but they would be there for each
other.

Again, certainly plausible, but your story seems to
assume that this is something your readers KNOW, as
opposed to something they can easily be convinced of.
And easy enough to make the point:  just show it
flashing through Yomi's mind that Tomo accompanied her
to the hospital when they both were six and Yomi'd just
broken her arm or something like that.

and ran over to Osaka.  She knelt, grabbed Osaka's
hand through the sheets, pulled up...

...and was forced to let go by a chop to her
wrists from Kagura.

And this doesn't strike me as a Kagura thing to
do.  It seems more like a Tomo thing to do.  Kagura
is quite capable of brutal, simplistic approaches
to problems when it comes to words and thoughts,
but I can't think of anywhere in the manga where
she takes any hasty, brutal actions.

Tomo is prone to quick actions that don't necessarily
solve problems.  Kagura is prone to quick solutions.
There is a difference.  Here, Kagura is judging
(correctly) that Chiyo is having difficulty accepting
what has happened, and (incorrectly) that brute
forcing Chiyo to face it will solve that problem.

I wonder if there's a better way to depict it.

Suggest you eliminate the chop and just go straight to
the grasping of shoulders:  Kagura grabs Chiyo from
behind and pulls with irresistable strength.

Kagura grabbed Chiyo by the shoulders and looked
her in the eyes. "CHIYO MIHAMA!"

Chiyo sniffled.  "Y-yes?"

"Listen to me.  Osaka.  Is.  Dead."

And this.  I'd expect Kagura to abruptly become very
diffident, looking around to others for guidance, in
such a situation.  Kagura tends to recognize very
quickly when she's out of her depth.

I think I see the problem: I failed to show that
Kagura saw she was running out of people to turn to,
and knew that something had to be done.  Yomi, Tomo,
and Osaka are gone; Chiyo is the problem; Sakaki is
busy dealing with Kaorin (and spectators, in this
scene).  Being out of her depth contributes to her
stress.

Does that sound accurate?  If so, I'll look for a
more explicit way to depict that.

Yes, I can see Kagura taking unaccustomed action if
forced to by the absence of better-qualified people.
I think all you have to do is first show us Kagura
looking around wildly for somebody more qualified,
seeing nobody, then taking a deep breath, before she
launches into this.

"Yeah, whatever, Miss Weepy Diet Girl."

"TOMO!  I thought we agreed you'd never mention
it." Yomi noticed Kagura staring.  "What?"

"That was you?" Kagura asked.

Heh.  A nice joke.  Although... I can't see Yomi
calling herself "Weepy" anything.  "Miss Diet
Failure Girl"?

Quoted from the dub.  It was a pseudonym she used
when writing in to a radio show.  One of the
vignettes showed Tomo learning about it when
she came over to hang out with/bother Yomi one night.

Hmm... haven't listened to the dub.  Don't remember how
the sub had it.

watching them, and Kaorin tried hanging off of
Sakaki's arm to get her to notice Kaorin only to
be almost dragged along.

IMO, too forward of Kaorin.  Walking alongside,
blushingly, maybe, trying and failing to find
something to say.

And I need to do a better job of noting Kaorin's
panic.  She needs something to cling to - literally -
and Sakaki has long been the rock of her heart anyway.

Yes, I can see Kaorin doing that if panicked.  Might
want to show her breathing heavily and irregularly or
something to underline, "clutching desperately".

over it.  Chiyo tugged on the mop, easily pulling
it free of shed and towel.  "Wow!  Osaka, when
did you get so thin?"

Again, my take is that Kagura would be feeling
vastly out of her depth here, and casting about for
someone else to take over.  I could see Yomi taking
some of the actions you ascribe to Kagura, however.

Hmm.  Would it seem in character for Kagura to ask
herself what the calmest-in-a-crisis person she
knows - Yomi - would do?

I think it'd be in character for Kagura to ask herself
what a good role model would do here, yes.  But I think
the role model might be Nyamo rather than Yomi.  Nyamo
is Kagura's coach on the swimming team, we know, and
her occupation, phys. ed. teacher, is what Kagura plans
to become.

The moment her hands closed around Chiyo's torso,
Chiyo kicked back hard enough to knock the air
out of her lungs.

Third reaction:  but why is Chiyo kicking off
violently, when she's only jumping off the tower?

She's re-enacting the scene when she tried to grab
Osaka, as described immediately afterwards.

Hmm... that didn't come across to me at all.

It took her a few moments to remember that Chiyo 
had cut her hair short and started wearing more
adjustable clip-on pigtails, at Osaka's
suggestion.

!!!  Osaka certainly might suggest such a thing, but
why in the world would Chiyo agree?

Experimenting?  Or maybe Chiyo could be wearing slip-
on/slip-off ponytail covers that Osaka bought or made
for her?

It just seems a good point to have the absurdity of
Chiyo's ponytails actually coming off, if that can be
done believably.

Doing it that way, by using Osaka's fantasies in real
life, seems too far-fetched to me.  One alternative
might be to have Chiyo be wearing a ribbon in her hair,
established early; Kagura grabs for a pig-tail, misses
but doesn't realize it, and gets a ribbon instead;
Kagura thinks, for a moment, that Chiyo's pig-tail
detached.

So, again - would it work to have Kagura try to think
what Yomi would do?

As stated above, I think Nyamo would be Kagura's first
role model.  However, I can imagine that Kagura has
never seen Nyamo in any comparable situation, and that
she HAS seen Yomi in a situation she thinks comparable:
perhaps Tomo doing something unusually foolish and
dangerous, or Tomo being vastly over-emotionally sad
over some trivial hurt.  Certainly I would think Kagura
would be grasping for any relevant role model here.

Hope this helps!



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