As I said before, Chris, this is wonderful. The way you take all sorts of contemporary conceptions about angels and the afterlife, aliens and allergies, flying men and the media, oddities and exposures, waking-realities and dream-realities, and how you meld all this into a charming, magical, feather-light yet in its own way disturbing tale about life, death, angel-magic and love... Yes, Yvonne was so right when she compared the world you've created here with the magical world of J.K.Rowling.

I so, so loved it that Lois was able to enter into Clark's dream as if that was a reality of its own. Here she could imperceptibly meld with Clark's dream-preconceptions about her counterpart, but at the same time she could also act on her own, speak, make choices and - not least - kiss. Kiss Clark. By entering his dream, she was able to make contact with him, interact with him and, yes, love him. And possibly damn herself in the process, of course, for breaking the rules.

Ahh, the rules. Nothing is more dangerous, nothing is more scary, certainly, than breaking the rules. Nothing can bring us more horrible punishments than breaking the rules. But honestly, Chris and everyone else out there, why do the rules decree or forbid the things they do? Why is it that when I was a kid, some relatives of mine made me feel that I would certainly go to hell for playing the frog in a dramatization of a fairy tale for kids? Or that I would suffer a similar fate for sewing a button on a blouse on a Sunday? Why do some people feel ready to die of shame if they are caught drinking a cup of coffee? Why are we forbidden or compelled to whistle, shave our legs, celebrate birthdays or eat fish on Fridays or eat a calf's testicles?

And why is it forbidden to be an alien? And why can't an angel kiss a living person in his dream?

Rules. People, have you considered that what exactly the rules stipulate is nearly insignificant? What matters is that a certain set of rules exists, and that a group of people define themselves as the good and true and right people because they follow those rules. Because that is what it means to follow the rules: it proves that you are a good and worthy person. So if you follow the rules you can belong to the group, but if you break the rules you get thrown out. And nothing, nothing scares us more than being rejected by our own crowd.

There is a Swedish saying that most of us would much rather stay in our own group and do something stupid or disastrous with the rest of them than blaze our own lonely trail and be right. And now consider Clark. By being an alien, and by having been outed as an alien, he is certainly breaking the number one rule of any society here on Earth, which is that if you want to belong anywhere you'd better be a human being. So because Clark is breaking that number one rule, whether he wants to or not, he shows no respect for us and our rules and we have the right to reject him. And, as Chris shows so eloquently in this story, everybody in alt-Clark's world is rejecting him.

Clark has no group to belong to, even though, out of the extreme goodness of his heart, he watches over and helps all those people who have rejected him. Unlike Clark, Lois does belong to a group - the group of angels. And that group has rules. All groups do. By kissing Clark, Lois has broken the rules of her group. What will Kilmartin, Lois's angel supervisor, do when he finds out? And how did he get that name, anyway? Maybe Kilmartin showed Martin what happens when you break the rules of the angels. And if so, then Kilmartin may soon earn himself a second name, by showing the same terrible thing to Lois as he showed to Martin.

Angel-Lois has melded with Dream-Lois and kissed Dream-Clark who was born out of Flesh-Clark. The foundations of heaven and earth are shaking.

I can imagine several very different endings to this tale. Lois and Clark could triumph and find a way to be together and love one another, either (and preferably) on the Earth, or in the heavens. Or else they could be defeated by the terrible force of our cruel rules, the ones that may apply in the heavens as well as on the Earth. And in my opinion, it's not a bad thing to read such a cautionary tale now and again, to be reminded of how readily we reject anyone who does not honour our own precious Rules.

Keep the story coming, Chris. It is fantastic.

Ann