I almost wish the backstory wasn't so clearly laid out and cut in stone. Personally I think ambiguity can add a lot of mystery and fascination to a story. Being told this about the knights was a bit of a letdown for me:
The Knights seemingly have existed throughout the ages, passing on their ideals but living in modern times.
I guess the reason why I'm disappointed is that the clash (or even the friendly meeting) of two people who don't know each other's reality bubbles at all is more interesting to me than the meeting of people who just disapprove of each other's takes on reality. Moammar Atta, the man who flew one of the planes into one of the twin towers of World Trade Center, certainly knew very much about the reality of modern Western civilisation and how it is perceived by the people belonging to it. His problem was not primarily that he didn't understand or know our reality, but rather that he just hated it.
Another way of rejecting the modern reality of the West is to live inside it but nevertheless keep yourself separate from it. The Amish people live in modern times but refuse to move their personal life styles out of the eighteenth century. Similarly, I guess, it is with the Knights: they must know our modern world if they live in it, but they just don't want to have anything to do with it.
If the Knights had been brought here straight out of the Middle Ages, they would have been absolutely "innocent" and "pure" in their medieval take on reality, and that would have made their meeting with anything in our modern world more interesting to me. I once saw a film about a medieval mining village somewhere in northern England, which was threatened by the horrible plague that swept across Europe. The village sage, a circa thirteen-year-old boy, told the villagers that the bravest of the men must embark on a heroic quest to find the greatest church in Christendom and bring the finest copper from their mine to this church and cast a spire and raise the spire to the top of the church. If they can do this before the next new Moon, the village will be saved.
And a ragged contingent of miners set out on their quest. After a sort of dream-journey down a nearly bottomless pit in their mine, they emerge on the other side of the world and pop their heads out of the ground to find... England of the 1990s. We who watch the movie immediately realize that that is where they are, but the villagers themselves are clueless. And impressed. So many lights! They stare in awe at the streetlights and all the other lights illuminating a mid-sized city in the north of England on a dark November evening. To the villagers, all the lights prove that this must be the City of God, but they are mystified by the fact that they can't spot the great Church they are looking for. Everybody knows that the church is always the tallest building in any town or city, so why can't they see it?
Eventually, after many trials and tribulations and run-ins with modern horrors like cars and trains and TV screens, the rag-tag band of villagers manage to find a foundry (which is about to close down for good) and persuade the founders to cast a spire for them on their last night at work. Finally, they manage to bring their newly-cast spire to the church (which is of course not the tallest building in the city) and raise it to the top of the church. It is the young boy, the sage, who finally puts the spire in place, but afterwards he plunges to his death on the ground. The village is saved, the plague has been averted, but the young boy had to pay for his village with his life.
Actually, the entire journey probably didn't happen at all. It was probably the young boy who just told the other villagers a story about how the bravest of them made their way to the City of God and found His Church and put a spire on the top of it and saved their village, at the cost of only one brave soul among them. (Soon after finishing his tale, the boy came down with the plague and died, but no one else was infected.)
But the amazing thing is that the boy apparently saw an English city of the 1990s, but he could only describe and understand what he saw using medieval terms and medieval ideas. He saw what we see, but he was unable to see what we see. Wow.
To me, almost the best thing about the movie was the meeting between the soon-to-be-unemployed founders of the 1990s and the ragged miners from the fourteenth century, trying to outrun death. The tolerant but weary founders regarded the miners as some kind of weird Hare Krishna people. They couldn't understand who these strange and wild people were, but they could sense their desperation, and in a gesture of utterly
human sympathy and good will, they agreed to cast the spire for them.
So all I can say is that... when people are exposed to things that are not part of their reality bubbles at all, the result can be... wow. And to me, the natural is rather more fascinating than the supernatural. Or maybe my problem is that demons hold only a limited fascination to me. A real, honest-to-God visitor from the
Middle Ages is so much more amazing for me to imagine than a modern army fighting demons with medieval means. But then I believe in the Middle Ages, but not in demons, I'm afraid!
Again, this is not a criticism of your story, Shayne. It's rather that your story sent my thoughts scurrying in all directions. And if your story ultimately won't give me the spine-tingling mystery and ambiguity of colliding "virgin realities" - inhabited by people who have never come into contact with conflicting world views, and are therefore "reality virgins" - it is reward enough for me that your story brought me back to that amazing movie I just talked about, and to the dizzying question of what the heck reality is in the first place.
Now I'm ready for Lois the vampire slayer and her Scoobies, Jimmy and Clark(?)! Bring on the action, Shayne!
Ann
