Frank, did I already ask you your Taco Bell order? Honestly loved your take on Dr. Perky. What's your Taco Bell order like?
I liked the story a lot and felt the Dr. Perky character was more than enough to fill the meat of the story, so I'll pass on the question. In fact I'm already pretty sure! If I wrote a real-world book, its Dr. Perky character would be that of the evil alien dictator who's overthrown her government and is about to take over Earth, but has some really bad PR and so the government is still sending "protective" delegations to her that are ineffectually trying to get her to "make nice" โ all of which goes on much of the time in Floornight โ but in reality there is no such alien dictator and the protective delegations never actually reach her and there's no evil alien dictator character.
I guess a good description of Dr. Perky's character would be this:
"Imagine that a writer got famous by writing really bad stories that everyone hates, and he decided he wanted to write a really great story to make up for the bad stories, but to do that he had to write it as a fanfic of a book that the fans actually like. He then got really into the book, wrote all of his best ideas and characters as part of the fanfic, and tried to make the fanfic something its own thing, in a way he thought was "better" than the original."
(Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration, I think I originally said "a lot less bad than that," but the basic idea is true.)
