A Puzzle Unsolved
By PresentPerfect

Reviewed by Asilin

On a bit of a roll this weekend; three reviews in a row! W00t!

Anyway, this review we’ve got a piece that crosses over with Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. Brief rundown, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is the background show to The Avengers. Kind of like Torchwood, but with superpowers instead of alien tech. I need to catch back up on it personally. Maybe I’ll do that before the second season starts.

Commentary and Review combined due to brevity.

I’ll just start with this off the bat: this is the kind of fic I was looking for when I decided to start reviewing.

This story is damn good.

To summarize, the story focuses around Agent Phil Coulson and Octavia and their burgeoning relationship. She’s found a mirror that lets her cross over and met Coulson via the symphony she plays in on Earth. They honestly seem to enjoy each other’s company, despite the major conflict point being the fact that neither one can let the other know much about themselves.

I shan’t spoil the ending, but it’s a wonderfully bittersweet ending, particularly for Coulson’s canon story when this was written.

So what does this story do well?

Let’s start with the shift changes. We begin in future tense, only to flip into present tense seamlessly in the next paragraph. This kind of tense shifts will continue throughout, with some wonderfully brilliantly balanced dialogue and thought passages in between the main meat of the story. At no point do the tenses detract from the story, instead they enhance by throwing us more into the moment, into the wistfulness of these moments, the poignancy they have.

On top of that, the characters are downright believable. Coulson is his happy, enigmatic self, with just a touch of exuberance that I can buy from a man falling in love. I don’t know Octavia as well, but I can totally buy a prim and proper girl who goes looking for an adventure just to get a small challenge, even if her friends don’t quite understand it. And I buy the relationship, two souls looking for that little bit of challenge the puzzle brings and enjoying the game of figuring each other out over the things they mutually love.

And, as an added bonus, you don’t actually need to understand anything about either source to get this story, although knowing that Octavia is a pony and about the mirror magic definitely brings the dialogue sections into clarity.

Basically, this story ensnares you with believable characters and an unusual tense set that heightens the emotional payoff of the ending.

The only thing I really noticed that bugged me at all was some comma usage, but a lot of that seems to be personal preference anymore (which is an entirely separate rant), so I’m going to completely ignore that.

Sequel? Please? I don’t care if it’s no longer canon to S.H.I.E.L.D., this deserves a sequel.

I adored reading this. It’s been upvoted and favorited, so I can only give it one rating:

Masterpiece

This definitely deserved it.

All the waiting was worth it. :D Thank you so much for taking the time to review this story! (Sorry for all the commas, I like them.)

3609428
That's okay :) I edit college papers, so I tend to be a bit more nit picky, ya know?