I am astonished by the amount of effort and work you put into this fest. I know what the "manuscript" I sent looked like, and seeing the end result is just... wow. This was not a 30000 words one shot with no major problems. This was a 193000 words behemoth with random caps, messy and still apparent corrections, and weird formatting. I am so grateful for your efforts. ( and I am getting a new macBook Pro with retina display next week, so hopefully my Word will no longer go wonky on me...) I also loved the fact that you really cared abut the quality of the product you were putting out there. Your pointed questions and suggestions definitely made this a better fic. Out of the whole story, the middle part with Severus, Poppy and Minerva was a highlight for me though there is little interaction between Severus and Harry. That Veridari chose Severus in the rain as a illustration made me supremely happy. I have about 60000 additional words of the story in my hard drive that did not make the cut, mostly more background for Flitwick, and a whole George/Neville love story, but also some domestic scenes of Petr and Severus. I considered cutting off the "Malfoys" part as well. It's just that I get suckered into these side stories and I have a hard time saying "NO!" to those insistent secondary characters, and I get pathetically attached to them. It was great to have you guys as test readers, to make sure the story did hold together without these extra bits. I have been reading the other stories in the fest, and I am truly grateful to you guys for putting it on, to inspire these other writers to create such amazing works. It is humbling to be presented along some of these masterpieces. Gee, I do ramble on... So just "Thanks" and "Keep it up!" and a smile.