Hmm… This seems really rushed. It should likely have been two stories. Perhaps it still will be…

A bit confused, I had Maryanne married to Otellio. George’s confusion is perhaps part of the story though…

In your mind, is Otellio the Sugar Daddy she married or Randall Stone? Maybe she is just separated from Stone and shacking up with Otellio. All is good. The mystery grows!!

My bad. I couldn’t find the story that said they were married so I made something up. I’ve fixed my story accordingly. ‘Stone’ was her previous husband’s surname and Maryanne kept it because it gives her name a certain gravitas in keeping with the image she’d like to have. She always hated her maiden name, ‘Shvets.’

Love it. Of course, the PI would have some ears and eyes in various places. No way he’d blunder into a situation without any background information. Very fun stuff, and painfully close to the big meeting.

I have attempted to ‘cap’ the other branch of the story and redirect things back here. We shall see if it works.

why cant we just add all threads by character as multiple sequels to this post from here on out.

Example:
Post/paste sequels to all characters here.

Sequels
Baretta’s next post
Tugger’s next post
Lambone’s next post
Otellio’s next post

that way we can at least navigate from one spot. Of course the action will continue from there and spread out but readers can just use the back button to see what happens to each character.

I plan to do this for Otellio’s next post, I will sequel this post.

Good idea Drake – let us sequel from this point. Actually, reading back and forward through the installments (as I have been doing in a vague effort to maintain continuity) is a more interesting experience that usual due to the multi-stranded postings; I think it should be done more often on Ficly.

Just thinking out loud here… The problem isn’t the way the threads wander around as much as it is about being able to find them all. When I get some time, I’ll see if there’s some way that I can create an HTML hot-linked graphical representation of the entire plate of spaghetti that is “Noir”. I know the site administrators don’t have much time to add new features to the site but I can offer that solution up to see if it can be integrated.