As you can see by the hands, the Severed Alliance is Lottie and Shauna. They’ve been BFFs for more than half their lives, and their friendship was broken by the Blossom thing.
“Severed Alliance” will pick up only five days after the end of “Missing Piece”. There nevertheless managed to be another story, which we aren’t going to see here, wedged in between them. “The Big Hiatus” was a story within a story, with the framing story set the day before “Severed Alliance” begins.
If you recall, there was a gap of more than a year between “Modern Men”, which happened in late winter/early spring of the kids’ third year, and “Space is the Place”, which happened in late spring/early summer of their fourth year. One of the things that fit in that gap was the Bobbins story “Into the Woods”, which ended in February of their fourth year. At the end of “Into the Woods”, Shelley Winters, Erin’s older sister, who’s been friend and mentor to Lottie since she was a little girl back in SGR, turned up pregnant by Tim Jones (who I pointed out in Hugo’s a few weeks ago). There was a long Bobbins storyline, “Hard Yards”, that covered the term of Shelley’s pregnancy, and ran parallel to the last three Bad Machinery cases. While the Bobbins stuff doesn’t spill over to Bad Machinery much, the fence is much more permeable the other direction. All the mystery kids took part in “Hard Yards”.
At one point, around about the time Shauna was gouging Miranda’s eyes out, Shelley and Tim got in a fight, and Tim left and/or got thrown out of Shelley’s house. He ended up crashing the Havershams’ garage, where he and Neil had been working on “a radical framework for self-driving car fleets based on insect swarms”. Mildred did not approve, because Tim has a long history of disaster following him around. (He’s responsible for Mr Knott’s eyepatch, just for starters.) So Mildred prevailed upon Lottie to do some investigation on the Shelley end of things.
As you can see by the hands, the Severed Alliance is Lottie and Shauna. They’ve been BFFs for more than half their lives, and their friendship was broken by the Blossom thing.
“Severed Alliance” will pick up only five days after the end of “Missing Piece”. There nevertheless managed to be another story, which we aren’t going to see here, wedged in between them. “The Big Hiatus” was a story within a story, with the framing story set the day before “Severed Alliance” begins.
If you recall, there was a gap of more than a year between “Modern Men”, which happened in late winter/early spring of the kids’ third year, and “Space is the Place”, which happened in late spring/early summer of their fourth year. One of the things that fit in that gap was the Bobbins story “Into the Woods”, which ended in February of their fourth year. At the end of “Into the Woods”, Shelley Winters, Erin’s older sister, who’s been friend and mentor to Lottie since she was a little girl back in SGR, turned up pregnant by Tim Jones (who I pointed out in Hugo’s a few weeks ago). There was a long Bobbins storyline, “Hard Yards”, that covered the term of Shelley’s pregnancy, and ran parallel to the last three Bad Machinery cases. While the Bobbins stuff doesn’t spill over to Bad Machinery much, the fence is much more permeable the other direction. All the mystery kids took part in “Hard Yards”.
At one point, around about the time Shauna was gouging Miranda’s eyes out, Shelley and Tim got in a fight, and Tim left and/or got thrown out of Shelley’s house. He ended up crashing the Havershams’ garage, where he and Neil had been working on “a radical framework for self-driving car fleets based on insect swarms”. Mildred did not approve, because Tim has a long history of disaster following him around. (He’s responsible for Mr Knott’s eyepatch, just for starters.) So Mildred prevailed upon Lottie to do some investigation on the Shelley end of things.