Haha oh excellent, I'm so glad to hear you had a good holidays and that you're feeling better (hope your wife is on her way there too and feels better soon!) We had a lovely nice quiet holidays over here, mostly eating a LOT OF food and watching movies and just generally messing around and having a good time relaxing which is great! :D 

As far as cliffhangers go, though, that was a hilariously perfect time to have one ;) But as to your points I'd say:

-it would make sense for Renso to encourage them to deal with Bracknell, I imagine he's suspicious of Bracknell's motives himself and wants to set him straight and what better way for him to judge our duo's potential than have them deal with his former prodigies? XD I look forward to seeing what you'very come up with! :3

-I think we talked about fast forwarding or briefly summarising that one? Whatever flows or feels best when you're writing it, I shall leave that up to you :P

-no yep, we did talk about that! XD that sounds super epic, I'm all for a couple sneaky ninja missions where they break people out of prison and just generally mess things up for Bracknell and Soto, that'd be hilarious and lead on nicely to the final confrontation,  actually, once Bracknell's wound up enough like you say 

-Mwahahaha yep, as much as it pains me to kill him (I really like him) I think I may have to D: they can't ALL make it out of this alive and I just can't find a plausible way for him to come out unscathed since well...Bracknell hates his guts. And since they're both so powerful I couldn't see either of them letting the other go alive, so if Bracknell was going to survive long enough to give them clues to finding Renso poor Roan had to croak it (and also the whole not approving of their friendship thing, though he will in true tear-herder fashion come to terms with it on his death bed and make Bol promise to look after her :'): I DID however come up with a very nasty way for Bracknell to die once Ari and Bol finally pin him down afterwards *cackles* I can't wait!

Oooo I shall definitely give it a listen, I shall put it on when I work on my next response to set the mood XD