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New version looks good. You've got a good internal compass.
As per normal, I'll still wait until you hit your stride. Those first 3 chapters on this site can be rough

too much, based on where I sense this is headed, but I need about seven to ten more chapters to give you an accurate answer

Oooh dialogue is a tough one. You don't excel at it overnight for sure.

Ok here, the character is using meticulous speech. Try reading it aloud. When I did, I was sounding like the H.A.L. computer by the word appointment. Conversations tend to bounce back and forth more. They're replete in half-spoken sentences. We go for efficiencies a lot. Unless you're a celeb, you get interrupted a lot. The above convo would probably be closer to:

A: That’s all the time we have for today.
B: Already? But--
A: Tut tut. Ten o’clock appointment
B: How much do I owe ya?
A: Mr. Goodman’s recommended you, so this first visit is free--
B: Ooh, I like that price
A:  --but I really would suggest you come talk to me again soon
B: (Looks doubtful)
A: You're worried about the fees? We can work something out

Do you remember Stanley Tweedle from the sci-fi series "Lexx"?

if not, let me summarize him. He works a cubicle job earning only enough to get by, sleeps maximum quota and does the minimum to not get fired.

Eventually aliens show up and eat his planet. He escapes by fluke of being with the other good guys, and he's a pilot and they can't fly their ship, so they keep him.

After that, he spends the rest of season 1 shirking responsibilities, napping while on guard duty, trying to get into Zev's pants (but by peeping on her showering instead of bothering to hit on her), and many more. He is, effectively, the least motivated character I've seen in any work of fiction.

I found myself often wishing aliens got him so I wouldn't have to put up with him

My thought: The plot you have chosen appears to be  leading you down a similar path. This is salvageable, but let me answer that the long way.

tng: Lt Barclay

They introduced him as this blathering inept, socially awkward engineer but he was more of a laughing stock.
Later on he cleaned up. He was still a blathering, inept, socially awkward engineer but he was suddenly freaking smart*.
What happened? Writers watching him getting panned realized he had to win hearts. And apathy wasn;t going to win hearts, so they made him good at something. They picked a new areas of engineering no other character could excel at and gave them to him. In the turn of a season they had a cult hit.

Why? What changed the viewers? Easy. Suddenly we were all Barclay. Scraping to get by, awkward person out. Not invited to that party and passed on the promotion. But having that one skill that made us special and wishing the world would recognize it.

Therein is my recommendation

If your character is Luke Skywalker, fixes droids and drinks blue milk in some backwater -> have a mysterious guy in robes tell him you are the one

If your character is Rand Al'Thor and his only want in life is farming and shearing sheep -> make him deadly with the quarter staff (Actually, I stole this one for Tia because she's rather passive in her 3rd chapter). Your logical option here is the pistol. Make him a crack shot with it even if he is terrified while in action.

Recommended reading: One Punch Man (In your case,  "one shot man")

Give him at least one thing he's good at so the reader can latch onto it and identify with the struggle, and you'll be fine

hey all. Sorry to wade into this. Here's some interesting data.

Note: Germanic languages take prepositions on their native verbs. They generally don't on borrowed Latin verbs.
examples:
Eng: Bob climbed up
Lat: Bob ascended
Eng: Bob climbed down (Remember this beastie from another thread?)
Lat: Bob descended

This is part of a general debate French speakers have learning English:
Bob walked across the street
Bob traversait la rue
In Romance languages you just cross the street. It's hard to understand why in English you have to cross-across the street.

Back to the point. Stolen verbs in English don't need prepositions. "Stood" is not stolen. Ergo it takes the preposition.
That said, "Bob crossed the street" has worked its way into the language illegally. If English had language police, this use would have been banned 100 years ago, and the language would still look like Elizabethan times.

Consider: "Bob crossed the street"
By default, middle English speakers would ask: Crossed with what?
Modern English speaker: Crossed intransitively, of course.

Indeed... and Stephen King took about 100 pages in Tommy Knockers before he even decided to mention danger.

But we live in a very different time period, and unless you're famous already that people will read your work until it hooks them, you'll need to hook them manually. So many distractions these days -- Facebook, sports, 400 tv channels (I remember feeling blessed to get 21) a writer's work is cut out for them to retain readers [I mean a relatively less famous writer]

Re my review:

What I've done here is shove C up front. He's kind of the topic of these two paragraphs. Originally he's kinda buried in the woodwork. Took out some of the location bits (is it relevant that the chapel is in the orphanage or adjoining it? Maybe even free-standing? Bigger / smaller? I suspect not relevant at this time). Dropped a "he heard" which will get the POV demons on your back, and played with words a little bit to remove an "eyes widened"

btw you know that post in premium by charles (those posts) are just punking us. The most recent two are mocking Norm's (Dirk) posts

Lost in the Aeons

(Reminds me of Lost in Space)

I liked that title. Reminded me of 20000 leagues under the sea

re Question 1:
Ya... 10 episodes at $0.50 then joined up into an $7.99 tome means reader would saved $2.99 to read it as it rolled out. I don't see any other non-spurious price point. One guy decided the complete story was worth the sum of the episodes times 1.5 and felt no issue with charging $14 for the season, but that's a lot of money for an electronic format which has cost the author -nothing- to rerelease.

Re Question 2:
How do we define an episode? I'm thinking as a self-contained story... with a resolution as complete as possible (given the word count). The overarching story arc is treated in each episode but left unresolved. Rather, each acts as a self contained story, introducing its own central plot that is resolved at the end. The series would consist of short stories that happen to share the same characters.

No reliance on dramatic tactics to coerce readers into buying the next -- just a "here's a glimpse into the greater story". Ideally should work if a reader breaks in mid-stream. Like a TV show, one must assume no knowledge of past events. Only core world rules can be assumed (eg airlocks vs transporters). I would cite Stargate as a model to follow. Mind you, I don't like Stargate, but their model is hard to fault. On par with B5, though Straczynski commits the misstep of losing the middle-road consumer

Cover has some nice colours