(I would like to thank the following people: Noelle, TwinkleStar, Wonder, HopelessAbandon, SUSHISASHIMI333, Niebla and Jadefox. Thank you guys for being dedicated readers throughout and for offering your criticism to the novel. I am very grateful for your efforts. Thanks everyone. Also thanks to others who have reviewed my chapters.)
At that point two things happened. Two bombs flew into the air, from behind us. One was a flash bomb which caused everyone to cover their eyes frantically. The other hit me. Instead of an explosion, blue dust poured out from it and coated my body. My human flesh tore off immediately.
I felt my senses strengthen. My eyes were stronger with my blue-ray vision intact and my hearing and touch was also increased. With my arms I grabbed the president and Mrs Paulman and then with my legs I lunged forward. I head butted the terrorist before he could react and knocked him out of the way. I threw the President and Mrs Paulman into the bunker.
Now that they were out of the way, I could deal with my enemies. But who had thrown the bombs? The two body guards fired bullets at me. I felt the bullets hit my skin and burst to pieces. I was unharmed. At the point I noticed the terrorist had a different gun to them. I had a feeling that the bullets from that one wouldn’t be so nice to me.
As if having read my thought, the terrorist stood up and fixed his gun at me but I charged forward and knocked into him. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a woman run in and tackle both the bodyguards. I recognised her face. It was my stepmother.
I grabbed the man with both my hands and threw him to the wall opposite. He hit it with a thud and fell limply to the floor. I turned to the bunker and saw the president trying to rush back. He was armed but Mrs Paulman wouldn’t hear it. She pushed him back and pushed down a lever on the side and the bunker doors began to close. She screamed something in all the commotion. With my enhanced hearing I could make out that she was saying, “Look behind you, idiot”. Yep, she called me an idiot. I guess she lost her cool when the guards manhandled her.
I turned and saw my stepmother knock out a bodyguard. As he threw a punch at her, she ducked and rolled forward until she was crouching just before him. At that point she threw her left foot into the guard’s chest whilst using here two hands and the other foot to steady herself. He fell back but she didn’t let up. She stood up and threw three consecutive punches his way: one at the face; another at the chest and the third in the stomach. He fell back and collapsed.
I turned to see the other guard charge my stepmother with a knife and she didn’t see it coming. I lunged forward and grabbed the guard. I twisted violently wrenching the knife out of his hands whilst crushing his wrists in the process. He screamed in agony, but that didn’t matter to me. I wasn’t going to lose any more of my parents.
“Thanks for that Jason,” she patted me on the back affectionately. I smiled. Everything was going to be okay.... or so it seemed. The terrorist got up and exposed a grenade. He threw it at us. The explosion hit me and I flew backwards. There was no pain but it was a different story for the humans around me. I saw the guards fly up with us and my stepmother received the impact pretty hard. She had her hands up to shield herself but it didn’t look too good. She hit the ground and lay there limp and lifeless.
And then it occurred to me. I had a mouth that wasn’t for speaking or breathing but it had canines. As if I had been doing it all my life I opened my mouth and out shot a long barbed green tongue. It wrapped itself around the terrorist and pulled him towards me. As he came into my range I snapped my mouth at his neck. My canines pierced him as he let out a wailing scream.
I dropped him and ran back to my mother. Suddenly, the walls gave way and three figures appeared. They were similar to me, except that they were taller and more mature. They had more frequent deeper shades of blue with long tentacles that moved more vigorously. There were less white spots on their bodies though.
“Come with us” they spoke in unison in my mind. Then one of them looked at my stepmother and then looked back at me. His voice sounded in my mind.
“She will be fine. Human medics are on their way. She will live.” His emotions flowed through and I understood it to be the truth. Relief flooded itself inside me. I stood up to face my species. I felt so small and scared. They surrounded me. Blue dust began to spiral around us. I closed my eyes as intense blue light erupted everywhere. When I opened them again I was looking down at earth.
******
“So I am not going back?” I asked.
“No,” replied the elder Kodai, “We reached out thinking they had evolved enough but it appears they have yet to achieve peace and stability amongst themselves. If we were to lend them technology there is no telling how they might use it. After all, they were incapable of stopping some of their own from ruining this alliance.”
“I see, so we are going to fly away into space and never come back?” I inquired.
“Not never, we will come back in the future. We leave in two days.” With that the elder turned and began to leave my chamber.
“Can I make one request please?” I asked. The elder turned to face me.
******
“Welcome to Royal Albert Hospital, how may I help you?” said the receptionist as she showed me her pearly white teeth.
“I am here to see Maridia Lissy Turner,” I replied.
“And who may I say is visiting?”
“Tell her it’s her step son visiting. Tell her it’s Jason.”
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
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125,007 Literary Works • 672,816 Reviews
Hi there, mystogan –
Sorry for the super late review, and no problem about the reviews so far; I’m really glad I’ve been able to be of some help, and I hope that I can help again in this one. I’ve read all of the last three chapters, but instead of reviewing them separately I’m just going to drop one long review here because it’s much easier to sum up my thoughts and ideas without repeating myself this way. I’ll start by splitting it up into sections, pointing out all the things that stood out as needing improvement--
Plot:
This whole novel kind of reminded me of a vague dream: there were some bizarre happenings, some vivid images, but though those images were bursting with potential they never really developed much depth before the slides changed and suddenly another image was there. While the plot made sense the importance of things shifted a lot, and I was left disappointed time after time when I wanted to find out more about certain characters or situations. Things happened so fast that I barely took them in, and it failed to really build up any emotional impact inside me. Aside from the things which would be good with more depth, here are some of the questions that come up in my mind:
In the story Jason’s life is completely normal before the meteors strike and he discovers that he’s an alien and that everyone around him is lying to him. Before nothing of the sort happened – he was a little obsessed with aliens, sure, and not the most sociable of people, but those things aren’t that unusual. Then boom – he’s an alien, he can see differently, and people are plotting against him. The story snaps into two parts, the realistic and the fantastical, when it would have been a lot more believable if it was woven together a little more, the world we know with the one we are not so familiar with.
Living with his step-parents, did Jason really never notice anything unusual at all? Were there ever signs, suspicious things happening? Did his parents ever act odd towards him? Did he ever have dreams, or flashbacks, or intuitions: how could nothing ever happen that even made him suspect what was going on at all? The jump from him being a human to him being revealed as an alien is so clear-cut it doesn’t seem like he’s the same person.
Also, in the end it turns out that Jason is a lot more important than he thought he was in the beginning; a hostage whose death could ruin the prospects of allying with an alien race, perhaps even cause disputes or war. Wouldn’t the governments protect someone who was so important a little better? When I think of a situation like this I think of Jason being in a high-security area, not just living in a town, allowed to be ordinary. Maybe they wanted him to live a normal life (although there would have to be many disagreeing with that as he’s not exactly normal himself) or they just didn’t care; if so, wouldn’t there at least be some sign that his parents were qualified to protect him?
If even the answer to that is no, then it seems unlikely that he’d manage to get through so many years without any troubles at all: did they never even have to relocate? The terrorists would be trying to find them, and perhaps other people who found out what was going on and wanted to get involved; there would be people wanting to kill him and people wanting to save him, people hating him and people wanting him on their side. Maybe I can suspend my disbelief a little more if this is explained in more depth.
Characters:
Aside from wanting to know more about Jason and his personal experiences of things, I’m interested in his relationship with his (adoptive) parents. This was something that seemed to change a lot – at first, they didn’t get on, and then suddenly his relationship with his stepmother became one of the main focuses of the story. I just think this needs clarification, and explanation – if he cares so much in the end, surely they must have had some kind of a relationship before all this happened? What were they like? What qualified them to be looking after Jason, and what was their motivation? There’s so much more to be explored here, from his background to them to the feelings he had when leaving them. I don’t need to know everything, but I still feel like there’s something missing here.
Detail/description:
What does it feel like to wrap your tongue around someone? It’s not a sensation that’s easy to imagine without a little more description. Jason’s canines pierced the man’s neck: did they draw blood, or break bones? Also, how could he not notice for so long?
Again, there’s no emotion or description. Jason blandly states that he saw some blood pour out and felt some pain and it gives nothing away of what he really experienced: it’s more like a news article, telling the reader what happened but not letting them experience the story along with the characters.
I noticed this a lot throughout the novel; there are so many huge events happening, fights breaking out and bombs going off, and so little description so that the scenes that form in my head are like vague sketches with no colour, nothing to fill them in. Then there are other places in which there’s a lot of description:
But to me this doesn’t really feel right, either; it’s no longer too vague, but it’s not really showing me how Jason sees things. What did he notice first, and how did he react to it? What did he think; did it remind him of something; was the reflection distorted? Here he’s giving all the details you would need to make a sketch of him as an alien, but it seems just too much like that: it takes me away from the story even more and I still don’t really know what Jason is experiencing.
Since the novel is from his POV, I want to get to know him well when I’m reading. I want to see things from his eyes; know what he felt and experienced, what he saw and thought and heard and smelt and wondered as he does. In a way, I want to be in sync with his mind. He narrates parts so blandly, with so little description or emotion, when each event could be a chance to get to know the way he sees things. Some more examples of where detail would be good:
His flesh tore off – wow. Doesn’t this warrant just a little more description? What did it feel like; even if it was painless, it must feel like something.
Didn’t he resist at all? At least, did an expression of panic or confusion or something else cross his face before he hit the wall? He’s a human being, but here he sounds more like a sack of flour.
What do their voices sound like?
What does it feel like to crush someone’s wrists with your bare hands? What sound does it make?
Overall: I want to read more detail, and know exactly what Jason is experiencing; the big events to be described as they’re experienced instead of rushed through, to be shown all the characters’ reactions because these surely are all things they’d react to. Each big event is like an explosion that causes characters to react in some way; sometimes it seems like Jason is half beyond that barrier.
I think I’ve pointed out everything that stood out to me in the story now; I really hope that this helps. If you ever repost any edited/rewritten versions of this, I’d be interested to read.
Keep writing,
~Niebla
Hi mystogan!
I've finally gotten around to finishing your story. I sat down to read and review each chapter individually but I found myself captivated by the plot twists and developments and greedily moving onto chapter after chapter. I decided to write more of a general review about the course of the story and such instead.
First of all, I was not expecting that Jason was the alien at all. Being a pretty avid sci-fi fan I would think I would have figured it out on my own. I was on the completely wrong track for debunking the story and was happily surprised you decided to take it a different direction than what I was thinking.
There were some minor nitpicks but all grammatical, so I won't point them out in this review.
I enjoyed the description and the appearance of the Kodai. Their design was original but still had the classic alien concept.
I also feel you could write a sequel to this story of the future visit of the Kodai to Earth. I like it being left to the imagination about the future progression of the Kodai-Human relationship but there's a possibility of a sequel.
Overall, I enjoyed your story a lot and am looking forward to reading more of your writing. Every time you post another story the work has progressively gotten better and better. Keep writing!
~Jade
Hi there! Back for another Review Day review!
What a great ending. Really, I loved every bit of this. The last chapter here ties up all loose ends and makes a good closing.
The relationship between Jason and his stepmother is very interesting. Although I do believe she would come to help him setting as his stepfather came to his aid earlier. I do wish you had taken more time to focus on his parents. I feel like the only thing I know about them is that they love Jason like he was their own son. But since it's a short novel, I guess it's okay.
Your action scenes are great. As I've mentioned in about every review already, I love action in novels. And you've done such a great job with yours. It's important to mix action and the character's thoughts. That way readers get the action they desire and their curiosity about what the character is thinking about area fulfilled. You did a good job combining the two and not overdoing either of the aspects.
It was nice how you ended it with Jason gulping to see his mother. I thought that when his alien people (relatives?) come to get him, he was just going to leave without a second thought. But it really shows his character by going back to see his mother. He realizes now who he is and where he belongs, but he still feels like Earth is his home. It makes him a nice relatable character.
I enjoyed reading this. Good job with the whole story!
Keep writing!
**Noelle**
P.S. Sorry for any spelling mistakes. I did this review on my tablet and autocorrect is really stupid sometimes.
I feel like crying right now but I assure you it's tears of joy. I have to hand it to you, when it comes to action, you can really put up a good fight in your chapters. It started out so fast, with the bombs and everything was so hectic, I could feel the tension in the atmosphere. I think the starting was perfect, just as much as the ending was. This has to be the best chapter yet, of course it's the last chapter so it has to be really good but I'm disappointed that it ended so soon. Disappointed in a good way because I was actually having a lot of fun reading it.
The way you narrated the action scenes, I might have to learn a lot from you. It was so amazing how Jason was never able to realise any of his abilities before but just when he's pushed into the most life-threatening situation of all, his instincts completely take over. I liked how slowly after getting thrown and shot at he realises he is stronger and much more capable than the person he had been fearing.
Another thing I liked was the bond between him and his mother. I bet it hadn't ever been as strong as it was at that moment when both of them were on the verge of losing their lives. It also amazed me how she was so strong, yes, I was aware that she was an agent but the thought didn't occur to me until she'd landed a few kicks and punches at the first guard.
The line that I loved most here was 'I wasn’t going to lose any more of my parents.' It was so original and fitted the situation quite well. Although I'm not sure who had thrown the bomb full of blue dust, but I have a hunch that it was his own species. They made quite an entrance and by the end of the chapter, all my doubts and fears about the Kodais were gone. You showed that they truly are an intelligent race and did not even question the government about why Jason's parents died.
I guess, in the end, you managed to explain everything. I thank you for letting me read something so new and OUT OF THIS WORLD. =D Congratulations on finishing the book.