Published June 20, 2015
A/N: I really have absolutely no flipping clue as to where this is going to go now~~~ I think I’ll rewrite the story for the next round of LMS (is there will be one :D). For now, if you review (thank you in advance~~~ :3), please focus on my writing style and the characters themselves. The plot is going into pieces... >______>
Lin’s room is painted with pink, but resonated with a sense of coldness. Upon closer inspection, the paint behind the carefully mosaicked layers of posters, pictures, and drawings was faded and starting to chip. The chandelier is made of crystals that have long since clouded from age. The desk lamp is more easily accessible-- making it more easy to clean and in better condition. The window perched stoically above the desk now looked down--an empty socket forever transfixed on the world in front of it, which it saw but could not see.
Below that sightless, watchful eye, the dark, ink-like glob of something contracted and expanded in crazed spasms; the mid-aged lady whose hair was host to such a thing shrieked as she stumbled, grappling with it.
“Oooh… a darkling… You really don’t see them a lot, not near human residences.” Jen stuck her hands in her flowing, black overcoat and casually strolled towards the struggling woman. The girl tilted her head slightly as she observed the two beings. “This one is quite diminutive in size… It’s not been in this world for long. What a shame.” A smart snap instantly stopped the darkling’s writhing. Another snap, and it dissipated with a shrill squeak. The plump woman’s legs gave away as she collapsed onto the dusty ground. Thawed from her previous shock, Lin rushed over to lift her to her feet.
“Are you okay?” The girl asked worriedly as she directed the older woman towards her house.
“Don’t bother. She’s unconscious.” The Overlord ran the hand that snapped through her pitch-black hair. “Darklings have a tendency to latch onto hosts and feed off of their energy. They are typically attracted to flora. More so than humans, that is.”
“I guess that, since we live so close to the forest, it doesn’t really make a difference.” Lin murmured as she headed through the door and laid the unconscious person on the nearest couch, taking care to levitate her feet slightly. “When will Ms. Dubose wake up?”
“Oh I don’t know. She might sleep for quite a while. In the mean time, I think it’s worth taking a little look at your little forest.” Jen looked out of the large living room window. “Darklings don’t come in neat little packages-- if you find one, chances are that there will be more. At least a few thousand more.”
Lin pulled a nearby couch blanket over Ms. Dubose and looked out of the same window, searching the visible woods with her reddish-rust eyes. “A few thousand more… where did they come from in the first place…?”
Jen suddenly turned around, and Lin almost jumped--it’s quite unnerving to make direct eye contact with the Overlord. “Oh, places. Maybe Hell, maybe not. There are many different methods of generating darklings. I’ll remove them right now--wouldn’t want to have them sucking the life out of everything within a 100-mile radius, now, would we?”--the girl chuckled at this--“Though, you don’t seem shocked at all, considering that you’ve never encountered these such critters before.”
Lin looked away quickly, busying herself with ‘fixing’ the corners of the thin blanket meagerly wrapped around the plump woman’s frame. “Oh… I’m not, um… that bothered by… these. I… well I wasn’t very shocked when I summoned you, after all, and most people don’t believe Overlords exist.”
“Oh, maybe that’s why they stare at me speechlessly whenever I appear, yes?”
You’re on a whole different level of naive, aren’t you? Lin shook her head and smothered a smile, nodding with satisfaction at her work and stepping away from her unconscious patient. “So… now, do we go off on a crazy adventure to find a way to stop these darkling things from consuming everything and sucking our souls?”
“Nope. One step ahead of you, m’dear.” Jen plopped herself down on the opposite couch, swung one leg over the other, reclined onto the age-stiffened pillows*, and snapped with her right hand, all in one smooth movement.
Behind her, the oversized window rattled as the forest it revealed exploded in black. Columns, blobs, and puffs of tar-like substances shrieked as they swelled to hundreds of times their original size, burst, smeared all over the trees, the surrounding grounds, the beaten dirt road--even reaching the window. Soon, the pristine glass panes were completely covered by the thixotropic liquid. Comfortably positioned on the furred couch, the Overlord smirked at a speechless Lin.
“What, did you seriously think that this story is going to gain any sort of viable plot? Nope.”
Lin sighed, shaking her head again for the fourth time that day. “No… I suppose not…. But now, I have to clean the exterior of the house…”
Jen snapped again, and the pitch-like ooze instantly disintegrated into thin air. “Nope. One step ahead of you, m’dear. Watashi wa** very handy, yes?”
Make that the fifth time. Lin thought as her head subconsciously quivered in its roost.
A/N: AN! Oh, we all love ANs :D Not. Ahem… but anyways. This short thing is what took so long…
…
I’M SORRYYYYYYYYYY--- \(QAQ \) But I will upload a chappie on time this time! XD
*I can’t find a good name for the back of a couch… o-o Halp, guyz?
**Japanese. Who doesn’t love that stuff. “Watashi” is “I/me”, and Jen will be using that a lot. However, her speech is purposefully chaotic and inconsistent, so who knows? Maybe in the next chapter she’ll be using German... And “wa” is a particle meaning “is/am”. So, “watashi wa” will be “I am” in this context.
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The tense issues- Oh wait, someone already covered that. Eh, let's go on, then.
"The Overlord ran the hand that snapped through her pitch-black hair." What? ... What? This sentence is really confusing. 'The' hand? As in, not hers? How can it snap through hair? Clear it up a bit.
Some of your wording is weird, like reddish-rust. I'm going to quote my writing teacher again on this: "KISS; Keep It Simple, Stupid". Why make it so extravagant when you can easily use more understandable, yet equally descriptive words in their place? Rust is already reddish, just write rusty or rust-colored. Mosaicked is a little off, in my opinion, but since it's an accurate description of what's happening (definition-wise), it's your choice to use it.
The setting can be pretty confusing, too. Are they in Lin's house? I think so, but the first paragraph isn't really descriptive enough and confuses me a bit. "The window perched stoically above the desk now looked down". This line is...weird, but not in the good way. 'Now' looked down? So, it wasn't looking down before. That means that the window turned weird or something? I thought this was Lin's room... Did the darklings transform it or something? Eh, I don't know, I'm not the omnipresent writer. Unless you're aiming to make it so that the readers have no idea what the room's really supposed to look like, this line could be worded better.
The next part of this sentence, "an empty socket forever transfixed on the world in front of it, which it saw but could not see" also doesn't make sense. I know that the point of it is to be mysterious, but you don't pull it off well enough. Instead of being intrigued and mystified, it makes me even more confused on what the window looks like. Is it dark outside? Is there even glass making window, since it's empty?
When Lin tries to get Ms. Dubose back to the her house, it confuses me further. The first line, "Lin's room is painted pink", gives the impression that the two are in Lin's room, but somehow, Lin is phasing through the mosaicked walls to get the old lady back to her house. I'm assuming that in this line, "she directed the older woman towards her house", her refers to Ms. Dubose, since Lin should be in her own house already. Either way, Lin's doing some off-screen, unexplained magic.
Actually, with all this, the first paragraph isn't even necessary. Or, at least, its contents aren't. Setting up the field is awesome, but the intro isn't much relevance when the two just immediately pop into Ms. Dubose's house. It might be better that they were outside, so that it makes sense for Lin to direct Dubose back into a house.
Summing it all up, the characters are fine, but the description could be a lot better. Maybe I'm just that uncomprehensive, but this story is all over the place. I'm re-reading the story over and over to make sure I'm not missing a critical link, but having to scour the lines for some help at all is a sign that this thing clearly isn't, well, clear enough.
I love how the paragraphs are actually broken up. Thank you. This thing's much better when compared to the first chapter.
i'm tryinnnnggggggg
Well, hey! Your reviews are getting better, Ali! No need to worry.
Also, I know exactly what I'm doing-- some of the things you were confused about, I do need to change, but the intro at the beginning is absolutely necessary. Have you noticed that both this chappie and the last started with a detailed description of some element in Lin's room? :3
Well, thanks for dropping by, happy writing~~~!
Hm. Well, if there's no plot, what the blazes are you going to keep writing about? You know what, never mind. It's best I didn't know.
Grammatical issues have already been smoothed over, so I guess that leaves me with fundamental description. You've got a very descriptive style for such few words. (Thixotropic. Quite possibly my new favorite word.)
I enjoy Lin's character for her humorous cynicism, as well as Jen's for her unique eccentricity. In fact, they're what make me wish for a plot the most: to see them grow and to get to know them better. Their exchanges are quite enjoyable, and I honestly wouldn't mind seeing them save the world.
As for your flow, it's quite good. It's not quite out-of-this-world, but then again, little is, and I have no idea of how to make it so. Flow is one of the hardest aspects of writing, and even I have difficulty with it regularly. Though it's usually about using the sounds and appearances of words to construct a general mood.
So yeah, there's not much to put here. I suppose the most interesting part of this story is that there's not way of telling what'll happen next, and that in itself is excellent satire. Cheers.
-Chaser
Thanks for dropping byyyyy~~~ \(^w^)
(well... I might... but not anytime soon XD) The lack of plot allows me to incorporate a variety of themes and ideas that I can drop whenever I feel like I cannot continue it any longer. This sort of freedom is what I look for when trying to murder writer's block. (Shhhhh... don't tell it... don't tell it about my plan OwO)
YWS doesn't seem recognize it as a word!)
And no, no plot. Not now, not ever
I do agree that I have a lot of problems when it comes to grammar and syntax, and I will hopefully take care of most (if not all) of those troubles in the future.
(Also, thixotropic for the WIN!
Once again, thank you very much for the review, and happy writing~~~!
Why hello there Jen! I've seen this for a while, but now I'm finally here to review.
As you mentioned, I shall try not to focus on the plot. So....
Everything in this paragraph is present tense except for a few words. Since the rest of this chapter is all in past tense, I recommend just looking over everything in here and changing it to the correct tense.
I really don't think I have much to add, although it is confusing sometimes when you use "the girl" to refer to both Lin and Jen. Maybe for Jen, you could occasionally use "the Overlord" instead. I have no idea what to call the back of the couch other than the back of the couch. You could, however, call it the backrest. I don't know if that's helpful or not.
I love your use of Japanese in Jen's speech, and also when she says m'dear. It gives her a unique style, and German would definitely be cool. However, I do encourage at least trying to have a little bit of plot... It wouldn't be so terrible if Jen and Lin actually did go on an adventure to find and kill all of the darklings. Also, it appears that Jen's powers are unlimited? And they don't relate to tildes very much. In fact, the only time you used tildes in the entire piece was in the A/N at the beginning. ...Jen is the Overlord of Tildes, is she not?
Alright, well that's all! I await another chapter.
-Falco
Yup~~~!
Also, subject-tense agreement and tense agreement are two infected sores in my side. Created by two venomous thorns infected with radioactive bacteria injected with toxic viruses. Yes. >.>
Also, since LMS II started, I think I'll just upload the chapter meant for this week, and then completely rewrite! XD
Anywho, if you're looking for a plot...
...
...
[size=500]Nope.[/size]
:3