Warning: This work has been rated 16+.
Harry woke up sometime later with the sharp prong of the lounge chair cutting into her back. Will’s small form was laying across her chest and looking down at the whiskey bottle on the concrete, she started trying to remember what happened.
The whole conversation with Glenn had been a whirlwind and she didn’t even remember when he gave her the bottle, but he was the only one who could have given it to her. Unless it was maybe somewhere in storage –
Will stirred a bit as Harry was moving around in the chair and she was wondering if she could escape without Will waking. The stairway off the side of the building was extremely close, and it would go right down into the alleyway to the garage. Her ability to escape from any situation was returning, along with the voice in the back of her head trying to justify it, while another told her not to run away.
“It’s not running away.”
At first, she filed it as another unconscious thought but soon the form was hanging over her. A blinding white light surrounded the floating spirit, who wore a mask totally obscuring their face and a cloak creating a void body.
“You’ve run away before, Harry. This isn’t running away.”
Harry slid Will off her chest and into the dip in the chair.
“Who are you?”
“Perhaps it’s been too long for you to remember. Let me help.”
The figure reached out to touch her, slightly grazing with a cold hand on her own and Harry was brought into another world. It was different from the visions and memories she usually had, which were rigid jumps from one place to another. This transition moved as smoothly as the figure that floated around her while they rested on a decrepit tarmac.
“Now do you remember me?”
“Unless you were one of those pilots I slept with, no.”
“I can assure you that we never had any such relations, Ms. Harriet.”
Harry looked down the runway at the planes sitting next to each other and the forms unloading and loading each one. She couldn’t tell what was in the crates this time, but she remembered the place, and the memory. Soon she would be introduced to Major Garner for the first time and it would begin a career in smuggling.
“I know you remember it. I can’t see your mind, but I can see your emotions.”
Harry wished the whiskey bottle was visible within this distorted reality because she was needing it, badly. The longer the form rested next to her, the more she was flipping through the pages of its mind.If the ghost was able to tell she was looking for information, it certainly wasn’t going to tell her but there wasn’t anything there to read.
“So, you remember the scene. Do you remember me?”
“Tanis.”
“Hmm?”
“Christmas Eve, 3600. In the capital
city of Tanis.”
“And?”
“It was the first time I was 17.”
“Yes. You met Major Garner and then you
met me and then you were magically promoted to a high rank. This is all very magical isn’t it?”
The form moved her around the ground again and created a portal to another memory. Harry was aware of the process and how to make the memories work, it had just always been too dramatic for her taste. When it came to the powers of those gifted in the mind, there was a long streak of them being overly dramatic. And whatever other villains popped up along the way certainly weren’t helping the overall reputation.
“Bahtta, what are you doing here?”
The ghost started to speak, and Harry quickly added, “Beside trying to kill
Glenn.”
“Am I allowed to miss you?”
“You swore to kill me and kill my entire species, so no.”
Harry would have expected another shriek to come from the Horridus assassin standing beside her, like the greeting first received in the street. Between them in speech, the conversation was dead. And in their heads, the radio silence echoed even more, which started to scare Harry. She didn’t know which way this would now turn but her hands had already dropped to her side in search of the gun belt that wasn’t there.
“Do you honestly think I would let you bring a gun into this
world? How foolish do you think I am?”
“Very. I think you are way under
standard.”
“And why would that be?”
“Because you came all the way out here to Zinnia to hunt me down. It’s not a matter of locating me, as much as
the effort any person from my past has been willing to put in. Most of them have been too dead or lazy to do
anything about my existence.”
This might be the end.
Those might have been the words that set off a reaction and leveled the entire city.
“How do you know that I just didn’t come for Glenn?”
“Maybe you came for Glenn in the beginning, or more your hit squad did. From what I’ve heard, Glenn’s criminal issues
weren’t all the criminal and I doubt you would have been involved from the
beginning. But once you realized where
Glenn was leading you, it made it worth your time.”
The ghost took a flask from its pocket and presented it to Harry, who sniffed it with the worry of poison.
“If I wanted to kill you, it wouldn’t be poison. And wouldn’t your favorite philosopher say, ‘Never let someone waste your time twice’, in response to the grand plan you believe I have.”
They took the flask back and then set it on a chair that had appeared from nowhere. Harry kicked at the leg to test its stability and her foot swept through it easily, which wasn’t altogether surprising. The image of the chair and the flask floating in space, was all dependent on the belief of the person creating the image. Again, it was something she knew how to do and could do without a glass of water, but it was dramatic.
And Bahtta loved to be dramatic, above any of vir other pursuits in life.
End of chapter
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137,435 Literary Works • 672,020 Reviews
Hey LadyBird! I thought I'd knock out three birds with one stone! Namely, I thought I'd review a mentor for a lot of words in a new critique pattern! Woot Woot, BRB Rules!
I'm going to try to use the Middle Chapter Critique Template now.
Hey LadyBird, I haven't read your previous chapters, but I think it's really great that I can jump right here in the middle and still understand some of the context of what's going on. I love the characters that you have with the ghost popping out of nowhere. That's really cool to see.
Line Edits
You have a few line edits I noticed when I was reading your story.
You missed your space.
Syntax
Your syntax is a little lengthy and funny at several points in this story. Now most of these are opinions and preferences, so they are mostly not grammatical problems.
This is one example of word choice where I'm going to spout out the writing advice from writers and then you can choose to call it stylistic if you don't want to, or just say you'll get it in edits and then never do because it doesn't make that much of a difference, or it does and you go gung ho about it.
The classical opinion is that someone's small form should just be someone doing something. The idea is that instead of saying "Will's eyes were looking around the room" just say "Will looked around the room." That's what the verb Looked is for after all, to look. It simplifies not only the noun phrase to put the doer of the verb being the person rather than the person's possession, but it often eliminates "was" "had" "were" etc. In your case, it would be "Will lay across her chest looking down at the whiskey bottle on the concrete." or rather than looking since Will appears to be asleep, "pointed" thus not animate and consciously searching or staring at the whisky bottle while sleeping on her.
This is a personal pickiness, but the use of the dash here makes it feel as though it should be an abrupt ending, but it's not. A simple period here would get across the same message as nothing seems to be interrupting her thoughts. People are just moving around a little bit and she transitions into the next thought after noticing. It doesn't feel like an abrupt change because of the way you phrase the next part of the story.
Note several things: First, Will only stirred a "bit" meaning he's just moving a little and might even be dream-twitching, no clue. He's nto saying any mrnfpfhs or anything, just moving a little. That's natural for sleepers. As for Harry, that's our main character, right? So if one person moves, the other moves too, no problems with that.
Next: Harry wonders. She doesn't contemplate, doesn't actually verbalize it to the narrator, she wonders, which means she's just considering it gently. A wonder has the same connotation as wondering about why clouds drift. Planned, scrounged, or even fought would work better here if she's panicking a little bit. "Harry scrounged for a way to escape without waking Will." "Will stirred as Harry moved under him and she fought through her thoughts for some way to escape." You can use verbs a little unconditionally to add some stress here if that was the intention of the dash. If it wasn't, then take the dash out. No need for it if it's a transition from thinking about general stuff to thinking about escaping. Captive people always think about escaping, no drama.
You might also want to note that you have more of the first syntax thing here too. You're not really using your words as efficiently as you could e as you can see from my second example where I did the whole sentence. Those verbs need to lift themselves sometimes! If Will isn't actually starting to wake up, make him twitch or something minor that sleeping people do.
This actually came out really awkwardly to include "was" in there. To me the proper syntax here would be "Harry wished the whiskey bottle was visible within this distorted reality because she needed it, badly." It's not much different, but it doesn't have that weird "was needing" in there which makes it sound smoother to me. The sentence is already awkward with "the whiskey bottle was visible" not meaning that the whiskey bottle WAS visible, but that it wasn't. You could make that less garden path by saying "Harry missed the whiskey bottle" or "If only the whiskey bottle were here" or "Harry needed the whiskey bottle, but this distorted reality blocked it from her."
You might want to play around with the idea a little.
This sentence doesn't really feel like it means anything valuable to me. What I mean by that is that it's rather obvious by the ghost's method of saying "My name is ___." that they aren't forthcoming with information and the sentence you have instead is rather awkward. Basically you're saying "If the ghost could see her searching her memories, it wasn't going to stop her from doing that" but in reality what it means is "The ghost wasn't helping her figure this out" which we already see through the actions of the story. Wouldn't it be more helpful to drop a few lines of internal thought about what she's thinking of?
In short, you use a lot of "was" in your story which doesn't really help it along and I'd like to see probably 65% of those come out to just be Noun action verb rather than noun modifying verb action verb. You do something similar with your sentences too and you have a bunch of conjoined sentences with few that are short. Some of your paragraphs are only two sentences but they stretch for several lines. This used to be kind of frowned upon, sort of like using kind of and frowned upon.
If you want more details about the sentence structure thing, hit me up some time and I'll go over this in more detail.
Characters
Harry- To me Harry seems like a scatterbrained nuisance. She doesn't really know what she wants to do, she clearly is having a drinking issue, or she's had a lot of dramatic events happen with this General and she doesn't really seem to have a clear goal or feeling. It's like she's the ghost rather than the ghost.
Bahtta- This character seems like a mover and a shaker. They seem to have vir ducks in a row and know what they want to do with them. I'm pretty happy with what they're doing to this indecisive MC of yours.
Will- He seems like he's probably overly possessive and way too childish to do much of anything good for Harry who needs some discipline and direction in her life.
Plot
This came right after Harry struggled to think of some way not to wake him up when she moved him, so I have issues with how easy the task actually was versus her mental struggle to escape. It seems like there's no struggle to escape, she just has to walk away, so why include her struggle to escape in her thoughts in the story?
And speaking of, you had an amazing opportunity to remind us what this Genral's whole deal was while she tried to remember what she'd done with them and who this ghost may be, but you just skimmed it instead of showing us what she's thinking. Instead we get some trite line about how the ghost is responding to her thinking when I might have connected with her more if I spent some time in her head a little more. I don't really see where she's headed or where she's been from this chapter, which, granted, it's a part of a part, but still, I don't have a clear sense of her as a character where I do for these other two.
Why does she need whiskey right then? Why? If we can know that she wants it desperately, no, NEEDS it, then why can't you tell us WHY she needs it?
Summary
In short, you may want to work on editing this with a search for the words "had" and "was" to try to help make your verbs work for you rather than stacking against you. I feel like most of this was pretty good, but it didn't really catch my attention. The reason it didn't was because I didn't connect with the MC which I should have already done by this point, but really any part of a book should have something to catch a readers attention in case they flip it open to the middle for a writing sample, or put it down to pick up something else.
Send me a PM if you want any further clarification or review!
Aley
For some reason this format doesn't have a "good stuff" section, which I don't like, but this concludes my BRB new style review!
Intriguing??? Like I know Harry's way older than Will thought she was, by, like, centuries, but??? Now I'm super-curious about this because this sounds like remembered reincarnation or something.
Omg how many different characters from Harry's past are suddenly gonna pop up and profess continued love for her even though they've done some questionable stuff to her?
You know what's funny about Bhatta is that normally when an nb character is introduced I trip over their ponouns for a while even after I realize what's going on? but in this case somehow it just read really smoothly. I'm not sure why. It could be because there were no pronouns until the end of the chapter, at which point you used "they" first - a pronoun everyone's 100% familiar with - and then used "vir," at which point I was ready for it. So idk but I just wanted to say good job with that.
I also love the emphasis on Bhatta being super dramatic. I'm hoping it'll come up a lot more as we move forward, and since it's you I'm expecting it will. I'm a little surprised Will was asleep through this whole exchange, but then again they all have various powers so I guess if they wanted her to remain unconscious and not hear their conversation, that could absolutely happen.