The city passed by them swiftly, and they soon came to the edge of town. She spotted the pub up ahead. The sun was setting, framing it in an aura of golden light. She sharply turned into an ally at the side of the pub and skidded to a stop. Theron arrived moments later.
She grasped her ring on her left hand and twisted one of the segments slightly. What looked like mirror shards appeared and disappeared, all over her.
Theron blinked, “Cool. ”
He was now looking at a young adult girl, with a mohawk, piercings, and fishnet stockings, and not to mention piercing black lipstick. “It’s a new gadget, saves the time of changing, an illusion actually,” She lifted a finger to her ear and pressed the com in it. “Can you hear me.”
“Loud and clear.”
“Good.”
She pressed a button on her bike handle, it vanished.
“Stay here.”
“Aww, man.”
She glared at him ”I'll keep you updated.”
“Eden, turn on identity scanning,” The contacts on her eyes glowed slightly, as she turned blue arrows pointed to different patrons, with boxes stating their name and such. “ Edith Potts, Edith, Potts,” she mumbled scanning the room, “Ah-ha.” She spotted her sitting in a booth. She checked her character and shuffled over.
“Hey, you Mrs. Potts?” She stated, the woman looked up, she was probably in her forties. She sipped, her beer, “Yeah, why?”
Lysander sat down, and swung her legs up on the table, “ I’m looking for, Robert, you know where he is?”
“Wait, you're Alex, his old girlfriend, I haven't seen you in a while.”
“Yeah, he cheated on me so I broke up with him.”
“I haven’t seen him for about three years now, I think I have a picture of him from two years ago.” She handed Lysander a worn, wallet size, picture of, oh my goodness.
She took a picture and handed the photo back to the woman, who continued talking. "So how's life been, anything you want to know about Robert? I am sure you know everything about him, but he has his secrets, he was very conservative about them."
“What work did he do a few years ago, he never told me." Lysandra leaned forward
"You know he never told me either, though he did mention something about it being with an agency"
"You don't say that lines up with some of my probings, about his job. You still don’t know where he is?”
“No, I hope you find him though, and teach him a lesson” She raised her cup to emphasize her point.
“I plan to do nothing else, one and one more thing did he have a middle name?"
"Yes, I believe it was Theron, Robert Theron Lycoan, not the best combination of words I might add."
"Thank you you've been very helpful."
"Have a good one girly."
Lysandra nodded then stood up and left, pushing through the crowd to get back to the alley door. She twisted her ring again as she stepped outside and her disguise vanished. She kicked Theron who lay on the ground, asleep.
”Wake up I wasn’t gone for that long.”
“Owww,” He slowly got up.
“Hey where’s my bike,” She scanned the alley, it was nowhere to be seen.
“Yeah about that look, I need you to stay here,” Theron clasped his hands.
“What.”
She glanced around as dark shadows emerged from the ally. Theron, walk over and stood in front of her. His face inches from hers.
”You know, I'm sorry it has to end this way, I know who you talked to in there, I can’t risk anything."
His face was sorrowful, but his eyes, they were full of hatred, every word he spoke was poison dipped in honey. She would have tackled him, but she had bigger problems to deal with. He hopped on his cycle and nodded at the eight thugs that were surrounding her.
“Well then, shall we dance?”
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
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125,005 Literary Works • 672,798 Reviews
Hey, Messy back for more
OKAY! This is a better chapter. At least, I think so. There's some decent dialogue, an intriguing end, and some more cool tech stuff which I found really fun to read about bs see on a screen (maybe because I don't read many stories with AI in them like this)
Moving on to some constructive things to work on
1) Fleshing out the world - So we presumably drive to this city, go into like a restaurant cafe shoppe style thing? But is it outside or inside? I can't tell from what little description there is. What is the mood of the city? Are we in a higher-end place? If there is Jarvis type AI is the city more techy looking? I just have no clue how to imagine this scene.
2) Mrs Potts - I think you miss out here a lot on letting us get to know Mrs Potts. Dreamy made some good points about how they don't seem to share much bitterness about Robert dumping Lysandra's character. But then at the end, she seems to take a shot at him, so why didn't she react at first? And for that matter, as it is it's hard to envision the mood of this conversation. Is Lysandra being deceptive about how she words things, is Mrs. Potts sympathetic to her, or defensive of Robert? Why is she so willing to answer questions? What does she even look like?? Right now it might as well be a phone call.
3) Interesting ending. So, Robert is Theron or? I like the plot twist, even so early in the story. But why doesn't he fight Lysandra? Why leave a bunch of low-life thugs to fight her? He just saw her arsenal and they are friends, right?
Lastly, there are a lot of grammar errors in here as with the others. I want to bring to attention Grammarly, in case you don't know about it. It's got a free version that is a plugin for online writing. I use it for all my reviews and even import my chapters online to help proof-read them. It shows you spelling errors, tense problems, punctuation, etc. It's fantastic! I think it would really help you with some of the smaller things you might miss when proof-reading by yourself.
Hope this helps,
Messy
Hello, thanks again! I use Grammarly, so I don't know why it didn't pick up those things.
-Lady Of Mystery
Do you use it online? cuz it doesn't catch my mistakes unless I'm typing on a website. I usually put my chapter into wordcounter.io after writing it on my microsoft Word
Hey there LadyMysterio. I see this piece has been in the green room since October so I figured I better drop by.
Before I get too much into the content of this piece, you do need to work on your formatting for dialogue. There are typos elsewhere within the piece but I noticed the most issues with the pieces of dialogue. Just look at this section that I pulled out below.
The dialogue should be looking more like this:
There's two things that you can do with the issues on the dialogue tags. You can either rework the descriptions that come after the dialogue line, like I did for the first example. Or you can split the dialogue line from the description and put it on an entirely different line.
One of the other more technical things that I ran into in this story was the sentence structure. These two sentences that I pasted above are rather awkwardly worded. I think they need to be separated out and reworded. There are more than a couple of points in this story that need to be reworked and need to be reworded to make the story easier to read.
Within the story itself, it is a little bit hard to follow. I know I don't know what happened before this point but this is the point where a lot of lines are converging. There were so many details to be distracted by that it was very hard to maintain a focus on the plot. Or really to determine the plot. And for the first time in a long time, I think I might need to read the rest of the parts to give you an accurate review on the rest of the content outside of technical issues.
So if you have any questions about this review or anything else, just ask.
Happy writing.
- Jack
Awosme thank you for the review!
I love the username!
Hey there! I will post this as a comment so you'll have another review before the Greenroom consumes this.
I really liked the changes you've made. They actually make the story interesting and does move the story forward. I didn't know Lysandra actually changed appearance when she went to meet the Potts woman. And I liked the little conversation they had.
I guess the end of why Theron's eyes were filled with hatred will be revealed in the later chapters and I can't wait.
Keep up the good work!
Cheers!
Thanks, I am glad it's a smoother read.
-Lady Mysterio.
Hello there! I have some criticisms and I hope you don't mind me giving you some suggestions.
Ok, why and who was he hating? Was it because of his bike or is it something else? I feel so lost at the last paragraph. You could elaborate on that and make it clear because now it's just so confusing, especially the "every word he spoke was poison dipped in honey" part.
I also thought that this part could have had more content. It felt more like a filler rather than moving the story forward, you know. And this part also had so many typos that it was difficult for me to read without stopping.
To address some of the typos:
It should be. "Theron blinked, "cool."
I got a bit confused here. Weren't they standing close then why is she asking him is he can hear her? Is it because she's talking in some equipment and checking how it works? If so, you should definitely make it very clear about this equipment. I figured it out myself as I wondering the possibilities, haha.
I don't know if "starting" is the right word to use it here. I tried to think of other word but nothing comes to my mind right now! Sorry.
You don't need a comma after "sipped". "She sipped her beer, "Yeah, why?"
you're
This sentence need some serious editing. And I know I said I liked how 'on point' you are with your dialogues and with the story and how you don't waste any time describing people's emotion since both your characters are pretty reserved. But this particular scene would do well if added a little bit of emotion. After all, these two women are meeting after, I don't know, many years maybe. Even if they don't like each other, I'm pretty sure they'd at least pretend to care about each other and ask more and emote more; and even if they don't, as a writer you should tell us why they are the way they are. You don't even mention how this Edith Potts woman looks like, except her age that is already in Lysandra's 'face recognition machine', haha.
PM me if you need any clarifications. Keep writing!
Cheers!
Thank you so much for your reviews! They have been so helpful. I will go back and work on this part a bit more. Thank you again for the suggestions and such!
You are very welcome! Also, Loki <3