Alice was sitting in a black van, which was headed towards the New York city airport. Shadowscale was there as well, along with Melissa Remington and a couple other scientists. Melissa was currently explaining what had happened to her and the other scientists.
“At first they were experimenting on a few of us like lab rats. However, after Miss Wilkins ended up as a successful test subject, they ceased their experimentation, and we were left in the cells. A couple days later, shortly before you made your escape Shadowscale, a group of armed individuals opened our cells and said they were breaking us out. We followed them, and sure enough we all made it out. We then met with Oriella who was very interested in our work regarding teleportation. She offered to hire us, and I told her I would think about it first,” narrated Melissa.
“It seems the G.D.A. had everything figured out. I wonder where they got their information from,” said Shadowscale, musing.
Alice sat in silence, listening to their conversation. Now that everything seemed to be over, her emotions were catching up with her, and she was doing her best to fight back tears. Mom and Dad are dead. Why? Why did they have to die? she thought. She looked down at her hands, which had various green veins traveling along her skin. And also I look like this. I’m a freak show now. Who cares if I have super powers now, I’m basically a frankenstein monster.
She was distracted from her thoughts due to the van pulling to a stop. Several seconds later, the back door was opened and Oriella stood in the entrance.
“Excellent, since I’ve now finished clearing things up with the Gaver family, it’s time to discuss what I shall do with you lovely folks,” said Oriella. “Starting with you, Shadowscale. I’m guessing you want to return to your home planet, Draconica?”
“Yes I do,” replied Shadowscale, with a surprised tone. “How do you know its name?”
“I, like you, used to live on another planet,” replied Oriella. “My planet was called Blacklight. Due to an unfortunate accident, X and I ended up here, where we founded the G.D.A. As for why we know of your planet, well, we intercepted a deep space probe from yet another planet, apparently called X-8. From the probe, we acquired documented information about multitudes of planets and galaxies, including Draconica.”
Shadowscale frowned. “I know of X-8. I’ve never heard of Blacklight though.”
“It’s a more obscure planet, like this one,” said Oriella. “But in any case, we are getting off topic. We were discussing your return to Draconica. Dr. Remington, I was hoping you would assist us in rebuilding what you call your X-portal. Besides the fact that it would be incredibly useful to us, it would also allow Shadowscale to return to his home planet. Will you help us?”
“Yes,” said Dr. Remington. “I will attempt to rebuild it.”
“Excellent. Now, Alice,” said Oriella, turning to Alice. “I don’t think there’s any way to undo what’s been done to you. However, I believe we could patch up your outside better so that you look more normal, and could return to daily life. Randy already agreed, so what do you say? In return though you’ll join the G.D.A. and help us on missions. After all, your speed, strength, reflexes and endurance are all superhuman now.”
They can fix my appearance? Thought Alice. That would be great. But do I want to go on dangerous missions? Well, I guess that’s a small price to pay to be able to live among friends again.
“Yes. I agree to your terms,” said Alice.
“Excellent. After we’ve flown to our base of operations, we’ll get everything down in writing and clear up any questions,” said Oriella.
***
Isaac pulled out his phone, and typed out the number that Oriella had given him. I’ve decided. I’ll work as an investigator for the Global Defense Agency, he thought. Someone on the other end picked up the phone.
“Hello, this is Oriella,” said Oriella on the other side.
“This is Isaac,” said Isaac.
“Excellent! So you’ve made a decision?” asked Oriella.
“Yes. I’ve decided that I will take the job.”
“Excellent! Thank you for picking us, Isaac Johnson. We’ll send someone to pick you up and bring you to our headquarters. Also, you’ll be working with a partner.”
“A partner? Who will I be working with?”
“I believe you know her, her name is Alice Wilkins.”
Points:
Time spent:
IP address:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
Are you sure you want to delete this comment? This cannot be undone.
Mark this comment as a review? Points will be awarded to the poster.
Your comment was posted, but it wasn’t long enough to count as a review. Reviews need about four complete sentences (at least 250 characters). Try writing another review that explains your thoughts in more detail — the author will appreciate it, and you’ll earn points for it.
139,516 Literary Works • 672,595 Reviews
Alright, I’m back and ready for the final chapter. I also have spell check back which is a relief because my brain is quicker than my fingers can type.
I think you summed up everything well here, but I can’t help but feel Alice’s reactions are quite muted and rushed given everything she’s been through. I’m not sure if you’ve already talked more about her feelings towards losing her parents in another chapter but this felt super brief and kind of like we brushed over it. In order to connect more with her character it would be great to see more of what she’s feeling, even if it just permeates through the rest of the conversation rather than being said explicitly.
I feel the same way about her reaction to joining the G.D.A. She’s very quick to dismiss the fear and danger of going on missions. Even if she thinks perhaps they can compromise, it would feel more expected than her simply accepting these terms outright.
Oriella also shares a lot of information here that doesn’t necessarily feel relevant to the story. If we’ve got this far without knowing her backstory and about the other planets then I can’t imagine we need to know it right at the end? If you do want to keep it, I’d suggest it be something that comes up earlier in the novel and now Oriella just makes brief reference to it.
This was a fun read, and a good way to end my review day! Happy Sunday!
Icy
I picked this story up near the end, so there's still a lot of details that aren't totally clear to me, but I feel like I have a good handle on the story, the characters, and the situation. That's a testament to your writing as while a reader should not be able to understand from a single chapter alone, they should be able to pick things up from reading several chapters.
I like how all the characters, except for Isaac, have come together now. However, there's so much new information that you've introduced! In just a few paragraphs, we learn that there are more inhabited planets, that Oriella also comes from another planet, and there's much more advanced technology than we've thought so far. This is going from a story involving one planet to a story involving at least three planets.
Rather than divulging all that information at once, I think it would work better if Oriella was a little less talkative. Right now, she seems way too eager to tell everyone everything all at once. Is she the head of a super secret agency, or is she a blogger working for Buzzfeed? As the head of GDA, she should be mentioning as few details as possible, only sharing them on a need-to-know basis. So rather than having her explain how she knows about Draconica, have her instead say something like, "That's on a need to know basis, and you're not in a need to know position."
The ending with Isaac sets things up well to move into the sequel. It sounds like he's going to assume an important position in the GDA, and I think it would be natural if the reader learns everything that Oriella said as Isaac learns those things. Maybe have him in charge of the deep space probe program, collecting intelligence on various planets and galaxies. That way, we figure out how Oriella knew without it seeming like a big security breach.
Overall, I think you have a really good draft going on here! Based on when the earlier chapters were posted, it looks like you've been working on this for at least a couple years. I hope you continue to do so.
Heya Necromancer! Incoming review!
It is very much in the passive voice and it makes it sound boring. It could easily be changed to Do you see how just with those small changed, the scene feels slightly more alive? You don't have to do this with every sentence, of course, but knowing the change it makes it eye opening. If this is a first draft sort of thing, that's completely okay, and if you want to keep going with tweaking and perfecting your story in the long run, that's something to keep in mind.I apologize that I was never one to keep up with what story you have going on and it seems as from your description that this is the end (?) but I hope to be able to give some insight either way. <3 Anyway, on with the review.
So one thing I immediately noticed was your use of "to be" verbs. Those being was, were, can, could, be, being etc. It slows down the pace of the story. Not all to be verbs are bad, but you need to know when they're weighing things down.
In this sentence
I also noticed how Melissa was talking was somewhat robotic. Professional might be the better word. I'm not saying this as either a compliment or critique, because if it's in Melissa's character to act super professional all the time, that's great. if it isn't, that's something to take notice of. Each character should have their own voice, not every character will talk the same. So take their background into consideration when you give them dialogue.
Last thing for critiques is this To put it plainly, it is redundant to have the character say their names and also have it in the dialogue tags. It's almost talking down to the reader.
Okay, now let me praise what work you've done!
I like how it sounds like you really built your world to be what you imagined. I like the sort of espionage elements too, I'm a sucker for that. Even while I'm diving in on chapter 22, I'm not so completely lost that I don't want to read. Your characters look to have driving motives for what they do and proper reactions for their character which I haven't really gotten to know, but still.
But that's all I really have for today. I hope you found some of it useful. Again, I'm sorry I couldn't have given you some plot insight because, again, I didn't keep up. I wanted to give you a review because the work had been sitting in the green room for a while. I hope whatever I did say was helpful. Anyway byeeeeeeeeeee<3