You take a deep breath and steel yourself for what you could find. Not a body, please not a body, you chant to yourself like a mantra. You don’t hear any more shots, so you feel relatively safe climbing up the nearest tree. The wet branches scratch at your arms and drench your socks, tangling in your hair and catching in your clothes. This is why princesses don’t climb trees. Your heart drops out of your chest as a spider scurries along your hand, and you have to hold in a scream. Anything with more than four legs is unnatural. You peer through the branches, trying to find the source of the gunshots. Eventually, your eyes land on a woman, who you note is annoyingly taller than you are. She’s holding… a head? No, it’s just a squirrel. There is an obscene number of holsters belted to her body, and she isn’t wearing a coat despite the rain. She’s talking to a bird, which is how you know she’s crazy.
“No Ai, I missed the deer. I can’t see a thing in this evil rain.” The woman’s voice is hoarse as if she’s been yelling. She pets the bird, which may be a falcon or a hawk or… but who cares anyway?
The unidentified bird flaps its wings and lets out a screech. It takes you a few seconds to realize it was pointing you out, but that’s long enough for the woman to whirl around and aim her pistol at you. Tattle-tale! Rude goody-two-shoes jerk moron tatt-
“Who are you? Why are you spying on me?” The woman strode closer. “Are you a demon?”
“Alright, first of all, excuse you?!” You are deeply offended. “Second of all, who are you? Why are you killing my animals?! This is my backyard you know! And by the way, Ai is a stupid name for a bird. It probably thinks you’re getting annoyed with it every time you talk to it.”
“Ah.” The woman holsters her pistol. “You must be Queen Reinier. My apologies, I did not intend to intrude.” She gives a small bow, her short ebony hair falling over her face.
Your hands close into fists, and your heart rate pounds in your chest. “Wrong. Again. I’m Princess Aviva Florianne Tsveta of Zrenci, and I am no demon. I resent both of your insinuations and I demand-”
“Oh. I rescind my apology. I had not realized you were the other one. C’ai Xifeng, Empress of Yuxijai.” The woman- Empress Xifeng- flicks her eyes over you with a new gaze. “I need to talk to the Queen.”
You cross your arms. This woman is not only a trespasser; she is rude, callous, and downright disregardful of you. You could bring her to Reinier, you know she’ll never stand for such a vile woman, but you just went through all this trouble to sneak out! You could tell this so-called “Empress” to stick it where the sun don’t shine but… that’s a lot of guns. You could just jump on her. That would be epic.
CAST YOUR VOTES DOWN BELOW
To bring the Empress to Reinier, turn to page 48.
To insult the Empress, turn to page 93.
To attack the Empress, turn to page 3.
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
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125,005 Literary Works • 672,798 Reviews
I shall cast my vote for page three, because I am insane
have I mentioned that I love Aviva? Because she is incredible!
I can't wait to read more of this
Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening/Night(whichever one it is in your part of the world),
Hi! I'm here to leave a quick review!!
First Impression: This is continuing in a couple of interesting directions here and I think we're now really starting to get a good idea of what sort of world this is set in and some more specifics about who our character is here.
Anyway let's get right to it,
Hmm....well this seems oddly innocent here. It's a bit surprising there. I was expecting something a little crazier than that judging from the way the previous bit ended there but it appears this is just some sort of accident caused by a hunt of some kind...well let's see where this is headed I suppose.
Okay that's quite some sass being let on the loose there. Well that's quite a powerful moment here. I was expecting something a little different there as an initial reaction but it looks like this one is just directly attacking this I assume intruder of sorts and things are getting interesting.
Okay well this somehow managed to go from some exciting potential fight to be a bit of a polite insult contest almost. It is bordering on being fairly funny though, so I think its a fun move here.
Well this is suddenly going in a totally different direction to what I first imagined here but I do like this general direction that it is trying to head in. Well, I guess at least we don't have to think too far to understand what might happen next.
And I think I'm going with page 48 for this one.
Aaaaand that's it for this one.
Overall: Overall, I think we're heading towards some interesting scenes I think and we're possibly going to find out more about this world in the not too distant future. Well, anywhere, this was a solid enough scene so far, we'll see where the votes take it next.
As always remember to take what you think was helpful and forget the rest.
Stay Safe
Harry
Thanks for your review, and thanks for bearing with me even though your pick is not getting chosen!
You're Welcome!! And no problem
Ah, so you are the logical one!
HEYO! so this isn't a vote but I wanted to review for you!
So here's you nicely put review from NOX.
This is really well written! I haven't seen all the others before but I still think this has a lot of potential. It flows really well and I like the idea behind it. Most of all It is well written and makes sense to the reader. Its also very entertaining and spaced well for those who have a hard time reading things such as this. You use words that express what your trying to portray in characters. Your writing is galvanizing.
Thank you for you writing and sharing it with YWS. I hope you'll continue to write this piece and Enjoy it while you do.