The time-honored words of the Lord's Prayer seemed to hang suspended for a few moments. Or maybe it was some trick of the setting.
Regardless, the Prayer brought another service of the Freefall Church to a close.
"Well, what do you think?" Kuust turned his head only slightly, so as not to set himself adrift.
"Very interesting," his date replied. "Tell me again how all this got started."
"A while back the church decided they'd had enough of putting pastors up on stage. This being the Stellar Era, someone decided that zero-g equalized things nicely."
They left the sanctuary for the slight gravity of the station corridor. "How's the Halcyon?" she inquired.
"Still the second-prettiest gal I know."
"Oh? Who's the first?" Teasingly, Rochelle ran her fingers through his fur.
Traffic increased as they approached Station Center. Humans, vulpine Tirellans and bone-crested Debarkans mingled freely in the corridors.
Catching sight of a familiar face, Kuust smiled broadly. "Aiden!"
"Kuust! You're early!" So saying, the young Tirellan waded her way towards him.
"I, ah, cashed in a favor that let me swing past Raxar Prime."
"Sure you did." Aiden kissed him on the cheek, and then turned to Rochelle. "This must be the lady you've been telling me all about."
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139,547 Literary Works • 672,606 Reviews
Hey Stori!
~ I tend to advise against using quotation marks in your prose, unless absolutely necessary. So, my advice would be to simply rephrase it "...the Prayer signaled the end of the service to the members..."Shady here to give you the Beastly review I promised. You're already familiar with my reviewing style, so I'll not spend a lot of time on pleasantries, and jump straight into the review~
Let's start with critiques first, shall we?
~ Mm, I guess this what you were talking about, struggling with knowing where to put description. I would definitely slow this down and add a good bit of description here. We don't know what Tirellans are, or Debarkans for that matter-- so we have absolutely no idea how to imagine them 'mingling freely in the corridors'. Give us some physical descriptions here. Let us get a feel for these new creatures.
Generally, the thing I noticed most was the brevity. There is little description of anything or anyone, so, even though your dialogue is good, I couldn't really get a mental picture to put with it. Also...why so short? You scarcely got your scene set up, before this ended. I assume there is more to come? Because, like, you really don't have a story-line here... :/
Anyway~
Overall it was quite good. Just needs a bit more substance added to it. Oh, and your names are amazing. I love them. Especially your creature names. Tirellans and Debarkans. <3
Hope this helped.
Keep writing!
~Shady
Thanks. I'll do my best to continue this, though first I need to do some world-building. Or should that be station-building?
If you want, I can send you a PM telling you why there's a girl named Aiden.
Sure
I am very enchanted by this story. I love it so very much. I beg you! Please write more of this; make it into a novel, or at least a longer story.
On to nitpicking:
When it comes to Sci-fi, people are expecting extravagant descriptions. I'm afraid that this story simply lacked in that area. What does a Tirellan look like? How are they different from humans? What is Raxar Prime? What is the significance? I would love it if you would elaborate on these things and more.
This piece is quite short and ambiguous! I liked how you introduced non-human species subtly and smoothly, as opposed to the all too often seen pitfall of "This guy was an alien." Unfortunately, nothing really happens so its hard to gauge what this piece really means to the overall story. I like the Freefall Church, the idea of Church held in zero gravity is actually quite interesting and I think some more spiritual connections could be examined with this concept.
One technical nitpick;
This just feels unnatural, I think it needs to be changed.
Also, I went back and read through some of the previous parts of this story and I feel as though readers would benefit from a more comprehensive description of these different alien races. You obviously have a clear picture in your head, but we need to have one too! Otherwise so far there are the Tirellans who in my mind are giant anthropomorphic foxes, and the Debarkans who are dinosaurs.
One final suggestion is on the Tirellans. Be careful creating aliens which are essentially Earth-like in their appearance or physiology. An excellent series that avoids this is Mass Effect. The developers of that said they began with unique planets, thinking about what a habitable planet would have instead of earth (which is mostly green and water). If a planet were to be 99% water its inhabitants may look very akin to fish, if a planet is 99% jungle the natives may be camouflaged, or they may be agile like monkeys. For the sake of authenticity if you want the Tirellans to look like foxes, make sure you have an environmental reason on their home planet that allows us to believe that they would have been the dominant species there.
Overall, I think this story is quite good, and you have interesting concepts. Keep up writing and please feel free to PM me when you've written more!
Thanks, Redford. The reason it's so short is that it's not finished.
I've never played Mass Effect, but it sounds interesting. With the "Hundred Suns" series I'm trying to steer clear of military science fiction and just tell the stories of Aiden and her friends.