Warning: This work has been rated 16+.
Even as Yin and Yang's final attack bursts through the sky, lighting up the field in whites and blacks and the faintest hint of a pastel rainbow, Lily thinks the whole thing is cheesy. The great, amorphous cloud that makes up their Summum Malum breaks into a bazillion pieces, shattering across the cloudy sky, and after a few slow seconds, it sets in that the team has won. Lily and the thirteen other girls who battled evil after evil all summer have finally defeated their ultimate foe.
The scattered pieces of the Big Bad Cloud drift down in a drizzle of lights, and Lily thinks she might feel sick. It's cheesier than melted cheddar, and she's lactose intolerant.
Admittedly, summer break has been one grilled cheese after another, especially when Fuego gets worked up and sets things on fire. But Lily wishes that the whole thing had been a little less cliche and a little more serious. She knew, logically, that fighting back manifestations of evil was a necessary task, but it felt too straight forward. She had even predicted the combinations of opposing powers before they happened.
She glances to her partner and smiles when she sees her holding her free hand out, palm up, and staring in awe at the floating lights. Batty is easy to please, or at least she is when she's being Batty and not whoever she is without the dress and domino mask and magical powers. Her dark skin shimmers under the light, and the intense yellow of her costume glitters like gold. The wicked sharp halberd in her other hand seems to glow. It probably is glowing.
Lily manages to tear herself away from admiring her partner and looks around the field. The public library stands strong and sturdy on one side, the great brick walls looming over the green summer grass. Another pair of the lower-tier team members stands in front of the wooden doors, and their subdued green and brown costumes mark them as Flora and Fauna. The other two low-tier pairs stand on the other sides of the field, and in the center are Yin, Yang, and the four element-wielders. When she's feeling particularly bitter, Lily calls them the Big Six.
Suddenly there are arms around her shoulders, and the faint smell of floral perfume tickles Lily's nose.
"Oh my god! Revel, we did it!"
Ah, yes. Time for the hugging. Just dump a whole bag of mozzarella on this cheese-fest, Lily thinks. She tries not to tense up in Batty's arms, because for all that hugging is weird and cheesy, Lily does like Batty enough to allow her a few hugs.
"More like the Big Six did it," Lily mumbles. She brings up one hand to pat Batty's back. "Took Yin and Yang long enough to figure out how to combine light and dark."
Batty squeezes, and Lily gets a snootful of that perfume. It's lovely, but also necessitates thinking about boring things like trig proofs. Lily knows exactly what her parents would say if she fell for another girl, even if she only fell like a tiny bit.
"Don't be such a downer, Revel," Batty sniffs. "We helped. You're the one who figured out that we needed to combine our powers in the first place."
Lily doesn't mention that it had been obvious from the start. Teamwork was such a cliche lesson in this kind of thing. Like, duh, of course figuring out clever ways to combine light and dark or earth and air would be important. Instead, she grumbles and gives Batty another awkward pat. Hopefully they'll break apart soon, because Lily is running out of things to do with her hands.
Batty pulls away soon enough, and Lily immediately regrets disliking the hug, because the warm fuzzies dissipate as soon as Batty turns back to the center of the field. Lily looks too, because she feels funny watching Batty when her partner isn't watching in return, and she catches a glimpse of Brush and Circuit dashing from their position at the west side of the field to the center.
Batty must see them too, because next thing Lily knows, her partner is tugging on her arm.
"Come on!" Batty shouts. Her red-gold eyes glimmer in the rain of lights. "Let's go regroup with everyone!"
Lily can't resist that smile. Batty's teeth are so good. And now she sounds like a dentist. As they cross the field, Lily tries to remember the theorems her pre-calculus class learned last winter. She needs a distraction.
That distraction comes in the form of an onslaught of hugs. The moment Lily and Batty reach the center of the field, excitable and airy Aero jumps onto them, arms out wide, and pulls them into a group hug. Then firm and grounded Terra joins in, and suddenly Lily is drowning in the embraces of thirteen other people. It’s like she’s on a sports team or something and they’ve just won a state tournament. On second thought, this is basically the magic equivalent of that.
Perhaps, given that everyone’s in some kind of funky getup, they’re more like a dance team than like, a soccer team or something.
Lily loses track of how many hugs she gives and how many she receives and how many are simply shared expressions of relief. Her teammates keep calling for her, and even though at first, Lily could never get the hang of responding to ‘Revel,’ now she turns every time someone says it. When she does turn, there is always a pair of warm, solid arms to greet her.
It takes forever for the celebrating to wind down, but when it does, the atmosphere turns awkward. No one knows what to do after this. The team stands in a huddle in the center of the field, under the still-lightening sky, their gazes shifting between each other. Some still have arms around each other, like Yin and Yang, and Brush and Circuit. They’re the ones with the most romantic tension, Lily figures, though as soon as she feels Batty’s arm sling around her shoulders, she regrets thinking anything about the non-professional relationships her teammates might have.
“It was uh.” Yang squeezes Yin’s waist and bites her lip. “It was really amazing getting to work with you all this summer. We’ve all come so far and gotten so close, and we even managed to defeat the Summum Malum before school starts. And I just- it’s been such an honor.”
Lily notices the sheen in Yang’s eyes and looks away before the waterworks start. She can hear the stutters though, hear the shallow breathing and the sniffles, and it inspires sympathy tears in her own eyes. Aqua cries the heaviest, which is no surprise. The dampness that always accompanies Aqua’s teariness clings to Lily’s skin almost immediately.
Yin squeezes her partner back and sobs. “I don’t know what I’ll do without you guys! I loved working with you all, and fighting and cheering and learning, and I don’t want that to stop!”
Lily grimaces. She leans a bit into Batty, takes a long sniffle, and breathes out heavily. “We should all meet up in the real world then.”
Somehow this hasn’t occurred to everyone else yet, because when Lily looks up at her teammates, they stare, wide-eyed and open-jawed. They can be so stupid sometimes.
“What?” she huffs. “We beat the bad guy. It’s not like we’ll be in danger if we all gather like normal people. There’s a coffee shop in the library lobby.” Lily gestures at the great, brick library building. “School starts in three days. We’ll meet up the next day, right after school, here. It’ll be fun. We can exchange phone numbers and see each other’s faces.”
“I love it!” Aero shouts. She vaults over Terra’s head and steals Lily out of Batty’s grasp for yet another hug. “You all heard our Revel! We’re meeting for coffee, bitches!”
Lily tries not to groan as the revelry and relief start back up again.
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125,029 Literary Works • 672,786 Reviews
Hello, this is Foxmaster!
Well, this was interesting! The way that Yin and Yang are real people is really smart, I have to say I really enjoyed this. But I have to agree with @Horisun, that the description of the characters could have really brought this t another level.
so...... (cue dramatic music)
[qupte]Even as Yin and Yang's final attack bursts through the sky, lighting up the field in whites and blacks and the faintest hint of a pastel rainbow, Lily thinks the whole thing is cheesy. The great, amorphous cloud that makes up their Summum Malum breaks into a bazillion pieces, shattering across the cloudy sky, and after a few slow seconds, it sets in that the team has won. Lily and the thirteen other girls who battled evil after evil all summer have finally defeated their ultimate foe.
The scattered pieces of the Big Bad Cloud drift down in a drizzle of lights[/quote]
Well, the Big Bad Cloud and the description of the attack sounds really cool, but at first I thought that Yin and Yang were fighting each other, to be honest. If you described this a little more that would really help me out here, like what's the Big Bad Cloud?!!!
Oookay, so that doesn't sound so fancy now, considering how Lily hates this kind of stuff and hugging (I hate it when classmates feel the need to hug me for like literally nothing at all. *groans*) I have to say that Lily kind of sounds like Wednesday with hating human contact and fancy stuff, like like the television character.
Welp, that's all! Can't wait to see where this takes us. If you could review any of my work, though that would be great!
-Foxmaster!!!
Can I just say, I love this! I feel like Lily is how any rational person would react to a real life Glitter Force, or Sailor Moon, or something. (Maybe not as 'meh' when you finally defeat a super villain, but still) I didn't see many grammar or spelling errors either, so that's also a plus!
The only real criticism I could think of was that I wished we got a description of their appearances! That would've been really fun! Though I get you wouldn't be able to do all of them without the story dragging on, it would've been nice to have a tad more detail.
Other than that, I really really really enjoyed this! I will absolutely read the next one! Happy Review Day!
First off, I'd like to say this is an interesting concept for a story, beginning at the end of things. I like the satire of magical girl series here; it's lighthearted and charming. You have some pithy, witty lines that help the reader buy into the satirical elements. The first line is really effective. The whole 'bursts . . . lighting up . . . in whites and blacks' misleads the reader to think of drama, then Lily's anticlimactic commentary comes in and we know it's satire.
Not to nit pick too much on grammar here, but I'd say the third paragraph is a little confusing to read. Working in present tense for the main narration is always hard. Maybe sticking to one tense to describe the past might make it a bit more readable? For example, if you put the paragraph into past perfect, saying "Admittedly, this past summer break has been one grilled cheese after another, especially with Fuego getting worked up and setting things on fire." (replacing the 'is' with '-ing' verbs, so you don't have to switch tenses). and "Lily has known for a long time that, logically, fighting the manifestations of evil . . . "
I notice you try to create consistency with your descriptions, for example Batty is all about 'shininess' and Lily's using teenager-typical expressions like 'cheesy' for the team as a whole. One of the suggestions I have would be to go even further with that consistency. One example I have: "Glittering" and "glowing" give rather different impressions - one feels more glamourous, the other seems softer and quieter. Maybe Batty's halberd doesn't have to be glowing?
Regarding the ending, I would've liked to see some foreshadowing or hinting as to why exactly meeting up outside of their magical girl identities hadn't crossed their mind. Maybe some of them still can't believe the bad guy is gone? Are they afraid their teammates won't like the person they are behind the mask? If you're planning to have such a theme in the story, foreshadowing right from the first chapter/ prologue is always a good idea.
On the whole, this sounds like the start to a fun novel. My favourite part was probably how you depicted Lily's attraction towards Batty, implying it for several paragraphs before having her say it outright - and even then, it was the subtle sort of 'outright'. I thought that was pretty clever, and it makes the reader feel invested in their relationship and want to read on.
my Biggest issue with this sis that it is in present tense, it feels like you "adapted” it from a story that wasn’t in present tense to begin with, rather than write it with the style in mind. Present tense lends itself to immediacy, past tense does not, so simply writing a story in present tense as if it were past tense makes thing feel off. With this lecture out of the way I can give the rest of my thoughts. First: I like the idea; I’ve always been a sucker for virtual worlds (from Digimon to the awesomely bad sword art online), there are so many cool things you can do with that, so many themes and ideas you can ponder. That said, I would love to have a more concrete idea of this world and what it’s about, is it a Minecraft sort of world? Is it a world of Warcraft sort of world (I’ve never played it but I know enough to have a good guess at its world)? When writing fantasy or science fiction, it’s important to think about these things. My final remark is that, while I am impressed by your ability to introduce so many characters and keep track of them, I would advise that you be very careful going forward if you plan on continuing this. Make sure the characters are distinct, if there not in can confuse the reader and really dulls the story. So in conclusion, be careful with the characters, think about tense, and more vividly draw out the world. I think this is a really cool idea and I can see it going somewhere great.
Hey thanks for taking the time to read this! I'll be honest, I kind of just like writing in present tense, but in this story specifically I wanted to use it because there are funny timeline things going on, and the present tense helps keep things organized. I'm also of the opinion (minority it may be) that the past tense feels like someone is recounting something, and not like it's actually happening around them.
You're absolutely right that the setting here is a bit vague. Hopefully that'll clear up, or I may have to include a few details I wasn't planning on doing yet.
Thanks again!