Crystal is in her bedroom, filing her nails on the bed. She is on her stomach, still chewing the gum she has put in her mouth the afternoon. It caused no problem at dinner. She does it all the time. Just tucks it in behind the third molar at the right side of her upper set of teeth and voila! No worries of accidentally swallowing it. As a matter of fact, she boasts about her ability to chew on a gum for a week if she isn’t so mindful of having perfect teeth. Derek, as usual, envies the trivial skill.
Crystal throws the nail file to her right. She takes out her Phone and plays with it, rolling to her left, aware of the piece of metal that can epically kill her if she lets stupidity conquer. She lightly sighs. Maybe Derek is right. Maybe people are tired of my blabber. She sighs again, this time heavily. Annoyed that Derek could be, for the second time in their mutual life, right. Correct. Accurate. Exact. Precise.
And what does that make her?
Wrong. Incorrect. Inaccurate. Approximate. Unspecific.
She throws away her Phone and rolls back on her stomach, wishing stupidity would conquer. She cries as she hears the Phone bounce on the carpeted floor.
Then she stops whimpering. “What am I doing?” She sits up and wipes her tears. So what if people don’t like talking to me anymore? She takes the nail file and puts it in her bedside drawer. “I’m a Hero for crying out loud.” She jumps off her bed and crouches down on the floor, searching for the Phone, which she finds under the bed. I won’t cry just because people are being such jerks. She reaches for it, then it beeps and vibrates violently. Her Phone is being flooded with messages.
She grabs it and scans the messages. “Oh, my gosh! These are yesterday’s messages! From Vicky, Tony, George…”
It only means one thing.
Yes, one thing:
“Derek is wrong!” She jumps around, hugging the Phone. “Derek is wrong! Derek is wrong!” But something pricks her foot, and she stumbles down.
“Ouch!” She raises her right foot, searching for what stupid thing could have pricked her foot when she has been delicately keeping order in her room. One exception is when she's sewing. She is about to curse Derek when she sees a fleck of shadow on the floor. She tries to pick it up by pinching it, but it's very small, only a tad bigger than a tomato seed; so she pushes her forefinger on it, and it embeds in the skin.
Crystal brings her finger to to her face. The object is transparent, and she can spot little glimmer of gold intricately entwined.
It looks like a chip.
“Psst…”
Crystal hears it loud and clear. But where did it come from? She listens intently
“Pssssst…”
She looks at the chip, thinking for a second that the chip talks. But the sound didn’t come from it. She puts it in her pocket.
“Psssssssssssssst…”
“Who are you?” she asks the air.
“Crystal, I’m here,” a voice of a man whispers.
“Here?” Crystal scratches her head. “Where are you, Here?”
“By the window,” Here replies.
Crystal walks towards the window, forming an ice knife in her hand. She doesn’t know if Here’s an ally or an enemy. She slowly lifts the curtain.
“Crystal.” A face appears and startles her. But a hand immediately stops her hand from stabbing while another presses against her mouth, suppressing the scream. “Crystal, it’s me.”
“Me?” Crystal asks, once the hand is off. “I mean Rick!”
Rick enters. “Hush. I need to talk to you.”
“You know, ringin’ the bell downstairs would have been easier,” Crystal remarks, watching Rick make his way through her small window and crawl to her bed. “And my sister wouldn’t be pleased seeing you by my bed. What the hell do you want?”
Rick only crouches by the bed, hoping to conceal himself if ever the door opens. “Chip,” he whispers, “is an enemy.”
Crystal doesn’t crouch down, aware that the door is locked. But he doesn’t tell Rick because he looks funny. “Chip?” She throws a clenched fist on her protruding hip. Then she laughs.
Rick puts his index finger on his lips, signaling Crystal to hush. “He wants to kill you guys and Sun won’t believe me.”
Crystal puts on her poker face. “If Sunshine wouldn’t believe you, what made you think I would?”
“Dammit. Why can’t you two believe someone who you’ve trusted for years?”
"Whom."
"I'm not here for an English lesson."
"I don't think you should be here at all."
"Crystal... you have to trust me," Rick pleads.
“Well... I know you’ve been our friend for quite awhile…” Crystal thinks for a moment. “But you know, believing your conclusion,” bringing emphasis on the word 'conclusion' by doing the open-close quotation mark gesture, “about Chip is hard. You see, Chip is helping us grow stronger. Yesterday, he helped us fix our training schedules so we’ll be more accurate in fighting. I can’t see any reason why he would do that if he’s not on our side. And thinking that Chip is an enemy is just a piece of sh—” Then from I-have-no-idea-I-have-to-innocently-think-first face Crystal puts on her wait-a-minute-you’re-just-jealous face.
“It’s not what you think,” Rick defends.
“No, no…” Crystal holds Rick by the arm, assisting him to stand up, speaking in a as-matter-of-fact tone. “I’ve heard enough.”
“No, Crystal.”
“Oh, dear, oh, dear…” She holds Rick’s cheek and smiles. “My dear Rick, I want you to know that you can be assured that my sister loves you.”
Rick’s brows knit together. He puts Crystal’s hand away gently. “Crystal, listen to me. Anything personal is not mingled with any mission.
Rick's cheek twitches. Crystal catches it.
He clears his throat. “Chip is going to kill you guys.”
Crystal is irritated. “If Chip is such a murderer, then why don’t you tell the others, too?”
“Chip is a precise killer. We can’t leak this out to the others all at the same time or all of us would be killed.”
“That’s impossible, Rick. All the Heroes?”
“Would you like to risk it?” Rick snaps.
“Well, this is stupid, Rick. What is your evidence to start with?”
Rick pulls out a device and produces a hologram. Light fills the air, showing mugshots of a fair-skinned young man with black hair and black eyes. “Chip is a convict from England.”
Crystal gapes at the words.
“Here, look. His real name is Joseph Pratt.”
Crystal’s eyes widen as she reads the article. “I can’t believe it. No… I don’t believe it.”
“Working for Vandal Yen. Joseph was involved in a lot of crimes. His ‘specialty,' though, is assassination. He was jailed numerous times before, but never poisoned. He’d always escaped detention. Two years ago, in an attempt to save his half-sister (who also works for Vandal as an assassin), he burns his whole body from a bomb explosion.”
Crystal winces. “Bu—but what can this prove? If this ‘Joseph Pratt’ is dead, how can you link it to Chip?”
Rick smirks. “Joseph Pratt isn’t dead, Crys. He got out alive.”
“If he was severely wounded, how—”
“The E.V.I.L abducted him. His brain and heart was preserved, and so they gave him a new body. This new body is made of chips. How he got his alias.”
Crystal is beginning to shake. She’s terrorized of the thought of having a murderer amidst them. “You’re scaring me, Rick. How do you know this is true? Where do you get this information?”
“You know that I’ve been working with an underground organization recently, right?”
Crystal nods. How can she forget? Sunshine was beaming the day she told her. Her sister was so proud of Rick being ordered by a top secret organization as if she were his mother. She called him, “Ricky-poo.”
“Unfortunately, I cannot name them. It’s top secret. You’ll just have to trust me that they have provided me with this validated information.” Rick shuts off the device. His voice lowers. “Truth is they’ve sent me to stop him.”
“Well, you’re not doing a good job of it.”
“Yes, because Sun won’t believe me.”
“Well, what should I do? Why tell me?” Crystal is deeply confused.
“I don’t know… But the important thing is that you know and believe. You can be on guard.” Rick bows his head. “Just remember: Chip is just putting up a show. As long as he’s acting, you guys are safe. I’m doing my best to know what to do.”
“I found this chip a while ago, by the way,” Crystal shows him the transparent chip. “I think he’s been blocking our communication systems.” She lets him inspect it.
Rick puts it in one of his his belt's pockets. He walks to the window and stretches out a leg.
“Wait,” Crystal scowls. “I don’t understand.”
“Sorry if I can't tell you much…”
“No, I don’t understand why your girlfriend wouldn’t believe you.”
Rick's cheeks flush. “She's not my girlfriend.”
Crystal feels a sharp nudge on her heart. The pupils of her eyes shrink. It’s the same feeling and look she gets when she learns that a movie makes two people not end up together just for the sake of artistic tragedy—for the sake of drama. It’s also the same feeling she felt when she learned that Chachi Gonzales is in a relationship with Ian Eastwood. She has a knack for sensing perfect couples. She knows who's meant to be with whom and who's not. At least, that’s what she thinks.
“You're joking right?” she almost screams. This is worse news than the news of having a murderer amidst the team. Maybe one of the worst ever in her life.
“You really think we're together?”
“At least were!”
“Well, we aren’t and weren’t.”
Crystal now screams the word. “Seriously! I mean you guys are so perfect for each other!” Crystal covers her mouth, aware that she might have awakened other people up.
Rick looks plain and indifferent. “If you don’t believe me, then don’t.” He slides through the window, throws his gaze up the sky. “Well, I don’t blame you. I guess I’ve just abused the trust you’ve given me,” and disappears.
Crystal knows his last sentences weren’t for her.
They were for her sister.
When the window is a still picture of the beautiful moon sprinkling silver upon the edge of the hills, there is a soft, unfamiliar knock on her door. Crystal cocks her head, thinking if she would answer it; but Derek would have banged on her door, Neil would have incessantly knocked, and Sunshine would have firmly done it with her signature seven-knock rap.
It’s Chip, or worse: Joseph Pratt.
“No, Vanessa!” Crystal screams. “Zac is so perfect for you! Zanessa was so perfect!” She mocks a cry, and the knock does not reattempt.
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
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125,008 Literary Works • 672,820 Reviews
Hello porcupinestrongwill!
Rick put it in one of his his belt's pockets?The last part is so funny! Wait... Who is Vanessa? I guess if she made up a fake name then that would lead him to conclude that one of them has a name that isn't what it really is, good sub-conscious plan "Winter!" However, I did find one error:
Otherwise, it's perfect! Can't wait to read the next chapters!
~Kelpies.
Hi there!
I saw this chapter in the Green Room so I thought I'd check it out! I made sure to read the rest of the chapters before getting to this one so I could make sense of what's going on. So this review will probably be a mixture of comments from previous chapters as well as those from this chapter.
First off, I want to say that you have a nice balance of missions and down time in this novel. I think it's always hard to write about superheroes, or heroes in general, because you always want to send them on missions and have them save people. There's been, what, three missions already in six chapters? I think that's a good number. We're really getting to know the characters outside of just their fighting ability, which is nice. In order for us to really relate and understand why they do what they do, we need to get to know them first. After reading these chapters, I feel like I have a good idea of all of the characters's personalities.
Sunshine and Rick's relationship is very interesting. They haven't talked in over two hundred days and then all of the sudden, he comes back to talk to her? It seems a bit suspicious, really. Not saying that he's a bad guy or anything, but I find it very strange that he chooses now after so long to visit her again. And in this chapter he says that Sunshine and him were never a couple. That makes me wonder what kind of lies he was feeding to Sunshine to make her feel like they were together. (I assume they were) You're really getting deep into this drama here
One thing I really want to talk about is the way you are "telling" us everything. I'm sure that you're familiar with the whole "show don't tell" rule. Well, that could really apply to your novel here. As I read through it all, I got a good image of what was going on during the fights and such, but it was all told to me. I found myself wanting for more imagery to show me how the ice affected the robot and how the fire melted the first robot. Sure you told us that it happened, but where was the slow, melting metal? Where was the strange smell that filled the air as the robot melted? Humans have five senses, try and use a majority of them when you're describing. That doesn't mean use them all in one description of course. All I'm trying to say is that you have a lot of room to use those kind of descriptions, but you're not using them. See if you can work some in into later chapters.
Another thing I want to point out is that you seem to jump around a lot. There are a lot of times I've read where you jump from one part to another. For example, when they first met Chip, they asked him to join them for dinner or whatever and then they're all of the sudden back at the Tower. There's obviously some travel time in there. You could even just write a transition that says: "Chip didn't talk the entire walk back to the Tower". That's just one sentence that ties the two scenes together. There really isn't much that you have to do in order to write transitions from one scene to the next.
I didn't find anything to really nitpick on, so good job with that. I'm impressed that you're writing this in first person, present tense. Present tense is always something that is a bit hard to write in. I think it's because your characters just know the present and the past; they can't talk about things that are yet to come. When you write in past tense, your characters know the past, present, and technically the future. See, if Sunshine was explaining what was happening in the last chapter in past tense, she'd know what was going to happen after that. But she doesn't, which really builds on the suspense. I like it.
I definitely want to read more! Let me know when the next chapter is out?? Also, your trailer is nice
Keep writing!
**Noelle**
gosh. this review's awesome. thank a bunch. will definitely tell you when the next chapter is up. porcey x
Hello! So, review time!
'Crystal throws the nail file to her right. She takes out her Phone and plays with it, rolling to her left, aware of the piece of metal that can epically kill her if she lets stupidity conquer.' Does 'phone' really need to be capitalised? If it is an iPhone, then the 'P' is capitalised, but as I do not think it is, it does not need to be capitalised.
'She jumps off her bed and crouches down on the floor, searching for the Phone, which she founds under the bed.' Okay, so, you wrote 'founds'. Is that a word? I' not sure. It should be 'finds', in this context. And now I am very curious as to whether or not 'founds' is a word.
'Rick shut off the device. His voice lowered.' This is in past tense, very confusing, as everything else is in present.
'She let him inspect it.' 'let' should be 'lets', otherwise the sentence is in past tense again, though everything else is in present tense, which - as I have already said - is rather confusing.
'Rick it in one of his his belt's pockets.' You repeat the word 'his' twice, and I think you are missing the word 'put' after 'Rick'.
So, mainly switching between tenses is your problem here, as well as adding unnecessary words, adding (possibly) non-existent words, incorrectly capitalising letters, and missing out words. Other than those few flaws, this was an entertaining read, and I look forward to reading more.
hi, thanks for nitpicking the tense changes i've overlooked "founds" was a typo. funny, because when i think about it, it doesn't seem to be. lol.
the capitalization is intentional - to refer to their exclusive gadgets. i just can't think of any proper names yet, so i ended up with Phone, Plane, Tower, etc.
thanks a bunch for the review. helpful. porcey xoxo