~ Grandayria: Dawn Of Heroes ~ ::. Chapter One .::
Claude Vilean awoke to the piercing screech of his cracked alarm clock, a splintering pain in the side of his head and a gnawing pain towards the back of his teeth. He reached for the snooze button several times, but frustration mounted when he couldn’t seem to find it. He instead yanked the clock from the plug and chucked it the ground.
He hacked and coughed violently as he stumbled out of bed, making his way into the kitchen where he warmed a mug of coffee from the refrigerator. Scratching his long, gray hair, he searched and found a bowl and began to pour Cheerios into it.
He swung the fridge door open. No milk to be found. Slammed it shut and snarled.
With a sneeze and a cough, the pillow on his hard and bludgeoning sofa soon found his pale, wrinkly head. He wheezed and sniffled, drool dripping out of his crusty lips as he drifted back to sleep.
Red light once again. He glanced towards the clock and his stomach curled when he realized that he was more than a few minutes late. The light turned green, yet the car in front of him refused to move.
“Come on!” he yelled, blaring his horn. “Move it! Let’s go!”
The car finally moved, and he hit the gas towards the middle school, where the sidewalk was already plundered with children chatting noisily and rudely amongst each other. He took his suitcase from the trunk and used it to clear a path towards the front door of the building.
“Hey, Mr. Vilean!” Ethan, one of Mr. Vilean’s old students greeted him in a loud voice. “Can we talk about something important?”
Claude bit his bottom lip. “What? Oh. Hello, Ethan. I’m afraid I’m a bit under the weather. Can’t really talk right now. I apologize.”
He nearly smacked the student with his suitcase as he headed inside, eventually making his way towards his empty classroom.
He got one deep breath in before the door busted open once again.
Ethan appeared, the short boy jumping up and down out of anxiousness. The midnight-haired teen tilted his head, fixing his wide-framed glasses over his eyes. “Sir! Sir!”
“What is it?”
“Mr. Vilean…I…I…”
“Come on, boy, what do you want?” Claude shouted, digging his long and untrimmed fingernails into the wood of his desk.
“I need your help.”
Claude laughed. “Sorry, but I’m afraid I’m not your teacher anymore,” he respectfully said. “Remind me, what class do I teach?”
“Seventh grade science, sir.”
“And what grade were you in last year when you had my class?”
“Seventh grade, sir.”
“And what grade are you in this year?”
“Seventh grade, sir.”
Claude wriggled his eyebrows. A brief pause. “Are you trying to tell me…?”
“Sir, I got held back,” Ethan explained, folding his hands together with a sorrowful look in his olive eyes. “I just needed one more D instead of an F…and…I almost passed your class…and I just wanted to know…if you could make an exception.”
“An exception?”
Ethan nodded. “I want to know if you can talk to some people. Get me back into eighth grade so all my old classmates won’t make fun of me.”
Claude sighed, rising to his feet with a cough and a sniffle. “I’m sorry, Ethan,” he said. “But I gave you every opportunity last year to succeed. I tried extra credit, afterschool tutoring…I gave you every chance, but you still slacked off.”
“Come on, I almost passed your damn class!”
Claude shook his head. “Almost isn’t good enough when it comes to science. You must be exact. Always, no matter what.”
“But I tried so hard! I did all the work and I turned it in on time…”
“My answer is no.” Claude folded his arms. “I gave you all the help I could. You’ll just have to take my class again this year, and hopefully move onto eighth grade next year.”
Claude returned that evening to his dark and silent home, slowly making his way towards the kitchen as a strange feeling overcame him. A feeling as if he were being followed.
He swallowed a handful of pills from a canister, glancing over to a stack of books on different types of cancer. Dropping the can back onto the counter, he made his way towards the door to the basement.
Footsteps. He heard footsteps. Turned his head around but there was no one there. A deep breath. Coughed into his arm. He continued into the basement.
Flickered the lights on. An entire underground laboratory became illuminated. The smell of chemicals delighted his nose as he stepped around the plastic tables with various machines of different shapes and sizes rumbling and vibrating invitingly, the smell of rustic metal in the air maxing with the smell of chemicals, as well as a sense of comfort.For this wasn’t just a lab. This was his lab.
He made his way towards the edge of the basement, looking into a large wooden door frame leaning against the wall. “It’s nearly done,” Claude said, a finger to his wrinkly chin, staring at a red-nosed lever.
“What’s done?” Ethan asked.
Claude jumped in surprise. “What the…? Ethan!”
“Yes, sir?”
“What are you doing in my house?”
Ethan looked around the lab. A laugh and a shrug. “I don’t know. I just wanted to talk to you about my grades, sir.”
“Do you know what breaking and entering is? Ah, never mind. I’ve got things to work on, so you can see yourself out.”
Ethan’s eyes caught a metal panel next to the wooden door frame. His eyes glowed as he looked at the red buttons on the panel. “What do these do?” he asked, hopping over towards the panel.
Claude’s jaw dropped. “No! Don’t press those!”
“Why not?”
“Because. You don’t know what they’ll do. It’s an experiment in a highly volatile and highly dangerous state of completion. Just…get upstairs. I’ll drive you home. Where do you live?”
“Home?”
“Yes, home.” Claude started towards the entrance towards the basement. “Answer me, damn it. Where do you live?”
Ethan didn’t respond, just kept staring longingly at the buttons.
“Are you deaf?” Claude asked, raising his voice. “Or are you too stupid to understand what I am asking?”
“I don’t want to go home,” Ethan said. “I want to spend the night here with you.”
“You are stupid,” Claude said, his eyes glowing. “So stupid you can’t even get out of my house! Get out of my basement! So stupid that you can’t even pass the seventh grade. Seventh grade science, your dumb brain couldn’t comprehend! How can one person be this dimwitted? How can one brain be this incredibly small, you’re almost braindead or something! And now I have to deal with your tiny brain for another whole entire year. My god! What must your mother think of you? Good god almighty, she must curse herself every night that she didn’t just abort you! Retard!”
Claude began to laugh wickedly. His laugh turned into coughs as dust found its way down his throat, and his coughs turned to heavy wheezing as he clutched his chest and fell to his knees.
Ethan’s muscles twitched, his legs shook underneath his body. He spun around and in a fit of sheer anger, hammered his fists on the buttons. He pressed another one, and then another one. Claude opened his eyes and his jaw dropped as Ethan continued hammering down on random buttons. “What? You stupid…what are you doing?”
“I’m just a stupid kid!”
Ethan cried, continuing to press buttons at random. “I don’t know what I’m
doing. Right, sir? All I can do is not listen, huh?”
He caught the red-nosed lever
in the corner of his eyes. “What’s this do?” he asked.
His hands wrapped around it. “No!” Claude screamed.
Claude grabbed Ethan and pulled him to the ground, but it was all too late. Ethan pulled the lever, and the entire house began to shake and rumble. “What’s happening?” Ethan asked as granite and stone started to crumble from the walls of the basement. “I think…I think the building is coming down!”
“Damn it!” Claude tried to pull the lever back, but it wouldn’t budge. A blast of electricity spurted out from the wooden door frame. The frame became filled with a strange energy. The basement continued to crumble.
A large piece of ceiling fell over Ethan. He dodged it just in time to avoid his head being taken clean off. “Come on!” Claude shouted, grabbing the boy.
“What
the hell?” Ethan asked, kicking and clawing at his teacher who held him over
his thin shoulders. “What are you doing? Get off me! I don’t like being
touched, sir.”
“We won’t have time to escape
the house before it falls apart. There’s only one way to live!”
He jumped into the portal with Ethan in his arms, and the two of them disappeared as the basement turned to smoke and rubble.
Points:
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Canary word: Present
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125,005 Literary Works • 672,805 Reviews
Hello!
Wow! This piece was intense, especially towards the end, and very surprising. The twist at the end, I wasn't expecting that.
Positives-
The characters were amazing and relatable. For example, pretty much everyone had that teacher that doesn't care about their students. I think you captured that really well in your description, and it was immediately obvious what kind of person he was within the first few paragraphs. You also didn't hold back when he was shouting at the kid, so was very realistic, like he had lost control of everything he tried to hide.
Improvements-
Be careful when describing action moments because it can become confusing. For example, when the portal appears in the wooden door frame, it took me two attempts to understand what had actually happened. At first, I thought the electricity was what was destroying the house and that the portal had always been there, hidden away, rather then pulling the lever summons it. But that might just be me!
Also when Ethan catches sight of the red lever I don't think he should say "What does this do?". I feel that it's too casual for what is happening.
Overall, a really great piece with a good amount of mystery that makes me want to read the next chapter. Keep writing
Hi there!
Wow, that was a turn I didn't expect and I was definitely surprised because the title and the first page of Chapter One didn't match, but that's what caused my interest and urged me to read more.
The beginning was intriguing and I liked how you started it. The only thing I saw was that the part where the Scientist fell back asleep on the couch and where he was stuck at the red light were put close together. I had to read it twice for realize he wasn't dreaming. But if he was, that would be super cool, but that's just me. If you could put something like **** between the two scenes, that would be epic and make an already clean chapter even cleaner.
By the way, I LOVE the relationship between the two characters, it's almost comical because of the amount of hate they have for each other right now. Well... Annoyance is probably the better word. But I can see that you have something marvelous in mind for them- and I can't wait to see what you do with them! There was a definite difference between the beginning and ending. I loved that a lot. And the way you transitioned between reality to something totally crazy was pretty smooth. So far, it's a great plot. Good Writing.
Okay, content wise, starting off very ordinary leaves anticipation as to what is it that makes these characters so important to write about, and is a wonderful mystery if you pull it off with an amazing revealing of what it is that makes them special. You did well enough by revealing Claude to be a mad scientist. Now I just have to wait to figure out what's so cool about Ethan.
Ethan and Claude are a very odd duo and already hate each other. In my opinion I believe that the best relationships starts off with the two hating each other, then along the journey they learn to live with each other.
So it looks like that there is a lot to look forward to in the following chapters. And thanks for ending the chapter in such a dramatic way! Now I can't wait to read what happens next! Though I think the first chapter could have been a little longer. What can you fill it with? More thought into the setting of the scene. But I guess it's okay to leave some things to the reader's imagination.
Hi there!
Shea here to review this great story! I've read these a bit out of order haha but I really enjoyed both nonetheless. Ethan is a pitying character, whom I believe will be really great for this story! I liked how descriptive you were with the characters, especially Claude in the beginning.
Now for some suggestion; First off, I think that the use of the word "retarded" could be used a little less. Just as a warning, it might be offensive to the readers and be a turn off. Although it fits with the way that Claude acts towards Ethan, maybe just try to use it once. In the beginning, I think that some of the sentences are run-on and maybe just try to separate. In the third paragraph, I think that you should do the exact opposite and combine the last two sentences.
At one point in the chapter, the point of view switches over to Ethan which might cause some confusion for the reader. Without explanation, we are immediately back to Claude's. I agree with BlueAfrica when they say that Claude would have been long fired. He verbally abuses the students and calls them words that are very bad. The board in the school itself would not accept that and aparents would be complaining right and left!
One more thing, at the end you say that Claude jumped through the portal with ethan in his arms. How was the old man holding Ethan in the first place?
Overall, nice style and plot is great! Keep expanding on using words that you normally wouldn't to create a nice word flow! Keep up the good writing!
Shea
Okay. Some good things are happening in this chapter: there's plenty of suspense, the writing style makes good use of short sentences to give us a feel of Claude Vilean's character, and it ended at the perfect moment. It left me wanting to know what happened next without confusing me. You also got through the chapter without dumping a bunch of backstory on me.
I do have a few things I want to talk about.
The first is this spot.
The rest of the chapter, we're in Claude's viewpoint. In this section, for a short time and for no apparent reason, we're in Ethan's. It might be because you wanted readers to really, really understand that Ethan's classmates really will make fun of him for getting held back or to show us why Ethan would be desperate enough to come to Claude's house after hours. But we don't need it. We already know this, from Ethan's conversation with Claude during school.
Something that bothered me through most of the chapter is Claude's interaction with the students. Look, I get that he's a salty old man with a mysterious cough and doing experiments of questionable legality in his basement. But why hasn't he been fired yet? I mean, just look at this.
(I included that one because what crappy teacher blows off a former student who asks for help because "I'm not your teacher anymore"? What if the kid has a personal problem and wants advice? Plus I have a hard time believing he says this "respectfully" when he just laughed.)
How does this guy still have a job? I'm an education person, I realize there are things like tenure that guarantee teachers their jobs after a certain number of years teaching, and I know Claude is an older gentleman, but...even accounting for that, there's a limit to this. I mean, if a teacher was charged with illicit relations with a student? Pretty sure they'd be fired. If a teacher threw things at or beat their students? Pretty sure they'd be fired.
And if a teacher calls students "retards" and tells them they're stupid and otherwise abuses and bullies them...Preeeetty sure they'd be fired.
I get that he's frustrated with Ethan, too, especially finding him in his house after school hours, but it was hard for me to reconcile THIS Claude with the one who calmly explained why he couldn't simply change last year's grade to a pass (which isn't how it works anyway), it was unbelievable, and it was hard for me to get on board with Claude.
I don't mean he has to be 100% likable--or even likable at all--but I think calling a twelve or thirteen-year-old kid a "retard" and "stupid" and insulting his mother and saying she ought to have had an abortion is going too far.
But you can get other people's opinions on that too and see what the consensus is.
Thank you for reviewing. Claude's an asshole, to be blunt, and has a terrible temper. I don't know, he's a tough character to describe in a few sentences. I think he has goodness somewhere inside of him. He does care for Ethan, even if he doesn't completely show it yet.
The scene with Ethan being bullied was something I added right before uploading because I was afraid he wouldn't be sympathetic enough. I guess it was redundant in hindsight, though.