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This isn't panic, this is culture shock.
Someone is coming up from belowdecks. Footfalls on the steps inside the low door, then the door itself is pushed open. A man, tall and elegant, somehow even in that position, extricates himself from the cabin up into the cockpit. No, not a man, I correct myself. An elf, like me. Only, not like me. He has long fine white hair tucked in under a fur he’s wrapped around his shoulders, and a beautiful perfect face. It has the look about it of immeasurable age, and yet it is the face of a young man. His eyes are dark, and I realise suddenly they have no whites, but a too-large-seeming pupil and an iris of striking blue filling the entire visible eyeball.
He stares back at me, and I can see suddenly he’s afraid.
“Taniel,” he says softly.
I nod. “Kerilas,” I answer. It has to be.
He nods, but his eyes don’t leave me. “Paul,” he says, even more quietly, as if the sky might hear him.
“James,” I answer.
“What the hell is going on?” He’s just able to keep calm. I can see the struggle in his face. He’s on the edge of panic.
“I don’t know,” I whisper back. “I’ve been here for hours,” I point out, remembering that he will have only just woken up. “I thought I was dreaming but I’m not!” Now I’m saying it aloud, and hearing my own voice, at once familiar and completely different. It makes it all so much more real. Hearing the way my voice is shaking.
“It’s not a dream,” he echoes.
I think he’s really on the verge of panic. So I say, “Sit down. Don’t stand in the cockpit unless you’re doing something.”
He obeys, sitting across from me. He’s glad, it seems to me, that someone’s taking charge, even in such a small way as this. My advantage of a few hours is I can be calmer. He’s trying so hard not to panic.
“I was just suddenly here,” I say. “I thought I was dreaming, but it’s not stopping. It feels so real. Everything. Everything feels completely real. And… I know what I’m doing. I mean, I’ve been holding course all night.”
“Where to?”
In answer I look forward. He follows my gaze. The cliffs are high and jagged here; there’s no-where immediately evident where we can put in. “There, I guess. Wherever that is. The next island in the chain.” I remember from Ken’s description: We’re on the end of a chain of small volcanic islands called the Cat’s Tail that lead, if we follow them South-South-West for a few more days, into the heart of the Jeodin archipelago. “The point is, I knew how,” I say urgently. “I’ve never sailed a boat in my life, but I know how to do it.”
“How can this be happening?” he wants to know.
“I don’t know,” I say quickly. “I mean, I was awake, and I didn’t see anything… I don’t know, any kind of transition. No wavy lines or anything.”
He can chuckle at that. “Here, you must be cold,” he says suddenly, standing and removing the fur from his shoulders. I realise that I have been feeling cold. It crept up on me with the dawn, while I was lulled by the sea’s voice and the falcon’s company. He sits again, next to me, and wraps the fur around me, and I’m glad to let him do it, and ironically it’s now that I start shivering, and he keeps his arm around me. I can’t believe how safe that makes me feel. “You feeling better?”
I nod. I can hardly tell him that I feel wonderful.
“God, it must have been awful, being on your own all night. Why didn’t you wake someone?”
“I…” I’m a little lost for words. “I don’t know,” I admit after a while. “I didn’t know if anyone else… You know.”
“Yeah.”
“And I really thought it had to be a dream, for ages. I thought…” I run out of words again. It’s interesting, I think, that he’s immediately so protective of me, and how easily I let myself snuggle in the crook of his arm. It was as if that little exchange of body-language went on without either of us really thinking about it. Now I am thinking about it I get self-conscious, of course, and move to sit more upright.
Not without a little regret. It’s funny, I think, that he’d never have made these little gestures before… before I was in this female form.
“Yeah, sorry Paulie, I’m not sure what I was thinking there,” James says.
“It… It’s okay. Look, you’re going to get cold now.” It would be another hour or two before the sun had any real warmth in it, I reckon.
“Nah, I’m okay. Anyway, I’ll go and get another one if I get too cold. There’s loads of these furs down below.”
I nod, accepting it. “God, this is so weird.”
“‘Don’t panic,’” he says. “‘Don’t panic.’” He’s quoting Arthur Dent, of course.
“‘This isn’t panic, this is culture shock,’” I quote back. “‘You wait ’til I’ve settled in and got my bearings a bit. Then I’ll start panicking!’”
It makes him laugh a little anyway. Something familiar, something shared. And it does help.
“You know, I have to say, you look quite pretty like that,” James says.
“Er…” I can’t help smiling. “Thanks. Oh, and so do you. I mean, handsome I guess.”
It’s his turn to smile a little shyly. “No, what I mean is… you’re a girl.”
“I, uh, I noticed,” I say, noncommittally.
“So, um, are you okay? I mean, I think if that happened to me I’d go crazy, I reckon.”
“Early days,” I say. “Right now I’m thinking more about the fact I’m not entirely human, you know? And neither are you.”
“Oh, God, yeah,” he says, almost absently raising a hand to his ear, exploring how it comes to a tip. I remember doing the same myself earlier. I think the points of his ears are more prominent though. “God…”
“So, what colour eyes have I got?” I ask suddenly, to distract him.
“Green,” he tells me.
“Of course they are.”
“They’ve got this funny… It’s like they’re too big? The pupil and iris is so big you can’t see the whites at all.”
“Yeah, you’re the same,” I say.
“Yeah? Wow. That’s so weird.
“Yeah, I know. Good night vision,” I add, remembering how bright the stars had seemed, and the bioluminescence of the sea.
“What c–”
“Blue,” I say. “A bit darker than yours are normally.”
“Yours are kind of chibi I have to say,” he adds. “Big and pretty and…” He trails off, suddenly shy.
I chuckle. “All ready for my big scene with the tentacled sea monster?”
“Oh, don’t,” he says, and falls silent.
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “Maybe that isn’t funny.” I start shivering again. He’s shivering too, I see. “Look, I’m not being funny or anything, but can you hold me again, like before?”
“Er, yeah, sure.”
“It… I think it helped a bit,” I say. He turned a bit and I lean against him again. Then I sit up and pass him some of the fur. “Look, it’s big enough. Wrap it round both of us.”
He obeys, and I snuggle in against his side under the fur. I was being selfish, but I suddenly see how it helps him too. It’s easier for him if he can feel he has someone to protect. It gives him something to do, someone to be strong for. His forearm rests across my belly. It feels indescribable, to feel so protected. I have a little flashback suddenly. I’m snuggling like this against my father, and it’s his arm lying passively but strong and protective over my tummy, and falling asleep like that, lulled by the rocking of the ship.
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Comments
I Can't Believe
how erotic I found that and yet it's not obscene in any way! Oh, well done, dear!
Yours from the Great White North,
Jenny Grier (Mrs.)
x
Yours from the Great White North,
Jenny Grier (Mrs.)
Perfect Rachel!
Oh yes! You are finally wading in what I have been ITCHING to see!. Thank you For finally Bringing the interaction of James out!!!! I am very very interested to see how you handle love and romance Rachel. Very much so!~
I am at a loss of words. I am so happy you finally began this project and are actually making it romantic! I love it so far! *Giving Rachel excited hugs*
Sephrena Miller
nicely done!
Who would've guess the best transition would be none at all? Good work on the character development too!
Hugs!
grover-
Overlap
Transitioning by overlapping the scenes worked very well, this is delicious stuff. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Sequence?
Amazingly well-written for a supposed speed-writing exercise. The story and characters have a sort of vibrancy to them. Perhaps that's a side-effect of writing quickly, or perhaps Rachel is just a very good author!
I must say that I found the sudden insertion of chapter 1.05 after 1.04 a bit jarring, especially after I read 1.06 and thought it should at least come after that. But then, I've always been excessively fond of chronical linearity in stories, so don't mind me. I would, however, just like to hear Rachel's rationale for numbering the chapters that way, and that it wasn't a simple posting error on the website.
Not an error
It wasn't an error. 1.05 is in past tense. It's the awkward getting-over-the-actual-impossible-bit in action. :-) I needed a way to get out of relating the entire evening's role-playing in now-time, which would further alienate non-roleplayer readers. I needed a way to tell the transition in an organic way. This was my best effort. :-}
Speed-writing
it was a speed-writing exercise. This also partly explains the sequence thing, that you and others have queried. You don't want to sit around trying to figure out how to get over a hump in the story. A good way is to just skip to the other side and then cover what you need to cover in flashback.
Having said that it was speed-writing, it's not true that they're being posted with no revisions at all. Upcoming scenes are getting polished by me up until they get posted. Sometimes I just want to nail things a bit better than I did in the initial write. This is probably going to have more of an effect the further into the story we go, so the last bits will hopefully be quite shiny. There's something I still want said somewhere which I haven't yet found a place for a character to say it, but I'm planning to wedge it in somewhere.
I appreciate that it was a speed writing exercise ...
... but does that also mean it has to be posted in such short sections, particularly as I gather it's complete? Would it be spoiled if the sections were concatenated into much longer (even one) postings? Perhaps I'm the only one who finds postings of a handful of paragraphs irritating.
None of the above should be taken as criticism of the story itself or the actual writing. It's an intriguing concept and I'm enjoying it so far even though role play gaming is totally outside my experience.
Geoff
Installment size redux
I'm partly doing it this way in order to gauge reaction, and see if and how people respond to prose fiction being released in this fashion. So I'm listening to all opinions people may have about this.
After all, I read a lot of webcomics, many of them with long narrative arcs (longer than this story has) and plots that only inch forwards incrementally with each installment of only a few panels and a few lines of dialogue (and I'm being a lot more generous than that!) But still they hold me, unless they go silent for months on end. (Like Venus Envy :-( )
I just want to see what happens. :-) If you really can't stand it, wait until the final one comes out and read them all, I guess. The final one, unless I insert or remove one or two scenes before release, will be 1.35. It'll probably be marked as 'Final chapter' in the taxonomy.
As for its 'finished' status: I didn't reach the intended end of the story - some way off in fact, but I did reach a good ending to what I am now calling Part 1. It should be climactic enough to be a satisfying 'ending' while leaving other things still unresolved. Part 2 has been begun, but I'm mostly planning to do that in the new year, again, in a bit of a self-imposed rush to match the writing conditions of Part 1. Also because I'm planning to get back to The Taken at some point soon.
1.09 and 1.10 will be posted in a few minutes. :-)
Perhaps that's why we differ ...
... because I don't read webcomics - probably for the same reason I find short installments frustrating. I confess I follow the Doonesbury strip daily, but it's not quite the same thing. I also read Posy's illustrated novel each week in the Saturday Guardian (Tamara Drewe), but that was more for her drawing than the story, which was merely OK rather than gripping.
Unfortunately BC seems to be catching the FM disease - slow loading, so it makes for slow reading if I have to wait for a re-load every few moments. I am a fairly quick reader.
I guess I'm just a MOG (miserable old git ;) ) so don't take too much notice.
Geoff
shameless plug...
My own site also has the stories, at strangenoises.org, and shouldn't be slow loading at all! (It doesn't have so much to do - it actually runs the same software as BCTS, but only (so far) has my stuff on it.)
In any case, even staying here, why should you have to reload frequently? Also, I recommend making use of the RSS feeds to track updates on the site; especially now comments have their own feed too. Google Reader is especially nice for this.
(I actually don't find it that slow, most of the time.)
Cartoons & stories
I confess I do read a lot of online comics (Misfile, Abstract Gender, and El Goonish Shive are several of my favorites), but although there is little more in terms of plot development in a comic, you do have the visual aspect, which helps a lot. The short posts make it harder to keep track of who is who, I keep having to go back to the early bits to refresh my memory as to which character is who.
Oh, I expect the slower loading has to do with the power problems Erin said she is experiencing. Stardust has been moved back to it's old server temporally which is noticeably slower; and BC may have been moved also, I can't remember.
Picky point, you're still using gamer slang that you aren't explaining. This time around it's NPC, which you've used several times. An author shouldn't use abbreviations that he or she hasn't explained, or you risk losing the reader. Example: I use the abbreviation "PD" in a story. Now, 99% of people would assume that means Police Department. But in my story it actually means Program Director, and I say so.
Karen J.
Change is inevitable, except from vending machines
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” - Turkish Proverb
re: Cartoons & stories
It's very much written in the voice of the character, and it would break character too much to plod through the explanations in-story. Would you feel you had to explain 'petticoat' every time you mentioned it? After all, someone new to this kind of fiction who's also ignorant of clothing history might think it was some kind of coat; maybe one you put on when the weather's not that cold, just a bit windy. :-)
So I'm happy to explain the terms out-of-band as and when they turn up.
Mini-list of some of my favourite webcomics (in lieu of actually making a links page for my site) (in fact I might take this link and paste it into my site when I'm done)
Some of these clearly share thematic elements with what I do, unsurprisingly enough. :-)
Jargon
Any kind of human activity develops it's own jargon, it's one of the joys of reading fiction to explore this kind of thing. Sometimes difficult to gracefully integrate without confusing the reader but most things become clear as they go along.
One bit of possibly unfamiliar slang actually comes from another realm: "chibi" is from manga/anime and indicates characters drawn extremely cutely with enormous liquid-looking eyes and child-like features. A related style is super-deformed which is very cartoony, almost like Charles Schulz's Peanuts, and is used to indicate a silly sequence inside an otherwise realistic or semi-realistic story. I can see the characters referring to the first gnome they meet as being super-deformed. :)
- Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
I understand that, Rachel
Obviously you can't have the characters explaining each term used in the story. But how hard is it to put a note at the top of each "chapter" saying "A glossary of unfamiliar terms is included at the bottom" then at the bottom, along with the request for comments you can include each term and it's meaning as they first appear in the story. Like this:
Synopsis:
Are we heading South?
(An explanation of possibly unfamiliar terms is included at the end.)
Story:
***
“I have another question,†Dave says a little later. The formality with which he speaks is weirdly at odds with his muscular, barbaric visage. “Where’s the loo?â€Â
/cut/
“Go to sleep, Miss.â€Â
Notes:
NPC Non-Player Character. A character in the game that's run narratively by the DM/GM (see previous mini-glossary) rather than one of the players. To be contrasted with:
PC Player Character. The single character you as a player are playing. Taniel, Kerilas, Lotan and Samila are - or rather were until very recently - Player Characters.
Just a suggestion.
Karen J.
Change is inevitable, except from vending machines
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” - Turkish Proverb