Genesis

I was running through the city as fast I could, trying to avoid the blurry faces around me, people ran away screaming in panic, I resisted the urge of curiosity to look behind me, they weren’t far behind me, there wasn’t any sign of anywhere to hide. 

I prayed silently for someone to save me. 

They were starting to close in on me; phantom breath started breathing down my neck sending a shiver down my spine, I quickly took a sharp turn into an alleyway, while struggling to take my mind off them.

Suddenly, as if in a dream, light came from the heavens and struck my eyes and created for what seemed like a wave of light started enveloping everything in its path getting closer and closer by the second, until it finally hit me, it felt like fire had passed through me, I fell to the ground, in a dazed state, unable to move, I lay still. 

Time seemed to fly by, bees and crickets buzzing, birdsong played off in the distance, everything flashed from night to day constantly, I tried screaming for help, but none came. It felt like centuries passed, I tried to remember my name, who I was, but even those memories passed along with just as fast as the time. After what felt I started hearing footsteps nearby, walking towards me at a normal pace, the environment suddenly slowed to normal time; I was picked up and was being carried by an unknown figure wearing what seemed to be wearing armour with some sort of long wooden pole on his back on his back. I still couldn’t move. 

I noticed a few more people in armour walking up ahead; one was talking in a foreign accent. After a while we stopped at a worn down wall that I’d never seen before. 

One of the people in armour slid the wall open and stepped inside and beckoned for the others to follow his lead, we slowly made our way into the secret place which was actually a mine. We avoided the crevices in the ground and steep slopes of rubble left over a long time of mining. We found another entrance, I was blinded by white as we stepped through it, suddenly we were surrounded by doctors rushing past, scientists talking and rows of hospital beds against the wall, with people ranging from twelve to middle aged. 

We started walking towards a dark room, with every step, the darkness seemed to grow, bigger and bigger until it enveloped me whole, even the sound of the previous room had cut off. I woke up in a bed with blurry vision, I tried to sit up but pain pierced my head. “Careful now, you don’t want to force yourself up like that,” A voice said,

“Who are you?” I replied, “Why did you bring me here?”

“We found you hit by Alice’s toxin, you were in quite a state.”

I paused, the name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t touch on where, “Who’s Alice?” I replied.

“You do not know of the danger that looms right above us in the sky?!!”

I replied annoyed, “Why would I lie? There was this flash and I couldn’t move for what seemed like months,”

“That sounds truly peculiar, but unfortunately if you went and told someone that, they would surely feel insulted, for now you should go and see the local barracks and get acquainted with Jacky, you should be getting your first mission soon, but you should probably have a tour of the facility and meet some of the crew.”

“But why would I get involved with something I don’t even know anything about?”

“In a time like this, we’re all brothers and sisters in arms.” I could hear a hint of sadness in the voice, “But one more thing before you go, what might your name be?”

Sudden realisation hit me; I had forgotten who I was. “I… don’t know... I’ve forgotten…”

“Well, let’s just leave this to discuss for later times as we need to cut short on time, for now your name will be Eli and please follow the signs towards the barracks when you’re in the main corridor.” Small lights lighted up a walkway, to what I assumed would lead me back into the bright and white corridor. I stumbled out of bed, my head hurting like hell incarnate and my legs felt like jelly. I groaned but kept on trying to put one leg further than the other, as I made my way through the long walkway and through a doorway and emerged back into the blinding white. I followed the trail of signs into a huge room full of engineers creating some sort of weaponry. 

In the corner there sat an engineer in his mid-twenties, that was hardly bothered by all the work going on around, running his hand through his greasy hair as he read some kind of romance novel, I walked up to him and asked “Is there a “Jacky” around here?” He looked up slightly dazed looking, but after a few awkward seconds he jumped into life, not just figuratively, “Well, what might you want with charming grease-monkey like me eh?” He had this look on his face that made it seem as if he had won a million dollar jackpot from the local lottery. “Well a voice told me to talk to you,”

Jacky sighed as he sat back down again and picked up his book, “Should’ve known that no normal person would’ve come to talk to me in the first place.”

“I just woke up in this place and have no clue who I am!”

He stared at me puzzled, “So… Do you still remember your name, eh?” 

“I don’t, but I’ve apparently been given the name Eli, by that voice that you don’t believe is real.”

He perked up and came back to life, “Ah, you mean Alfred, yes he can be a bit eccentric, he usually helps with infected people like you, anyway it’s about time I gave you that tour.”

We walked through the long stretching hallways and corridors, we passed the canteen “And this would be the canteen,” He said as he pointed to a huge room with tons of people, “it’s lunch time currently, so it’s fairly busy right now, but we can get lunch once we’ve finished the tour, just wait till you see the food they do, but back to the tour!” He said pompously While Jacky pointed out the different bays with all of the equipment suited to them, from medical, to combat, science and a weird looking Psi bay that looked abandoned with wires running in and out of it, “Have an interest in the Psi bay? Well I could always, give you a tour of the inside. “Yeah, if that’s ok, it does look unwelcoming though,”

“Don’t worry about it, we’ll be able to slip in unseen,” Before I could even say anymore, he started dragging me towards the bay. “Why aren’t we allowed in the Psi bay?”

“Well apparently, it’s supposed to be a secret weapon, to use if things get really bad, but apparently it can be really dangerous.”

“You really sure we should do this?”

“We should be fine; I mean you haven’t even died after Alice’s toxin, so you really should be fine against some super weapon, right?” He patted me on the back. 

We walked towards the Psi bay and stared it over for a few seconds and took out a pocket knife and started banging in different places around the wall, it started to make hollow sounds, he paused and started to slash the wall making a horrible screeching noise that resounded throughout the entire hall, “What the hell are you doing?! Someone is going to hear us!” I said through gritted teeth,

“Just a few more…”

“What do you mean just a few more? You’re just hacking at a wall like a madma-” I stopped to stare at cut up hole in what I assumed to be a paper wall with what appeared to be a crystal mastiff, “What is this?” I remarked

“Shhhh! Keep watching.”

The crystal dog started to vibrate, and started to turn into a shade of brown, it started moving slowly at first, but there was a sudden flash blinded Jack and me. “Agh… I should’ve warned you about that.”

I felt a warm wet nose nuzzle my hand; I quickly got up on my feet and wiped my hand in disgust. Jacky reached down and started stroking the now alive mastiff, “Whoa, relax! He’s only 3 years old, he’s more of a stalkerish type, so he’ll be following us around until we put him back” Jack said amused at my reaction.

“Why the hell was he made up of crystal before though?”

“We have the generator that magnetises the doors of the Psi bay to keep them shut, since we have some extremely strong candidates that can break into the place and steal some valuable equipment, that live off living organisms heat, and we ran out of your average farm animals so we had no use but to use him, and by the way his names Spot, isn’t that right boy, eh?”

“Can we just move on before anybody walks down here, I mean, aren’t we lucky for shutting down a generator and nobody noticing?” I frowned

“Well if you insist, we shall!”

We slowly walked into the Psi bay sheepishly and looked around, “Wow… I’ve never actually had a proper look into this place before; this is some really weird s**t, even for me.”

“I can’t see anything.”

“Ah, I forgot that you don’t have any augments yet,” he took out a glow stick out of his pocket “I always bring one of these glow sticks to where I work as it can get pretty dark from time to time and my augment can run out occasionally,” he then broke it, shook it and threw it into the dark that lay in front of us and what lay ahead of us and lit up only a part of what already looked truly terrifying, a huge metal talon lay in front of us. “Welcome to Project Isis!” He said triumphantly,

“Wait, did you say Isis?” I said shocked,

Jacky frowned, “Yeah? The Greek goddess of rebirth, that’s symbol is a bird right?”

“Ah, never mind, I never really payed attention to that kind of stuff back in school,”

“Anyway the reason why we named it after the goddess of rebirth is because, it’s a portable nuclear device, but we aren’t going to try and blow up the whole country, we’re just going to try and wipe out the Fescii, but we have a plan for when the time comes,” he continued, “ I’ve been trying for ages to get into this place, although the real reason I came here, is to take some of the crystals stored in it, since they’re pretty much harmless drugs,”

“Wouldn’t that have an effect on the machine though?” I continued, “Why would you waste useful resources in a time like this?”

He shrugged, “There’s plenty of crystal for now, there shouldn’t be a problem, bout them,” he threw some to me, it appeared to be just a fragment. “This stuffs so potent that an amount like that should make the trip last for an hour or so.”

I sighed, “I swear I’ll kill you if I wake up in a prison ward next,” Just then I swallowed the crystal,

Jacky chuckled, “The unfortunate thing is, we don’t even have a prison ward, also you were supposed to sniff the crystal, just then the world started to burst into colours, I could vaguely make out Jacks voice, “Now you’ll probably act like an overly energetic drunkard you know,”

“You could’ve told me not to swallow it earlier,” I replied, “You obviously don’t know a lot about drugs do you?” I heard him chuckle before the colours completely took control of my sight. Different indistinguishable noises and shapes went back and forth in my vision. I woke up in a white room, hearing a guitar and a guy with Russian accent that I recognized from somewhere, singing. I sat up in bed and looked around, I was in what seemed like an infirmary, with other patients in pods that looked… almost dead, just then the guitar and singing stopped, I felt breath flow on my neck from behind me, I turned around slowly to be met with a large grinning face staring at me, “Bwa!” He shouted, and laughed. “I caught you off guard!”

“Uh… What happened while I was out?” I asked,

“Well, let me count, while firstly you started shouting about your love for different kinds of cocktail, then you started chasing Jacky all over the place, trying to make out with him, if you know what I mean.”  

“Anyway, the names Artyom and I’ve heard enough about you from your little expedition, it’s Ewan, isn’t it?”

“No, actually it’s Eli,

“Oh, well I’ve never been great with names in the first place,” He chuckled, “I was also happened to be the person that found you!” he continued, “You were just lying there staring at the sky, at first we thought you were just another dead body, if it weren’t for our Vita device,”

“Vita device?”

“You mean you don’t have one?” He furrowed his brow,

“I haven’t heard of it at all,”

He stretched out his arm with a strange device, that looked like it was something straight out of a seventies sci-fi movie, “Now this is a vita device right here for you,” he continued “Absolutely no ties attached” I took it and stared at its green luminescent screen, with lots of different icons showing what I assumed was monitoring my body and its status, “New user registered, welcome new user.”

“Just enter your name in the little box, it isn’t touch screen unfortunately, since that kind of vita device ran out a while ago, so you’ll have to cope with the older version,”

This should do well I sup- “Major trauma to the leg detected, applying morphine,” I heard a clicking and a whirring sound and a hissing noise, and thing suddenly everything got brighter, and a happy calming feeling spread throughout my body.

“I think I may have given you the wrong one, we usually keep a lot of vita devices from dead hunters, and it appears to have remembered its past owners trauma to his leg, unfortunately,” He said, and leaned forward trying to wrestle the device off my wrist, “This damned thing thinks it knows your DNA!”

“Well you’d think a big burly Russian like you would be stronger,” I said smirking,

“Don’t let that morphine get to your head kid, if this thing keeps up pumping you full of morphine, you could easily overdose.”

 

Artyom grunted while he wrestled with the device for a few minutes before finally giving up on the stubborn device,

“I suppose our only option is to use extreme measures.”  

Reviews

[barleygirl]

The mechanics of your writing are pretty good, altho there are a fair number of grammar & spelling mistakes. I understand if you aren't editing for that in the early stages of sketching out the story, tho.

Your storytelling is also pretty good, mixing realistic dialogue with mostly good passages describing what's going on. I'm not a fan of this genre of writing (fantasy), but I could still mostly follow what's going on & I was reasonably interested to keep going.

I do notice that you write run-on sentences pretty often (example: first couple paragraphs & more later on). This makes the storytelling feel rushed, which is kind of a good thing for chase scenes, but too many run-on sentences isn't such a good thing, overall. It's better to mix short & long sentences, to vary the pacing & to give the reader a break from prolonged passages of action.

Speaking of action, this story is apparently all about action, which is the reason I'm not a fan of this genre. I find a constant string of action scenes to be a little boring after awhile. I'm more interested in finding out more about the characters -- what are they thinking, how do they feel, how are they interacting with each other -- you do have SOME character development such as this, but it's not enuf for me to really get into your story & care about what's happening to the characters.

If you're doing a long action scene, such as how this story starts, make sure to pay attention to details . . . it's not enuf to just put a person in one situation, then magically something else is happening. A steady stream of this type of action feels a little disconnected. For example, I think the narrator was being carried away at one point (early on) & then suddenly he/she is walking with the others. For an action-packed story, each sequence must lead logically to the next (my opinion).

The strongest aspect of your storytelling is the way you've employed your great amount of imagination. This story goes thru some imaginary situations, but you tell it like it's to be expected, in a way that's convincing to the reader, such that we're buying into your fantasy. If you're going to do fantasy, then try to be equally imaginative in every detail . . . example, using morphine -- that's an old-fashioned concept, why not create a whole new drug for this instance? You can't fight an imaginary health issue (Alice's toxin) with an old-fashioned everyday drug. Go fantasy all the way, if you're going there at all, I say.

I hope these comments help. As I said early on, I'm not a fan of this genre, so I'm not qualified to imagine my way thru your various sequences. I like a story that's more realistic & straightforward. So I may be judging you on my own expectations & standards. I know people who watch a lot of fantasy & action films would be better at following this kind of story & appreciating the strengths. Thank you for asking me to review you. I'll try to get back to another chapter soon.

[Darksource]

Thanks so much for the review, I really should've known that this wasn't your genre, but you're help with the pacing makes your help extremely useful. :)

[barleygirl]

Sometimes it's good to get feedback from people who don't agree with us, or who have different preferences, becuz then we REALLY find out if what we're writing is at least clear & understandable.