'Ello! So, I finally got around to posting something, as I've been editing this story that I worked on (and did not complete) for Nanowrimo last year.
Clara So DearSummary (as written on Nanowrimo page): The memoirs of Clara, aka CR, a prodigy among the "students" at the Rasler Metaphysical Research Center, where youths determined to have abnormal abilities are kept, subjected to experimentation, and if deemed useful, trained to become a powerful military weapon. Blessed and cursed by the most extraordinary talents ever seen in any of the Center's elite, Clara enjoys privileges many others do not receive - including the admiration of the notorious director, Rasler - at the price of being stripped of her identity and everything that makes her human.
Link!Excerpt - Chapter 1I was only seven years old and I had no idea what I was capable of. It was spring and I was outside once again observing the lake, under a twilit sky, feeling the coolness of evening on my skin. Both seemed endless from my vantage point. My siblings played in the distance and their voices carried softly on the water and the wind like birdsong. My parents were in the house, cooking dinner or something, I can't remember.
I was up to my knees in the water. I loved how it stayed so still around me. I looked at my toes in the water, how they were so separate from myself, how like a kaleidoscope lens the surface showed me a completely transformed image of them. Resting on pale sand, squirming like worms without any sound to accompany it. I marveled at the shapeshifting powers of the water.
I heard Natale come crashing through the grass, and I heard her stop near me. I didn't move.
"You know what? Now that I think of it… Did you come from the lake?" she said. "Because I definitely don't think you're one of us."
I didn't respond. I heard her standing, breathing, waiting, and she didn't wait long. The water began to ripple. She walked out into the shallows near me. I was more offended by this disturbance on the water's magical surface than I was by her comments.
"That's why you like the lake, huh? Huh?" she asked. She started to kick and skip through the water. The water splashed and swirled, and came back into itself and rolled outward and upward again and I didn't like the sound of the movement of the water. It sounded like it was groaning, complaining. It was like I'd never heard a noise quite like it.
"Are you some kind of fish? Are you some kind of water bug? Huh? Huh?" Natale laughed at her own little joke. She wouldn't stop running and kicking. It wasn't water which engulfed my knees anymore – it was all waves. Rising and falling. Too much motion, too much activity. Too much noise. All the splashing.
Then her mouth arrived at my ear, screaming. "Answer me Lucy, answer me!" Top of her lungs. It was so loud, it was like my mind couldn't take anymore. The rushing finally consumed me. With an incredible fury, I reached around and grabbed her, her arm I think, and pushed. I became mindless. I was shoving her, and water was everywhere, it was angry like me. So together we forced her away –
Then I realized that I was in the water, and she too was in the water… No, that wasn't it. We weren't just in the water. The water was around us. Through some ungodly force, the water had risen up and wrapped around us, trapping our struggling figures. We were a small lake, floating in the air, engulfed. My fingers, having been wrapped around her arm, felt chilled, unmoving skin, while the cloth of her dress fluttered against me like a divine silk. The water's pressure swirled all around. I wasn't sure whether I was pleased with the punishment I'd given, or whether this was too much, and I really wasn't even sure what was happening.
But no sooner had I started to think on this than I felt the water flow down, funneling down faster and faster. Water slid down my body, and then cold air would touch my wet skin, and then again I was slapped with a harsh wave. The suspended pool – us included – suddenly brought us crashing into the lake again. The rushing in my mind… It hadn't gone away, but… What it was doing then… I had never felt before… And then I slipped out of consciousness, still surrounded by water.
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When I opened my eyes, I was sitting half in the water with my knees on the sandy bottom and my back against a reed-covered mound protruding from the lake. I took a moment to realize that I was in water, and then to remember why I was in water. Natale was laying in front of me, on the grassy shore with her feet still floating in the shallows. I'd say she looked like she was sleeping, but that wasn't it.
I waded over to her side, crawling pathetically on my knees through the sand. I stared at her face for a very long time, trying to figure it out, getting as close as I dared. Her brown hair was black with water and strands were plastered over one of her eyes. It looked like my sibling's juvenile brush strokes, a terrible, nonsensical painting. The other eye, the visible one, was closed, but it was all wrong. The lid was too still, the skin was too pale. Even the eyelashes looked wrong somehow.
I didn't know much about the concept of death, but somehow I knew. There's something about a lifeless body, some horrible aura – or absence of an aura – that just tells you. She was dead. Many things occurred to me at once, and in mere seconds all these thoughts melded, and the rushing came back, but without any noise this time. That was how I knew it was real. I wasn't supposed to get those headaches unless there was noise. But somehow the stress sufficed, and it was too much.
I don't know if perhaps it was some kind of thought that my connection with the lake could save me, or just my naivety – likely, it was both – but I waded back into the lake, very, very slowly, until the water reached my neck, and I felt its embrace, and I started swimming.
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^Edit 6/19/11: I've had two chapters up for a little while now! I plan to do some more small edits based on Sionann's critique, but since I'm being slightly lazy in these first few weeks of summer, y'all will have time to get a word or two in before I do, probably... o.o
Link Once Again!I would love to get feeback from you guys. Don't feel like you need to get a fp account if you don't have one to review my story, just post your comments/CC on here. ;]