My first SR fiction., It's about Shen. Options

[emo samurai]

Edit: There's a revised version at the bottom if you don't want to read the woefully flawed semi-rough draft.

Lunch with the Streets by emo samurai

Why do people struggle against each other? Why do they fight towards the peak of a mountain made of those who have tried and failed to do the same? It can’t be mere self-interest; only one person can win in any competition, and everyone must know, deep down, that they most probably will not be that person.

This principle, of course, is seen everywhere, including the streets. From the callow, ambitious youth to the leering sycophantic crony, one always senses the clamor, the desperation, that goes on behind their eyes. People are always fawning over societies that will never do anything but suppress them. Perhaps it is human nature; that thought does not make the human condition any less pathetic. On the contrary, it destroys all hope I might have had for change.

I mused on all of this while watching the sprawled form of the boy who shot at me. If I hadn't quickened a deflection spell on myself, I would have been dead. Of course, things did not turn out this way, since I later levitated the boy 20 feet into the air and dropped him on a pile of trash, half of which, by my reckoning, was broken and sharp. People, with all their banal predictability, still interest me, so instead of letting the child die from his wounds, I decided to heal him.

The boy was about 3'9" tall, just below average for a dwarf, and was decorated with crudely tattoed symbols from nearly every gang in the Barrens that would admit a dwarf. It was likely that none of the tattoos were drawn by the gangs themselves; the only reason the gangs spared him for this slight was most likely a mixture of sympathy and a grudging admiration of his exhuberance. I imagined that they paid others to set up fake meetings so that he wouldn’t be disheartened that nobody real wanted to talk to him. Across his forehead was tattooed the word “Toady.” No self-respecting gang would call themselves the “Toadies,” and every gang had to at least feign self-respect, so I supposed that to be his name.

When he woke up to find that his ghost had not left him, his first act was to reach for his holster. When that proved futile, he resignedly decided to speak.

“Why did you shoot me?” I didn’t know of any gangs that I’d angered, but on second thought, I don't presume to understand gangs.

“Mostly for money. Word is you’ve got a lot of it, and it’s fragging hard to attack you in that apartment of yours.” Fair enough.

“Do you want some lunch? I will pay for your share, if you'd like.”

“S-s--sure, I guess. My name’s-”

I cut him off curtly and offhandedly. “‘Toady, I know.”

I eventually decided to go to Tetsuo’s Folly, a sushi palace that served fish that were genetically modified to fall into a coma within minutes of when they reached the prime age for harvesting. The modification was the product of an attempt to make sure that the fish never developed beyond when their meat was the mosts succulent. Technically, it did the job, it simply had a few... side effects. The fish were born... wrong, for lack of a better term. What the farmers had was a batch of fish with extra eyes and fins that were very, very good to eat. They also made most hardened fishermen and hatchery owners regurgitate when they saw the fish for the first time. The formula was never perfected because the only real problems were cosmetic.

“So..." he paused, narrowing one eye and widening the other as he stared at his food, "Are they supposed to look–”

I cut him off, curtly and offhandedly for the second time. Pehaps I was developing a pattern. “Yes.”

“Um... Okay." He looked unconvinced.

“We should begin with the most basic aspects of our situation. Why did you attack me? You obviously knew that I was a mage of some power.”

He seemed to think that I was foolish for asking. “Mostly being poor and hungry.”

“I mean before that.”

“So you want a life story?” He asked resignedly.

“Yes.”

“Is that what you took me to lunch for?”

“Yes.”

“Is that why you didn’t let me bleed to death?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a weird guy.”

“Yes. So what happened to you? What led up to the shooting? What turned you into
‘Toady, Biter of More Than He Can Chew’?”

“Fuck off.”

“Answer my question.” The air darkened around me a bit, casting a light shadow over everything. Nothing large, simply a small illusion spell to gently frighten the child.

“It started with being born. You’d think I was being boring and stupid, saying that, but you never had my mom. She was nice enough, a boring, average single corporate mom, until it was obvious that I wouldn’t grow much after the age of 5. Then she took up drinking and lost her job.”

“Sounds terrible...”

“Nah, I’m okay. I’m pretty safe for a Barrens kid; all the gangs look after me ‘cause I’m so small, and corp life was boring as hell. Even as a kid I knew it was all drek. Company this, company that, blah blah blah blah blah... ”

“What happened to your mother?”

“As you can imagine, she drank even more after losing her job. She stopped noticing me about a month after being kicked out. The Ancients took me in as a foundling, thinking that they should ‘look after their lessers’ or some drek like that. The fact that I’m an orphan helps.”

“Do you take any drugs?”

“I don’t, but the gangs I run with sometimes do. It depends on the gang; it’s mostly the troll and ork ones that do. They offer me some, but I guess it’s the Ancients who mostly influence me. Meaning I don’t do any drugs.

“Speaking of the Ancients, didya know that they’ve got this huge weapons cache? They’re going to go down to Glow City and totally...”

“Yes, very interesting... So how do you survive?”

“I bum food and drink off of my friends and random people. Like I said, it helps that I’m an orphan.”

“I’m sure. How do you like your sushi?”

“‘s good, I guess. A bit slimy.”

“It’s supposed to be that way.”

“I guess. They say fish’s supposed to be good for your brain. Is that why the Japanese and you are so smart?”

“I suppose so.”

“Well... thanks.”

“Thank you for your insight.”

“In-what?”

“Insight. Penetration. The act or power to see into a situation.”

“Oh...”

“For example, you have insight into the world of the gangs. You know of a part of them that I would never have guessed at; you know of their capacity for an unexpected, if limited, sense of compassion, a humanity, if you will.”

“You sound like a corper.”

“I suppose I do.”

“Are you one?”

“No. I think of the corporations much the same as I do the gangs. To me, they are large, impersonal, self-interested meta-entities whose goals and intentions have nothing to do with the interests of the people who make them work. They live solely to accumulate power and wealth for the sake of accumulating power and wealth. Much like gangs, but with less snarling and brandishing of chains.”

“You don’t make me sound very good.”

“I don’t.”

“They’re not that bad.”

“So they don’t kill people for walking down the wrong sidewalk and mug old women for money? They're perfect citizens who make their living without violence and vice?”

“...”

“Exactly.”

“They’re nice to me.”

“So was the corporation.”

“... I wanna go now.”

“That is your choice. I would suggest finishing your lunch.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“As you will.”

I explained to the waiter that I would pay for his bill and ate what he left behind. No use wasting good sushi, even if it would leave me overstuffed. People were, after all, starving, and it would be unhealthy to eat by the time I gave it to a beggar; postmortem susceptibility to food poisoning was a side effect of the fishes’ genetic engineering because of the weakened cell membranes.

He was waiting for me at the door outside my Barrens apartment. I had paid contractors to reinforce the rotting floors and walls with plasteel and put a palmlock on the outside door. I had a water elemental bound to protect it from all intruders. All of which did nothing to protect me from his knife. He managed to lodge it in my thigh; if I’d prepared for it, I wouldn’t have fallen the way I did, clutching at my wound and yelling.

The look on his face was both encouraging and infuriating. His eyes belied an obvious horror; wide open and round, they were in the classic look of fear and unexpected remorse. That was encouraging. His mouth, though... his mouth was also open, but closed just enough to betray complete incomprehension. Incomprehension is to me the most basic human fallacy, and to show it at a moment like that...

I pulled out the knife and healed myself. Not with the "laying on hands" gesture of magician serials, but with apparently spontaneous self-healing. I could always target myself with my own spells. To academics and magicians this makes sense, but to any normal person, as I was quickly realizing, the vision was horrific, like some awful cacodemon regenerating himself after being slashed with a brave knight's sword. He ran and screamed like any idiot in his position would, and like any angry self-appointed guardian in my position would, I levitated him onto my apartment’s rooftop. I would feed him in a day or two.

Perhaps.

[Wounded Ronin]

The problem is that both of the characters are speaking with the same voice. They sound like the same person.

[emo samurai]

Yeah... I'm having trouble getting a consistent voice for both of them. I'll cut out the contractions for Shen, and I'll put in more shadowspeak for Toady. Shen'll end up sounding like Illyria from Angel.

What do you think of the general format? Think it's too boring?

[emo samurai]

I'm done with the revision.

My story's non-traditional, to be sure. What do you think of the general idea?

I can see some things wrong with it... the boy isn't representative of the streets as a whole, and he doesn't have any details. Can somebody more knowledgable tell me details I should put in?

One thing I hope people get is that Shen is almost psychotically detached from everything as he experiences it.

[Backgammon]

Uhh I stopped reading after while, which is never a good sign. That dialogue is simply not interesting. You need to stick descriptions of how people say things, pad those sentences. For example:

“So...", he began, eying the fish suspiciously, "Are they supposed to look–”

“Yes”, I cut him off sharply. He still didn't look like he trusted the food.

Ok that's just an example, the point is really that you need to put in descriptions like that. Shotgun dialogue like you have is just totally uninteresting. Giving them differant speech patterns will only do so much.

Also, personally, while the introdution philosophy you had was good, in a delicious dystopia cyberpunk kind of way, it's somehow missing.. something. Relevance, or more fluid move into the rest of the action. I don't know. I can't put my finger on it, but it's missing something.

[krayola red]

The thing that jumped out most at me was that Shen sounds freakishly like a robot. That might be what you're shooting for though, what with him being psychotically detached from his environment, but I just thought I'll toss it out there anyway.

Ditto Backgammon. The pure dialogue block makes the story seem too sedate, and Shen's philosophies and musings seem forced and out of place. You might want to inject some old fashion cinematic action into the story to liven things up.

All in all, not a bad piece. There were definitely interesting bits, and if you write more, I would read it. :)

[emo samurai]

My god, you're right. About all of this.

Hmmm... action...

I liked "gently frighten the child." What do you think? That one was by accident.

Plus, you're right about the dialogue. He should philosophize in the middle of the conversation and describe what's happening to keep up with everything outside the little dialogue. It just isn't enough to be the central premise of the story, so I'll make it seem like part of the story rather than the centerpiece.

[will_rj]

You know, perhaps you should set a poll up and gather everyone´s opinion :-)

[krayola red]

[emo samurai]

[knasser]

Firstly, well done for writing it. There are loads of people who could write a story and are often happy to criticise, but fewer that actually knuckle down and write something. Writing is also like any other skill - the more you do it the better you get (with the exception of Terry Pratchett who started off brilliantly and has been getting worse ever since).

As to your story itself - There are two things that will draw a reader in and hold her tight. One is tension and the other is atmosphere. Essentially, your story is a conversation over dinner. You could try and introduce more tension, e.g. change the "I decided to heal him" to "I decided to heal him and keep him alive, for now." But given the story structure I would defintely try to introduce more atmosphere and the way to do this is through detail. Don't be shy of describing the the restaurant, the smells (has he ever smelt fish before? How would you react?), the nervous mannerisms of toady. Stick it all in, let your imagination run wild. And then you can cut back what you don't need, afterwards.

The other points are just individual stylistic ones. Things like:
"When that proved futile, he resignedly decided to speak."

I would amend to

"When that proved futile, he resigned himself to speak."

or

"When that proved futile, he sighed and spoke."

Resigned is something you do more than a method of doing something. 'Resignedly' is a bit ugly therefore. The first amended version tidies that up to avoid it. The second amended version is probably more emotive in that it actually shows resignedly. It's usually better to show than to tell, if you can.

Anyway, don't be disheartened by all these pointers. You've chosen a hard style of story to tell. Conversation / atmosphere pieces are trickier than a This Happened-> That Happened -> Stuff Exploded.

Give us the next version when you have it!

Hope this helps,

-K.

[Konsaki]

Just a couple of things from me...
After seeing that you had hit enter twice after almost every line, I didnt even read over it. It is sorta hard for me to read text that is just spaced out eveny like that... makes me lose intrest real fast. Just making something its own paragraph is fine, just dont space everything out unless you want to make something stand out.
You can throw together thoughts and speech into the same lines and make it more than just one liners bouncing off each other.

[Witness]

Well done emo! I like the story / vignette here, and although I wondered if it might be improved by telling it from the kids perspective, I think I've concluded that I prefer it from Shen's (which is more unusual). I have some suggestions and comments, which you may freely ignore, but since you asked...


1) How about moving the "sprawled form of the boy who shot at me" bit, rephrased appropriately, to the very beginning. IMO it would make for a more arresting first line, and would then give the philosophical musings more context and help to paint Shen's self-assured character more clearly right from the start.

2) There's a bit of a continuity disconnect at the line "I eventually decided to go to Tetsuo’s Folly". It changes the scene rather too suddenly for my tastes, but that could still work if it was clearer that he was taking Toady with him. I suppose I would go with:

[Witness]

[Witness]

[emo samurai]

How would Shen trick the answers out of the kid? I wish to know more.

[Witness]

[emo samurai]

Oh... I'm wondering if it's his style, and all signs point to "probably."

[emo samurai]

Here's my second version.

[ Spoiler ]

Lunch With the Streets by emo samurai

Why do people struggle against each other? Why do they fight towards the peak of a mountain made of those who have tried and failed to do the same? It can’t be mere self-interest; only one person can win in any competition, and everyone must know, deep down, that they most probably will not be that person.

This principle, of course, is seen everywhere, including the streets. From the callow, ambitious youth to the leering sycophantic crony, one always senses the clamor, the desperation, that goes on behind their eyes. People are always fawning over societies that will never do anything but suppress them. Perhaps it is human nature; that thought does not make the human condition any less pathetic. On the contrary, it destroys all hope I might have had for change.

I mused on all of this while watching the sprawled form of the boy who shot at me. If I hadn't quickened a deflection spell on myself, I would have been dead. Of course, things did not turn out this way, since I later levitated the boy 20 feet into the air and dropped him on a pile of trash, half of which, by my reckoning, was broken and sharp. People, with all their banal predictability, still interest me, so instead of letting the child die from his wounds, I decided to heal him.

The boy was about 3'9" tall, just below average for a dwarf, and was decorated with crudely tattoed symbols from nearly every gang in the Barrens that would admit a dwarf. It was likely that none of the tattoos were drawn by the gangs themselves; the only reason the gangs spared him for this slight was most likely a mixture of sympathy and a grudging admiration of his exhuberance. I imagined that they paid others to set up fake meetings so that he wouldn’t be disheartened that nobody real wanted to talk to him. Across his forehead was tattooed the word “Toady.” No self-respecting gang would call themselves the “Toadies,” and every gang had to at least feign self-respect, so I supposed that to be his name.

When he woke up to find that his ghost had not left him, his first act was to reach for his holster. When that proved futile, he resignedly decided to speak.

“Why did you shoot me?” I didn’t know of any gangs that I’d angered, but on second thought, I don't presume to understand gangs.

“Mostly for money. Word is you’ve got a lot of it, and it’s fragging hard to attack you in that apartment of yours.” Fair enough.

“Do you want some lunch? I will pay for your share, if you'd like.”

“S-s--sure, I guess. My name’s-”

“‘Toady, I know.”

***

I eventually decided to go to Tetsuo’s Folly, a sushi palace that served fish that were genetically modified to fall into a coma within minutes of when they reached the prime age for harvesting. The modification was the product of an attempt to make sure that the fish never developed beyond when their meat was the mosts succulent. Since the fish floated to the top when they became comatose, they could be harvested by a large metal plate moving across the surface of the water; it was the most effective way the geneticists could think of to mark the fish as ready for harvesting. It worked, it simply had a few... side effects. The fish were born... wrong, for lack of a better term. What the farmers had was a batch of fish with extra eyes and fins that were very, very good to eat. They also made most hardened fishermen and hatchery owners regurgitate when they saw the fish for the first time. The formula was never perfected because the only real problems were cosmetic.

We sat in the prix-fix section of Tetsuo's folly, meaning that for 40% off of the normal menu, we could sit away from the bustle and the posturing of the executives who were busy making deals and talking to "contacts." Executives loved to seem as rich as possible, so taking a discount on anything was not an option for them.

“So..." he paused, narrowing one eye and widening the other as he stared at his food, "Are they supposed to look–”

I cut him off, curtly and offhandedly for the second time. Pehaps I was developing a pattern. “Yes.”

“Um... Okay." He seemed unconvinced.

“We should begin with the most basic aspects of our situation. Why did you attack me? You obviously knew that I was a mage of some power.”

He seemed to think that I was foolish for asking. "Whad'ya think? I didn't have anything t'eat, and you do.”

“Before that.”

“So you want a life story?" He eyed me with the same expression that he used on the fish. He was obviously loathe to reveal anything.

“Yes.”

“You’re a weird guy.”

“Yes. So what happened to you? What led up to the shooting? What turned you into
‘Toady, Biter of More Than He Can Chew’?” I feigned a bit of smugness to goad him into speaking.

“Fuck off.”

“Answer my question.” The air darkened around me a bit, casting a light shadow over everything. Nothing large, simply a small illusion spell to gently frighten the child. If anger would not force him to speak, then perhaps fear would.

“It started with being born."

"In a gutter, I suppose."

He seemed to take me seriously and derived no offense from it. "Nah, my mom was a secretary. She was nice enough, until she found that I was a dwarf. Then she hit the Wiz and lost her job.”

“Sounds terrible...”

“Nah, I’m okay. I’m pretty safe for an urchin; all the gangs look after me ‘cause I’m so small, and corp life was boring as hell. Even as a kid I knew it was all drek. Company this, company that, blah blah blah blah blah...”

“What happened to your mother?”

“As you can imagine, she snuffed even more after losing her job. She stopped noticing me after about a month. The Ancients took me in, thinking that they should ‘look after their lessers’ or some drek like that. The fact that I’m an orphan helps.”

"What happened to her?"

"Threw her out, said she was 'unworthy,' whatever that means. Don't know much else." He was surprisingly nonchalant about this, reporting it much the way one would report walking from one room to the next. “Speaking of the Ancients, didya know that they’ve got this gimongous weapons stash? They're gonna go down to Glow City and totally...” Excitement. Mildly unsettling, but not the least bit unexpected.

“Yes, very interesting... So how do you survive? You obviously can't do so attacking magicians.”

He collapsed to the back of his chair. "Look, I said I was sorry."

"That's beside the point. What do you do?"

He leaned forward a few inches and took a sip of his soykaf. “I bum food and drink off of my friends and random people. Like I said, it helps that I’m an orphan.”

“I’m sure. How do you like your sushi?”

He thought for a moment. “‘s good, I guess. A bit slimy.”

“Of course.”

“Well... thanks.”

“Thank you for your insight.”

“In-what?”

“Insight. Penetration. The act or power to see into a situation.” I made a mental note to buy the boy a comlink and some teachsofts.

“Oh...”

“For example, you have insight into the world of the gangs. You know of a part of them that I would never have guessed at; you know of their capacity for an unexpected, if limited, sense of compassion, a humanity, if you will.”

“You sound like a corper." He said "corper" much the same way one would say "terrorist" or "salesman."

“I suppose I do.”

“Are you one?”

“No. I think of the corporations much the same as I do the gangs. To me, they are large, impersonal, self-interested meta-entities whose goals and intentions have nothing to do with the interests of the people who make them work. They live solely to accumulate power and wealth for the sake of accumulating power and wealth. Much like gangs, but with less snarling and brandishing of chains and more responsibility for this city's poverty.”

“You don’t make me sound very good.”

“I don’t.”

“They’re not that bad.”

“So they don’t kill people for walking down the wrong sidewalk and mug old women for money? They're perfect citizens who make their living without violence and vice?” We both paused. “Exactly.”

“They’re nice to me.”

"And who else?"

“... I wanna go now.”

“That is your choice. I would suggest finishing your lunch.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“As you will.”

I explained to the waiter that I would pay for his bill and ate what he left behind. No use wasting good sushi, even if it would leave me overstuffed. People were, after all, starving, and it would be unhealthy to eat by the time I gave it to a beggar; postmortem susceptibility to food poisoning was a side effect of the fishes’ genetic engineering because of the weakened cell membranes.

***

He was waiting for me at the door outside my Barrens apartment. I had paid contractors to reinforce the rotting floors and walls with plasteel and put a palmlock on the outside door. I had a water elemental bound to protect it from all intruders. All of which did nothing to protect me from his knife. He managed to lodge it in my thigh; if I’d prepared for it, I wouldn’t have fallen the way I did, clutching at my wound and yelling.

The look on his face was both encouraging and infuriating. His eyes belied an obvious horror; wide open and round, they were in the classic look of fear and unexpected remorse. That was encouraging. His mouth, though... his mouth was also open, but closed just enough to betray complete incomprehension. Incomprehension is to me the most basic human fallacy, and to show it at a moment like that...

I pulled out the knife and healed myself. Not with the "laying on hands" gesture of magician serials, but with apparently spontaneous self-healing. I could always target myself with my own spells. To academics and magicians this makes sense, but to any normal person, as I was quickly realizing, the vision was horrific, like some awful cacodemon regenerating himself after being slashed with a brave knight's sword. He ran and screamed like any idiot in his position would, and like any angry self-appointed guardian in my position would, I levitated him onto my apartment’s rooftop. I would feed him in a day or two.

Perhaps.

How do I make the rant at the beginning more relevant? I wanted to start with musing just to show that Shen is able to just lift himself mentally out of whatever situation he's in, and I want to keep the philosophizing because I like it. And Witness, what did you mean by "threatening the waitstaff?"

[emo samurai]

I NEED CRITICISSSSSSMMM!!!

[Witness]

OK emo, I'll chime in again- but tell me when you're sick of my opinions!

Yes, the conversation is much improved, I think.

I think I'd still recommend starting with the body. First describe Shen looking down at the body of the kid who tried to attack him. Then have the philosophical musings. Then cut back to the description of the kid and what had just happened. It just works better IMO. More dramatic, more engaging and easier to understand what's happening at the start.

As for threatening the staff (or other patrons), I guess what I was getting at was that this could be more than just a lecture. It could be a mental showdown, and could be much more interesting as a consequence.

The kid doesn't want to be there, doesn't trust Shen, still wants to prove he's the 'bigger man'. So he's pushing Shen (or trying to) as much as Shen is pushing him. He's making dark threatening comments to Shen like 'Whaddya bring me to a dive like this for. Tell you what, why don't I just stand up and slit that suit's throat with a fish knife. You think you're fast enough to stop me, big man?' And other threatening, challenging, exchanges like that. Maybe, like I said, even have Shen questioning himself. Show Shen earning the respect, gradually.

I think in the version you've got, the kid is just a bit of a wet blanket and a non-entity, calmly taking whatever is dealt by Shen. Get more into the kid's shoes, make him a bit more threatening, and don't be so wedded to Shen being 100% cool and unflappable all the way through. This can be more than just a 'look how cool my character is' piece. You want drama right? I reckon that means Shen needs to blink, if only once.

[emo samurai]

Good idea...

[emo samurai]

I'm thinking of updatings Shen's monologue; he'll cut out all the stuff about the gangs and the corporations and just talk about life in 2070 in general. During the monologue, he'll stare out the window for dramatic effect, and when he looks back, he'll find Toady gone. Here's his monologue.

"It's not the fact of this age that I'm worried about so much as the soul of it. I think we're in the age of Nietzsche's last man, all dressed up in snazzy business attire and the latest fall colors. All things are now done for mere prudence and profit; anything human and truly great has been trampled under the immaculately polished 2000 :nuyen: shoe of corporate power. Despite all the advances in magic and science, I can't bring myself to do anything but hate this land."

[Schaeffer]

That evoked a cool mental picture... nice job.

[emo samurai]

Edit: Thank you.

And for anyone who doesn't know Nietzsche, the Last Man is the man who does things for prudence and nothing else.