The Sand Castle, Pt. 2 (238 hits)
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Submitted by ampersand (View user info) at 2007-02-19 12:28:43 EST
Part 1: http://www.ubersite.com/m/98735
Read that if you want this to make sense. If you dont want to read all of it though, just skip to the dialogue at the end. In word this is a 13 page double spaced document, I'm hoping it will be north of fifty pages by the time I'm through, which is a lot bigger then anything I've written so far so apologies if the pacing is clumsy. Also the paragraphs probably seem to be strangely sized but they make sense in word.
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He was in a cavernous room, so large that, from where he stood, only parts of two walls were visible. Alex could not for the life of him figure out why even those two walls were visible for there was no noticeable light source at all. It felt like torch-light though he thought, and the dancing shadows seemed to agree with him, so he concluded that torch-light is what it was. Invisible torch-light. Well, whatever the light was, it illuminated a sort of middling-grey stone, and not stone blocks or bricks mind you: the whole thing was carved from solid stone. Its vaulted ceiling was so high that the library would have felt like an outdoor environment were it not for the countless wooden bookshelves that turned it into a dense, almost claustrophobic labyrinth. And labyrinth, Alex thought, was precisely the right word to use for the bookcases were not arranged into regular aisles of any sort, but nor were they scattered about at random: the more he walked about the more he got the feeling that he was walking through an elaborate maze.
The corridors widened at seemingly random intervals into small open areas which held tables, desks, and chairs as well as a great many stacks of books and various strange artifacts scattered across the room. Some of the books were stacked to three or four times Alex's height. He somewhat wondered how the wizard had managed to stack them so ridiculously high. Then he started to wonder why the wizard had stacked them so high but decided quickly that this would not be a good thing to wonder. His attention was soon diverted to more interesting questions anyways; for example, what sort of strange alphabets were these books written in? And to what sort of creature did the massive, toothy skull resting on that table originally belong? And where the hell was he? He assumed of course that he was somehow inside the sand castle but this didn't make him feel any less lost as, clearly, the wizard's castle was somewhat larger then it seemed. And if Alex was inside the wizard's castle, where was the wizard?
Whenever Alex lost something, be it a pair of socks, a pencil, or even a little wizard, he found the best course of action was usually to look for it. So look he did. Alex looked left and right and he looked up and down. He looked down hallways and around corners. He looked with his left eye, his right eye, both eyes at once, and, for a brief time, with neither eye at all. He thought he recalled having heard somewhere that peripheral vision was actually better then regular vision so, for a time, he tried looking out only the corners of his eyes, but all to no avail. That is not to say he saw nothing though, for he saw many things. First and foremost he saw books of course: red books, black books, blue books, short books, tall books, fat books, small books, pretty books, ugly books, old books, new books, here books, there books, hair books. Or rather, hair book, for sitting in the middle of one particular shelf was a single book that seemed to be entirely covered and bound with hair. Alex reached out to touch the book, perhaps to stroke it even, but pulled his fingers back at the last moment. The book, which did not very much relish the idea of his boney fingers rubbing their oils into its hair, appreciated his sudden reticence. It searched for a way to express its gratitude to Alex but could think of nothing. The book pondered for a moment the sad irony of having so many eloquent words printed inside itself and absolutely no way to project them to the outside world. Then it yawned and fell asleep.
Alex saw much more then just books though. He saw a blue and red tapestry embroidered with what he guessed was a coat-of-arms, a large oil-on-canvas painting of a small cottage nestled in an idyllic hillside with a pair of strong oaks hiding it from most of the sun's brilliance, and a large glass showcase holding probably four dozen butterflies, each one unique and each one labeled with its Latin genus and species. Actually, they weren't labeled with their genus and species: the famous monarch butterfly should've been labeled Danaus plexippus but was in fact labeled something much longer which had not a single d, a, n, u, s, p, l, e, x, i, or p in it. Alex was not positive, but it didn't look to be Latin at all. Moving on from the butterfly case, he found a similar case with numerous specimens of eyeballs, all labeled in the same fashion, and probably in the same bizarre language, as the butterflies. At first he was fascinated by the eyeballs which were both more numerous and more varied then the butterflies, but then he realized that disembodied eyeballs were gross and decided to move on. Most of the eyeballs felt that Alex was at least twice as gross as they were and so figured they were better off without him anyways. One eyeball though, in the lower left corner of the case, had become hopelessly smitten with the handsome stranger on the other side of the glass and would never really recover from his sudden departure.
"LEVIATHAN!" a voice somewhere near him screamed in panic. Alex looked about him to see who was responsible for the sudden noise but found no one at all. Surprisingly, he was unsurprised. He was surrounded by shelves of books and very little else. Among the very little else though, was a large glass bottle, corked, turned on its side and resting on a shelf as a bookend. Inside the bottle was a good bit of a clear liquid, probably water. On top of the probably water was a perfect miniature of a 16th century caravel. On the deck of the perfect miniature of a 16th century caravel were perfect miniatures of a pirate captain and his crew. On top of the perfect miniature of the pirate captain's head was a suitably large miniature black hat with a bright yellow feather. On top of his left shoulder was a scarlet macaw to which he occasionally turned and whispered quietly. The macaw, for its part, occasionally turned to him and bit him in the neck but the captain seemed never to notice. Most of the rest of his outfit was similarly swashbuckling, especially the patch he wore over his left eye and the falchion he seemed to enjoy waving about as he spoke. Curiously though, he also wore a tie. It was perfectly knotted and of a silky red fabric with small black squares spaced evenly across it. To the captain's side stood a large, hairy man dressed in raggedy black trousers and a raggedy red and white striped shirt with a raggedy red bandana tied about his shaved head; undoubtedly this was the first mate.
"Erm, sir, I think Leviathan is a snake."
"Err, yea, suppose so...MIDGARD SERPENT!"
"Err, that's a snake too sir."
"Hmmm, suppose it is," he lifted the patch over his apparently perfectly functional left eye to get a clearer view of the beast, "MOBY DICK!"
"Whale, sir."
"Ahh, yes, whale. Well, what do you suppose it is then?"
"...Ugly?"
"Well yes, I see that it's ugly, but ugly what? Ugly unicorn? Ugly Cyclops? Ugly ogre?"
"Ogre?"
"It does seem rather ogre-like doesn't it? We should probably shoot it then shouldn't we?"
"Probably sir."
"Well fire away then...or whatever it is you people say. Fire at will? Yes? FIRE AT WILL!"
Alex watched the whole conversation with mild interest and then burst out in laughter as a volley BB pellet sized 'cannon balls' launched for him with dainty little 'pffft' sounds and then bounced off the glass bottle, making high pitched 'tinks', and landed in the water at the bottom of the bottle with tiny 'plops' and hardly any splash at all. He laughed even harder when he noticed how many little 'canon balls' already rested in the water. Evidently he was not the first 'ogre' to cross their path
"Aim higher!" the captain commanded, seeming somewhat flustered by the ogre ogre's laughter. The crew remained still until the first mate nodded at them to do as they were told; the captain seemed not to notice. The crew scurried about adjusting the angle of their canons and preparing for a second volley but quite a lot of eyes were rolled in the process and a few sighs were sighed. "FIRE!"
A few more petite booms and a couple more tinks off the glass saw the second volley join its predecessors in the bottom of the bottle. Alex was rolling on the floor in a fit of side splitting laughter.
"Damnit! DAMNIT! You there! I demand you get up off the ground and stop laughing at me! Damnit! DAMNIT! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!" The crew again did not move and this time the first mate shook his head 'no' at the captain's command. They put down their instruments of war, a few went below deck and came back up a few moments later with several kegs; the first mate nodded affirmative. The captain, well on his way to hysteria, did not notice.
"FIRE DAMNIT, FIRE! WHY IS NO ONE FIRING!" the first mate shrugged his confusion as the captain rushed to the nearest cannon and began trying to load and fire it himself. He poured himself a measure of powder and poked it into the breach using the instrument he was actually supposed to have used to clean the breach before pouring in fresh powder. To clean the breach he used nothing at all. The macaw bit the captain's neck again and fluttered onto a nearby pile of cannon balls, perhaps to supervise the operation, perhaps simply to get away from the captain. Either way, it was an unfortunate choice for the bird, for the captain, who was now well past hysteria, mistook him for a cannonball and shoved him rather roughly down the barrel of the canon. The bird cawed its distress but the captain seemed to take no notice. Actually, the captain seemed to be speaking to his shoulder as though the bird were still perched there. He lit the fuse:
Pffft! "CAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWW"!!!! Tink! Plop!
"FUCK! OH GOD DAMNIT! FUCK!" the captain noticed his mistake far too late and set off on a string of almost thirty seconds of uninterrupted obscenities. Eventually he needed to stop for a breather but, when he looked like he was ready to start back up again, he instead sat down cross legged cried like a little girl. After crying for a bit he looked up at the sky angrily, or rather, he looked up at the bottom of the shelf above him angrily, took off his hat and attempted to throw it overboard. The hat landed on the deck several feet short of overboard; the captain looked back up at the shelf even more angrily. He then put his head back down, pulled his legs tight to his chest, and started to undo his tie as tears again streamed down his face.
"What's wrong there big guy?" Alex noticed the captain's distress and stifled his laughter.
"Piss off," the captain explained.
"I'm sure you can get another bird you know."
"I suck," the tears slowly faded from the captains voice but the distress remained.
"What?"
"Take down the sails boys and toss the anchor into the drink! This ship isn't going anywhere..." he shouted to his crew, the first mate stopped chugging rum long enough to shake his head no at the order. The crew resumed its drinking.
"I wanted to be an accountant, but they wouldn't have that would they? No briefcase-and-tie job, not for Johny! DO SOMETHING WITH YOUR LIFE JOHNY! MAKE YOUR PARENTS PROUD JOHNY!"
"..."
"...so they sent me to pirate school. But not one of the nice private pirate schools, they sent me to a state school. And not one of the big one's with the big budgets either; one of the crummy ones. And everyone made fun of my ties! I graduated in the middle of my class but no one would hire me, NO ONE WANTS A PIRATE WHO WEARS A TIE JOHNY! HOW CAN YOU MAKE SOMEONE WALK THE PLANK WHILE YOU'RE WEARING A TIE! They also said I was a bit of a drama queen."
"Well I'm sure they were just kidding about the last part...so how'd you wind up in the bottle?"
"Well I had to get a job somewhere."
"Ahh."
"Maybe I should shoot myself out a canon too..."
"Well if it makes you feel any better, you're far and away the best pirate captain in a bottle I've ever met."
"You don't mean that," he sounded doubtful but, for the first time in the conversation, the captain lifted his head off his knees.
"Absolutely I do. Look at the way you had your crew shooting off all those shots at me. If you weren't inside that bottle I bet at least two or three would've been direct hits."
"I'm sure of it!" his doubts finally erased as the captain jumped back to his feet, retied his tie, picked his hat back up, and turned to his crew: "Put the sails back up boys and bring up the anchor! Full speed ahead!" The first mate looked at the sails, which had never been taken down, and the anchor, which had never been released, and resignedly rolled his eyes. The captain rushed to the steering wheel at the rear of the ship, pausing to smile broadly, wave at Alex, and shout: "Thank you ugly ogre, you have lifted my spirits! But don't think that we won't shoot if we see you again!" Then he gripped the wheel and started spinning it wildly about, first clockwise, then counter, and then clockwise again all to no effect. He started kicking it and cursing violently. Eventually he threw his hat back to the deck and started hacking at the wheel with his falchion. Alex smiled and waved goodbye but the captain did not notice him leave.
User Reviews
Submitted by LisaD (user info) at 2007-05-18 13:38:51 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
No Comment
Submitted by ghola (user info) at 2007-04-29 15:30:00 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Method (user info) at 2007-02-20 10:24:52 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
HUG?
Submitted by gravitas (user info) at 2007-02-20 09:00:20 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
The descriptions came more smoothly in this part, and I like the peculiar style. The main character must have some damn good eyesight, or I was picturing the ship being smaller than it is.
Submitted by ampersand (user info) at 2007-02-19 15:35:20 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Thank you very much, this is exactly the sort of feedback I'm looking for. It's very hard to get comments on style instead of content. You're right that I use a lot of repetition and other little gimmicks, but when I read it back to myself its hard to see where I'm getting out of hand. I'll try and be more concise in the future.
Submitted by Sacrilicious (user info) at 2007-02-19 15:04:15 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
I like the story itself a lot. I read the dialogue in part 1, and I saw your request for feedback.
Some of your sentence structure seems choppy or awkward, and you use a lot of repetition with words. It seems that some of the time you use this intentionally, but in some cases I think a rewrite of some lines/ paragraphs might help. For instance:
"Alex could not for the life of him figure out why even those two walls were visible for there was no noticeable light source at all. It felt like torch-light though he thought, and the dancing shadows seemed to agree with him, so he concluded that torch-light is what it was. Invisible torch-light. Well, whatever the light was..."
5 instances of "light" in 3 sentences is overkill. The repetition later of "books" seems to sort of work, but all the "looks" and "looking" is repetitive. On the occasion that I write a piece of fiction, I struggle with repetition a bit myself.
"He somewhat wondered" sounds like an odd choice. Either he wondered, or he didn't, right? You could use "vaguely" or something like that to describe he was less than interested, but "somewhat" sounds odd.
"And labyrinth, Alex thought, was precisely the right word to use..." and "Surprisingly, he was unsurprised" - Too many lines like these can be a diversion. I want to read the story, and while they may be meant to sound clever, they take me out of it by stilting the flow.
I think I understand the nature of the language you're going for, I just think you could ease up on the style in certain places to make the story flow better.
+2 for a creative story and I'll try to keep up with the series.