White Mirror [One-Shot] | Canalave Library

Cavespider_17

Posts: 142

White Mirror [One-Shot] Jan 8, 2019 13:18:05 GMT

Post by Cavespider_17 on Jan 8, 2019 13:18:05 GMT

This is a piece for the Extravaganza for Walrus, using prompt number seven:Someone realizing that they're actually the bad guy.

This piece is written using Anadiplosis

White Mirror

The Boss’s office is a mess with papers everywhere. Everywhere I look notes are scrawled down with clear missions. Missions I myself will undoubtedly be participating in. In one of the drawers something is hanging out. Out of curiosity I reach in and pull it out to read. Read it down to the last letter and the weirdest feeling of horror consumes me as I notice my life is a lie.

Lie after lie told to me by the Boss who at first appeared so humble.

Humble. Humble I once called us. Us together forever, forever slaying those for the Boss. Boss of what I wonder? Wonder no more, for I discovered his secrets. Secrets that should never be told, told to the world. World of suffering is what I am in for now. Now it’s started to catch up with me – guilt. Guilt of what I have done and what I will do. Do I even matter in this world other than for my crimes? Crimes of murder.

Murder was the only thing I was ever capable of and will always be. Be it true or not the world is dark and cruel, cruel enough to throw a mon like me under the bus if they had those here. Here things are strange, strange like the mons here don’t fear death. Death of course is relative as it is in flux like so many other things. Things like time.

“Time to run again.” Again I pack my bags and head into the shadow of the building. Building up my confidence to strike once more at a target. Target whoever. Whoever put me up to this a long time ago knew exactly what they were doing. Doing something awful like creating a killer.

“Killer…” I hear someone hiss at me for what I was.

Was it too late already then?

Then again back then I was a Gastly. Gastly here aren’t common so I did get beaten up a lot growing up.

Up and up I climb. Climb the tower of my sins. Sins that will never fade no matter what the cost or how long it will take. Take me to Arceus to be judged for my crimes, crimes and sins. Sins I can never escape from, from the past, past to the future, future to the present.

Present me with your presence and judgement. Judgement is what you will use on me isn’t it? It is only fair I get the worst possible
judgement since… I am evil. Evil wasn’t what I wanted to be but…

“But now it’s time for me to end you. You and your murdering,”

“Murdering you accuse me of, but I see your lies,” lies the Metang.

Metang… I hate them – since they are psychic.

Psychic strikes the core of my skull and I scream in pain. Pain swims through my veins as he sniggers at me coldly and narrows his eyes and starts to snort.

“Snort all you want Eric,”

Eric continues to laugh at me and my agony.

“Agony is all you will know from now on Elias.”

Elias… it’s been a while since you called me that, that’s better, better than “Gengar”.

“Gengar have one more trick you don’t know about. About time I got to use it. It is over!” Over my body dances a blank and purple destiny-bond knot and I let the psychic attack fatally consume me for my crimes.

Crimes he will pay for too!

Author of:

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The Walrein

Posts: 10

White Mirror [One-Shot] Mar 17, 2019 4:11:43 GMT

Post by The Walrein on Mar 17, 2019 4:11:43 GMT

Hello Cavespider_17, thanks for writing this for one of my prompts! Using anadiplosis in every sentence certainly made for a unique story, and I think it's cool that you're experimenting with things like that, but I think it ultimately didn't work out in this case. The constant repetition of words at the end of every sentence was jarring and made the piece difficult to get through for me. What I think the core problem comes down to is that anadiplosis is a tool for putting special emphasis on a certain word or phrase, but, to paraphrase Syndrome from the Incredibles, when everything's emphasized, nothing is. Another thing to consider is that anadiplosis usually isn't used with the repeated word pair occurring exactly at the ending and beginning of successive sentences. Doing it that way often lead to awkward, forced-feeling sentences in this story, and disrupted the flow of the narrative almost every time it occurred. I'm guessing you were doing it with every sentence like that as a sort of literary challenge, but my recommendation for if you were going to try this experiment again would be to try to vary the way you used anadiplosis more. You already did that a little by sometimes having words repeat within a single sentence instead of just at the beginning and end of sentences, but there are more ways you could mix up your use of the technique, such as by having phrases repeat instead of single words, or by having the repeated parts be slightly separated from each other.

Moving on to the story itself, it seems like this is set in the PMD world with a Gengar as the protagonist, which is a cool choice. I'm guessing he (or so I guess from the name 'Elias') used to live in the human world at some point since he knows what a bus is, but he seems to have been living in the PMD realm since he was a Gastly, so he's definitely not your typical PMD protagonist. A Gengar would certainly be a good choice to send on assassination missions, which I presume were the type of missions Elias was going on with all the talk of murder, but I feel like this clashes with the premise of Elias coming to a sudden realization about the nature of his deeds after reading some papers in his boss' office. Had he always just been assuming that the people he was 'forever slaying... for the Boss' had to die for the greater good in some way? Or did he somehow not know that he was killing people? I think this might have been stronger if we had a better idea of exactly what was in those papers and what Elias had been doing that could allow him to consider his actions on the side of good before reading them.

Some other points which weren't explained well were why Eric (who I assume is the 'Boss' referred to earlier) would leave such important papers just lying out like that, or why Elias was poking around his Boss' office in the first place. The general flow of events after he found the papers was also difficult for me to follow. It seems like Elias left the boss' office to go pack his bags, then came back and entered the shadow of the building he was just in, heard a random person hiss "Killer" at him, ascended to the part of the building where his boss, Eric, was, and said that he was going to kill Eric. Eric somehow knows that Elias found out about the papers (or at least he doesn't seem surprised at this accusation) and immediately attacks him with psychic, then Elias uses destiny bond and they both die. However, I think Eric could have been the one who said "Killer" to Elias, and the part about him climbing up and up might've been purely metaphorical? The "But now it's time for me to end you" line sounds like it's from the middle of a conversation, not starting it. But then why would Eric just go up to his subordinate and call him a killer out of the blue? In either case, this work definitely could've used more narration describing what was going on to clear things up.

But regardless, thanks once again for writing this for me, and I'm still impressed with the number of prompts you were able to fulfill for the extravaganza event.

girl-like-substance

the seal will bite you if you give him half a chance

Posts: 527
Pronouns: xe/xem

White Mirror [One-Shot] May 16, 2019 22:05:10 GMT

Post by girl-like-substance on May 16, 2019 22:05:10 GMT

This is an interesting one, huh. I genuinely don't think I've ever seen such sustained anadiplosis – certainly not in prose, anyway. Like it's not just from sentence to sentence, it also crops up repeatedly within sentences, connecting individual clauses. It's definitely a very striking formal conceit, and sometimes it works really well, especially when like, the form works well with the first-person narrative. Like here:

Humble. Humble I once called us. Us together forever, forever slaying those for the Boss.

I feel like the story's at its strongest here; here, the chain-linking of the sentences with the repeated words works effectively as a rhetorical device, seeming relatively natural but giving the passage a really strong, forward-driving force. Where it isn't quite as good is where the form reads like an imposition – there are a lot of lines that read like they've just been phrased that way because the formal restrictions you've placed on yourself calls for it. Which like, that could be interesting, in a story where that was part of the point, but I'm not sure that it is here.

In fact, I guess that's the one thing I was left wondering when I finished reading; I wasn't entirely sure why you'd gone all in on anadiplosis. I almost expected some kinda theme of circularity, with the gengar returning to this place after all this time – maybe the story looping back on itself, with perhaps the last word of the whole thing being reflected in the first word. But if there was one, it wasn't quite well developed enough for me to be sure of it.

Anyway, technical wobbles aside, this was definitely an interesting experience – not just for the anadiplosis but for the incredibly meaty sort of gengar you've got here; you mention Elias' skull and veins very specifically, which is a very different take on a species that's usually characterised by its intangibility. Perhaps that's appropriate, since you drilled so deeply into his head and all here. :P

GHOST TOWN | GO HOME
& assorted one-shots

admin

Posts: 272

White Mirror [One-Shot] Jul 11, 2019 3:58:28 GMT

Post by admin on Jul 11, 2019 3:58:28 GMT

So! Let's talk about that device.

Honestly, the others hit on the pros and cons of it better than I could, and tbqh, I can see what they mean, certainly. There were times when it was a little weak and other times when it was the best possible choice you could have made in this story. But while the others point out that the difference between these two moments comes down to strength of prose, I kinda also want to bring up a different point...

...by saying it says a lot about our narrator that he's speaking in circles.

I mean, I know you. I've seen a lot of your work, and you tend to write a lot of stock crazy people. This isn't a bad or good thing generally speaking (although I will say I wholeheartedly agree with Vray and a few others on the subject of Nusko and Sarah); I'm just saying it comes to no surprise that you would tackle this prompt with a gengar who is clearly on the verge of losing it completely, if he hasn't already gone well past that point. I'd like to think he hasn't and that this is just a Thing that Gengar Do because the alternative is a little ... I don't know. Anticlimactic because you'd expect him to snap (whereas if he was just Like That from the beginning, it'd fit with gengar's usual trickster nature and feel a little more fresh at the same time).

But anyway, the point I'm trying to make here is that wherever this breed of crazy comes from, it's definitely coming through with all those loops. No one talks like that unless their thoughts are speeding along so fast and in so many convoluted ways that they can't help but talk out loud. Perhaps while pacing and in a mumble. You know how it is. But the thing is, in order for this to work, Elias has to be 100% not lucid. His thoughts have to careen into each other into one big mess, and they have to bounce from one line to the other very quickly. And for the most part, you actually do succeed in that. However, there are times when he sounds a little too lucid (notably the line where he's talking about his gastly childhood—he lapses into what sounds more like a child than a raving mad mon, with the whole "I got beaten up a lot" bit), and there are, more importantly, times when the pattern isn't even his to begin with. Like, when Eric speaks, he sounds just as off as Elias is, which actually accidentally normalizes the speech pattern and waters down the Crazytown effect. It does this because at that exact moment, when Eric indulges in the same patterns as Elias, it's revealed that this is not a part of the story or something that actually enhances what's going on or the characters within it but rather simply a narrative device to add an extra challenge for the writer. So it's kinda like pulling back the curtain abruptly on the audience, which ends up giving them a rather uncomfortable taste in their mouths because otherwise, this device adds so much more depth to Elias's character.

So ... long story short, don't get me wrong. I think using this device is a pretty brilliant way of telling us that Elias is about five eggs short of a full dozen. It just could be tightened here and there to really drive home that point, is all.