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03-28-24 12:16 PM
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Xeogaming Forums - Muses' Sanctuary - New Story (don't know if I like it, feedback would be appreciated)
  
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Elara
Posts: 6067/9734
Generally you ask the moderator of the forum *ahem* to close it and trash it for you, since deleting can cause problems. If you want it gone, give me the word. It has good potential, I just think it needs better structure and detail.
cityondown012510
Posts: 82/201
I dunno how to delete threads. But yeah, we're talking about it right now lol.
Squire Vince
Posts: 1432/1586
Tear it apart brick by brick. you still writing the apoc thing?
cityondown012510
Posts: 80/201
blah. i hate it. so much. i think i'm gonna take the whole thread down actually.
Squire Vince
Posts: 1429/1586
ehh, Iike it for what it is. some parts to look at, the dialogue, some of the things said people wouldn't say. like "we were siblings" i'd suggest replacing that with "we were family."
cityondown012510
Posts: 75/201
With grey skies overhead, Oliver Kane looks out through the veil of heavy rain at the window across the way. Behind that window lies what has now become his home. Well, a place to stay, anyway. Because Oliver wouldn’t consider the small, hot, cramped dorm room any more a home than his current perch on a ledge, several feet above the roof of a six-story parking structure. He’s been away at college, almost a hundred miles away from his family and all of his old friends, for about three months now, and has hated every moment of it. Ultimately, it has brought him to this: sitting on the roof of a building, in the pouring rain, wondering where he want wrong. In his hand, occasionally being thrown and caught again, is a small glass sphere, filled with sand and water. He looks again with disdain at the closed blinds in the window, behind which his insufferable, awful excuse for a roommate is no doubt fucking another nameless, faceless girl, and then down at the glass sphere. If possible, the look of loathing and disgust deepens, and he catches the sphere and holds on this time, tighter than seemingly necessary. He slowly pulls back his arm, as if to throw the glass ball, when he hears a soft scuffling noise behind him. He whips his head around sharply, rain flying off of his short black hair, as he steadies himself on the edge of the roof with his left hand. He can’t see anything, but knows that someone or something is there.
“Who’s there?” he asks loudly, scanning the roof below for the source of the noise.
“Oh, it’s just me,” says a soft, gentle, friendly-sounding voice to his right. As his eyes shoot to where the voice came from, he sees a pretty girl hauling herself up onto the ledge. She has brown hair, braided into a ponytail that lies halfway down her back, and stunning blue eyes. She’s wearing a pale yellow t-shirt of a band that Oliver has never heard of, light, faded jeans, and rainbow-colored flip-flops. Her skin is pale, but she doesn’t seem sickly. Sitting down on the far side of the ledge, she smiles over cheerily at Oliver, letting her legs swing joyfully in the rain.
“And who exactly are you?” he asks, perplexed by this strange girl’s appearance.
“Me? I’m Julia!” she says, as if this is all the explanation that is required. “And you are?”
“Uh, Oliver. Oliver Kane,” he says, still confused by her presence.
“Nice to meet you, Oliver. Lovely day, isn’t it?”
“No. Not at all. It’s pouring.”
“Oh, well, I’ve always liked the rain. I know most people don’t, but I think that it has a strange sense of...oh, I don’t know...majesty to it, don’t you think?”
“Not really,” Oliver says, giving Julia a strange look.
“Well maybe you’re just not looking hard enough,” she says with a warm smile. “So what brings you up here today, Oliver Kane?”
“Surely not the view,” he grumbles, casting an eye over the grey, dreary landscape, filled with tall buildings, smoke emissions from the engineering building just behind his dorm, and the smoldered ruins of Adams Hall, which had recently burned down in a very tragic (more like melodramatic, Oliver thought) fashion.
“I don’t think it’s so bad. Better to see the world for what it is than live in ignorance, don’t you think?” Julia replies, keeping her sunny disposition.
“I guess so. But that doesn’t make this shithole any better to look at,” he sneers. Julia nods solemnly, still smiling.
“Well, if it’s not the view, then why are you up here?” she asks him again.
“It’s...kind of a long story,” he says hesitantly.
“I have time,” she chirps, smiling at him again.
“Well...why do you care, anyway? You don’t even know me.”
“Of course I do! You’re Oliver Kane!” she says, laughter in her eyes.
“Okay, yeah, you know my name, but you don’t know anything else about me. You don’t know where I’m from, what I’m like, what music I listen to, what I do for fun--”
“Alrighty then, fill me in, Oliver. Where are you from? Tell me what you’re like. What music do you listen to? What do you do for fun?” she cuts him off, giggling playfully. Oliver looks at her, smiles to himself, and begins to talk, a bit of the hostility leaving his voice.
“As you wish. Like I said, I’m Oliver Kane. I’m from St. Cloud, Minnesota. I’d like to think I’m a relatively nice guy. I’m typically shy, and never usually talk to people that I don’t know like this. I’m a good listener, and when I come out of my shell, I know how to have a good time. I listen to mostly alternative and punk bands, and I’m pretty close-minded when it comes to music. For fun, I like to read, I don’t really watch TV much, or play video games. Oh, and I like to play football. Well, I used to, anyway.”
“See, there we go. Now I know lots about you, and you can tell me why you’re up here, right?”
“I guess. I just...a lot of things in my life have been going wrong lately, and I guess I just kind of came up here to get away from it all.”
“In a temporary sense or a permanent sense?” Julia asks shrewdly, the humor in her voice replaced with sharp intuition. Oliver hesitates to answer, and Julia nods slowly. “So, what exactly has been going wrong?” Jumping on the chance to avoid her previous question, Oliver answers quickly.
“Well, pretty much everything. I can’t stand it here. I haven’t made a single friend yet. My roommate is a sex-craved douchebag who is currently either annoying the hell out of me, or asking me to stay out of the room so he can fuck some girl he just met. I have to be alone in every class, at every meal, and when I’m allowed to be there, all I do, even on Friday nights, is sit in my room and read. And when Blaise, my roommate, has a girl over, I just go to the library and read. It’s awful. I don’t have the slightest shred of a life, or anything even close to a friend. And I tried to join the football team, because I thought maybe I could make friends that way, and I played horrible in tryouts, and was practically laughed off the field. So, not only was that a tough blow to my self-esteem, it was also basically me ruining the one chance I had at making friends. Not that I probably would have gotten along with them anyway, most football players are meat-headed jocks. Even though all of that was hard enough, I was still getting by, because I knew that the people I had back in St. Cloud would always be there for me. Problem is, I was wrong. So, I had finally managed to scrounge up enough money for a two-way train ticket home and back here, so I went home for Thanksgiving weekend, thinking that it would be pretty much like rejuvenating myself in a social sense. But it wasn’t. I saw all my old friends, and it was all so different. They treated me differently, I felt out of place and unwanted, and it just wasn’t the same. To cap it off, when I went to visit my girlfriend at her school this past weekend, she ended up breaking up with me because she didn’t think that I was making enough of an effort in our relationship, and that she deserved better. And, if that ALL isn’t enough to make my life a living hell, I was looking on the online system that shows our grades, and as it turns out, I’m failing three of my five classes, because I’ve been skipping so many of them because I’ve been so depressed and apathetic. So, to wrap up my incredibly long, self-absorbed, and probably extremely annoying rant, pretty much everything in my life is falling apart, and I can’t take it anymore. Why I’m telling you ANY of this, I don’t even know, but...”
“Well, that does sound pretty bad, Oliver, but I think you’re looking at things the wrong way.”
“The wrong way? What other way is there to possibly look at them?”
“Everything that can have a negative spin put on it can also have a positive one,” she says with a grin.
“Oh yeah? Go ahead, try to make any of that shit positive.”
“Okay. First of all, it’s very rare to find a good roommate. Does he steal or break your things? Does he treat you poorly? Other than being a little annoying and a bit inconveniencing, does he do anything particularly wrong?” Julia inquires.
“Well...no, I guess not...”
“Exactly, so it could be much worse. As for the football team, you said it yourself. You seem like you’d get along with deeper, more emotional types of people, so it would be futile to make friends with the football players. Not making the team just gives you more of an opportunity to find the types of people that you’ll actually get along with. Plus, you didn’t seem too thrilled about actually playing, either, just about making friends.”
“Well, yeah, I guess you’re right,” he admits.
“In regards to your friends, it was a bit foolish of you to think that you could go back and have everything the way it was before.”
“Why is that foolish? In the summer, and even mostly during the school year, we’d all hang out like every night, late into the night. We were like siblings. We were inseparable. And I go back and feel like an outcast. How is it foolish to expect to still be accepted?”
“Did your friends all go away too? Or are they all still living in St. Cloud?” she asks him.
“They all stayed there. They either went to community colleges, St. Cloud State, or didn’t go to college.”
“Exactly. You can’t just expect to be gone for three months, three months during which they were almost definitely doing the same thing that you had been accustomed to doing with them, without you, and then to come back and everything be the way it was. As much as they may have missed you, the fact is, they most likely got used to you not being there. When you came back, it was different for them. Maybe they did different things, had new inside jokes that you weren’t a part of, or anything else similar. But the fact is, you have to give things like that time. The longer you’re back there with them, the more a part of the group you’ll be again, and the more things will be like old times. It wasn’t their distaste for you that made it different, it was the distance.”
“That’s a good point,” he concedes.
“Your grades are simple enough to fix. Start caring. It’s only early December. You still have a few weeks to kick it into high gear and pass those classes. Most classes are weighted mostly on the final anyway, so as long as you study hard and put in the extra work that you need to, you can definitely still do it.”
“Yeah. Yeah I can,” he says, confidently.
“And as for your girlfriend...you have one of two options. Either she’ll come around and see the mistake that she’s making, if you’re half as good of a guy as you seem to be, or she won’t, and you’ll move on and find someone that is more deserving of a good guy than someone stupid enough to throw him away. Of course, break-ups are never easy, but let’s face it: this girl, if she was willing to toss you to the curb, isn’t worth throwing yourself off of a parking structure. If you really love something, set it free, and if it comes back, it’s yours forever. If she comes back, great. If she doesn’t, maybe it’s just not meant to be, and maybe the girl you are meant to be with is closer than you think.”
“You’re right. You’re definitely right. But I have a question.”
“Shoot.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Helping me.”
“Hmm. I think the better question would be, why not?”
“Because, despite getting a brief history of what I say I’m like and my current problems, you really don’t know me.”
“Since when do you have to know a person to care about them and want to help them?”
“You’re a great person, you know that, Julia?”
“I’m glad you think so,” she says shyly, smiling at him again.
“You know, I don’t actually think I’ve ever seen you around campus.”
“I’m not surprised,” she says quietly.
“I’m really glad I came up here today. You helped me a lot, you know. I know I barely even know you, but you’re good at making me see things in a different light.”
“I’m glad I could help you, at least,” she says.
“Well, we went over why I’m up here...why did you come up here today?” he asks keenly.
“Surely not the view...” she mutters, quietly again, her voice tainted, for the first time in the conversation, with unhappiness. Oliver continues to look out over the bleak skyline, nodding in agreeance with her sentiment.
“But I thought you said it wasn’t so bad,” he says humorously. She says nothing in response, and Oliver continues to sit, staring into the rain, quietly in thought. He hears a creaking sound behind him, and turns his head around. The last thing he sees before the door down into the parking structure slams shut is a long, brown ponytail, whipping through the open door frame.
Xeogaming Forums - Muses' Sanctuary - New Story (don't know if I like it, feedback would be appreciated)



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