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geronl:
I wasn't trying to make him sound like a homosexual. I was trying to make him sound like a stuffed shirt "dweeb" from a 30's movie but I get your point. This is a very rough draft.

The character will grow and change. That's what main characters do in a good story.

geronl:
snippet from a book I am working on

This is where the girl meets the alien. (She's not the main character, and she's not going to be some little girl who defeats trained soldiers in combat - those kinds of stories are dumb to me. She is a secondary character who will have bigger roles in future stories as she gets older. If this thing gets a book 3 she'll be an adult and the main communicator with these aliens.)


--- Quote ---Seoul National Capital Area

There was no school because of the invasion but Park Eun-Hee really needed to study for her upcoming math exam. She had left her book in her desk. Eun-Hee didn't have to walk far from the family's sixth-floor apartment to reach the school. Just a quick trip, no reason to ask her parents for permission. They'd just be worried.

The shops along the way were all closed. The streets and sidewalks almost completely deserted. The fighting was miles away but she could see a military vehicle blocking an intersection in the distance. The soldiers would protect them from any of the aliens, she believed.

The door was unlocked as usual but the building was so quiet it was eerie. She giggled to herself, probably had seen way too many movies about haunted schools. She climbed up to the third floor and found her classroom. There was the book, right where she had left it. Easy as...

There was a scuttling sound. Something was behind her. Please be a stray cat or a bird that flew into an open window, she prayed. When Eun-Hee looked into the darkened area behind her, against the wall, she saw it. It was one of the aliens, out of its armor and looking injured.

“Why did you come here?” She asked it. She sat at her desk. It blinked but otherwise did not move. It was carrying no weapons, in fact it was naked. It gave off a barely audible shrill whimpering sound.

“Is that your language? If so, I doubt we'll ever understand each other.” She told the alien. Trying not to show that she was shaking like a leaf.

Eun-Hee had seen the television footage of these things fighting. They were very agile. This one must be injured. The news reports said these things were viciously cruel, they had sent the beasts yesterday. Today they were invading.

“Your world has a new sun. It can heal over time. None of this was necessary was it?” Eun-Hee asked, although she would admit they might have a thousand reasons why it could not wait. “If you had just come peacefully...”

Maybe they had no concept of peace. She wondered if they could learn. Then she laughed at the idea of trying to teach this creature anything. Being in the school felt ironic. She would just slowly leave and then run home to report this to the authorities. It would be the right and proper thing to do. If they took it alive they could learn a lot about the aliens.

Internal injuries. Maybe it was just scared. It may have been forced to join the invasion against its will. Not all of the aliens could be the same. She always thought it was strange in books or movies where an entire alien race acted the same. Why couldn't they be individuals too?

The aliens were losing all the battles around Seoul. The aliens were doing much better near Busan and Jinju. There were reports that some of the landing vessels were burrowing into the ground, possibly digging underground bunkers.

They had lived under ground for so long. Eun-Hee looked out the window at the reddish world in the evening sky. When it was darker, and that would be soon, it would glow brighter. She pointed at the other planet.

“Dangsin-ui segye, i-e-yo?”

She saw the creatures eyes look at where she was pointing. It saw its home world. Another whimpering sound came from its throat. A very lonely sound. To her ears, Park Eun-Hee did not think this alien was like the others. It didn't seem like a soldier. Then again, didn't all soldiers long for home?

Finally she stood up from her desk and started moving toward the door. She kept eye contact with the alien. It watched her. She was in the hallway and she slid the door shut. She breathed a sigh of relief as she turned and started running toward the stairs. Eun-Hee heard a crash behind her and the noise of something chasing her.

She screamed but something hit her as she reached the end of the corridor. It slammed into her and she was crushed between it and the wall. Eun-Hee saw stars as vision faded. The thing was holding her up after her legs failed. She looked into its face and had no idea if there was an expression as she passed out.
--- End quote ---

Idaho_Cowboy:

--- Quote from: geronl on December 15, 2016, 10:11:02 am ---Setting & character intro

rough draft

No real story plot yet

---- @sneakypete


----------------


Stanley opened the file cabinet and thumbed through the contents to find the right spot to slide the folder into place. With it he closes his briefcase. It was this thing about his job that brought him satisfaction, putting things where they belonged.

Stanley is a short bespectacled man with thinning hair. He wears a crisp white button up shirt and a bow tie. The bow tie is not an affectation or a sign of character, it was just than a dangling tie could get caught up in a drawer or one of the machines he was in charge of when necessary. Stanley wouldn't hear of going without a tie at all, though; shudder the thought.

In fact not only is Stanley of the most white-bread, vanilla personage, he utterly lacks ambition and imagination. If he were the King of the Vikings, they'd never have invaded the English isles or discovered Nova Scotia. He is made of such stuff that abusing his power, even to retain the throne, would be unthinkable.

This made Stanley the perfect figure to keep order in the Universal Exchange that links and keeps track of pretty much everything that happens everywhere, all the time. A person with imagination or ambition would use such a position to, perish the thought, change things. Play God or at least play favorites and enrich themselves.

The filing cabinet was just one of trillions that Stanley is responsible for. Also he has been responsible for them for as long as he could remember. Not that it mattered. It could have been decades or centuries or epochs, but time didn't exist in this place as it did elsewhere.

A distant alarm sounded, sort of like the bugle of war but very far away. Stanley checks the readings on his holographic wrist computer.

“Oh dear, this is out of place!” Stanley utters to himself. Things being “out of place” is one of the worst possible things in his mind, the other was being “out of time”. Space and time are like longitude and latitude on a planet, they are like coordinates for the universe.

Quickly Stanley moves toward his waiting conveyance, which resembles a 1929 Ford Roadster convertible with the top down. “Sagittarius Majoris,” he intones to the vehicle, “2123832-1232”. This completes the coordinates and the vehicle takes off toward that sector. Although the vehicle was moving fast enough that everything else became a blur, it still took a good minute to reach the desired place and time index.

Stanley exits the vehicle and runs up the path between two tall rows of filing cabinets and assorted other things, as he turns a corner he spots the disturbance. Meanwhile the details of the incident appear within his briefcase, but Stanley paused long enough to take in the sight.

The creature was nine feet tall, humanoid, except that it's head was six heads all meeting at the center where they shared a mouth. Six noses and twelve eyes and six bushy heads of hair that sort of gave the impression of some bad artistic impression of a flower. This was a Sagitarian. A very confused and lost Sagitarian who was in a mild state of shock, unfortunately he wasn't the only one.

Stanley walked purposefully toward the creature and waving the file he had retrieved from his briefcase. “It says here that some sort of anomaly whisked you away from Sagittarius Majoris and deposited you into the closet of one Maylilin Disli of the planet they call Aslastia. The poor child was frightened out of her wits and nearly fell into a coma by getting a glimpse of you.”

The large Sagitarian responded, but it was short.

“Yes, yes, you've never seen a three-eyed being before and it's not your fault that you were there. The problem is that the anomaly must be hanging around your planet, possibly in some kind of orbit. It must be studied and rendered pacified,” Stanley tried to explain.

Obviously Sagitarians won't do it, being beastly and stupid. You would think they'd be more intelligent with six brains. All that wasted potential just waiting for evolution.

The creature responded again.

“About that, yes come with me. I'll get you back home to your...” Stanley checks the file, walking back toward the vehicle with a confused creature following him, “Two wives and seven children. I can't believe you can afford to support them on your waste retrieval salary.”

The creature responded.

“Oh, I see, you make them work and support you.”

The creature climbed into the passenger seat of the Roadster as Stanley got in on the opposite side.

“I'll have you back in your time and place in no time,” he assured the Sagitarian who was starting to become more animated as the shock of his circumstances wore off. They arrived at a large column-like fixture with a large transparent door.

“Just step through the door and you'll be home.”

The Sagitarian walked around the column and sniffed the doorway suspiciously.

Stanley checked the readings on his holographic wrist computer, “It's perfectly safe, I've used it often enough to send wayward beings back to where and when they belonged. All you need to do is step inside and you will be home again.”

Twelve eyes became suspicious slits for a moment but the creature sighed through its mouth and stepped inside and made a noise. The door slid shut again.

“Well, no, I didn't say it was painless. It's not completely painless,” Stanley explained as he hit the ENACT key and began walking back to the vehicle without even looking back and the creature was sucked upward with the sound of a pneumatic tube before a bright light erupted for a second and his atoms were separated and then compressed before being shoved through a singularity set toward his appointed time and place.

The Sagitarian had been properly filed back to his own time and place, where he belonged.

--------

--- End quote ---
That was surreal...

geronl:
A few chapters later


--- Quote ---Park Eun-Hee had to tell her story at least a dozen times. First to her parents, then to a local official, then to some military types and politicians and finally at a press conference. It was all too much and it wore her out. Everyone asked the same kind of questions, the whole thing was scary at first but it got to be boring.

Not that her story was going to make people feel any better. Sure, an alien had seemed friendly more or less, that was a good thing. That news was dwarfed by the plans that the aliens were carrying out though. To strip the Earth of anything useful, even the minerals in the ground and the water in the oceans and take it all to their world. Then they'd leave.

This would take a long time, it would seem. Although they had done a good job of invading Earth, so far, in only a few days. Eradicating humans would take a bit longer. Their world had caused all sorts of tidal waves, flooding, hurricanes when it passed by, but for some reason they hadn't parked their planet-ship closer. Why?

The South Korean government had put her family on an Osprey and flown them to Jeju Island, where no alien activity had been reported. It turned out that a lot of wealthy and politically connected people had gone to Jeju Island. It was a resort, after all.

Park Eun-Hee was then escorted into a small building nestled against the side of a mountain. Taken into a tunnel and then to an underground chamber.

“I don't know what's going on.” She said to everyone. Soldiers, scientists and others were working in this place. Then she reached the end. Behind a thick transparent wall was a small chamber, a cell, and inside of it was the alien. The splotchy marks were the same, this was the same alien she had spent hours with in her school.

A scientist-looking person came to her. “We're trying to communicate with the creature. We thought maybe you could help.”

She looked at the man as if he had lost his mind. “What makes you think I can help?”

The man pointed at the wall in the chamber. A sketch was there, apparently drawn by the alien and it was unmistakably a drawing of Park Eun-Hee.
--- End quote ---

sneakypete:

--- Quote from: geronl on December 20, 2016, 08:25:32 pm ---snippet from a book I am working on

This is where the girl meets the alien. (She's not the main character, and she's not going to be some little girl who defeats trained soldiers in combat - those kinds of stories are dumb to me. She is a secondary character who will have bigger roles in future stories as she gets older. If this thing gets a book 3 she'll be an adult and the main communicator with these aliens.)

--- End quote ---

@geronl

I'm already looking forward to reading more of this book.

I am no authority,but I do believe you have the talent and the patience to be a successful author if you decide to keep working at it.

Ever consider trying to sell short stories to "Analogue,the magazine of Science Fiction and Fact" ? http://www.analogsf.com/,or "Issac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine"? Doing so might be the easiest and best way for you to start establishing a reputation as a science fiction writer,and practically guarantee you a readership once you do publish.

BTW,I think so highly of both that I have given out free subscriptions as Christmas presents to the children of friends that I consider to be VERY bright. Nothing to keep them interested in school and learning more than to introduce them to good science fiction and facts that will entertain them at the same time it educates them and makes them want more.

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