Storythread

>battle_of_yonkers.pdf

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Are people still thirsting for reviews and edits? Would people be interested in me reading their story and verbally editting/complaining/ranting as I go?

Warning, I will be both harsh, and drunk if I do this.

And would also need a good site to record me

Sounds like a standard Friday afternoon in the discord.

How about this one? (simply because its the only way I'll ever get anyone to read it all the way through)

The reason I'm interested in doing this is so that other people might be interested in hearing the review on other people's writing, like a lecture, more benefit for the effort.

Also, I'm busy tonight and will see about doing this tomorrow I guess. Sorry, just wanted to field the idea and gage the response.

You apparently forgot that this is Veeky Forums.

OK so apparently the previous thread was early archived last week and I was still writing a story during that.

Also previous thread link? Still not done with a story from prev thread.

>4channers have the attention spans of gnats, won't be interested
>4channers love to hear other people brought low
>writers love to try and get better

I figured 2-1 was good odds.

The archive only holds threads for three days now rather than seven (damn penny-pinching admin).

Is this the story you meant?

I think it's a fun idea. I don't know anything about the best way to go about recording it though (couldn't you just upload a recording to youtube and post the link here?)

is my story in case that wasn't clear.

I'm on a Chrome book right now, no idea if there's a native app for recording myself and then making a video, even if it's just like, a lewd anime girl in front of my voice.

Yes, and thanks. Still working on it, will again when I get home tomorrow.

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As I said, I know nothing about video editing, but I'm sure if there isn't already an app on your chromebook there should be some free software capable of doing the job; attaching a picture to an audio recording is just about the most basic thing you can do with editing software.

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>In the distant future, mankind uses their own dead to fight their wars
>"This is command, what's the situation, over?"
>"This is B Company. Sir, this is fubar! We're getting rattled down here, over!"
>"...Colonel."
>"Make no bones about it, over!"
>"Colonel..."
>"If we don't get air support soon, we're boned, over!"
>"STAHP!"

The archive actually holds threads for about as long, maybe even longer now; I've got a thread open on a different board that died on the 20th. Problem is that the "/board/archive" page only displays things from the past three days, which makes searching for things annoying.

Anyways, here's a story I cooked up for a random idea that popped up.

"Understanding different cultures goes a long way in preventing mishaps," said the half-elf. "Take it from me -- if you ever attend a dwarven concert, don't be surprised if their only instruments are anvils."
"Oh hush up. It's not as if elves are any different with their flute music fetish, as I learned for myself." replied the dwarf, who proceeded to down the rest of his ale.
That was his fifth mug this evening - or maybe it was his sixth? I had lost count.

The half-elf sulked a bit. She wasn't fond of being corrected, and hated when she didn't have the last word. At least that's what it seemed like to me from her behavior today; she'd been talking her head off telling stories to our half-orc companion, and whenever our dwarf made a quip or segued into a story of his own she'd become annoyed. Not overtly though. She probably would rather die than drop her wise front to us, so the outward signs were subtle. A slight narrowing of the eyes, a brief pursing of her lips. Every now and then her ears would twitch.

I resumed playing my harmonica.

"I'd like to go to one some day," spoke the half-orc. "I've always loved music."
She was new to adventuring and cities, and she made no attempt to hide that. The half-elf and dwarf had rather excitedly been teaching her and showing her around, and she took it all in gleefully. Although she was still a rookie, her lineage would give her enough strength to get by as she learned the ropes.

"Aye, I'm sure you will some time. Maybe we'll stumble upon a city hosting one in the course of our work," said the dwarf as he bit into his meat. (1/3)

"But for now you'll just have to make do with this lad's noise," he continued, grinning as he pointed his food towards me. I gave him a fake glare and continued playing.

He struck me as a simple man, rowdy and with a love for ale and arms. He fit more than a few of the traditional stereotypes humans hold for dwarves, but he seemed like someone anyone could trust. Sure, he probably struck the half-elf as somewhat crass, but I'd chalk that up to him treating us all with a familiarity you wouldn't normally show someone you'd just met that day. Just like the half-elf he loved to share his knowledge, but compared to her schoolteacher-like instruction his was more like a brother or uncle excitedly explaining how to do something.

"Don't misunderstand me. It's just a joke, there's no need to be mad." I pulled my harmonica away from my mouth.
"Oh, I know that," I said with a smile, switching from my angry facade back into my calm demeanor. "It's almost impossible," I quickly glanced at the half-elf, "to go adventuring without developing a sense of humor." I turned towards our half-orc. "Otherwise you'll get into all sorts of misunderstandings." I reached for my mug to drink some water.

The half-orc and dwarf laughed, along with the half-elf, although I suspect she was using it to hide her annoyance. In my experience, it was true; I had personally never met a seasoned adventurer who hadn't had a sense of humor. She was probably releatively new to the job -- she probably gained most of her knowledge from books or stories, and probably hadn't been doing this for barely half a year.

"I'm sure you have plenty of stories about that," the half-orc replied to me. (2/3)

"Not too many, actually," I said as I put away my harmonica and readied my fiddle, "but there's one that stands out. A few years ago I was traveling around with a paladin. He was pious, righteous, and with a love for helping others -- you know the type. He never made a vow that he didn't keep, whether it was slaying monsters or curing plagues. He was a reliable guy, and enjoyable to be around.

"Having just finished a fairly lucrativve job, we decided to take a month's rest in the city. The first day of our vacation we went to a tavern for a few drinks. On this occasion there was a man loudly declaring his woes about work, about how recently he'd been having to put up with a lot of 'fucking dicks' and 'shitty assholes' -- his words, not mine. Our paladin, never one to shy away from helping drunkards with their problems, approached him and offered to help with his problem. 'While I'm here, I'll make sure that you don't have to deal with inconveniences like those,' said the paladin, or at least something to that effect. He told the drunkard that the next day he would go to his place of work, to check it out for what it was and to talk to his employer.

"Well, it turns out that the drunkard worked within the sex trade; he wasn't a cheap prostitute one would hire for a night, nor was he some high-class gigolo. He was something in-between, but made enough in commission and tips that he earned a respectable amount. And it turned out that his complaints on that night were literal rather than figurative. (3/3)

"Needless to say, our paladin didn't enjoy his month-long vacation that much." The dwarf was having himself a good laugh, and although she obviously wasn't expecting such a raunchy tale it was plain as day that the half-orc enjoyed it too. The half-elf, on the other hand, seemed to be forcing a smile. She glared at me for a second, before glancing over at the half-orc and realizing that she had enjoyed my story.

Did she feel a need to protect the half-orc's "innocence" or something, as she was her younger?

Turning to our dwarf, I said that I would be retiring to our room for the night, mostly because I didn't want to earn more ire from the half-elf. And so ended our first day as a party.

JOURNAL END

P.S. Oh, right. I need to remember to get their names. (4/3; I suck at counting/dividing up posts)

This thread needs more pics.

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Alright, Imma now gonna be continuing that Catboy Vigilante story!

It is an evening n the city of Dayport as a man is parkouring across the roofs of adjacent buildings. The person in question is Haru Izo, a "Nekojin" or a Cat-Person. A race of feline-humanoid people who essentially are identical to human beings but feature cat-like features such as sharpened teeth, keen eyesight, better vision at the dark, quicker reflexes and higher amounts of agility. And also originating from the Far-Eastern misty continent and nation, known as Astrus.

However he is currently assuming the form of a local vigilante hero, almost like that of The White Scarf in the stat-capital city of Darlington, of the Darlington State. But unlike The White Scarf, Haru Izo is less recognized and is more obscure than anything. And unlike the White Scarf who has gained the favor of Darlington City's police, Haru Izo is treated as a criminal and or suspect who has committed acts of assault and battery, plus is also suspected of being an illegal immigrant. Haru Izo is also simply known as “The Cat Boy of Dayport” or sometimes: “Cat Guy” or “Cat Boi.” His nicknames mostly have to do with the fact that he is a young and even good looking male in the early twenties range.

Haru Izo, or “The Cat Boy.” Specializes in martial arts skills, hand-to-hand combat, certain levels of firearms handling and fighting with improvised weapons, though he carries an extendable metal staff that he uses as his signature weapon. He also is adept in Freerunning and Parkour, especially when scaling certain walls and jumping from adjacent buildings to another. As mentioned he has already ran in trouble with the law as he is suspected as an illegal immigrant by the local authorities of Dayport and also that his acts of vigilantism isn’t exactly smiled upon by them either. Fortunately for Haru Izo the Cat Boy, his actual identity is not known all thanks to that Super Hero or Villain-style latex eye mask he wears.

Tonight Haru is on the prowl for his brand of justice as he looks down upon his target location, a seedy and questionable looking clubhouse location which had various motorcylces parked outside. Which indicated that it was a hangout joint for Bikers, likely the bad types who do gang related and drug dealing activities. Haru scaled down the wall of the building he was standing on the roof of by drawing out his natural claws that Cat-People such as himself are born with. He scaled down using his claws on the walls to slide down and jumped off once he was in a safe falling distance and proceeded to swagger to the biker’s hangout joint.

He had with him a small bag slung on him that had something inside it, which was big enough that it filled up the bag and made bloat up. He also readied his metal staff-weapon and before he really got close to the joint, he donned his latex eye-mask to conceal his identity and also put up the hood of his hoody too for extra identity concealment.

Now that he was closing in to the location, three bikers guarding the entrance noticed the Cat Boy approaching. One of them smirked and called out. “Hey you! What ya doing here???”

Haru looked onto them and the bikers now saw his face as one of them whistled. “Hey there handsome. Whats a pretty boy like you doing in here? Trying to get a sugar daddy?”

One of the bikers also said. “Hey, its one of those Cat People. We got ourselves a Catboy-twink here-”

“You all know Oswin Webly, right?” Haru spoke, interrupting one of the bikers as they were surprised Haru knew the name of their leader and lead-biker.

“What the!? How did you know the name of our boss???” One of the bikers asked in surprise.

And then, Haru unzipped the small bag he had, removed it around him, and then showed a severed and bloody head of Oswin Webly, the leader of this Biker Outfit. Which shocked the Bikers.

youtube.com/watch?v=WXxQu4s20GY

Haru Izo dropped the severed head of Oswin Webly and kicked it to the three shocked bikers.

“You! YOU FUCKING KILLED OUR BOSS!!!” One of the bikers said.

“It’s about time someone taught you bikers a lesson in not to pick on the weak, sexually assault women and deal drugs to people. So I started with your boss.” He said vindictively and pointed at them. “And now it’s your turn, scum!” He said again vindictively and brandished his metal staff weapon.

“WE’RE GONNA FUCKING KILL YOU FOR THAT!” A biker yelled and charged at Haru Izo but he struck the biker first with his metal staff, knocking the man unconscious. The other two also charged at him but to no avail as Haru the Cat Boy struck them first. Haru made a striking sweep at the second biker making him fall on his back and Haru once again, struck the third attacker in the head, knocking him out.

Haru then proceeded to bash the head of the second biker who fell on his back; he smashed the guy’s head till he heard the crushing sounds of the skull breaking, killing the man. Haru did the same to one of the other bikers he fell by bashing their heads in, killing them. And as soon as Haru was done caving in another man’s skull, one of the three he knocked down was about to get up but was soon kicked down again by Haru. But this time, Haru viciously stomped on the third biker’s head with his boot about five times till the biker’s skull broke and finished off with a boot-grind to the dead biker’s face.

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Alright, I'm not drunk, and I'm going to record this while eating ramen, but fuck it.

Let's see how this goes.

vocaroo.com/i/s1XPhO9Gqarp

Holy fuck, is that what my voice sounds like?

Tell me this is just a bad quality microphone because I'm just using the built in mic for my shitty chromebook.

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Okay, I've listened to your critique. You have a point on some of the more technical aspects. Remember, I wrote this to be posted on Veeky Forums so it wasn't edited particularly extensively. I probably need to use semi-colons less.

A lot of your complaints are a little nitpicky though. A few are just plain wrong. For example, it's standard to use single rather than double quotation marks for normal speech in a lot of books (just randomly sampling from the books by my desk, it seems like single quotation marks are slightly more common). Your objection to ellipses and parentheses are also a little odd given that they're perfectly common in most published works.

In a few places you actually contradict yourself. You complain about difficult fantasy names, then you complain about generic names. You complain about telling not showing, then you complain that everything should have been laid out in an exposition dump at the beginning.

The only part where I actually got annoyed though was where you said some of the language was too technical for fantasy readers. One of my pet peeves is authors who treat their readers like idiots, and I know I'm not alone in this. None of the words I use should be too complicated for anyone who ever sat though a science class in primary school.

You also complain about things not being explained, when they're explained a sentence or two later. Honestly, I think you should stop going through it line by line and instead just read a couple of posts, stop, and summarise your thoughts on what you just read. Apart from anything else it'll take forever if you keep going on like you are.

>Holy fuck, is that what my voice sounds like?
Heh, I actually find it kind of funny listening to my characters speaking with a gruff American accent.

FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

If these problems are born of first draft woes then ignore them. But I stand by what I said.

Yes, I pointed out some nitpicks, but those nitpicks are born of some fundamental problems, as I see it, in your writing.

You have a failure to craft expectations, the story was adrift without purpose or motivation, and this makes your characters weak.

Mull on it instead of just defending yourself. And remember that the reader only knows what you put on the page, in the order you write it, it's your job as a writer to build the story and create the image and story.

We're gossiping about you in the server, Chronicler.
Don't look, you'll get sad.

honestly, I just disagree that it has to be action, action, action from the very beginning. This isn't a magazine where I'm writing a short story that has to be 5000 words.

There's action later on in the story, but I don't even consider it to be that main point. This is about the setting and the characters. Which I know you don't find very compelling, but you're not even a quarter of the way through yet so they've barely been introduced, let alone had time to develop an arc.

>Mull on it instead of just defending yourself.
I did. But with the exception of some minor technical points you just haven't said anything yet that I thought, on balance, was something I could really do with changing. I like the slow build up and the more subtle introduction to the setting, and if you don't then that's a matter of taste.

Keep going though. This is a lot more interesting than what normally goes on in this thread - i.e. people posting stories and nobody arguing over their merits. What's the point of art if you're not going to argue over it?

Maybe someone else could weigh in and break the deadlock here.

It's called having creative differences. Like a fight, except often bloodier.

This used to be a mass grave, you know. Back when Séjic was purging, he used all the train tracks as mass graves and had his arms cars mow through them, turn them to mush. Then the Unions took him out and it's been twelve years since they've cleaned up the country and the states around us. They did it on the Kurge, too, and to this day I don't think the stink of corpses has ever left it. And now people live there. Trains haven't run years but people live in the big grey buildings. Pink and purple flowers have grown all over the tracks and walls. Every 26th of June kids pick the flowers, bring them home. Corpse-fed flowers in your home. All I can see from my window is the smattering of human paste. But they, the kids, never go into the tunnel. It's ruined, blocked off past a point, after, I think, a bomb went off in an arms car. It's flooded in the deep part, and stinks worse than the waft of bodies they, and I, say you can get. And it's hot, too, sticky all year round except for winter. The flowers in there get really tall, though, fed by all the rot build up in the long summers. They would get, I'd say, as tall as people. Kids wouldn't pick those.

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Newfag to Veeky Forums here, this kinda thread seems like a lot of fun! I'll dump all the interesting pics I have before looking for one to write about myself

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Don't dump too much, otherwise the thread will hit the image limit

WWhat the fuck is that? I like it, I want to know more.

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I mean, kinda defeats the purpose of the thread but
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daredevils_of_Sassoun

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uh, dude, seriously - if you keep going like that the thread's going to hit the image limit before anyone has time to write anything

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Thanks senpai, I just wanted some context to save the pics with a proper name.

Just finished reading the story.

Some of the criticism was on point, if not very well presented. Yes, the narrator seemed to fluctuate a bit and it could have done with more polish. Sure, there were some nitpicks to be made but I didn't see nearly enough problems in there to call your writing fundamentally flawed.

I also didn't find the characters weak, really. I kind of liked the chemistry they had and wish you had put even more emphasis on them interacting.

For example, I was a bit bummed out by your decision to simply skip the conversation Mai-Kiyya and Jayyo had about her childhood. I believe a chance for some good dialog was lost there.

All in all, while it was a slow build-up, I'm glad I stuck until the end. It was a good story.

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I'm glad you enjoyed reading it. I can write more action-packed stuff, but honestly, I /like/ my stories that are slower paced, more character oriented, with intricate setting details. Even if everyone else hated them my attitude would still be 'well, screw you guys, they make me happy', but it's nice to know that my tastes aren't completely boring.

>I believe a chance for some good dialog was lost there.
now that I think about it you may be right, but by that point I felt it was starting to overrun a bit, even by my standards, and I didn't think the pacing could suffer another digression.

>Yes, the narrator seemed to fluctuate a bit and it could have done with more polish.
Was there any specific bit that you felt needed work? I know pointed out a few things but he seemed to have a problem with everything so it was hard to pick out the most relevant bits.

OwO what's this from

とある飛空士への追憶

It translates as 'Recollections of a Pilot' (more or less; Japanese doesn't translate well to English). The English-language title is 'The Princess and the Pilot', although I don't actually think there's an English-dub version.

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There's one thing that everyone in Corresia knows as a fact: Never enter the Hellgate. Nobody who ever entered there ever left. Those people who supposedly did are just cowards who just took a glance and said that was enough.

Never seen the Hellgate, have you? Don't be daft, of course you have! If you sailed in here from the Telensite Isles, then you must've seen somewhere where the earth itself splits open and reveals a gaping wound. Huh, fell asleep for that leg of the journey? Consider yourself lucky, just looking at that place is enough to terrify most people for life. Just looking into that gash can have you looking face-to-face with a real demon.
Not everyone accepts being scared though. Some bold idiots come down here explicitly to walk in there. Poor souls, they walked to their own demise. They get forgotten, never mourned or remembered for their suicidal foolishness. You could even see some of those boats, docked by the shore, never to fare the seas again. That is unless some unscrupulous pirates decide to hijack them.

Why do they do it, you ask? Well, you know the stories about demons, right? How they pour out from the Hellgate to cause all sorts of mischief in the world. Well, some folk, they think that they can find something down there, some force capable of banishing all the demons for good and closing the Hellgate for good. Sure it all sounds nice for everyone, but you know what they say about people with good intentions. Some just do it for the privilege. Some say it's their purpose to do it. Honestly, none of it matters when none of them return.
Did some of them do it for nefarious purposes? Sure. Some misguided idiots, going through some rebellious phase, thinking that the demons were actually friendly actually did try to get to the Hellgate. Course, their fate's no different than that of any other person going there.

So why don't we leave? Well, ain't that the million-copper question on all our minds?

no matter what anyone else says, thanks for livening up the thread

The old folk on Corresia, they said that some time in the distant past, there were great warriors, gifted by the heavens with holy weapons and the like. Apparently, they used these weapons to fight the demons and their infernal masters in this cataclysmic battle. Sure, the demons lost, but they still scarred the earth. Even with all their powers, the great warriors wouldn't catch everything. Knowing this, they found some spots they knew they couldn't fix in time and asked the people to find someone among their own to take the place of these heroes.

Of course, it was never explained how anyone's supposed to know when the heroes were supposed to return. Maybe those old bastards forgot. In any case, it's stories like this that give us hope. They remind us that humanity was great before and we can still be great. Most of those folk that enter the Hellgate, they probably believed that story too. Me? I just believe it as a story. I don't have much reason to believe otherwise. If you had any survival instinct, you'd understand.

Getting late now, eh? Yeah, you should go get some rest, get settled in. I'll be around tomorrow if you need to ask anything else. Just remember - don't try and be a hero. Those guys aren't the real ones.

Tell us more

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