Ice, in The Neko Child
Dec. 23rd, 2009 11:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
farlaMy temper is moderated somewhat by the fact I found this through google, although the second chapter author's note has since changed to remove any reference to me so I'm not sure how much credit I was actually given. Also by the fact it's just so weird to read.
See, someone's trying to change bits of the story to fit their new idea, so they're adding and removing things. What they add and remove give an idea of how they thought the original bits fit together, as if you're removing Thing A, you'll want to remove Explanation A that goes with it. Of course, if you aren't sure which bits match up to which, or even what Thing A is, exactly, and if it conflicts with Thing 1 you just added, the result is a stitched-together mess. But it gives me a good look at how they thought the story worked.
The Neko Child by Kari Suttle
A demon child was born and abandoned in the human realm, raised by a neglectful man. What will Koenma do when this demon child gets loose and starts killing humans at random? First fic, please review!
Introduction
The child stared at the bird. Her normally expressionless eyes held a tint of curiousity as she looked at the mangled creature, still chirping; its wing was bent and thick, scarlet water was crusted over it. The child did not know what it looked like normally, but she knew that it was wrong somehow.
I don't really know why that line was left in, because obviously this girl does know what it looks like. As we see next line, there's another bird right next to it. The line was originally there because the child hadn't ever seen a rattata clearly, and that was part of why she crawled over to stare at it.
The bird’s companion sat beside it, twittering and chirping loudly at her, angrily loud. The child tilted her head, focusing on the bird and trying to understand it.
The child adjusted her voice to match the bird’s tone. “What?” she asked. “Mad?”
I get the impression this writer didn't get the reason for a lot of events in the story. The child was mimicking the rattata's tone because she's trying to communicate, as intonation must carry a lot of weight in a language with two syllables. It's part of why she often introduced herself with "Hello," as that's the opening to communication: "I am here. I know you are here. I am announcing my presence. I am a speaking creature and I think you are a speaking creature and so if you try to speak I will listen and try to speak back."
The bird repeated itself, only angrier. “No. I didn’t hurt it. Not mine.”
The reason the rattata are angry at her is because they're blaming her for their companion's slow, horrible death but they're too afraid to go out and kill it themselves with her there. Not because she's in the general vicinity of something going wrong, and not with the friend entirely capable to speaking up for itself.
The whole not mine bit seems like it's a remnant of the spearow scene.
The creature bounced about on its tiny feet, as if wanting to claw her yet knowing it was unable to. The child backed away a bit, retreating to analyze its chirp pattern and frequency. The child was able to pick up words like ‘why’ ‘you’ and ‘hurt’ and ‘kill’.
I also conspicuously didn't do any quotes around the words, because she's working off concepts. The rattata aren't literally asking her why she's killed something and not let it die, but whatever they are saying is about this general issue. This is important because it's how she handles all language.
Why did she let it suffer and not help it?
“No.” she repeated. “Not mine. Yours.” The bird ruffled its feathers, bouncing closer to its friend and raking its small claws., chirping again This time it was different slightly, slower. The child was able to understand a part of what the creature said.
‘Why did you......suffer…kill…’ The child’s face scrunched up in confusion.
Also, the whole "expressionless" bit means her face is not synced up with her actual emotions, not just that she's really reserved. The child would only look confused if she's attempting to inform those around her that she's feeling confused. Cats, meanwhile, are hardly expressionless, they just have different sorts of expressions. I'm assuming the early reference is kept here just because emotionless little girl is a popular trope, even when they're not technically being one.
Allowing the bird to repeat itself, she listened closer. The child watched the bird twitter and chirp as it bounced about its friend, ending its rant by raking its claws again. Then the child understood.
Reaching out to the bird, she clasped its neck and snapped it. Why had she watched it suffer and not kill it.
Except "suffer" is understandably different than "die", as is "help". The child's confusion is over the fact the rattata was referring to two similar things and it takes her a while to work out the distinction.
Also, the only reason the child was sitting quietly and talking with them is that they were not making any aggressive moves. Why a cat demon would be putting up with lip from a bird is pretty confusing.
The bird quieted, twittering softly now. It no longer chirped at her, was no longer angry.
The resolution here is just bizarre. The rattata was partially crushed - that's why it looked odd but she wasn't sure what was wrong exactly, because the whole body was damaged. A broken wing, while a pretty awful thing for a bird, is not the same thing and shouldn't really demand an immediate mercy killing. That's all especially striking given the writer presumably combined the rattata scene with the later spearow one, and the spearow one very definitely did not end with her snapping its neck and wandering off.
I'm not sure what the girl's rationale here is either, since she was pretty uninterested in "helping". The child killed the rattata as part of the conversation: "Look, I have understood what you were saying" not because she only goes along with things that involve neck snapping.
The child stood and made to go back home. The park was no longer of interest to her.
It's also odd that it's been redone to be a random bird she has no connection with, because part of the point of the scene was establishing the guy she lived with regularly killed pokemon and she just thought this was normal.
But as she walked, eyes followed her from the nearby brush. “Well.” The unseen one considered, “This demon child might get to be a problem. I’ll have to inform Koenma.”
The child is supernaturally unnoticeable and spends most of her time hiding. This is important, because it's the only way to explain no one noticing things like claws. Disliking notice will continue to be referenced in this version, but it'll never add up to anything. She'll keep hating the idea but never actually do anything to avoid it.
Chapter One
When the child entered, she found the man still on the couch. He wasn’t her father, though he seemed to consider himself so. They looked nothing alike, and held no affections toward each other. The man who called himself her father was not her father. The child ignored him.
This is just depressing. I tried to make it clear that the child didn't have any idea if they were actually related and had only made a halfway effort at figuring it out in case it had to do with why he was feeding her, and that the guy did actually care about her, otherwise he wouldn't have done stuff like feeding her. Their general lack of interaction is because she generally doesn't interact. She says he's big enough to kill her because this is a relevant fact to her, not because he's actually abusive. He's not. But it's kind of like having a pet scorpion, you don't express the fact you care about it with hugs.
If the guy really is abusive and really doesn't care about her, then her behavior toward him is recognizably human.
For as long as she could remember, she had lived in this small, dingy little house. It was falling apart; the roof was in need of repair and leaked when it rained, the paint was so old and faded it was peeling, and the fence outside was leaning badly and creaked whenever a gust of wind blew, to name a few problems. The backyard wasn’t all that big, either; about the size of the living room, which was small in itself. The living room held a tv perched on a tiny tv stand, a long couch, and an armchair. In the center of the furniture sat a wooden coffee table, old and dusty with neglect.
For whatever reason, the writer has made the house a lot nicer than it was meant to be. The wood of the house is supposed to be rotting into powder and the place smells of spilled food and drinks, especially beer, because the only things that ever get cleaned up are the pokemon corpses.
The room held only a single picture that sat on the brick mantle above the fireplace. It was of her at a year old. She was sitting on the couch the man now occupied, her infant face staring blankly, curiously, up at the camera the man had been holding. Her dark hair had been black as ebony even then, just as straight and tame as well. Her emerald eyes shone a brilliant green, eyes that shone intelligence even as an infant.
This is another odd change. I'm not sure exactly why the writer wanted to have baby photos. Considering that both characters have claws on their hands, the reason this is a bad idea should be obvious. The girl doesn't even seem to possess supernatural don't-notice-me powers for cover that.
I assume part of this is that the writer had a clear background for the girl. The problem is that concrete things like that are at odds with the basic setup, and wind up contrasting badly with the style.
Also, just as you need claws to claw things open, you need special eyes to see in the dark. I assume the writer is thinking of green cat eyes, but cat eyes on a human are going to look obviously wrong and green human eyes are just human eyes. You might as well just give the girl regular nails too and say she's just got super strength. That's why the child's irises' are white, something I suspect the writer here didn't pick up on.
She looked into the living room to see the man eating. Upon closer inspection, she saw it was a sandwhich. Her stomach growled instantly, reminding her that she hadn’t ate breakfast and that it was past lunchtime. The child went into the kitchen and, with a decent sum of effort, climbed onto the counters. Opening cabinet after cabinet, it took the child a few minutes of looking before she found some canned fruit .It was small and had yellow marks on it she couldn’t understand, yet she knew it to be easy to open and eat. No ingredients necessary just open and eat. She could do that.
Recognizing patterns is distinct from reading. The child's inability to reliably identify food inside cans is because the cans are often not labeled properly, not because reading is the only way to do so.
She also wouldn't even understand the concept of adding ingredients. If it's food, you eat it.
Not wanting to attract the man’s attention, for him to notice her and remember she was there, she quickly, but gently, got off the counters and took her prize to the room. The room that the child stayed in was down the hall going off the kitchen and living room, at the very back, just like the child liked. She had always stayed in that room. She couldn’t remember if she’d chosen it herself or if the man had given it to her; she never retained memories of anything beyond a month or two in the past.
Here I get the impression the writer didn't understand the references to the child not remembering the first time she did something. It was meant to indicate she had an extremely good memory, to the point she could actually remember each time a thing happened all the way back to probably about one year old when her permanent memory first kicked in and therefore say with certainty she didn't remember the first time.
I'm not really sure why it's changed to her spending her time in her room, especially after establishing she doesn't get along well with the man.
Sitting down on the floor, she carefully, cautiously, opened the can with her clawed fingers There! She picked the pear slices out with her fingers and popped them in her mouth. It made her claws and fingers messy, her mouth too when she drank the remaining juice out of the bottom of the can, but it satisfied the growling in her stomach.
This just irritates me because tearing open metal is hard and even something with claws and unusual strength would have some issues. I used this as part of indicating the child's relative strength - she's roughly as strong as an adult at this point, probably a bit better, so she's able to smash a can open with a rock. A tiny kid being as a strong as an adult is already a pretty big jump.
Satisfied, the child put the can down in a corner, where a pile of other cans and the like were. The man bought food every week and let the child alone. She fed herself. She knew the man probably wouldn’t care if he found her taking from the food, wouldn’t be mad at all, but the child tried to avoid letting him watch her get food anyways.
But she's eating in the house and leaving the cans around. There's also the plot hole now of why the man is feeding the girl, since he doesn't seem to like her.
The child is secretive about eating, but she's secretive about all aspects of it - she likes to cache food, she likes to be out of sight when she's eating, and she likes to avoid any traces of it afterward.
She also eats a lot of food, something I probably should have made clearer, but basically something with unnatural strength shouldn't eat a can of fruit and consider themselves full. That's part of why she doesn't like people noticing her eating.
The child yawned. Looking around her room, she found the darkest corner of the room and curled up in it.
As this girl is not maybe-dark-type and certainly isn't supernaturally unnoticeable in shadows, this is not such a great idea as a hiding place, especially in a room with limited exits. The child is not sitting in the dark because it's easier to sleep there, especially given she prefers to sleep during the day. She's doing it because it's safer.
But just as the child was about to close her eyes, a loud knock came at the door. The child ignored it, intending to go back to sleep. Then it came again, another knock, slightly louder, slightly more demanding, but not enough that people would be able to tell. She thought for a minute, pondering what course of action she should take. Another knock, noticeably louder. The child stood and exited her room, pausing at the hall entrance, deciding. The man would not answer it; he may have been in the room near the door, but the tv was on. It was too loud for the man to hear anything else.
This was supposed to indicate the child had better hearing originally - that's why she can easily make out the sound at the door despite the other noises.
The child didn’t want to go get the door, to have some unknown person’s attention on her, to have to figure out what the person wanted of her and what she was supposed to say. Another knock, louder this time. The child gave in. The person would not go away unless someone answered. Going to the door, she unlocked the door and cracked it open.
This is another odd change, given the writer has made her relationship with the man worse. The child goes to the door because she understands that people who are banging on the door get angry and start yelling if no one arrives, and that this would make the man angry, and then the man might be angry at her, and given the child is not capable of ripping apart metal with her bare hands yet, this is a legitimate danger to her. Just doing it because knocking demands answering doesn't make sense, and it's more social behavior from something that's supposed to be decidedly not.
“Hello!” the person, the woman, was imposingly tall, radiating authority. Her clothes were known to the child, but not familiar; if she had been normal, like the children, she would have recognized the clothes as a police officer’s uniform, but the child was not like the other children and she did not know. The woman wore a blue button up shirt with a shiny, gold badge pinned on its chest. Blue pants, too. The clothes stood for something, a position of authority, of being better than, to be obeyed without question. The child didn’t know why clothes symbolized authority, she just knew they did.
I realize the story tends to be unclear in places, but the child wouldn't just know things mean authority, she's just good at picking up cues. I mean, part of the point of her being nonhuman is that she doesn't react in the same way to things as a human.
The woman had another person with her, a man. He didn’t feel like the woman did, didn’t radiate imposing authority, but he still expected to be obeyed. The child ignored him, focusing on the woman—the woman would be the one to speak.
I don't even know. The child does tend to rank people in terms of how much attention they get, but she'd hardly decide the relevant factor is which one speaks.
The woman’s voice friendly voice held a tone of falsehood to it. The child picked up on it.
I think this is here because of references throughout the story to the child picking up on lies. It's meant to be similar to her ability to understand language in general. It doesn't seem to have any relevance here or reason for her to care, rather than it being that she finds the literal sound horribly annoying.
“Are you Mr. Winston’s daughter?” The child thought for a moment. Then she remembered. That was what the man was called.
Another thing I tried to make clear is that people use names all the time, the child just doesn't care about them. In later chapters people will be identified by name in dialogue only to continue to be referred to by epithets in the narration, including the child herself, because the story is taking place from her viewpoint. She's entirely aware of their names and entirely capable of referring to them as such, she just doesn't think in those terms.
The child didn’t reply, but inched open the door and moved back, further into the darkness of the household.
The explanation for this (that the child basically does not know how to interact with people) has been removed for some reason, as is the suggestion of what it means (while she doesn't really want the man to be angry, she's ranking him angry well below just interacting with another adult, meaning she doesn't think that's a significant threat. Stuff like this was part of indicating the man isn't actually abusive and that her references are just her being cautious).
It wouldn't really work anyway, as the reason the child backs up is that doing that makes her invisible and so she can rely on just stepping a few feet further in to be safe from view and having people walk right by her. If the girl wants to get out of sight, she's going to have to turn and run the other way.
The woman entered, squinting, as if she couldn’t see. The woman yelled into the house. “Hello?” No answer. The man wouldn’t hear her until she walked further into the house, the tv was still too loud. The other blue-coat followed the woman in, but the child ignored him. He only followed, only listened and acted on what he was told—he wasn’t a threat.
I really get the impression this is working off something from the original story, but the child classes "guy who barely touches me" as "guy who is able to kill me". I think the only one she classes as a nonthreat at all are the rattata, and she's really not sure about them. She only really gets into the threat/not threat bit later on, and her criteria are never based on "doing what you're told" for obvious reasons.
The other blue-coat muttered some words, something about the darkness of the house. He walked in further and flipped the light switch on the wall. Light illuminated the room, making the blue-coats flinch at the sudden light. The child looked at them, eyes alit with curiousity. Why did they flinch at the light? Why did their eyes recoiling shut again for a brief moment? The child didn’t ask—she couldn’t ask. She felt it was something she should know, and asking about it would call attention to the fact she didn’t know. Make them notice her.
The child's references to these sort of things are based on innate differences. Asking why someone else can't do something she does is calling attention to that ability she has and they lack. Similarly, asking why someone acted in a certain way is saying she wouldn't. It's not a simple matter of keeping her mouth shut, and she does ask questions.
The girl's abilities here strike me as scattered - she's able to see in the dark, but also her eyes aren't sensitive to light at all.
There's also the jump here that the girl was getting out of sight and is referencing not wanting to be noticed but is unconcerned by the light.
The man had noticed the light. He grumbled, mumbling words only audible to the child as he craned his large head to look in the blue-coats direction.
“Who’re you?” he asked. His words jumbled slightly, as was his way of speaking.
He was drunk. Seriously, that's why he was swaying and mumbling, and it's a large part of why the child, even as cautious as she is, treats him as dangerous at all. He's unpredictable because much of the time he's smashed. When he isn't he's perfectly able to speak normally.
The woman didn’t answer his question. “Are you Mr. Winston?”
The man nodded. “Yeah, what do you want?” His face was annoyed, angry somewhat. The child wondered if he was mad at them for coming in, or at her for letting in. The child thought the first option, the man didn’t seem to have seen her there yet.
See that somewhat? We'll be seeing that a lot.
While not clear early on, I sort of hope that as the chapters progressed people realized that the child was reliably reporting various emotions and that "something" was a sort of mental placeholder for a particular emotion she wasn't sure of. The "something" referenced in the conversation means he was afraid.
“So the little girl who opened the door is your foster daughter, Lyn Mead?” The child’s ears perked. She had heard the words ‘foster daughter’ and ‘Lyn Mead’ uttered in reference to herself before. They were talking about her. That meant they knew about her. But how? The child had never seen these blue-coats before. She had seen blue-coats walking, but never up close or long enough to gather information. The child was unsettled, and her mouth curled into a frown. They shouldn’t know about her, but they did.
No idea why she's adopted, or why the writer kept in bits about not using names when she promptly names the kid.
The reason for the child getting upset by this is that she's very good at hiding, and that's somewhat the point - they literally only know about what the guy put on his taxes. She's not seen by people because she's extremely cautious and has supernatural abilities to avoid being seen. Of course, she doesn't understand this, so it's also why she doesn't stay for the full conversation but goes and hides in a corner.
And the reason she does that, in turn, is because large sections of the early chapters are written around people's names. The child does have a name and people use it, and it's going to come up at some point in the conversation.
The woman continued. “Then why isn’t she in school! Our records state that she should be enrolled in school, in Kindergarten. Why have you not enrolled her yet? School has been in session for just over a week now.”
The child’s frown deepened. School? She had heard the word uttered by other children, older children. The way it was used, it must be a place, a place older children were supposed to know about and be at. The child knew about school, but only like she knew about the blue-coats—not up close, no details, she just knew that it was. The child wondered what school was, why children were supposed to go to it. She could have asked, but it was like asking about why the blue-coats had flinched when the light had been turned on—it was information she was supposed to know, but didn’t know. Asking would bring attention to it. Attention to her. So again the child remained silent.
Basically, this girl doesn't pay much attention to her surroundings. She's outside and exploring but hasn't picked up basic information, including that these people are called police. The child tends not to know things because she's really young and weak and therefore doesn't take too many risks, but she's extremely attentive because the more she knows the fewer risks she'll end up taking.
I wonder if things like this are due to the style. I know I got at least one reviewer thinking she was illiterate because she described Team Rocket uniforms as having squiggles on the front.
The woman had continued talking, talking louder than before. The other blue-coat had joined in, both of them talking with elevated voices to the man. Yelling, almost. The child ignored them, deciding that there was nothing else she could learn from listening to them.
Again, the girl is just not interested in her environment. Yelling, to the child, is a big deal, because people are threats. The writer seems to be trying to keep to the format where the end of the conversation isn't heard, but doesn't understand why it happens.
Also, the man doesn't get into a screaming argument. For whatever reason he's pretty bothered by this. Possibly it's just he's worried he'll get in trouble, possibly he was told to keep the child hidden and is panicking because he screwed that up, but no matter what, a screaming argument is not helping matters.
The man also isn't supposed to have a bad temper - that's part of why the child is willing to get anywhere near him. She's just extremely risk-adverse.
Nothing that would answer her questions. The other blue-coat and the woman had not noticed her, neither had the man. At the door, the other blue-coat had looked at her with half-seeing eyes, seeing her but not caring to pay attention to her presence; the woman had seen her with full-seeing eyes, dangerous full-seeing eyes, but the woman was now focused on the man, not the child.
The writer just doesn't seem to get why being seen is a big deal to the child, even though later on we see that people who get a very good look at her immediately start trying to throttle her. So references like this are still present, but there's no suggestion of why it matters, and we're told this person has just seen the girl without anything bad happening.
There's also simply no reason why people wouldn't notice the girl since again, she doesn't have any sign of supernatural don't-notice-me powers.
The woman didn’t seem to notice that she was still there. If the woman didn’t notice, the other blue-coat wouldn’t notice either. She could sneak back to the room, maybe go back to sleep. The child stifled a yawn. Moving silently, the child snuck back to her room, quietly, silently, unnoticed.
One of the things I wanted to do was explain how the child could actually make it to adulthood. Even ignoring the issue of people trying to kill her, having things like claws is noticeable, and her behavior is very clearly not human. She has a narrow window in early childhood to learn enough that she's able to interact with humans before she's forced to, and so she pays a lot of attention but stays out of sight. She isn't casual about the whole thing, because it's very literally a matter of life or death for her.
The child woke up very suddenly, not slowly as she always did.
I don't know why this is changed. The child is supposed to be a very light sleeper, and I can't see what the point of this is. I sort of wonder if it's because I describe her waking up with a slow heartbeat and breathing, but considering it was right after a nightmare, the point was again that she just doesn't display signs of stress.
Adrenaline coursed through her veins, prompting her to stay awake rather than fall back asleep. Something wasn’t right. She snapped to awareness, her blank golden-yellow eyes looking in quick glances around her barren room, listening carefully, measuring her surroundings with caution.
I'm not sure if the writer just forgot the eye color she said before or what.
It irritates me because I actually spent a lot of time trying to decide how different her features could be and still pass for human. With white irises and big pupils her eyes end up looking like they're just a very dark brown, and as long as her eyes aren't wide open the fact the shape is actually an oval rather than a circle can be missed.
Something was off, something was different. She had been caught off guard and awoken. Something filled the child, pulling at her complete consciousness, begging her—curiosity, the child realized. Curiosity was something the child was familiar with. The child decided to investigate.
Footsteps echoed across the house, their hurried pace reaching the child’s keen ears. Their pace was odd, vibrating through the floor in a concerned, searching manner.
“Those footsteps. They could only belong to the man.” The child told herself, her voice void of any inflection or variance of tone that would indicate emotion. The child cocked her head, listening, thinking. Nodding, the child made her decision.
One of the other things I kept in mind was that the child only emotes if she thinks there's someone watching. She does occasionally do things like head-cocking, but it's to figure out where a sound is from or get a better look. She certainly wouldn't talk aloud (she spends her time trying not to attract attention) and really, doesn't actually think in English to start with. And if she's going to speak in English it comes with inflection, because that's how she hears it spoken. She'd have to deliberately do it otherwise, and that's a type of inflection too. So this basically makes me want to cry.
Uncurling, she stood and removed herself from the corner she had slept in. The man appeared to be searching for her. The child wondered why—the man had never searched her out before, never once made any indication that he remembered her presence in the house.
This is just weird, as it suggests he doesn't ever visit most of the rooms in the house.
Also, it's somewhat of a point that the man does remember her, because most people don't.
So why? The child moved to her door, reaching up on her tip-toes and opening the door. Curiosity pulled at her. She sought the man out, not really thinking of what she would do once she reached the man, just thinking about reaching him. When she saw his silhouette standing outside one of the unused rooms down the hall, closer to the living room than to her room, she noticed that he planned to move in her direction. The child realized she would have to decide what she would do. The child didn’t want to show herself to the man, to have his attention fixed on her, to have him remember she was there. Yet if she did not bring herself to the man, he would get angry. When the man got angry, the man would yell loud, loud enough to hurt her ears, and when his breath smelled he would hit things and throw stuff. If the child was nearby, he would try to hit her too. The man never managed to hit her, the child was too quick for him to catch, but the act itself still reminded the man she was there. The child preferred to remain unnoticed, not remembered by anyone.
Like with the angry bird earlier, the girl is oddly nonviolent. One of the clues that the man doesn't hit the child is simply that we see the child several times and she tends to respond with lethal violence at any provocation. The best she does is occasionally delay the lethal violence when it's explicitly pointed out what a terrible idea this is.
The child decided to let the man find her. She walked out into the hall and stood, waiting, knowing the man was coming her way, towards the back of the hall, away from the living room
The man was frustrated when he found her. “Where ya been, kid?” he growled. He was dressed in his work clothes, and his expression was mad. Not mad at her, she knew, mad at having to go to work. The man hated work, this the child understood, but the child didn’t understand why he would seek her out before going to work. She didn’t ask, allowing the man to rant on, though she could have asked. She waited for the man to indicate what he wanted her to do.
“…come on.” The man said, “I’m s’pposed ‘t take you ‘t school.” The man moved to grab her by the arm, his movement rough and stumbling. The child stepped back, moving out reach. She did not like being grabbed and led around. The man got angry, and the child noticed this time his anger was at her.
“I said come on, brat!” the man made to grasp her arm again. The child stepped out of his reach once more. The man became angrier.
This entire mess is exactly why the child shows herself immediately. She doesn't want a situation to escalate into something bad while it's still currently manageable. She pretty much only has three ways of dealing with things: she hides, or she does what someone says, or she kills them. There's really no point in not doing what someone says until they get angry and then having to kill them.
The child’s clawed fingers curled into her palms, making bloody crescent marks.
This I find kind of interesting, since one of the things I kept in mind was that the child couldn't make a real fist, although I'm not sure I ever stated it directly. So on the one hand it's good the writer noticed this, but on the other that's why she doesn't curl her fingers into a fist in the first place.
The man looked at her, saw her, talked to her. The man would remember her, talk of her. The man was a threat. The man needed to be killed, eliminated, erased. But the people in blue coats from yesterday wanted her at school, they had seen her, seen the man, told the man to do this. They would notice if she didn’t arrive at school, become suspicious if the man died, think of her and remember her more.
Here the writer just doesn't want to follow through.
See, the child has exactly one reason to stay at the house rather than just walk off, which is that new food appears there every week or so. As soon as that stops being a factor, she walks off. If she's really that concerned about a couple people, she can just kill them too.
The child chose to redirect his anger rather than to kill the man. “Follow.” She said, “This one will follow.” The man, though angry, gave in.
Yeah, you can almost taste the fansub.
The child's speech patterns aren't the same as those around her, but neither does she adopt weird speech out of thin air. If anything she tends toward dropping words or a pidgin, which is meant as part of her generally not processing language the same way as we do. If you don't want to be noticed you shouldn't use bizarre grammar constructions no one else does. The closest the child gets is some tense issues when she tries to refer to an event in the future would absolutely happen unless she does something else.
The man's own survival instincts are not doing too great here either. He grabs the child a couple times but it's largely a matter of not thinking about it, and unlike this girl who leaves piles of torn cans around and doesn't seem to have any hiding ability, it's never clear if he actually knows she's anything other than human. So we have someone attempting to manhandle a metal-rending clawed girl here. It's suicidal.
“Whatever, jus’ go get in the car…” the man turned, heading through the hall towards the living room, wheeling to the right and opening the front door there. The child followed, staying five steps behind the man the whole time. Receiving no help from the man, nor expecting any, the child climbed into the backseat of his truck, despite her unusually small size.
Unfortunately, the writer doesn't seem to get why the child kept being described as tiny. For one thing, she really was just growing on a different timescale than a human child. But she also wasn't eating properly. She's not eating enough and what she is eating tends to be slightly toxic to her because she doesn't have a human digestive system and so FDA approved doesn't mean much.
The girl, conversely, seems to be eating just fine.
The man’s truck was dull and her nose wrinkled and scrunched up at its bad smell; it smelled like dirt and like what the man’s breath smelled like sometimes.
One of the other things I liked about the child was making it clear how she considers a lot of things normal, rather than harping on how unpleasant they are.
The moment the child was in and her door closed, the man pulled out of the driveway and drove off. To school, the child remembered-the man wasn’t taking her to his work. The child wondered what school was. Why did the people in blue coats with badges make the man do this? The child thought about it as she watched the trees and houses fly by out the window, but came up with nothing. Maybe it was just their job, the job they had to do but hated, just like the man.
I find this odd because the original has the child easily able to tell that the woman doesn't want to be there or care much about her job, while here there's no suggestion until now, when it's just supposition.
Yes, maybe that was it. It was their job to make children go to school, and because she was a child she had to go too. But what concerned her was how the blue-coats had known about her.
This keeps coming up, but the writer never seems to get that there was a reason the child kept thinking about if people knew about her.
It wasn’t long before the man dropped her off at a big, big building. Many other people her age and older were there, walking to school or being dropped off. All the kids walked inside. The child followed them. The children all went to a big room at the back of the school with a sign above it. The child went in there too, walking slower and observing them. She saw how they sat in lines, and wondered what the lines were for. The children slowly got older as the lines went from the entrance side of the room to the opposite side of the room. The child assumed she was supposed to sit in one of the lines with the smaller children. The child didn’t want to sit near the children, didn’t want them to see her and talk to her like they talked to each other. The child moved to sit in a corner instead, watching for a moment where the people were and what they were doing. Adults were scattered around the room, mostly standing near the children and watching them. Occasionally, one would move to one of the children and talk harshly to one of them. The child became bored, and yawned. The man had woken her up, and she was still tired. She decided to curl up and try to go back to sleep.
The reason the child was sleepy was because she normally slept during mornings, and she managed to stay attentive the first day despite that in the same way you'd stay awake if someone chucked you into a pit of vipers. Similarly, the child went through a stupid amount of effort to not sleep near people.
The girl in this story, basically, doesn't have a consistent character, being both wary and unwary and not seeming to have reasons behind anything she does, although she does occasionally verge on catlike indifference.
Hiya, I’m Kari! I’m a new author *first post EVER* but I’ve been reading fics on here for at least five years now, so I’m hope I’m good enough. PLEASE, DROP ME A REVIEW AND LET ME KNOW HOW I’M DOING! Good or bad? Constructive criticism is highly welcomed! Let it be known that this DOES have a plotline to it and it WILL eventually involve the Yu Yu gang, it’ll just take a few chapters before that happens. I think they’ll appear in….oh….chapter 3, though you’ll hear from them a bit before that possibly. I PROMISE the next chapter will be longer, too, cause I’m eager to get to the good part of the story. I have it planned, not all the way, though, suggestions are welcomed. PLEASE REMEMBER TO REVIEW! Reviews help me improve my stories. Reviews also make me want to add the next chapter.
...Yeah.
Author’s Note: Hello all! Just wanted to say GO BACK AND REREAD CHAPTER ONE I ADDED SOME STUFF TO THE BEGINNING. By the way, will someone please tell me how I add revisions to a chapter w/o having to delete it and re-upload the newer version? That whole area in general is confusing to me, any advice you can give is highly appreciated! Once again, thanks to all the people who reviewed and alerted! I didn’t expect any reviews for my first fanfics, much less alerts! Once I get all my editing and revisions done for the next few chapters I’ll post chapter 3. It should be out around Wednesday the 25th. Now, onto what you’re really here for—the chapter!
This would be where the previous note mentioning me presumably was. All I can get off google is the line "Its called “Ice” by Farla and ALTHOUGH it's a pokemon fic I could swear you could take out the pokemon and it wouldn't affect the story in any major way."
The child had just managed to block out the noise of the children talking when she heard footsteps approaching her, footsteps heavier than that of the children yet lighter than the man’s. The child opened her eyes and looked up, but didn’t uncurl herself from the corner. The person was a lady.
This is a style glitch. The child tends to describe things in very concrete terms, so it's stuff like man or woman or teacher.
Her face didn’t reflect anger or stress, but something else….softness? Something. The child wasn’t sure.
Like I said, somethings. The writer absolutely did not get it.
The lady knelt down to her level, and the child didn’t object, too caught up in trying to discern what the lady wanted.
“Hi, hunnie, are you lost?” the lady asked, her voice was sweet, without a ring of falseness.
Another thing I tried to make very clear was that lie detecting is different than a nice person test. The child reacts badly because she literally does not like the sound, nothing more. Numerous nice people ping as lying. They are, if anything, more likely to be classed as lying.
The child shook her head. No, she wasn’t lost. “Do you know where to go?” The child shook her head. No, she didn’t. The lady held out her hand. “Come with me, and we’ll get it all figured out, okay?”
This whole exchange doesn't happen with the child, largely because it can't. If she's in any environment where people actually care about the kids, she doesn't make it to adulthood. This is the point where she first learns to properly act like a kid, and she's not able to pull off anything more than background acting - actual one on one interactions are a lot harder.
If anyone pays real attention to her at this point, she'd register as nonhuman in a minute or so, even if they didn't understand exactly what the problem was. Assuming she somehow manages to keep things under control, her best attempt at human child would be setting off so many abuse warning bells that people would be watching her constantly.
The child stood, but didn’t move. She looked at the lady’s hand, trying to figure out what she wanted her to do with the hand, why it was extended. If the lady wanted to hold her hand, the lady would have just grabbed it roughly and pull her along, like the man always did. But the lady didn’t do this, so she must not want the child to hold her hand. The child frowned. What did the lady want her to do?
Then she remembered the boys she had seen a week ago while out walking. They had held out their hand to a child, a girl, and demanded in loud, commanding voices for money. When the girl didn’t give any money they started hitting the girl. The lady didn’t look strong, so the child decided it was okay to tell the lady.
“No money.” She said. The lady’s expression faltered, showing confusion now.
The girl is basically really, really stupid.
“Honey, I’m not asking for your money!” the lady laughed. “Take my hand and we’ll go find out where you’re supposed to be.” The child didn’t understand why she had to take the woman’s hand, and she didn’t want to, because then the lady would drag her around the halls. Her claws curled again, aggravating the nearly-healed crescent shaped cuts from earlier.
Another point where this girl is significantly more powerful. The child's healing abilities steadily increase over the story, and therefore start at an above human but not supernatural point.
The child wanted to lady to leave, wanted to kill the lady so she wouldn’t remember her and talk about her, but there were too many people and children around to do that.
The child stood, telling the lady what she had told the man. “No, won’t take hand. This one will follow.” The lady seemed taken aback at her words—or was it the lack of naivety in her voice? She followed the lady out of the big, noisy room to another room near the front of the building. This room was much smaller, but the child saw that if she went behind the counter she would be able to get to many other rooms from this one.
A stern woman looked up at the lady. “What do you need?”
The lady replied quickly. “This girl doesn’t know whose class she’s in.” Her tone was….warm?...but her body was tense. The lady was nervous yet pretended not to be. The child looked at the strict woman, her gaze observant. Icy eyes….stern, impatient aura….a body muscular enough to be strong yet lithe enough to possibly be quick…The strict woman could be a threat, the child decided. Yes, the strict woman was definitely a threat.
Not to little metal render here.
An awful lot of this comes off as liking the concept of the character and completely failing to follow through on it. The child feels people are threats because she isn't that strong and there are more of them than her and also they're prone to randomly trying to kill her. She's not going to make a big distinction between being slightly more muscular than someone else. This girl also has fast healing, again well better than the child at this point, so she's not really in danger even if she screws up and gets into a fight with a hypothetical human who was stronger than her.
The strict woman turned her attention to the child. “Name?” It was an order, not a question. The child thought. The man had never addressed her with a name…not anytime within the child’s memory, save for yesterday when the blue coats came to the house. The name that the man had called her was the same name that the blue coats had used to address her, and it was their job to find her and make the man take her to school, even if they didn’t like it, so maybe that name was hers.
“Lyn Meed.” She replied, for it was the name that they had called her.
Did the child really come off this stupid?
The strict woman flipped through papers before speaking again. “Room 205. Robin Claire.”
This must have been what the lady was looking for, because the lady nodded to the strict woman and motioned for the child to follow. The child was confused when the lady led her back to the big room at the back of the school instead of another room. Hadn’t the strict woman said another room? There weren’t enough marks on the sign above the big room for it to be the longer-named room that the strict woman had said. The child decided it didn’t matter.
The lady talked to her as she led her through the big room. The child mostly ignored her, not really understanding what she was talking about anyways, just that it had something to do with school. The lady stopped in front of a woman standing in front of line of smaller children.
“Hi, Robin!” the lady greeted. This time the lady’s voice rang with falseness, a fake cheer.
I suppose this kind of thing is more noticeable now that we've mostly moved away from my actual writing and she's trying to keep going in the same way, but hasn't any idea why it was getting brought up or how it mattered to the story.
The child ignored it, for it wasn’t directed at her, focusing instead on what she had called this woman--Robin…the strict woman had mentioned Robin Claire…maybe this was the person she was supposed to be with? The child decided that she must be, because the lady introduced the woman as Mrs. Claire, calling the new one her teacher. Teacher. The child didn’t know what that was, and, after observing her like she had she strict woman, she decided that the teacher, the woman, wasn’t anyone to be concerned with.
Minor, but I made the child's teacher male specifically to avert the standard female teacher thing.
The woman led her to the back of the line and sat her down, asking if she had any paper or pencil. The child shook her head. A backpack? No, the child didn’t have this either. The child thought that a backpack might be the large, odd bags that all the children had. The words were similar enough, so it was possible. The woman’s expression changed, reflecting a new emotion, one the child wasn’t familiar with.
See, I realize the whole "something" business was confusing, and it was supposed to be, but I didn't use it for multiple emotions.
The woman’s brows creased and her lips turned slightly downward, her eyes appearing moist with…something.
Water, possibly. Again, I know it was confusing, but it was supposed to be solvable by dint of only being used to refer to one thing. Just using it all over the place means that it can only be used in places where the reader can work it out by context, which means that the whole point of using it is lost. You might as well skip the runaround.
When the woman spoke again, her voice was different, not holding the tint of falseness that it had, but that tint of…something.
“Well, I’ll give you some of my paper and a pencil when we get to the class room. Did you forget your backpack?”
No. “This one doesn’t have one.” She replied. The…something…on the woman’s face became stronger.
“Did your mommy not buy you one?”
The child became confused. “This one has no mommy. Just a man. The man did not buy this one anything for school.”
This actually ties back well into the bit about names. Despite the fact the child does not think the man is actually her father and indeed suggests that he's probably aware of this, she refers to him as Daddy because that's what she's supposed to call him. Explaining to everyone that he's the man who may or may not be her father is, for obvious reasons, a bad move.
The child, in this position, would have answered the question with "No." because her unknown mother had indeed not bought a backpack and this would have been the shortest route to ending the conversation. The girl here is not only noticing but caring about what the woman means, and trying to get clarification, and volunteering extra information. So she won't ask questions because it'll make people notice her, but she doesn't mind telling people odd things.
Upon hearing this, a new emotion was added to the woman’s expression, one the child recognized. Anger. But the child sensed that it wasn’t directed at her, but probably at the man.
The reason the child tends to bring up anger is that she's highly risk averse. She's worked out that angry people are slightly more violent and she does not want to stick around for the finer details. If she was primarily interested in who was being focused on, she'd be focusing on that and stop caring about which emotion exactly it was.
“Well, I’ll have to call him during lunch time and let him know you need some things, okay? I’ll give you a folder to put the paper and pencil in, and you can keep it.” The woman continued talking, but the child ignored her. The child ignored the other one, too, the one who stood up and talked to all the children, and made them stand and sing.
The girl is absolutely failing at the whole not being noticed business, as well as survival in general. The writer seems to have noticed the child doesn't emote and somehow jumped from that to the idea she's ignoring her surroundings most of the time, which is about the polar opposite of what I was intending. Anyone can fail to emote if they're basically asleep on their feet.
The child followed her line of children to another room, room 205, she guessed, where the woman spent a long time sitting them down in desks and looking at the school things they brought, the things the child didn’t have. The child wondered why they needed them, but decided they might be important when the woman handed her a bright pink folder with paper inside, as well as a pencil. The child played with the paper and pencil, trying to mimic the marks shown on the paper on the wall all around the room. The child half-listened to what the woman was saying, paying attention when it mattered and copying the marks on the wall when it didn’t.
And now she just knows the letters are important. In a kindergarten classroom, which tend to overflow with decorations. There are, of course, certain visual tricks that you can use to attract people's attention to particular areas, but since the whole point is that she's not human and doesn't react like a human, that doesn't work either. The reason she calls the TR on the uniform squiggles is because that's what they are to her, a design. Like spoken language, she does not easily translate written letters.
Incidentally, I don't think I brought it up then but the child can't actually hold a pencil properly. The claws get in the way. There's a unposted later scene in TR where she gets yelled at for picking up a pen by grabbing it around the middle and has to switch to basically balancing it on her hand so it looks kind of like how a human would hold a pen.
Because she's not human.
And her not human bits are not just cosmetic touches.
The child almost had one of the sheets of paper full of marks when the woman stopped talking, instead directing them on the floor for ‘circle time.’ The woman read them a book with lots of pictures in it and few marks, talking in a loud, enthusiastic voice. The children laughed and talked, though some cried for their mommy and daddy. The woman brought out some big cards too, cards with marks on them. The woman would point at the mark and make a sound, and tell the children to copy her. The woman wanted them to associate that sound with that mark, and the child decided that maybe that was why there were so many marks on the wall. The child mimicked the other children, trying to not seem interesting enough to be called upon like some of the other children were. The child was successful, and she wasn’t called upon, though she could feel the woman glance at her sometimes.
The woman spent a long time showing them the big cards, but the child didn’t mind. The marks were important, the child thought. The marks were on the walls, above doors, on cans of food, everywhere.
So what I just said about squiggles times a thousand. Sign writing tends to be a wide variety of shapes. The child has a very good memory, which means she often doesn't filter stuff. She doesn't see the sign saying STOP she sees an image which includes, among other things, the particular line drawing that happens to, by the way, involve what are referred to as the letters S T O and P and if you explicitly demand she read it to you she'll say it says "Stop".
Because that's not how humans do it. Humans can learn to read and do it automatically. Kind of like how you don't have to manually translate your thoughts into your native language.
It would be good if she knew what the meant, so she listened and learned. Most of the children had stopped crying for their mommy and daddy now, too distracted by the cards and the funny things the woman did. The child knew the woman was trying to divert their attention—her voice was false, and her movements held a tint of stress, of desperation, to them.
The child tends to get agitated in situations where people seem to be lying, trying to keep her somewhere and acting like if she knew better she'd want to escape. Good thing the girl just knows the woman is only trying to be nice!
This is more of the writing style just being at odds with the additions. There's no point to the things the girl is bringing up.
The children got bored of the cards quickly enough, much quicker than the child did, and soon the woman had told the children to go play. There were toys all around room, toys the child was unfamiliar with. The children ran to the toys, laughing and talking loudly, excitedly. The child didn’t see why the children found the toys so interesting—they didn’t do anything, most of them. So the child went back to her desk and found the paper she had been marking on.
The girl is an absolute idiot.
The child knew what some of the marks sounded like, so she could practice recognizing them now. The child turned the paper over and began copying the marks again, making the sound that the woman had made whenever she flipped over the big card with its picture on it. The child felt the woman watching her, though the child didn’t turn and look at her until the woman walked over to her.
“Hi, I’m Mrs. Claire.” The child stopped making marks and looked at her. The woman could get mad if she didn’t, and that would make her notice her more. “You’re Lyn, right?” She nodded, recognizing that that was the name they called her. “Do you want to go play? I’m sure you’ll have lots of fun!” She shook her head. No, she didn’t want to play. The child never played with toys. “Are you sure?” the woman paused, noticing the paper the child had been marking on. “Oh, Lyn, that’s wonderful!” the woman’s voice changed, filled with…something. Happiness? No…something like happiness, but different. The child couldn’t place it. “You’re writing very well Lyn, that’s amazing! Can you remember what the letters sound like?” Letters? The child frowned. The woman must mean the marks.
So she can remember all the sounds the woman said, but completely tuned out when the woman presumably announced it as "This is the letter A".
The child nodded again, only half-listening now. The woman was talking to her, just her, with eyes looking at her, not through her like most. The woman was paying full attention to her. The woman would remember her. The child didn’t like to be remembered, because if they remembered her they might notice her odd-ness, might figure out that she was different, that she wasn’t like them.
And the writer has remembered this is important, although clearly she still doesn't get why. The only time people really look and pay full attention to the child it's seconds before trying to kill her. That's what the whole half-seeing business is about.
“Can you show me what they sound like?”
The child nodded again, and pointed to the one shaped like a mountain. “’ah’” The one that looked like a circle. “’oh’” The snake-shaped mark. “’sss’” The child went on, sounding out all the marks the woman had shown them.
Due to the child's very different way of filtering things, she tends to not go for very abstract descriptions. A looks nothing at all like a mountain. It looks like a triangle with the two lines on either side continuing on past the bottom line of the triangle.
What A does look a little like is how a kid would try to draw a mountain, because we tend to process images into distinct shapes to remember them due to not having a very good memory for details and complete images, so humans would both see it as a mountainlike shape and expect that description to mean something when they said it.
“Wow, Lyn, you’re a really smart girl!” the woman smiled, happiness shining on her face. The child frowned.
The child very conspicuously doesn't do these things. Do people just automatically mentally fill in stuff like frowning if it's not mentioned? Should I have mentioned blank, unmoving expressions every other sentence?
The woman would remember her now. She shouldn’t have talked. “Does your daddy teach you letters?” The child shook her head.
Another issue is that the child prefers verbal communication and very rarely moves her head, because moving your head makes focusing your eyes a bit harder normally. This can be somewhat offset by how your eyes will rotate to stay on an object, but the child's eyes can't do this. Animals with excellent eyesight, especially those functioning in low light, have oblong eyes that can't be rotated. It's part of why she initially doesn't get the idea of eye contact, as she has very good peripheral vision that she relies on to make up for this.
No, the man, the one the woman called ‘daddy’ didn’t do that. The man ignored her, just as the child liked.
So close and yet, after all the changes, so terribly far. For one thing, this man doesn't ignore the girl, he's tried to hit her a number of times. For another, she's not on good terms with him rather than her poor interactions with him just being part of a general trend. As a result, going back to the idea the child prefers to be treated this way no long works, and fails to communicate the original point, that she wasn't actually being abused or neglected by how she was treated.
This woman did ignore her, would still if she hadn’t talked and did something the other children couldn’t. Doing something others couldn’t attracted attention. Attention was bad. A frown marred the child’s face as the woman went to some children who were fighting, over a toy, she noticed. This was not good.
Given the summary, the girl here is presumably going to eventually going to kill the teacher or kid(s) (and apparently for no real reason) although I'm not sure how much of that the writer could possibly get from the existing scenes given how they seem to be avoiding having her actually be violent and do anything wrong, and chewing through the nice teacher's throat would probably be too much. Alternatively, I suppose they might have someone else attack her and make it the resulting violence all their fault, or maybe wuss out completely and have it only be attempted murder before she's stopped.
In conclusion, I kind of want to revise Ice now.
I've PMed them about this and haven't heard back yet, so I'm going to see how that goes. Please delay swarming them.
See, someone's trying to change bits of the story to fit their new idea, so they're adding and removing things. What they add and remove give an idea of how they thought the original bits fit together, as if you're removing Thing A, you'll want to remove Explanation A that goes with it. Of course, if you aren't sure which bits match up to which, or even what Thing A is, exactly, and if it conflicts with Thing 1 you just added, the result is a stitched-together mess. But it gives me a good look at how they thought the story worked.
The Neko Child by Kari Suttle
A demon child was born and abandoned in the human realm, raised by a neglectful man. What will Koenma do when this demon child gets loose and starts killing humans at random? First fic, please review!
Introduction
The child stared at the bird. Her normally expressionless eyes held a tint of curiousity as she looked at the mangled creature, still chirping; its wing was bent and thick, scarlet water was crusted over it. The child did not know what it looked like normally, but she knew that it was wrong somehow.
I don't really know why that line was left in, because obviously this girl does know what it looks like. As we see next line, there's another bird right next to it. The line was originally there because the child hadn't ever seen a rattata clearly, and that was part of why she crawled over to stare at it.
The bird’s companion sat beside it, twittering and chirping loudly at her, angrily loud. The child tilted her head, focusing on the bird and trying to understand it.
The child adjusted her voice to match the bird’s tone. “What?” she asked. “Mad?”
I get the impression this writer didn't get the reason for a lot of events in the story. The child was mimicking the rattata's tone because she's trying to communicate, as intonation must carry a lot of weight in a language with two syllables. It's part of why she often introduced herself with "Hello," as that's the opening to communication: "I am here. I know you are here. I am announcing my presence. I am a speaking creature and I think you are a speaking creature and so if you try to speak I will listen and try to speak back."
The bird repeated itself, only angrier. “No. I didn’t hurt it. Not mine.”
The reason the rattata are angry at her is because they're blaming her for their companion's slow, horrible death but they're too afraid to go out and kill it themselves with her there. Not because she's in the general vicinity of something going wrong, and not with the friend entirely capable to speaking up for itself.
The whole not mine bit seems like it's a remnant of the spearow scene.
The creature bounced about on its tiny feet, as if wanting to claw her yet knowing it was unable to. The child backed away a bit, retreating to analyze its chirp pattern and frequency. The child was able to pick up words like ‘why’ ‘you’ and ‘hurt’ and ‘kill’.
I also conspicuously didn't do any quotes around the words, because she's working off concepts. The rattata aren't literally asking her why she's killed something and not let it die, but whatever they are saying is about this general issue. This is important because it's how she handles all language.
Why did she let it suffer and not help it?
“No.” she repeated. “Not mine. Yours.” The bird ruffled its feathers, bouncing closer to its friend and raking its small claws., chirping again This time it was different slightly, slower. The child was able to understand a part of what the creature said.
‘Why did you......suffer…kill…’ The child’s face scrunched up in confusion.
Also, the whole "expressionless" bit means her face is not synced up with her actual emotions, not just that she's really reserved. The child would only look confused if she's attempting to inform those around her that she's feeling confused. Cats, meanwhile, are hardly expressionless, they just have different sorts of expressions. I'm assuming the early reference is kept here just because emotionless little girl is a popular trope, even when they're not technically being one.
Allowing the bird to repeat itself, she listened closer. The child watched the bird twitter and chirp as it bounced about its friend, ending its rant by raking its claws again. Then the child understood.
Reaching out to the bird, she clasped its neck and snapped it. Why had she watched it suffer and not kill it.
Except "suffer" is understandably different than "die", as is "help". The child's confusion is over the fact the rattata was referring to two similar things and it takes her a while to work out the distinction.
Also, the only reason the child was sitting quietly and talking with them is that they were not making any aggressive moves. Why a cat demon would be putting up with lip from a bird is pretty confusing.
The bird quieted, twittering softly now. It no longer chirped at her, was no longer angry.
The resolution here is just bizarre. The rattata was partially crushed - that's why it looked odd but she wasn't sure what was wrong exactly, because the whole body was damaged. A broken wing, while a pretty awful thing for a bird, is not the same thing and shouldn't really demand an immediate mercy killing. That's all especially striking given the writer presumably combined the rattata scene with the later spearow one, and the spearow one very definitely did not end with her snapping its neck and wandering off.
I'm not sure what the girl's rationale here is either, since she was pretty uninterested in "helping". The child killed the rattata as part of the conversation: "Look, I have understood what you were saying" not because she only goes along with things that involve neck snapping.
The child stood and made to go back home. The park was no longer of interest to her.
It's also odd that it's been redone to be a random bird she has no connection with, because part of the point of the scene was establishing the guy she lived with regularly killed pokemon and she just thought this was normal.
But as she walked, eyes followed her from the nearby brush. “Well.” The unseen one considered, “This demon child might get to be a problem. I’ll have to inform Koenma.”
The child is supernaturally unnoticeable and spends most of her time hiding. This is important, because it's the only way to explain no one noticing things like claws. Disliking notice will continue to be referenced in this version, but it'll never add up to anything. She'll keep hating the idea but never actually do anything to avoid it.
Chapter One
When the child entered, she found the man still on the couch. He wasn’t her father, though he seemed to consider himself so. They looked nothing alike, and held no affections toward each other. The man who called himself her father was not her father. The child ignored him.
This is just depressing. I tried to make it clear that the child didn't have any idea if they were actually related and had only made a halfway effort at figuring it out in case it had to do with why he was feeding her, and that the guy did actually care about her, otherwise he wouldn't have done stuff like feeding her. Their general lack of interaction is because she generally doesn't interact. She says he's big enough to kill her because this is a relevant fact to her, not because he's actually abusive. He's not. But it's kind of like having a pet scorpion, you don't express the fact you care about it with hugs.
If the guy really is abusive and really doesn't care about her, then her behavior toward him is recognizably human.
For as long as she could remember, she had lived in this small, dingy little house. It was falling apart; the roof was in need of repair and leaked when it rained, the paint was so old and faded it was peeling, and the fence outside was leaning badly and creaked whenever a gust of wind blew, to name a few problems. The backyard wasn’t all that big, either; about the size of the living room, which was small in itself. The living room held a tv perched on a tiny tv stand, a long couch, and an armchair. In the center of the furniture sat a wooden coffee table, old and dusty with neglect.
For whatever reason, the writer has made the house a lot nicer than it was meant to be. The wood of the house is supposed to be rotting into powder and the place smells of spilled food and drinks, especially beer, because the only things that ever get cleaned up are the pokemon corpses.
The room held only a single picture that sat on the brick mantle above the fireplace. It was of her at a year old. She was sitting on the couch the man now occupied, her infant face staring blankly, curiously, up at the camera the man had been holding. Her dark hair had been black as ebony even then, just as straight and tame as well. Her emerald eyes shone a brilliant green, eyes that shone intelligence even as an infant.
This is another odd change. I'm not sure exactly why the writer wanted to have baby photos. Considering that both characters have claws on their hands, the reason this is a bad idea should be obvious. The girl doesn't even seem to possess supernatural don't-notice-me powers for cover that.
I assume part of this is that the writer had a clear background for the girl. The problem is that concrete things like that are at odds with the basic setup, and wind up contrasting badly with the style.
Also, just as you need claws to claw things open, you need special eyes to see in the dark. I assume the writer is thinking of green cat eyes, but cat eyes on a human are going to look obviously wrong and green human eyes are just human eyes. You might as well just give the girl regular nails too and say she's just got super strength. That's why the child's irises' are white, something I suspect the writer here didn't pick up on.
She looked into the living room to see the man eating. Upon closer inspection, she saw it was a sandwhich. Her stomach growled instantly, reminding her that she hadn’t ate breakfast and that it was past lunchtime. The child went into the kitchen and, with a decent sum of effort, climbed onto the counters. Opening cabinet after cabinet, it took the child a few minutes of looking before she found some canned fruit .It was small and had yellow marks on it she couldn’t understand, yet she knew it to be easy to open and eat. No ingredients necessary just open and eat. She could do that.
Recognizing patterns is distinct from reading. The child's inability to reliably identify food inside cans is because the cans are often not labeled properly, not because reading is the only way to do so.
She also wouldn't even understand the concept of adding ingredients. If it's food, you eat it.
Not wanting to attract the man’s attention, for him to notice her and remember she was there, she quickly, but gently, got off the counters and took her prize to the room. The room that the child stayed in was down the hall going off the kitchen and living room, at the very back, just like the child liked. She had always stayed in that room. She couldn’t remember if she’d chosen it herself or if the man had given it to her; she never retained memories of anything beyond a month or two in the past.
Here I get the impression the writer didn't understand the references to the child not remembering the first time she did something. It was meant to indicate she had an extremely good memory, to the point she could actually remember each time a thing happened all the way back to probably about one year old when her permanent memory first kicked in and therefore say with certainty she didn't remember the first time.
I'm not really sure why it's changed to her spending her time in her room, especially after establishing she doesn't get along well with the man.
Sitting down on the floor, she carefully, cautiously, opened the can with her clawed fingers There! She picked the pear slices out with her fingers and popped them in her mouth. It made her claws and fingers messy, her mouth too when she drank the remaining juice out of the bottom of the can, but it satisfied the growling in her stomach.
This just irritates me because tearing open metal is hard and even something with claws and unusual strength would have some issues. I used this as part of indicating the child's relative strength - she's roughly as strong as an adult at this point, probably a bit better, so she's able to smash a can open with a rock. A tiny kid being as a strong as an adult is already a pretty big jump.
Satisfied, the child put the can down in a corner, where a pile of other cans and the like were. The man bought food every week and let the child alone. She fed herself. She knew the man probably wouldn’t care if he found her taking from the food, wouldn’t be mad at all, but the child tried to avoid letting him watch her get food anyways.
But she's eating in the house and leaving the cans around. There's also the plot hole now of why the man is feeding the girl, since he doesn't seem to like her.
The child is secretive about eating, but she's secretive about all aspects of it - she likes to cache food, she likes to be out of sight when she's eating, and she likes to avoid any traces of it afterward.
She also eats a lot of food, something I probably should have made clearer, but basically something with unnatural strength shouldn't eat a can of fruit and consider themselves full. That's part of why she doesn't like people noticing her eating.
The child yawned. Looking around her room, she found the darkest corner of the room and curled up in it.
As this girl is not maybe-dark-type and certainly isn't supernaturally unnoticeable in shadows, this is not such a great idea as a hiding place, especially in a room with limited exits. The child is not sitting in the dark because it's easier to sleep there, especially given she prefers to sleep during the day. She's doing it because it's safer.
But just as the child was about to close her eyes, a loud knock came at the door. The child ignored it, intending to go back to sleep. Then it came again, another knock, slightly louder, slightly more demanding, but not enough that people would be able to tell. She thought for a minute, pondering what course of action she should take. Another knock, noticeably louder. The child stood and exited her room, pausing at the hall entrance, deciding. The man would not answer it; he may have been in the room near the door, but the tv was on. It was too loud for the man to hear anything else.
This was supposed to indicate the child had better hearing originally - that's why she can easily make out the sound at the door despite the other noises.
The child didn’t want to go get the door, to have some unknown person’s attention on her, to have to figure out what the person wanted of her and what she was supposed to say. Another knock, louder this time. The child gave in. The person would not go away unless someone answered. Going to the door, she unlocked the door and cracked it open.
This is another odd change, given the writer has made her relationship with the man worse. The child goes to the door because she understands that people who are banging on the door get angry and start yelling if no one arrives, and that this would make the man angry, and then the man might be angry at her, and given the child is not capable of ripping apart metal with her bare hands yet, this is a legitimate danger to her. Just doing it because knocking demands answering doesn't make sense, and it's more social behavior from something that's supposed to be decidedly not.
“Hello!” the person, the woman, was imposingly tall, radiating authority. Her clothes were known to the child, but not familiar; if she had been normal, like the children, she would have recognized the clothes as a police officer’s uniform, but the child was not like the other children and she did not know. The woman wore a blue button up shirt with a shiny, gold badge pinned on its chest. Blue pants, too. The clothes stood for something, a position of authority, of being better than, to be obeyed without question. The child didn’t know why clothes symbolized authority, she just knew they did.
I realize the story tends to be unclear in places, but the child wouldn't just know things mean authority, she's just good at picking up cues. I mean, part of the point of her being nonhuman is that she doesn't react in the same way to things as a human.
The woman had another person with her, a man. He didn’t feel like the woman did, didn’t radiate imposing authority, but he still expected to be obeyed. The child ignored him, focusing on the woman—the woman would be the one to speak.
I don't even know. The child does tend to rank people in terms of how much attention they get, but she'd hardly decide the relevant factor is which one speaks.
The woman’s voice friendly voice held a tone of falsehood to it. The child picked up on it.
I think this is here because of references throughout the story to the child picking up on lies. It's meant to be similar to her ability to understand language in general. It doesn't seem to have any relevance here or reason for her to care, rather than it being that she finds the literal sound horribly annoying.
“Are you Mr. Winston’s daughter?” The child thought for a moment. Then she remembered. That was what the man was called.
Another thing I tried to make clear is that people use names all the time, the child just doesn't care about them. In later chapters people will be identified by name in dialogue only to continue to be referred to by epithets in the narration, including the child herself, because the story is taking place from her viewpoint. She's entirely aware of their names and entirely capable of referring to them as such, she just doesn't think in those terms.
The child didn’t reply, but inched open the door and moved back, further into the darkness of the household.
The explanation for this (that the child basically does not know how to interact with people) has been removed for some reason, as is the suggestion of what it means (while she doesn't really want the man to be angry, she's ranking him angry well below just interacting with another adult, meaning she doesn't think that's a significant threat. Stuff like this was part of indicating the man isn't actually abusive and that her references are just her being cautious).
It wouldn't really work anyway, as the reason the child backs up is that doing that makes her invisible and so she can rely on just stepping a few feet further in to be safe from view and having people walk right by her. If the girl wants to get out of sight, she's going to have to turn and run the other way.
The woman entered, squinting, as if she couldn’t see. The woman yelled into the house. “Hello?” No answer. The man wouldn’t hear her until she walked further into the house, the tv was still too loud. The other blue-coat followed the woman in, but the child ignored him. He only followed, only listened and acted on what he was told—he wasn’t a threat.
I really get the impression this is working off something from the original story, but the child classes "guy who barely touches me" as "guy who is able to kill me". I think the only one she classes as a nonthreat at all are the rattata, and she's really not sure about them. She only really gets into the threat/not threat bit later on, and her criteria are never based on "doing what you're told" for obvious reasons.
The other blue-coat muttered some words, something about the darkness of the house. He walked in further and flipped the light switch on the wall. Light illuminated the room, making the blue-coats flinch at the sudden light. The child looked at them, eyes alit with curiousity. Why did they flinch at the light? Why did their eyes recoiling shut again for a brief moment? The child didn’t ask—she couldn’t ask. She felt it was something she should know, and asking about it would call attention to the fact she didn’t know. Make them notice her.
The child's references to these sort of things are based on innate differences. Asking why someone else can't do something she does is calling attention to that ability she has and they lack. Similarly, asking why someone acted in a certain way is saying she wouldn't. It's not a simple matter of keeping her mouth shut, and she does ask questions.
The girl's abilities here strike me as scattered - she's able to see in the dark, but also her eyes aren't sensitive to light at all.
There's also the jump here that the girl was getting out of sight and is referencing not wanting to be noticed but is unconcerned by the light.
The man had noticed the light. He grumbled, mumbling words only audible to the child as he craned his large head to look in the blue-coats direction.
“Who’re you?” he asked. His words jumbled slightly, as was his way of speaking.
He was drunk. Seriously, that's why he was swaying and mumbling, and it's a large part of why the child, even as cautious as she is, treats him as dangerous at all. He's unpredictable because much of the time he's smashed. When he isn't he's perfectly able to speak normally.
The woman didn’t answer his question. “Are you Mr. Winston?”
The man nodded. “Yeah, what do you want?” His face was annoyed, angry somewhat. The child wondered if he was mad at them for coming in, or at her for letting in. The child thought the first option, the man didn’t seem to have seen her there yet.
See that somewhat? We'll be seeing that a lot.
While not clear early on, I sort of hope that as the chapters progressed people realized that the child was reliably reporting various emotions and that "something" was a sort of mental placeholder for a particular emotion she wasn't sure of. The "something" referenced in the conversation means he was afraid.
“So the little girl who opened the door is your foster daughter, Lyn Mead?” The child’s ears perked. She had heard the words ‘foster daughter’ and ‘Lyn Mead’ uttered in reference to herself before. They were talking about her. That meant they knew about her. But how? The child had never seen these blue-coats before. She had seen blue-coats walking, but never up close or long enough to gather information. The child was unsettled, and her mouth curled into a frown. They shouldn’t know about her, but they did.
No idea why she's adopted, or why the writer kept in bits about not using names when she promptly names the kid.
The reason for the child getting upset by this is that she's very good at hiding, and that's somewhat the point - they literally only know about what the guy put on his taxes. She's not seen by people because she's extremely cautious and has supernatural abilities to avoid being seen. Of course, she doesn't understand this, so it's also why she doesn't stay for the full conversation but goes and hides in a corner.
And the reason she does that, in turn, is because large sections of the early chapters are written around people's names. The child does have a name and people use it, and it's going to come up at some point in the conversation.
The woman continued. “Then why isn’t she in school! Our records state that she should be enrolled in school, in Kindergarten. Why have you not enrolled her yet? School has been in session for just over a week now.”
The child’s frown deepened. School? She had heard the word uttered by other children, older children. The way it was used, it must be a place, a place older children were supposed to know about and be at. The child knew about school, but only like she knew about the blue-coats—not up close, no details, she just knew that it was. The child wondered what school was, why children were supposed to go to it. She could have asked, but it was like asking about why the blue-coats had flinched when the light had been turned on—it was information she was supposed to know, but didn’t know. Asking would bring attention to it. Attention to her. So again the child remained silent.
Basically, this girl doesn't pay much attention to her surroundings. She's outside and exploring but hasn't picked up basic information, including that these people are called police. The child tends not to know things because she's really young and weak and therefore doesn't take too many risks, but she's extremely attentive because the more she knows the fewer risks she'll end up taking.
I wonder if things like this are due to the style. I know I got at least one reviewer thinking she was illiterate because she described Team Rocket uniforms as having squiggles on the front.
The woman had continued talking, talking louder than before. The other blue-coat had joined in, both of them talking with elevated voices to the man. Yelling, almost. The child ignored them, deciding that there was nothing else she could learn from listening to them.
Again, the girl is just not interested in her environment. Yelling, to the child, is a big deal, because people are threats. The writer seems to be trying to keep to the format where the end of the conversation isn't heard, but doesn't understand why it happens.
Also, the man doesn't get into a screaming argument. For whatever reason he's pretty bothered by this. Possibly it's just he's worried he'll get in trouble, possibly he was told to keep the child hidden and is panicking because he screwed that up, but no matter what, a screaming argument is not helping matters.
The man also isn't supposed to have a bad temper - that's part of why the child is willing to get anywhere near him. She's just extremely risk-adverse.
Nothing that would answer her questions. The other blue-coat and the woman had not noticed her, neither had the man. At the door, the other blue-coat had looked at her with half-seeing eyes, seeing her but not caring to pay attention to her presence; the woman had seen her with full-seeing eyes, dangerous full-seeing eyes, but the woman was now focused on the man, not the child.
The writer just doesn't seem to get why being seen is a big deal to the child, even though later on we see that people who get a very good look at her immediately start trying to throttle her. So references like this are still present, but there's no suggestion of why it matters, and we're told this person has just seen the girl without anything bad happening.
There's also simply no reason why people wouldn't notice the girl since again, she doesn't have any sign of supernatural don't-notice-me powers.
The woman didn’t seem to notice that she was still there. If the woman didn’t notice, the other blue-coat wouldn’t notice either. She could sneak back to the room, maybe go back to sleep. The child stifled a yawn. Moving silently, the child snuck back to her room, quietly, silently, unnoticed.
One of the things I wanted to do was explain how the child could actually make it to adulthood. Even ignoring the issue of people trying to kill her, having things like claws is noticeable, and her behavior is very clearly not human. She has a narrow window in early childhood to learn enough that she's able to interact with humans before she's forced to, and so she pays a lot of attention but stays out of sight. She isn't casual about the whole thing, because it's very literally a matter of life or death for her.
The child woke up very suddenly, not slowly as she always did.
I don't know why this is changed. The child is supposed to be a very light sleeper, and I can't see what the point of this is. I sort of wonder if it's because I describe her waking up with a slow heartbeat and breathing, but considering it was right after a nightmare, the point was again that she just doesn't display signs of stress.
Adrenaline coursed through her veins, prompting her to stay awake rather than fall back asleep. Something wasn’t right. She snapped to awareness, her blank golden-yellow eyes looking in quick glances around her barren room, listening carefully, measuring her surroundings with caution.
I'm not sure if the writer just forgot the eye color she said before or what.
It irritates me because I actually spent a lot of time trying to decide how different her features could be and still pass for human. With white irises and big pupils her eyes end up looking like they're just a very dark brown, and as long as her eyes aren't wide open the fact the shape is actually an oval rather than a circle can be missed.
Something was off, something was different. She had been caught off guard and awoken. Something filled the child, pulling at her complete consciousness, begging her—curiosity, the child realized. Curiosity was something the child was familiar with. The child decided to investigate.
Footsteps echoed across the house, their hurried pace reaching the child’s keen ears. Their pace was odd, vibrating through the floor in a concerned, searching manner.
“Those footsteps. They could only belong to the man.” The child told herself, her voice void of any inflection or variance of tone that would indicate emotion. The child cocked her head, listening, thinking. Nodding, the child made her decision.
One of the other things I kept in mind was that the child only emotes if she thinks there's someone watching. She does occasionally do things like head-cocking, but it's to figure out where a sound is from or get a better look. She certainly wouldn't talk aloud (she spends her time trying not to attract attention) and really, doesn't actually think in English to start with. And if she's going to speak in English it comes with inflection, because that's how she hears it spoken. She'd have to deliberately do it otherwise, and that's a type of inflection too. So this basically makes me want to cry.
Uncurling, she stood and removed herself from the corner she had slept in. The man appeared to be searching for her. The child wondered why—the man had never searched her out before, never once made any indication that he remembered her presence in the house.
This is just weird, as it suggests he doesn't ever visit most of the rooms in the house.
Also, it's somewhat of a point that the man does remember her, because most people don't.
So why? The child moved to her door, reaching up on her tip-toes and opening the door. Curiosity pulled at her. She sought the man out, not really thinking of what she would do once she reached the man, just thinking about reaching him. When she saw his silhouette standing outside one of the unused rooms down the hall, closer to the living room than to her room, she noticed that he planned to move in her direction. The child realized she would have to decide what she would do. The child didn’t want to show herself to the man, to have his attention fixed on her, to have him remember she was there. Yet if she did not bring herself to the man, he would get angry. When the man got angry, the man would yell loud, loud enough to hurt her ears, and when his breath smelled he would hit things and throw stuff. If the child was nearby, he would try to hit her too. The man never managed to hit her, the child was too quick for him to catch, but the act itself still reminded the man she was there. The child preferred to remain unnoticed, not remembered by anyone.
Like with the angry bird earlier, the girl is oddly nonviolent. One of the clues that the man doesn't hit the child is simply that we see the child several times and she tends to respond with lethal violence at any provocation. The best she does is occasionally delay the lethal violence when it's explicitly pointed out what a terrible idea this is.
The child decided to let the man find her. She walked out into the hall and stood, waiting, knowing the man was coming her way, towards the back of the hall, away from the living room
The man was frustrated when he found her. “Where ya been, kid?” he growled. He was dressed in his work clothes, and his expression was mad. Not mad at her, she knew, mad at having to go to work. The man hated work, this the child understood, but the child didn’t understand why he would seek her out before going to work. She didn’t ask, allowing the man to rant on, though she could have asked. She waited for the man to indicate what he wanted her to do.
“…come on.” The man said, “I’m s’pposed ‘t take you ‘t school.” The man moved to grab her by the arm, his movement rough and stumbling. The child stepped back, moving out reach. She did not like being grabbed and led around. The man got angry, and the child noticed this time his anger was at her.
“I said come on, brat!” the man made to grasp her arm again. The child stepped out of his reach once more. The man became angrier.
This entire mess is exactly why the child shows herself immediately. She doesn't want a situation to escalate into something bad while it's still currently manageable. She pretty much only has three ways of dealing with things: she hides, or she does what someone says, or she kills them. There's really no point in not doing what someone says until they get angry and then having to kill them.
The child’s clawed fingers curled into her palms, making bloody crescent marks.
This I find kind of interesting, since one of the things I kept in mind was that the child couldn't make a real fist, although I'm not sure I ever stated it directly. So on the one hand it's good the writer noticed this, but on the other that's why she doesn't curl her fingers into a fist in the first place.
The man looked at her, saw her, talked to her. The man would remember her, talk of her. The man was a threat. The man needed to be killed, eliminated, erased. But the people in blue coats from yesterday wanted her at school, they had seen her, seen the man, told the man to do this. They would notice if she didn’t arrive at school, become suspicious if the man died, think of her and remember her more.
Here the writer just doesn't want to follow through.
See, the child has exactly one reason to stay at the house rather than just walk off, which is that new food appears there every week or so. As soon as that stops being a factor, she walks off. If she's really that concerned about a couple people, she can just kill them too.
The child chose to redirect his anger rather than to kill the man. “Follow.” She said, “This one will follow.” The man, though angry, gave in.
Yeah, you can almost taste the fansub.
The child's speech patterns aren't the same as those around her, but neither does she adopt weird speech out of thin air. If anything she tends toward dropping words or a pidgin, which is meant as part of her generally not processing language the same way as we do. If you don't want to be noticed you shouldn't use bizarre grammar constructions no one else does. The closest the child gets is some tense issues when she tries to refer to an event in the future would absolutely happen unless she does something else.
The man's own survival instincts are not doing too great here either. He grabs the child a couple times but it's largely a matter of not thinking about it, and unlike this girl who leaves piles of torn cans around and doesn't seem to have any hiding ability, it's never clear if he actually knows she's anything other than human. So we have someone attempting to manhandle a metal-rending clawed girl here. It's suicidal.
“Whatever, jus’ go get in the car…” the man turned, heading through the hall towards the living room, wheeling to the right and opening the front door there. The child followed, staying five steps behind the man the whole time. Receiving no help from the man, nor expecting any, the child climbed into the backseat of his truck, despite her unusually small size.
Unfortunately, the writer doesn't seem to get why the child kept being described as tiny. For one thing, she really was just growing on a different timescale than a human child. But she also wasn't eating properly. She's not eating enough and what she is eating tends to be slightly toxic to her because she doesn't have a human digestive system and so FDA approved doesn't mean much.
The girl, conversely, seems to be eating just fine.
The man’s truck was dull and her nose wrinkled and scrunched up at its bad smell; it smelled like dirt and like what the man’s breath smelled like sometimes.
One of the other things I liked about the child was making it clear how she considers a lot of things normal, rather than harping on how unpleasant they are.
The moment the child was in and her door closed, the man pulled out of the driveway and drove off. To school, the child remembered-the man wasn’t taking her to his work. The child wondered what school was. Why did the people in blue coats with badges make the man do this? The child thought about it as she watched the trees and houses fly by out the window, but came up with nothing. Maybe it was just their job, the job they had to do but hated, just like the man.
I find this odd because the original has the child easily able to tell that the woman doesn't want to be there or care much about her job, while here there's no suggestion until now, when it's just supposition.
Yes, maybe that was it. It was their job to make children go to school, and because she was a child she had to go too. But what concerned her was how the blue-coats had known about her.
This keeps coming up, but the writer never seems to get that there was a reason the child kept thinking about if people knew about her.
It wasn’t long before the man dropped her off at a big, big building. Many other people her age and older were there, walking to school or being dropped off. All the kids walked inside. The child followed them. The children all went to a big room at the back of the school with a sign above it. The child went in there too, walking slower and observing them. She saw how they sat in lines, and wondered what the lines were for. The children slowly got older as the lines went from the entrance side of the room to the opposite side of the room. The child assumed she was supposed to sit in one of the lines with the smaller children. The child didn’t want to sit near the children, didn’t want them to see her and talk to her like they talked to each other. The child moved to sit in a corner instead, watching for a moment where the people were and what they were doing. Adults were scattered around the room, mostly standing near the children and watching them. Occasionally, one would move to one of the children and talk harshly to one of them. The child became bored, and yawned. The man had woken her up, and she was still tired. She decided to curl up and try to go back to sleep.
The reason the child was sleepy was because she normally slept during mornings, and she managed to stay attentive the first day despite that in the same way you'd stay awake if someone chucked you into a pit of vipers. Similarly, the child went through a stupid amount of effort to not sleep near people.
The girl in this story, basically, doesn't have a consistent character, being both wary and unwary and not seeming to have reasons behind anything she does, although she does occasionally verge on catlike indifference.
Hiya, I’m Kari! I’m a new author *first post EVER* but I’ve been reading fics on here for at least five years now, so I’m hope I’m good enough. PLEASE, DROP ME A REVIEW AND LET ME KNOW HOW I’M DOING! Good or bad? Constructive criticism is highly welcomed! Let it be known that this DOES have a plotline to it and it WILL eventually involve the Yu Yu gang, it’ll just take a few chapters before that happens. I think they’ll appear in….oh….chapter 3, though you’ll hear from them a bit before that possibly. I PROMISE the next chapter will be longer, too, cause I’m eager to get to the good part of the story. I have it planned, not all the way, though, suggestions are welcomed. PLEASE REMEMBER TO REVIEW! Reviews help me improve my stories. Reviews also make me want to add the next chapter.
...Yeah.
Author’s Note: Hello all! Just wanted to say GO BACK AND REREAD CHAPTER ONE I ADDED SOME STUFF TO THE BEGINNING. By the way, will someone please tell me how I add revisions to a chapter w/o having to delete it and re-upload the newer version? That whole area in general is confusing to me, any advice you can give is highly appreciated! Once again, thanks to all the people who reviewed and alerted! I didn’t expect any reviews for my first fanfics, much less alerts! Once I get all my editing and revisions done for the next few chapters I’ll post chapter 3. It should be out around Wednesday the 25th. Now, onto what you’re really here for—the chapter!
This would be where the previous note mentioning me presumably was. All I can get off google is the line "Its called “Ice” by Farla and ALTHOUGH it's a pokemon fic I could swear you could take out the pokemon and it wouldn't affect the story in any major way."
The child had just managed to block out the noise of the children talking when she heard footsteps approaching her, footsteps heavier than that of the children yet lighter than the man’s. The child opened her eyes and looked up, but didn’t uncurl herself from the corner. The person was a lady.
This is a style glitch. The child tends to describe things in very concrete terms, so it's stuff like man or woman or teacher.
Her face didn’t reflect anger or stress, but something else….softness? Something. The child wasn’t sure.
Like I said, somethings. The writer absolutely did not get it.
The lady knelt down to her level, and the child didn’t object, too caught up in trying to discern what the lady wanted.
“Hi, hunnie, are you lost?” the lady asked, her voice was sweet, without a ring of falseness.
Another thing I tried to make very clear was that lie detecting is different than a nice person test. The child reacts badly because she literally does not like the sound, nothing more. Numerous nice people ping as lying. They are, if anything, more likely to be classed as lying.
The child shook her head. No, she wasn’t lost. “Do you know where to go?” The child shook her head. No, she didn’t. The lady held out her hand. “Come with me, and we’ll get it all figured out, okay?”
This whole exchange doesn't happen with the child, largely because it can't. If she's in any environment where people actually care about the kids, she doesn't make it to adulthood. This is the point where she first learns to properly act like a kid, and she's not able to pull off anything more than background acting - actual one on one interactions are a lot harder.
If anyone pays real attention to her at this point, she'd register as nonhuman in a minute or so, even if they didn't understand exactly what the problem was. Assuming she somehow manages to keep things under control, her best attempt at human child would be setting off so many abuse warning bells that people would be watching her constantly.
The child stood, but didn’t move. She looked at the lady’s hand, trying to figure out what she wanted her to do with the hand, why it was extended. If the lady wanted to hold her hand, the lady would have just grabbed it roughly and pull her along, like the man always did. But the lady didn’t do this, so she must not want the child to hold her hand. The child frowned. What did the lady want her to do?
Then she remembered the boys she had seen a week ago while out walking. They had held out their hand to a child, a girl, and demanded in loud, commanding voices for money. When the girl didn’t give any money they started hitting the girl. The lady didn’t look strong, so the child decided it was okay to tell the lady.
“No money.” She said. The lady’s expression faltered, showing confusion now.
The girl is basically really, really stupid.
“Honey, I’m not asking for your money!” the lady laughed. “Take my hand and we’ll go find out where you’re supposed to be.” The child didn’t understand why she had to take the woman’s hand, and she didn’t want to, because then the lady would drag her around the halls. Her claws curled again, aggravating the nearly-healed crescent shaped cuts from earlier.
Another point where this girl is significantly more powerful. The child's healing abilities steadily increase over the story, and therefore start at an above human but not supernatural point.
The child wanted to lady to leave, wanted to kill the lady so she wouldn’t remember her and talk about her, but there were too many people and children around to do that.
The child stood, telling the lady what she had told the man. “No, won’t take hand. This one will follow.” The lady seemed taken aback at her words—or was it the lack of naivety in her voice? She followed the lady out of the big, noisy room to another room near the front of the building. This room was much smaller, but the child saw that if she went behind the counter she would be able to get to many other rooms from this one.
A stern woman looked up at the lady. “What do you need?”
The lady replied quickly. “This girl doesn’t know whose class she’s in.” Her tone was….warm?...but her body was tense. The lady was nervous yet pretended not to be. The child looked at the strict woman, her gaze observant. Icy eyes….stern, impatient aura….a body muscular enough to be strong yet lithe enough to possibly be quick…The strict woman could be a threat, the child decided. Yes, the strict woman was definitely a threat.
Not to little metal render here.
An awful lot of this comes off as liking the concept of the character and completely failing to follow through on it. The child feels people are threats because she isn't that strong and there are more of them than her and also they're prone to randomly trying to kill her. She's not going to make a big distinction between being slightly more muscular than someone else. This girl also has fast healing, again well better than the child at this point, so she's not really in danger even if she screws up and gets into a fight with a hypothetical human who was stronger than her.
The strict woman turned her attention to the child. “Name?” It was an order, not a question. The child thought. The man had never addressed her with a name…not anytime within the child’s memory, save for yesterday when the blue coats came to the house. The name that the man had called her was the same name that the blue coats had used to address her, and it was their job to find her and make the man take her to school, even if they didn’t like it, so maybe that name was hers.
“Lyn Meed.” She replied, for it was the name that they had called her.
Did the child really come off this stupid?
The strict woman flipped through papers before speaking again. “Room 205. Robin Claire.”
This must have been what the lady was looking for, because the lady nodded to the strict woman and motioned for the child to follow. The child was confused when the lady led her back to the big room at the back of the school instead of another room. Hadn’t the strict woman said another room? There weren’t enough marks on the sign above the big room for it to be the longer-named room that the strict woman had said. The child decided it didn’t matter.
The lady talked to her as she led her through the big room. The child mostly ignored her, not really understanding what she was talking about anyways, just that it had something to do with school. The lady stopped in front of a woman standing in front of line of smaller children.
“Hi, Robin!” the lady greeted. This time the lady’s voice rang with falseness, a fake cheer.
I suppose this kind of thing is more noticeable now that we've mostly moved away from my actual writing and she's trying to keep going in the same way, but hasn't any idea why it was getting brought up or how it mattered to the story.
The child ignored it, for it wasn’t directed at her, focusing instead on what she had called this woman--Robin…the strict woman had mentioned Robin Claire…maybe this was the person she was supposed to be with? The child decided that she must be, because the lady introduced the woman as Mrs. Claire, calling the new one her teacher. Teacher. The child didn’t know what that was, and, after observing her like she had she strict woman, she decided that the teacher, the woman, wasn’t anyone to be concerned with.
Minor, but I made the child's teacher male specifically to avert the standard female teacher thing.
The woman led her to the back of the line and sat her down, asking if she had any paper or pencil. The child shook her head. A backpack? No, the child didn’t have this either. The child thought that a backpack might be the large, odd bags that all the children had. The words were similar enough, so it was possible. The woman’s expression changed, reflecting a new emotion, one the child wasn’t familiar with.
See, I realize the whole "something" business was confusing, and it was supposed to be, but I didn't use it for multiple emotions.
The woman’s brows creased and her lips turned slightly downward, her eyes appearing moist with…something.
Water, possibly. Again, I know it was confusing, but it was supposed to be solvable by dint of only being used to refer to one thing. Just using it all over the place means that it can only be used in places where the reader can work it out by context, which means that the whole point of using it is lost. You might as well skip the runaround.
When the woman spoke again, her voice was different, not holding the tint of falseness that it had, but that tint of…something.
“Well, I’ll give you some of my paper and a pencil when we get to the class room. Did you forget your backpack?”
No. “This one doesn’t have one.” She replied. The…something…on the woman’s face became stronger.
“Did your mommy not buy you one?”
The child became confused. “This one has no mommy. Just a man. The man did not buy this one anything for school.”
This actually ties back well into the bit about names. Despite the fact the child does not think the man is actually her father and indeed suggests that he's probably aware of this, she refers to him as Daddy because that's what she's supposed to call him. Explaining to everyone that he's the man who may or may not be her father is, for obvious reasons, a bad move.
The child, in this position, would have answered the question with "No." because her unknown mother had indeed not bought a backpack and this would have been the shortest route to ending the conversation. The girl here is not only noticing but caring about what the woman means, and trying to get clarification, and volunteering extra information. So she won't ask questions because it'll make people notice her, but she doesn't mind telling people odd things.
Upon hearing this, a new emotion was added to the woman’s expression, one the child recognized. Anger. But the child sensed that it wasn’t directed at her, but probably at the man.
The reason the child tends to bring up anger is that she's highly risk averse. She's worked out that angry people are slightly more violent and she does not want to stick around for the finer details. If she was primarily interested in who was being focused on, she'd be focusing on that and stop caring about which emotion exactly it was.
“Well, I’ll have to call him during lunch time and let him know you need some things, okay? I’ll give you a folder to put the paper and pencil in, and you can keep it.” The woman continued talking, but the child ignored her. The child ignored the other one, too, the one who stood up and talked to all the children, and made them stand and sing.
The girl is absolutely failing at the whole not being noticed business, as well as survival in general. The writer seems to have noticed the child doesn't emote and somehow jumped from that to the idea she's ignoring her surroundings most of the time, which is about the polar opposite of what I was intending. Anyone can fail to emote if they're basically asleep on their feet.
The child followed her line of children to another room, room 205, she guessed, where the woman spent a long time sitting them down in desks and looking at the school things they brought, the things the child didn’t have. The child wondered why they needed them, but decided they might be important when the woman handed her a bright pink folder with paper inside, as well as a pencil. The child played with the paper and pencil, trying to mimic the marks shown on the paper on the wall all around the room. The child half-listened to what the woman was saying, paying attention when it mattered and copying the marks on the wall when it didn’t.
And now she just knows the letters are important. In a kindergarten classroom, which tend to overflow with decorations. There are, of course, certain visual tricks that you can use to attract people's attention to particular areas, but since the whole point is that she's not human and doesn't react like a human, that doesn't work either. The reason she calls the TR on the uniform squiggles is because that's what they are to her, a design. Like spoken language, she does not easily translate written letters.
Incidentally, I don't think I brought it up then but the child can't actually hold a pencil properly. The claws get in the way. There's a unposted later scene in TR where she gets yelled at for picking up a pen by grabbing it around the middle and has to switch to basically balancing it on her hand so it looks kind of like how a human would hold a pen.
Because she's not human.
And her not human bits are not just cosmetic touches.
The child almost had one of the sheets of paper full of marks when the woman stopped talking, instead directing them on the floor for ‘circle time.’ The woman read them a book with lots of pictures in it and few marks, talking in a loud, enthusiastic voice. The children laughed and talked, though some cried for their mommy and daddy. The woman brought out some big cards too, cards with marks on them. The woman would point at the mark and make a sound, and tell the children to copy her. The woman wanted them to associate that sound with that mark, and the child decided that maybe that was why there were so many marks on the wall. The child mimicked the other children, trying to not seem interesting enough to be called upon like some of the other children were. The child was successful, and she wasn’t called upon, though she could feel the woman glance at her sometimes.
The woman spent a long time showing them the big cards, but the child didn’t mind. The marks were important, the child thought. The marks were on the walls, above doors, on cans of food, everywhere.
So what I just said about squiggles times a thousand. Sign writing tends to be a wide variety of shapes. The child has a very good memory, which means she often doesn't filter stuff. She doesn't see the sign saying STOP she sees an image which includes, among other things, the particular line drawing that happens to, by the way, involve what are referred to as the letters S T O and P and if you explicitly demand she read it to you she'll say it says "Stop".
Because that's not how humans do it. Humans can learn to read and do it automatically. Kind of like how you don't have to manually translate your thoughts into your native language.
It would be good if she knew what the meant, so she listened and learned. Most of the children had stopped crying for their mommy and daddy now, too distracted by the cards and the funny things the woman did. The child knew the woman was trying to divert their attention—her voice was false, and her movements held a tint of stress, of desperation, to them.
The child tends to get agitated in situations where people seem to be lying, trying to keep her somewhere and acting like if she knew better she'd want to escape. Good thing the girl just knows the woman is only trying to be nice!
This is more of the writing style just being at odds with the additions. There's no point to the things the girl is bringing up.
The children got bored of the cards quickly enough, much quicker than the child did, and soon the woman had told the children to go play. There were toys all around room, toys the child was unfamiliar with. The children ran to the toys, laughing and talking loudly, excitedly. The child didn’t see why the children found the toys so interesting—they didn’t do anything, most of them. So the child went back to her desk and found the paper she had been marking on.
The girl is an absolute idiot.
The child knew what some of the marks sounded like, so she could practice recognizing them now. The child turned the paper over and began copying the marks again, making the sound that the woman had made whenever she flipped over the big card with its picture on it. The child felt the woman watching her, though the child didn’t turn and look at her until the woman walked over to her.
“Hi, I’m Mrs. Claire.” The child stopped making marks and looked at her. The woman could get mad if she didn’t, and that would make her notice her more. “You’re Lyn, right?” She nodded, recognizing that that was the name they called her. “Do you want to go play? I’m sure you’ll have lots of fun!” She shook her head. No, she didn’t want to play. The child never played with toys. “Are you sure?” the woman paused, noticing the paper the child had been marking on. “Oh, Lyn, that’s wonderful!” the woman’s voice changed, filled with…something. Happiness? No…something like happiness, but different. The child couldn’t place it. “You’re writing very well Lyn, that’s amazing! Can you remember what the letters sound like?” Letters? The child frowned. The woman must mean the marks.
So she can remember all the sounds the woman said, but completely tuned out when the woman presumably announced it as "This is the letter A".
The child nodded again, only half-listening now. The woman was talking to her, just her, with eyes looking at her, not through her like most. The woman was paying full attention to her. The woman would remember her. The child didn’t like to be remembered, because if they remembered her they might notice her odd-ness, might figure out that she was different, that she wasn’t like them.
And the writer has remembered this is important, although clearly she still doesn't get why. The only time people really look and pay full attention to the child it's seconds before trying to kill her. That's what the whole half-seeing business is about.
“Can you show me what they sound like?”
The child nodded again, and pointed to the one shaped like a mountain. “’ah’” The one that looked like a circle. “’oh’” The snake-shaped mark. “’sss’” The child went on, sounding out all the marks the woman had shown them.
Due to the child's very different way of filtering things, she tends to not go for very abstract descriptions. A looks nothing at all like a mountain. It looks like a triangle with the two lines on either side continuing on past the bottom line of the triangle.
What A does look a little like is how a kid would try to draw a mountain, because we tend to process images into distinct shapes to remember them due to not having a very good memory for details and complete images, so humans would both see it as a mountainlike shape and expect that description to mean something when they said it.
“Wow, Lyn, you’re a really smart girl!” the woman smiled, happiness shining on her face. The child frowned.
The child very conspicuously doesn't do these things. Do people just automatically mentally fill in stuff like frowning if it's not mentioned? Should I have mentioned blank, unmoving expressions every other sentence?
The woman would remember her now. She shouldn’t have talked. “Does your daddy teach you letters?” The child shook her head.
Another issue is that the child prefers verbal communication and very rarely moves her head, because moving your head makes focusing your eyes a bit harder normally. This can be somewhat offset by how your eyes will rotate to stay on an object, but the child's eyes can't do this. Animals with excellent eyesight, especially those functioning in low light, have oblong eyes that can't be rotated. It's part of why she initially doesn't get the idea of eye contact, as she has very good peripheral vision that she relies on to make up for this.
No, the man, the one the woman called ‘daddy’ didn’t do that. The man ignored her, just as the child liked.
So close and yet, after all the changes, so terribly far. For one thing, this man doesn't ignore the girl, he's tried to hit her a number of times. For another, she's not on good terms with him rather than her poor interactions with him just being part of a general trend. As a result, going back to the idea the child prefers to be treated this way no long works, and fails to communicate the original point, that she wasn't actually being abused or neglected by how she was treated.
This woman did ignore her, would still if she hadn’t talked and did something the other children couldn’t. Doing something others couldn’t attracted attention. Attention was bad. A frown marred the child’s face as the woman went to some children who were fighting, over a toy, she noticed. This was not good.
Given the summary, the girl here is presumably going to eventually going to kill the teacher or kid(s) (and apparently for no real reason) although I'm not sure how much of that the writer could possibly get from the existing scenes given how they seem to be avoiding having her actually be violent and do anything wrong, and chewing through the nice teacher's throat would probably be too much. Alternatively, I suppose they might have someone else attack her and make it the resulting violence all their fault, or maybe wuss out completely and have it only be attempted murder before she's stopped.
In conclusion, I kind of want to revise Ice now.
I've PMed them about this and haven't heard back yet, so I'm going to see how that goes. Please delay swarming them.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-24 07:56 pm (UTC)I mean, a lot of the stuff I finally picked up on after the billionth re-read or so, like that the child's eyes actually were white with gigantic pupils instead of black, and that the people who tried to kill her wouldn't have done it if they hadn't seen her clearly, but other stuff just flew past my head. Like her photographic memory, and that there was actually a reason that she's so small.
But anyway, yeah, pretty weird re-working.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-24 10:35 pm (UTC)other stuff just flew past my head. Like her photographic memory, and that there was actually a reason that she's so small.
I waffled too much on those things in the early chapters. Like I say she's among the smallest in the class, when she should really be the smallest by far, and I have lines that don't really fit well into having a perfect memory. I hadn't completely decided in the first few chapters so I avoided committing myself just in case I thought of a reason it shouldn't be that way later on.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-25 02:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-25 02:24 pm (UTC)(I really do need to revise it.)