Dark Dusk Dreams Pt 3

[sexysilver]

As noted before, this is here for you enjoyment as well as your criticism. See anything you find.. annoying, ect Just tell me. I'm out to try to make it more enjoyable for my future readers

Part 1: http://www.forums.finalhit.org/showthread.php?tid=16684
Part 2: http://www.forums.finalhit.org/showthread.php?tid=16885

Master Eugene Hempstead was the dictionary meaning of boring, and all such related words like mind numbing surely included him. Rockett stared at the mage before her. The master of the Alambran history class was a shriveled prune of a mage. His skin was mottled with age. Not even Brittany Hall with all of her beauty products could have saved him now. Hempstead craned his neck forward like a turtle as he surveyed his class. Blinking owlish eyes, he slowly opened his mouth to begin his incessant drone. No matter how hard anyone had tried to concentrate, it was impossible to figure out what he was saying or even to pay attention. The students had concluded that Winterlocke, the magimaster of Alderwood, could not possibly fire someone who had been teaching when dirt was new. Hempstead would be at his desk until he croaked.
Once, Rockett had given a third rank an enchanted pen, which copied the sounds it heard. In Hempstead’s class, the background gossip was written down in great detail, including the fact Ariella’s hair color was not naturally red. Even the ‘doink’ for every time a paper airplane hit the chalkboard had been noted. However, none of Hempstead’s commentary was scratched down. When she had specified the spell to only pick up Hempstead’s voice, the third rank had returned to her with a grim expression and an hour’s worth of straight lines in his history notebook.
The day worth remembering had been the day Hempstead had been a substitute lecturer for Rockett’s history class the year before. Blake Dranger and his sidekick Daven had slipped some sort of herb from the experimental garden into Hempstead’s morning tea. The frail old man had spent a good candlemark jumping up and down on the desks, turning the entire room upside down, before some masters came to the rescue. Blake ended up at the Juvenile Mage’s Correctional Facility and Daven was still serving detention every Monday. Without Blake, Rockett’s class had grown quiet, but word was Blake would be back in a month.
She had not minded Blake. He was daring enough to greet her or crack an occasional joke around her, but he always timed it just right as to not agitate her. His genuine character had kept him from being permanently expelled.
Daven wisely stayed away from Rockett. She made it clear that the simpering freckle-faced boy annoyed her. The sorceress also knew that Daven had never forgotten the time she had turned his charcoal into a firecracker a snide remark he made. The basics master refused to believe his story, thus he had ended up with five more detentions.
Rockett’s mind slowly shifted away from the droning voice of Hempstead. She closed her eyes and forged onto the smoky recesses of the ethereal plane. She was always there on the plane with her mind. Its existence was only accessible by her mind, so when she was awake and focusing on her physical world she could simply drift on the ethereal plane without concentrating on it. Her second year at Alderwood had nearly passed before she began to realize the truth of the plane. Before she had found that sometimes when she closed her eyes and always in her sleep, this place of smoky shapes and endless depths came to her. Nobody but herself had ever existed on the plane when she was a child. At night she had always been alone. In the children’s homes that had traded guardianship over her, she had spent the darkest hours roaming aimlessly, looking for a way out of the shoddy prison. Even if she had found the ethereal plane back then, few human minds could come to it. It was not until her first year in Alderwood that Rockett began to see the shapeless glimmers of others at night. During the day, when she sought the solitude of her mind, the glimmers were gone. Her second year, one who had the power to consciously walk the plane came. It had been a great black form pulsing with power but radiating tranquility. The sorceress remembered reveling in the taste of It. It had floated across the expanse, stroking her smaller presence with great black tendrils. The moment those tendrils had touched her essence, she had suddenly understood what this place was.
Tiny wisps of blue-tinged smoke swirled around her as her mind reached out across the plane. For the last few years, she had known that like Earth was one plane and Alhambra another, the ethereal was a plane for the mind. However, she had never taken the power she knew was there. Mage’s feared those “walkers” who could enter the ethereal plane freely. To be one was to dance with death. Because she could never get away from it, she merely used it to slip away to peace.
The scrape of chairs as tyros began to stand pulled Rockett’s focus back to the classroom. She glanced up at the chalkboard, noted the homework, then stood. Conventional spells with Tangaunté was next and last of all Master Pythos’ mathemagical theorems.

[Benladesh]

i remember reading this as well a while back. You've improved on it I see ^_^ i see you mention candlemarks again. When we have time we will take time to figure out a whole time system together and i will make a graphic or something to keep it simple.

ok i don't want to be the "THERES A TYPO!!!111one" guy but i thought i should point them out so you can fix them out as this is something that needs to be perfect

Quote:but he always time it just right as to not agitate her.

timed it?

Quote:The sorceress also knew that Daven had never forgotten the time she had turned his charcoal into a firecracker a snide remark he made.

I kinda get what you're saying but its unclear.

Quote:The basics master refused to believe his story, thus he had ended up with five more detentions.

Ok here is some suggestion. Rockett is obviously a very smart girl and people do not want to mess with her. I would think that the teacher would not want to mess with Rockett and therefore kinda didn't want to face Rockett.
I think Rockett would also be smart enough to notice that. She seems very direct. I dono, maybe you can leave it like that but It would fit if the teacher wanted to avoid rockett and therefore doesn't "believe" the story and rockett knows this.

[sexysilver]

Oops typo yes.. thank you for seeing the typo I'm good at those

That second section.. is still a mystery. I'm still trying to define the laws of my magick, so that was a quick mildly thoughtless change from what it was before... I'm trying to think exactly what the laws of magic would be for a transformation. I recently watched the FMA shows, and their whole thing with the ingredients to make something... I was thinking that if you want to transform something, you have to have the right ingredients... so you can't turn a piece of wood into a piece of stone.. but that'd make life difficult for me. Plus I still have creationists who create creatures out of nothing.. but I suppose I could blame that on their special magick lol.

And magic or magick? Magick annoys me but magic is like Harry Potter.. and I want to get as far away from Harry Potter as possible lmao.

Hmm I was more implying on that part that she didn't step in but he was trying to explain and the teacher was like well whatever that's not true.. maybe I can think of how to reword that.

[weee5067]

Wow, I like how you introduced the ethereal plane. Somehow, it fits really nicely with the class (but I'm sure you must have known that when you wrote it ). Not much to comment on this time, change-wise.

Quote:Master Eugene Hempstead was the dictionary meaning of boring and all such related words like mind numbing surely included him.

Okay, I said I'd stay away from punctuation, but I'm pretty positive on this one...you need a comma between 'boring' and 'and'. I initially read the sentence as ending directly after "related words", and got very confused when the sentence kept going. Also, there's a chance 'like' should actually be 'as', but I'm not positive - it just sounds more correct to me. And 'mind numbing'...I think the two words are supposed to be connected by a hyphen, but I've never seen any really strict rules about that, so that's entirely a matter of personal preference.

Quote:The master of the Alambran history class was a shriveled prune of a mage. His skin was mottled with age.

I know this is my fault, but the instant I realized these two sentences rhymed, I reread them in a mental singsong. You should probably only consider changing the rhyming endings if anyone else comments on this...I'm probably just special

Quote:Nobody but herself had ever existed on the plane when she was a child, because at night she had been alone. In the children’s homes, she had always roamed the rooms looking for a way out. Even if she had found the ethereal plane back then, few human minds could come to it.

This part confused me. Was she alone on the ethereal plane at night? Or was she alone and awake, wandering the building she was in? Did she never enter the ethereal plane as a child? That's what the last sentence indicates, but the first sentence makes it sound as though she must have stumbled onto the plane once in a while; otherwise, how could she know that no one but her existed on it?

Again, I loved your ability to create characters. And the ethereal plane sounds awesome...I want to read more about it

[sexysilver]

I added the comma. And- actually lol, I knew I had to introduce the ethereal plane somewhere sooner, so I went back and added it in at that part Glad it worked out well

Lol! I'm a natural poet I guess.. I definitely didn't notice that part.

As far as that part, I guess I should make it a big clearer. She was in orphanages all the time, but she didn't want to be so she'd wander around at night looking for ways to leave the orphanage. She's been on the ethereal plane since birth, but as a child didn't recognize what it was.. to her it was just a bunch of swirly shapes. Humans without some time of magick blood can't access the plane so she never saw anyone else there until she bodily moved to the plane of magick (aka Alhambra)

"Nobody but herself had ever existed on the plane when she was a child. At night she had always been alone. In the children’s homes that had traded guardianship over her, she had spent the darkest hours roaming aimlessly, looking for a way out of the shoddy prison."

I need a better word for shoddy.. but better or no?

[Dag]

I think you should elaborate more on the plane, maybe about the dangers of it (if there are any)... I dunno, I just felt that I want to know more about it (good hook if you are writing more on it).

And I think you said plane like 100 times in that one paragraph, try to use synonyms maybe like "alter-reality", "utopia (maybe?)", "transcendental world (bad but I dunno)"

Love the way you write otherwise

[sexysilver]

Hmm.. It's not an alter-reality or utopia though. It's a completely different world stacked on top of other worlds with other worlds stacked on top of it. O.x I thought about that before, but have no synonym for it

And there are dangers hehe =D You just don't find them out for a while :*

[Benladesh]

i don't think the repeated use of the word "plane" should be changed. it is mentioned quite a bit but i did not find it bothersome to my reading or to the text in general. The way this is written makes it ok to use the word more then once. I wouldn't change it.

The only synonyms I can think of are realm and dimension.

[weee5067]

Quote:Nobody but herself had ever existed on the plane when she was a child, because at night she had been alone. In the children’s homes, she had always roamed the rooms looking for a way out. Even if she had found the ethereal plane back then, few human minds could come to it.

Quote:Nobody but herself had ever existed on the plane when she was a child. At night she had always been alone. In the children’s homes that had traded guardianship over her, she had spent the darkest hours roaming aimlessly, looking for a way out of the shoddy prison.

I think I like the overall feel of the original paragraph better, but the rewritten one does give slightly more information, which is nice...maybe some mix of the two would be perfect.

Quote:to her it was just a bunch of swirly shapes. Humans without some time of magick blood can't access the plane so she never saw anyone else there until she bodily moved to the plane of magick

If you could somehow put that in, I think it would really help. Maybe put a description of what she saw the ethereal plane as in the paragraph, or something.

[treeko]

=D As good as always ^^

[+Josh]

Quote:Master Eugene Hempstead was the dictionary meaning of boring, and all such related words like mind numbing surely included him.

I believe that those two words should be hyphenated. And I think it would help the flow of the sentence if it were in quotation marks, it's a little hard to read IMO.