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Revenge


SonicBOOM XS

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Hey, guys and gals! I finally got around to writing a story and decided to work on a topic I thought up quite a while back: it was a disillusioned Matoran reflecting on burning down his village, but I changed it to become more of a Velika origin story (to explain his current killing spree). It's my first story in a while (school essays dull my writing skills considerably :P) and I understand that this will most likely not be a very good work. I had fun writing it, though, so I guess that counts for something. Enjoy!

 

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I'm sitting here, looking at the ruins of Le-Kawi. Rubble, still smoldering with the odd tendrils of smoke, litters the once beautiful jungle floor. Ash, its blackness permeating the pure green of the leaves that fell from the canopies, is responsible for the crunching sound emanating from the footsteps of the weeping.

 

At the moment, the only thing I can think of is...well, nothing.

 

No one knows who or what was responsible for the devastating fire that took the homes and lives of many. Some say it was the Kardas Dragon, a mythical beast that once guarded the Mask of Life.

 

Others say it was the Kanohi Dragon, come from the labs of a few crazy Makuta who decided to make life a living Karzahni for the rest of this universe's inhabitants.

 

Oh, for Mata Nui's sake, get your head out of a Madu fruit! It was obviously the Tahtorak! Have you SEEN that thing? It rampaged through Metru Nui like a Gukko Bird after a berry!

 

And then you have the small group of conspiracists. And of course, they're pinning it on someone from among us. Don't you see? It's all so clear, it HAS to be one of us, it was an inside job! And even if it wasn't one of us, then it was from Ta-Kawi. And so on and so forth, with their twisted view of politics and social policies.

 

Funny how it's always the crazy ones that end up right. Reminds me of the time people believed that the world is round because you can't see anything past a certain point, therefore the world must be curving. Guy comes up, yells that the world's flat because you CAN see everything, just that our draw distances are too low. He lives in a cave now, drive to madness by the laughter of his peers, but turns out he was right: there's an outer boundary to this world, and it's flat since you can see the other side via telescope. Guess the astronomers over at Ko-Metru better reposition their telescopes every now and then.

 

But I digress. Point is, it's the conspiracists who are right: it was one of us. Can't say who, that would violate my code of confidentiality. I'm sworn to secrecy, and I won't say who did it. All I will say is that no one suspects him.

 

Turaga's looking stressed, he's being harassed by his adviser to initiate war with Ta-Kawi. Tensions between us have fired up recently, pardon the pun, and we were just about ready to go to war with Ta-Kawi anyways. You don't just let a sister village block off your supply chain; we needed those resources to fashion taming instruments and form supports for our tree huts. Just because we've been running low on Bula berries and Vuata Maca doesn't mean you shut off our main resource line.

 

You can tell he doesn't want to fight Ta-Kawi. Him and the fire Turaga never really got along, but they worked together for the sake of keeping the villages alive. That, and he's a pacifist: he wouldn't let us form armor for our Gukkos or create weapons of any sort. Now, though, things are different. Our current supports are failing, and we're running low on tamed Rahi. We may just have to go to war.

 

But he isn't going to do anything until the adviser stops blabbering on heatedly. Turaga sends him away and asks for some time to think, then spots me sitting. Calls me over. I'm relatively close to him since we used to be best buddies before he became a Toa. After that, we don't talk much, but I go regardless.

 

What do I think we should do? I don't know, but maybe going to war with Ta-Kawi wouldn't be such a bad idea. You've been a Toa, you know how to fight and how to lead. Sometimes people will need to fight, and you're no longer bound by the Toa Code.

 

He argues the point that no one needs to die over petty things such as supports and instruments, not with half the village gone. I counter by saying that unless we get both, we're dead anyways: either the rest of the village, weakened by the searing heat, falls to the ground and we all die, or the Rahi pick us off and we are forever remembered as the best meals them carnivorous Gukko ever had.

 

And after all, wasn't he the veteran of a hundred battles? Did he not remember what happened to Lesovikk when his team died because he failed to save them? Did he not understand the necessity of sacrifice in the name of saving many? War is a reality he must face, and he knows all about how to win it. He shouldn't let his honor be stained because he stood around while the remnants of his village fell to the ground.

 

He should remember what happened when he neglected to kill the Doom Vipers that wiped out his entire team, and try and prevent a similar fate from happening here.

 

That gets him. His eyes become steely, resolved. His agreement to war should be more shocking than if the Turaga of Metru Nui was revealed to be a Makuta, but at the moment, the only thing I can think of is...well, nothing. Again.

 

He thanks me for my advice and walks away, no doubt preparing one of his elaborate speeches to rally the Matoran together under one cause. I walk away too, except in the opposite direction.

 

It takes me a while, but I get there. A cave, dark and damp, populated with tiny Nui-Jaga and maybe a few corpses.

 

I step in. The dampness rushes over me, but it's a feeling I've gotten many times.

 

There's only one inhabitant, a Po-Matoran with a few drill tools. Poor guy's been here for years.

 

He's still gone crazy from the internal annihilation he suffered for his views.

 

And as I've said, it's always the crazy ones that end up right.

 

“Did you do it?”

 

Yes, I burnt half the village down. Controlled fire, not a tough task. Enough to incite the villagers and force a war between two tribes. The other half will collapse in a few days time, as you wished.

 

“Good, good. Have some more of this.”

 

He hands me the same vial he's given me thrice before; it's filled with a green substance that seems almost...alive. I down it in one gulp, get that same euphoria and energy I did the past times. Get that same loss of senses. Get that same feeling of obedience. I will follow this madman to the ends of the world and back, along the solid wall boundaries, and I will do everything he says.

 

“Those fools. I came here to observe MY creations, and they LAUGH at me. At their CREATOR. Well, not much of a problem. Before long, everyone will know Velika is not someone to be trifled with. And they. Will. Pay.”

 

Undergoing Renovations...


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Whoa... that was really good. It was like reading an actual Bionicle book, except better (sometimes their writing can be slightly below mediocre here and there). I greatly enjoyed reading this. And you're saying your skills were dulled when you wrote this? I've gotta go look at some of your other works if that's the case!

Herro there, person.

How are you?

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Thanks! I haven't posted my other works on BZP, and most of my recent writing was restricted to the aforementioned school essays as well as editing friends' essays and theses :PI'll be writing more in the future now that it's summer, so maybe I'll improve. Hopefully. XD

Undergoing Renovations...


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  • 2 weeks later...

YOU CAN'T TAKE ME WITHOUT BLOODSHED ON BOTH SIDES. YOU WILL NEVER KEEP ME OUTTA THE CRITIC'S CLUB, UNDERSTAND ME VELOX YOU SLIMY--

 

Oh right, I'm on the job now. Phew.

 

You have a knack for stringing words and ideas coherently together into something that flows and is easy to follow along with, which is good; what I don't see a lot of, on the other hand, are ideas to be strung together. What we have to go off of here is several various tangents in the narrator's damaged mind, many of which look like they're about to give us some detail on the time period, the setting, or even on the people around your narrator, but instead of being given answers we're given "I digress" or just a totally broken switch in thought process. It makes him seem scatterbrained as opposed to truly crazy (even considering your twist at the end) and he comes off as more of one of Tony Stark's builderbots in his basement instead of a Terminator.

 

Another thing I was confused on, even after reading your story again, was the use of Velika at all. You said in the preface that this had transformed into a sort of origin story for him, but all we really got was a sort of Dr. Strangelove cackling self-monologue to himself while the narrator gives us a warped, foggy view of what's really going on. We also get a weird...timeskip?... of sorts where we skip right from the narrator talking to the Turaga right to Velika, which is odd because he purports to have burned half the village down even though the fire was eons ago and someone would have surely investigated what was going on by now and realized this guy was a little too cuckoo. In addition, we're not really treated to much of Velika's motives or his plan itself here: what's he getting revenge for? How did they spite him? There's just not enough story here to really even draw my own conclusions.

 

There were opportunities to put a good story together, too. Several plotlines on just my first read - the Turaga, his pacifism, the death of his old team, the war and conflicts between villages on whatever landmass the Matoran are on, Velika's past - were mentioned and then aborted just as quickly, leaving the reader only more unanswered questions about what's going on and where it could go from here. Why don't they get along? How were these Turaga put together in the first place? What's the physical and political landscape of things look like? Is there possibility for alliances, backstabbing? Was Velika from one of the two villages about to go to war? What am I reading here, besides the ramblings of a madman and him drinking what appears to be Antidermis at the end of the story, for purposes as of yet unknown? I just don't know.

 

You have a good start here, but this story feels incomplete, like there's construction tape still over it in places and it was just posted to gauge feedback of what you already had. What you have is decent. But I can't help but feel like it's missing pieces, some of which are minor but some of which are very, very major, and necessary for a good story.

 

-Tyler

SAY IT ONE MORE TIME 

TELL ME WHAT IS ON YOUR MIND

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It was done in 30-ish minutes and I was half-asleep, but thanks a ton for the review. It's really helped me.

 

Now to spend more time on my next story XD

 

EDIT: After rereading the story, I think some of my stylistic choices kinda threw you off. I thought I implied that Velika was the one who said the world wasn't round, it was flat. And he got ridiculed. It worked in my head as a reverse Galileo. That being said, I didn't make it outright clear, and I worded it badly so I guess you ended up confused.

 

And the rest was intentionally vague; like I said, half-asleep and 30 minutes. Not a good combo XD

Edited by SonicBOOM XS

Undergoing Renovations...


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