TSIASOS Spork: Part 3, Chapter 4: Terror.

[ultimate_cheetah]

There is no terror here. There is only exasperation.

They were surrounded.

Good first sentence. Short, snappy, and gets the point across.

They would have to stand and fight, and they would likely die.

Sigh. Godfuckingdammit Paolini. Something like dying should not be tacked on at the end of a sentence. It should be emphasized. Something like: “They were going to die.”

Kira’s mind whirled as the reality of the situation clamped shut around her, like an iron coffin. There was no escape this time, no trick or turn or hope of reprieve. They were too far from anywhere to expect help, and neither the Jellies nor the nightmares would show them mercy.

Alright, I like the iron coffin metaphor. But the other information is something that should be put before the “they were going to die” sentence. And the second sentence is unnecessary

It was all her fault, and it wasn’t something she could fix.

Finally, some ownership.

If I keep going like this, It’s going to take forever.

So, Falcon asks Kira if the staff is supposed to be broken, and Kira says no, and she’s not sure if it can be fixed. But she’s going to TRY to fix it, right? I mean, I’d hate to think they came all this way for nothing.

Someone (the dialogue’s not marked) says that’s not acceptable, channeling the reader’s thoughts. The Jellies (who I’m rooting for at this point) come in with a boom. A literal boom, exclamation point and everything.

The building shuddered. Pieces of the starry ceiling crashed to the floor, the heavens coming undone. The diamond case swayed and fell, shattered—sending the pieces of the Staff of Blue flying in different directions.

The Entropists bent to pick up one of the shards.

GOOD. The Entropists have freakin’ MAGIC. Which is stupid, but at least they can stop this from being a waste of time aaaaannnd I’m getting my hopes up too soon.

The Jellies are moving in, “parked”outside the temple.

Parked? PARKED?! That sounds like they’re attending a freaking picnic.

But anyway, Falcon says that the Wallfish is 15 minutes away. Nelson charges in the front area to get some wounded marines, and Falcon “fires” grenades, which have chaff and chalk inside them for some reason. Kira goes out to help, too, and gets a Nameless Extra. Nelson is returning to the battlefield. Can I just say how stupid it is for Nelson to do this. I mean, Kira has the VenomThing, but Nelson has this genetic disease that gives her a lot of pain on some days. And she’s running out into a freaking battle (even though she has an exo suit). And she doesn’t have battle experience that I know of. One important rule of anything is: if you don’t know what you’re doing or are compromised, then you shouldn’t help. You’ll just add to the body count.

A numbing impact hit Kira on the right side, causing her to fall to one knee. She glanced down and immediately wished she hadn’t: the black fibers along her ribs were blown out like a spray of needles. Blood, muscle, and bone were visible scattered between.

Even as she looked, the fibers knitted together as they began to close over the wound.

HOLY SHIT! That isn’t a “glancing down” injury. That is a OW OW OHGODI’VEBEENSHOT injury. There’s bone! Bone! And it isn’t a burn, so her nerves are still there. Kira should be on the ground, screaming in pain. If someone chopped off her leg she would probably just stare at it.

So Kira crawls forward with “legs that had lost all feeling”. I don’t know how that would work, since her spine wasn’t hit, but it doesn’t really matter since she’s walking pretty quickly, after the Venom Thing heals her. She drops of an Extra, and heads back out, despite Falcon warning her not to be stupid.

“SJAMs incoming,” barked Koyich. “Hit the deck!”

Really, dude, you couldn’t just say “hit the deck”. Every second counts here. Kira drops down, and “a half second later” explosions rock the streets. (Does Kira have a built in clock or something?)

They all survive. More Jellies close in, and they decide to retreat inside the temple. But there are four more Marines/Extras on the ground. Oh. I care sooo much.

A jelly (described as a squid) approaches with a blaster. Trig jumps forward, somehow firing a blaster and a rifle at the same time. (Has Paolini seen a rifle? They’re huge.) Vemonpet wants to attack, but Kira doesn’t trust it. (Smart.) And then my favorite part happens.

Ready?

The sound from the Jelly’s weapon was short and sharp. It cut through the commotion like auditory punctuation (Really?). Startling silence followed. Trig’s guns ceased firing as his armor locked up, and then he slowly toppled backward, a statue falling.

Centered on the front of his visor was a finger-sized hole, and frozen on his face, a look of terrible surprise.

YEAAAHHHAAASSSSSS!!!!! AHAHAHAHAHHA!!!!

Kira’s like “Ima tear that Jelly to shreds”, but before she can, a woman runs in front of it and shouts “we come in peace”. That woman is *gasp* Major Tschetter.

How did that happen? Seriously? I want to read about this. A woman somehow meets aliens and convinces them to ally with her. THAT sounds more interesting.

Anyway, more Friendly Jellies come, but Kira ignores them to look at Trig.

The medic removed Trig’s helmet with practiced speed,

...and the toxic atmosphere boiled his blood or something.

and pooled blood poured out across the tessellated floor in bright crimson streaks.

He’s dead.

The kid was still conscious, his white-rimmed eyes darting around with a panicked look.

He’s unconscious. And DEAD.

A bullet had hit him near the base of his neck, ripping apart the arteries.

Why is she thinking like this? When my mother broke her foot, I wasn’t like “I wonder what bone she broke”, I was like “OH NO!!!! … Are we gonna miss the ice cream truck?” (I was five.)

Kira wishes she had “acted faster”, but I think she’s being unfair. She did the entire system a service.

Trig is sprayed with “medifoam” which stops the bleeding. He’s going to die in a few minutes if they don’t get to cryo, though. Which I’m actually hoping happens.

In all seriousness, it would be great to kill a character here. It would make the loss of the Staff seem more real, because they actually sacrificed someone. It would cause tension between Kira and the others, the Jellies and the humans, and within Kira herself. It would raise the stakes, and make this battle seem like more of a turning point, instead of a generic fight.

And Kira and Falconguy could bond over their shared losses. Oh yeah, Kira is supposed to be grieving, remember that?

I didn’t either.

One of the marine ships, the Ilmorra, flies toward them, but laser beams suddenly fire from somewhere inside the city. Kira covers everybody with the Venomthing right before the ship explodes behind a mountain. There’s a “mushroom cloud”, towers swaying and groaning, the works.

And we never find out what shot that ship down. Not in this chapter, anyway. I assume it’s the Jellies, but it could be the city’s defense system for all I know.

A jelly moves toward Trig, Cheddar says they can help, but Falconi’s like “is that why they shot them?” No, that’s because they’re good guys. Cheddar says it was a “mistake”. In my opinion, Trig shot first. The poor Jelly was just defending itself.

After some token resistance and dicking around, Falcon finally agrees, and the Jelly smears Trig with a “gelatinous substance”, their form of cryo. It’s also very useful for keeping food fresh, (probably), and this is totally unrelated.

Oh, and despite the mushroom cloud continuing to climb, and hostile Jellies everywhere, Cheddar decides to have a chat.

Um, everyone… come closer. A little closer. Little bit closer. ….

*Slap*

ARE YOU THAT GODDAMN STUPID?!! YOU SHOULD BE RUNNING! SOMEONE HAS A SHIP, RIGHT?! GO! GO! GO! GO!

They ask Cheddar if she’s herself (in an ironic echo to the earlier chapter where Cheddar asked Kira the same thing), and Cheddar confirms. She asks about the Staff of Blue, sees that it’s broken, and they just give up instead of going back and scavenging for the fragments or something.

It turns out that the Jellies were hoping to use the staff against the nightmares (which they call the Corrupted), because the corrupted are suuuper dangerous. And these nightmares are extra dangerous. Yeah…

Then Cheddar actually says something interesting. The Jellies that are allied with Cheddar are a rogue few that want to kill their leader and form an alliance with the humans, to make sure both species survive. They couldn’t approach earlier because they risked being caught and executed by the other Jellies. Finally, the story is getting somewhere. Too bad it took half the book to do so.

Oh, and Cheddar understands the Jellies language because of a special helmet. Seriously, this woman’s adventures sound waay better than anything in this book.

By the way, I should mention the gunfire is coming closer. Yeah.

And it’s probably been more than a few minutes right now. RIP, Trig, we barely knew ye.

Cheddar chooses right now to inform everyone that the Jellies are building a massive fleet, because they are planning to take over, and were planning to do so for a while. Which is the first thing I would have led with, but okay. The Leader!Jelly is there, and the Rouge!Jellies want to use that moment to stage a coup.

Again, do they have to do this right now? It’s really annoying to sift through all this exposition.

And then we get some bad news. The Wallfish won’t be able to stop because the coolant line that had to be repaired aaalll the way earlier in the book broke. So they have to escape in the jelly ships. This is bad news because it causes the book to be longer.

They start heading out and… Sigh.

“Wait,” Kira said, and went to stand directly in front of Tschetter. “I have a question.”

“Stow it, Navárez,” Koyich snapped. “We don’t have the time.”

Exactly! Unless the question is “Why is the Soft Blade making me sense that you guys are lying?” or “Why am I getting a sudden urge to eat you all?” then it can wait.

Kira didn’t budge. “Why do the Jellies think we started this war? They’re the ones who attacked the Extenuating Circumstances.”

Fuck.

Tschetter spoke quickly. “The Jellies I’ve been dealing with placed the xeno on Adra in order to hide it from the rest of their species. Apparently the xeno was a major threat in the past, and the Jellies seem to view it with a mix of fear and reverence. From what they’ve told me, their group would have done anything, anything, to keep the xeno from bonding with another host.”... “From their point of view, we were no different than thieves who had broken into a top-secret military installation. Imagine how the UMC would have reacted.”

This is good. Different points of view and all that. Humans do this a lot in sci-fi books, so it’s nice to see the other side of the coin.

Cheddar goes on to say that most of the Jellies only found out Kira existed when she sent that signal. (In an earlier chapter I sporked.) This was also about when the nightmares started attacking the Jellies and broadcasting messages in English, so the Jellies thought that the humans and nightmares were allied. Again, I like this, but this would’ve been much better coming from one of the Jellies.

“But the Jellies still planned on invading us no matter what,” Falconi said.

Because moral ambiguity is boring!

We also learn that the nightmares are drawn to the suit, right before four nightmare ships arrive. They have a “sense of wrongness” that Paolini once again fails to describe.

Everybody FINALLY decides to get a move on. Kira takes off her skinsuit, sensing something, and GASP, realizes that she can communicate directly with the aliens.

She approached the alien and said: [[Kira here: What is your name, Shoal Leader?]]

The collected Jellies stirred with surprise, their tentacles shifting and turning with a life of their own. [[Lphet here: The Idealis lets you scent us! What else has—]]

Yes, every single thing an alien says is marked like that.

But before the alien (which I shall call a she, since Paolini only refers to it as, well “it”) can finish…

And converging upon them via several of the westbound streets were masses of twisted bodies climbing over the piles of rubble and even climbing over themselves: tortured flesh that was red and black and melted like the scars on Falconi’s forearms—an army of the Corrupted. An army of nightmares.

Wow, asshole. Imagine if I had scars and I was reading this. (Well, I do, but only small ones.) Falconi’s supposed to be her love interest, right?! Does anybody think of another person that they care about as having “tortured flesh”? Christ! I’ll just leave this and all my festering disgust here.

But wait, there’s more!

Then a crack sounded behind them, loud as a gunshot. Kira crouched and whirled, expecting to be ambushed.

In the depths of the temple’s inner sanctum, the dark obelisk fractured, white lines racing across its surface, shedding dust. The nape of Kira’s neck prickled as the front of the pillar fell forward with a doom-laden peal.

The obelisk was hollow. Inside it stirred a tall, angular something—a figure as lean as a skeleton, with legs that jointed backwards and two pairs of arms. A cloak of black seemed to hang from its pointed shoulders, and a hard, hood-like shape hid all its face, save the crimson eyes that burned within that shadowed recess.

AAAAAAHHHHH!!! IT’S A- Ra’zac ripoff. Yaay. This is literally every “EVIL” cliche rolled into one. Also, this is supposed to be one of the Vanished’s “dread servants”. Why would an alien race that existed many many years before have the same motifs corresponding to something frightening that we do?I mean, they lived on a red sun, correct? Why is red scary then? Would you find yellow scary? They have black plants. Why is black scary?

It was a Seeker, and that meant death.

Uh huh. I don’t believe you, Paolini. You lost all believability after this chapter.

Anyway, on to the next chapter! Which is *drumroll*... Me! I’ll try to get the next spork up as soon as I can.

Comments

[anontu]

Wait, hold on... does that mean they know the human race?
Considering the squidward clan has been fighting the humans for most of the book I'd say they do. Or maybe they don't. I don't have the book. Does anybody remember if anything is said about the squidward's knowledge of humankind?

[ultimate_cheetah]

I think they were planning to invade humanity for a while, so they've gotta know some things.

[baronleduc]

Man, I wrote this question in the weirdest way possible. Now I can't edit the original post. Thanks, Dreamwidth. *shakes fist in the air*

What was I was trying to say, is if the jelly people was aware of the humans before the war. IIRC, did the war started suddenly ? I did not read the novel (I tapped out after a few chapters. Fuck that), but I barely remember when Kiragon was aboard the military/medical ship with a very long and ridiculous name, woke up and, RKO outta nowhere, the ship was under attack. There was no mention of the jelly people before the event started.

Also, Cheetah didn't answer my question if they can do parallel parks. I need to know, stat! That would've been impressive to do with massive spaceships!

[ultimate_cheetah]

What was I was trying to say, is if the jelly people was aware of the humans before the war. IIRC, did the war started suddenly ?

Some Jellies attacked after seeing that Kira got the suit. The rest found out about Kira, when she accidentally sent a signal. And they thought the nightmares were working with the humans.

Also, Cheetah didn't answer my question if they can do parallel parks. I need to know, stat! That would've been impressive to do with massive spaceships!

If I tell you, I'd have to insure your silence.