Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-25073641-20160228125651

Hello guys. Ruckus here, and I’m here in the writing workshop to present my upcoming pasta, which is titled “The Damnation” (for God’s sake that title is so cliché). Truth be told, I really worked hard on this one – I’ve burnt the midnight oil for like 28 nights and I’m just still somewhere in the beginning of the development – and I hope that would be obvious. You see, to write this story, I’ve done things I’ve literally never done before in my whole life, and it includes five-hour intense brainstorming (which didn’t work out too well), reading shit-tons of novels (a few of them actually became my inspiration for the story), and the worst of all, changing my writing style altogether (gasp!).

Yes, mates, the ordeals I have gone through truly devastated my humanity, but fortunately, it seems like my efforts are working out quite better than I’ve expected.

Let’s break down the story.

You see, this story is “unpolished”. That means the story is rough and riddled with unseen flaws, maybe there are also hidden plot holes and formatting errors in there, but I’ll get to that later on when I finish the story.

I might add, the story is incomplete, so, summing it all up, the story won’t make any much sense… yet. It’s my story, so obviously I’m working hard to make the whole damned thing easy to read and understandable. You have suggestions? Just tell me. I won’t hesitate a moment to consider it if your suggestion is good enough to get into my story. And if you have problems with the way I write (I tell you what: it’s in non-chronological order. I hope that helps you a lot), well, please tell me… all the things I should fix up and I’ll do everything I can to satisfy both your and my needs.

And, of course, I need some help from some professionals out there. Grammar, punctuation, wording, plotting… the list goes on and on. That’s actually the reason why I’m posting this here. Shameless or not, I actually NEED these people to help me out; I hope they can provide me their insight: Humby, Empy, Blacknumber, Dupin, KillaHawke, and ‘‘Underscorre’’. It’s not that I’m forcing them to do what I want them to do, it’s just… they literally know everything (“so many things”, scrapping off the cheap exaggeration) about writing.

So, I’m gonna stop beating around the bush and tell you the story. Here it is:

The Damnation

The event that came to be known as “The Damnation” took place at exactly 11:27 a.m., eastern standard time, on the afternoon of July 17th, 2017. As oblivious as it might have seemed, no one instantaneously noticed the peculiar change – it was almost as if “nothing” bad really happened to the planet Earth. People conducted their usual activities. Animals did their things. Trees and grasses swayed back and forth as the wind blew softly. And the vehicles drove to and fro, the streets filled with the irritating noises of blaring horns and arguing taxi drivers. It was everyone’s mediocre day…

Had it not been for The Damnation.

Its story of discovery was, in fact, unexpectedly peculiar. You might have expected it to be seen by some person with keen eyes and sharp mind, but that’s not the case. That’s not the interesting part. The person who’s thought to have discovered the fault was a person named “DarkLord666”, real name Richard Fergusson. He used a blog as an instrument to spread his word to the general public. His description of the mysterious phenomenon was vague, nearly incomprehensible, nonetheless his message was perfectly clear and intact.

The following blog post is transcribed from Fergusson’s blogpost, which was recovered from an undisclosed website in the deep web.


 * Something’s wrong with the world right now. I don’t know if you noticed it, but I think the best thing I can do is share this weird discovery that I made just a few minutes ago. Right here in California, it’s about 5:30 in the evening. Yeah, that’s not the actual issue. Here it is: if you go outside, you’ll find out that the sun is still up there. And it’s supposed to be evening right now. It’s weird, isn’t it?


 * If ypu [sic] have first-hand knowledge about this, please comment below and share it with us. Some sort of explanation or enlightenment will also work out great.

His forum post, as he had expected from the very beginning, was met by a disconcerted crowd of hysterical people agreeing with him. The 80 percent of the crowd consisted of people from the different areas in the Americas, while the remaining 20 percent was from other continents. Nevada, Oregon, Texas, California… all experiencing the same phenomenon, all under the same scorching 98 degrees’ Fahrenheit heat.

By seven in the evening, the sun had never come down; the mass hysteria due to this strange event, unfortunately, had grown across the world – the internet and words of mouth were just two of the many catalysts... The conditions remained throughout the Americas, yet it seemed entirely different in Europe, Asia, Oceania, and Africa. While the North and South America suffered from severe heat and sunlight, Europe was “stuck in mid-evening”, the Asia “in complete darkness”, Oceania “in an endless dawn”, and Africa “in between day and night”.


 * “It was already seven in my clock, but the sun seems to not come down.”


 * “It’s supposed to be daytime here in South Korea… I suppose no one can’t explain why it’s still nighttime in here.”


 * “… I agree, I read six in the clock but it feels like two in the dawn.”


 * “The world is indeed corrupted, or possibly it was just my bloody clock that was wrong…”

The Tidelock

For the first time in many decades, the entire world was in sheer terror. The unexplainable phenomenon was everywhere… in the early morning news, newspapers, magazines, blogs, and several other media that could be used for communication. People of the world had called to several space organizations existing – especially National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA – and demanded an acceptably reasonable explanation.

These organizations appeared to have shut their mouths deliberately. Days and weeks had passed by, not a soul spoke and explained things in behalf of these organizations; the people of the world, despite slowly losing hope, still waited in peace for the answer to their greatest question: “What is happening?”

They got the answer after four weeks five days.

When these organizations released their public statements regarding this specific topic, as well as their explanation, the people of the world could have been figures of question marks, trying to figure out what the alien and scientific words meant.

Fortunately, there also existed news and magazine and online articles that had the ability to give justice to these statements. They lacked the scientific information and accuracy, but had the complete, clear gist of the long whole story. It was auspicious for everyone who had no technical knowledge of anything and everything about cosmology and astrophysics. It should be obvious that not everyone cared about these topics.

“The Tidelock took effect way earlier than we initially expected.”

The people of the world had gone to hell and back straining to adjust to the radical environmental and economic change. After the planet Earth was affected by The Tidelock, the continents were either under critical amount of sunlight or in pitch-black darkness. And it was a change, so far, no one had been happy for.

The Americas were in permanent daytime. That was a given fact, considering the onset of The Tidelock. Clocks were generally useless. Calendars too. News shows had their on-screen clocks taken out. Radio stations never broadcasted the time. In general, there was almost zero percent chance of telling time without the aid of an unaltered clock. As everyone knew, it’s 11:27 a.m. in California, and that would not change for an extremely long time, if not for an eternity. Either way, the people of the word… the homo sapiens… will long be extinct and faded to ashes before a miracle sets in.

Of course, like some sort of a dream, the people of the world had managed to fit completely into this peculiar setting. Somehow. It had been about three months after The Tidelock occurred – the dread this phenomenon caused, as you might expect, had not entirely diminished away from the people’s minds, but moving on from the ultimate fear of heat death was needed, and the people of the world successfully complied to this requirement. The people of the world did quite a good job of surviving despite living in a hazardous world where anything fatal could happen, and where the chances of getting skin diseases, especially skin cancer, was 75.4 percent higher than normal (assuming something else is normal) … and for an obvious reason.

But, like those post-apocalyptic movies everyone sees, there were things far worse than the effect of The Damnation itself – it’s the wild flames that The Damnation sparked.

One of those was the X-virus.

The Roots

The X-virus began almost as the same time as The Damnation. The disease was initially unnoticed by the time, only known by a few dozens of village doctors and citizens. At the beginning, the only information gathered about it was that this certain strain set off in an obscure town somewhere in the state of Nevada. The first known patient was a Hispanic woman to be named Esmeralda Gonzales. Only a scarce bit of info was gathered regarding her identity, not a social security number, not a bank account within the United States, almost nothing; this concludes the woman was an illegal immigrant from South America.

With the help of her Nevadan wife Amy Dunwall, she was brought to a nearby medical center, which was only a three kilometers away from their house. A few hours prior to her diagnosis, Ms. Dunwall noticed that she had an extremely high fever and was sweating profusely despite being put in an air-conditioned room. These weren’t all – to her horror, Ms. Dunwall noticed greenish-black spots all over her body and an inexplicable lump, possibly a tumor, between her breasts. There was also constant vomiting.

When she was diagnoses, after the doctor told the details about her “profoundly new” illness, something strange happened, which lie beyond any explanation.

Ms. Gonzales, as she listened to the doctor’s medical report, started to turn fearful and hysterical. Her eyes darted back and forth, and she sweated like a madman. Without any clarification and seemingly without anything to trigger this anomalous behavior, at all.

“She seems to be out of her mind…”

Much to Ms. Dunwall and the doctor’s surprise, Ms. Gonzales shot up from her seat and screamingly insisted them to stay away from her, or “you’ll be infected”. Her eyes were brimming with trepidation. Her body shook tremendously. Her mouth drooled, bubbles flowing out of her ghostly white lips, saliva raining down to the two people in front of her. Then out of the blue she demanded Ms. Dunwall for the car’s key.

“Miss Gonzales, please calm down.”

The doctor, with the aid of Ms. Dunwall, attempted to calm down Ms. Gonzales, telling her that “everything would be fine” if she would “not panic and cooperate with them and the other doctors.” Otherwise, Ms. Gonzales was unmoved and never gave the impression that she heard or listened to what they said. She kept on asking for the car’s key, looking afraid and desperate, with strings of tears running down her pale cheeks. The two tried, but at the end, their efforts weren’t worth it.

In a fit of shock and exasperation, Ms. Dunwall simply handed her wife the Sentra’s key. Gripping the keys tightly, Ms. Gonzales rushed out of the doctor’s office, not speaking a single word and not looking back. Sobbing terribly, she walked out of the empty medical center, went to the car, and drove away from the place.

Since that day, she was never found again.

A Californian policeman just walked into the spotlight. Interviewed by a CNN news anchor, standing still in front of the camera with a bandana over his face, the policeman said, “A Mexican-something woman came to me wielding a hunting knife, and asked me to shoot her…” The policeman, who was by-named “Mack”, then started to describe to appearance of the woman, which according to several viewers of the show, were “revolting and scary at the same time.”

As the sallow-faced anchor listened to the man whose identity was kept hidden from the public, Mack started to word the terror he as he came face-to-face with the odd, abnormal woman.

“Can you tell us how you felt when the woman walked to you carrying a knife?”

“I don’t know. I was sort of scared when I saw that woman. Who the hell would not? She had a faintly green skin, like those awful things you find in the movies, and she had black, rotten teeth and nails. I saw her eyes, and it was bloodshot…

“When I refused to shoot her, she threatened me. She said that… that if I don’t kill her, many people will die, and including me and my family. I had no idea what to do. I thought she was playing with me, that it was just an elaborate prank or that she was out of her mind. I wanted to laugh at her and ask her to stay away from me… I don’t understand her motives. Then after everything, she just ran away and went out of my sight. That was the last time I saw her.”

Soon after the incident, a rough sketch of the woman was broadcasted across the whole United States, along with the phone number of the local police station, as well as Mack’s personal phone number. For several days, not a finger was able to point out the woman’s identity. It had become a hopeless search. The police were about to call off the manhunt, until a woman arrived into the scene and told everyone that she knew “everything” about the mysterious woman.

Her name was Amy Dunwall; she claimed that she was the wife of this green-skinned woman. She affirmed in a phone call with Mack that the woman’s name was Esmeralda Gonzales, adding that she owned a rundown Nissan Sentra and ran away from home when she discovered her unknown illness. That was all she could share with the confused and daunted policeman as she dropped the call without even saying a goodbye.

The police, enlightened by the bit of information, decided to restart the search, bringing in Mack into one of the three search teams in his request. Whether they would find her or not, only fate would tell. One thing that Mack knew was: “it’s going to be a long day.”

It had been a long day for Matthew Hackel, and he could tell that since he never had any sleep after that disturbing encounter with, as he called it, “the green woman”. Today’s search had been fruitless, and it was to be expected; a senior police inspector, who happened to be one of the best in the California, once bragged that his men were “as efficient as a fucking high-end lawnmower”. To his eyes, they looked like a crowd of blind children looking for their toys that slipped out of their hands.

No one knew, and no one would. There could only be two reasons why they couldn’t find the green woman: it’s either the green woman had a doctorate in “ninjalogy” or the team he was brought into was just completely useless as this woman named Amy. It was saddening. He wanted to find the green woman and put her behind the cold bars for messing with a cop like him; and if it would ever happen, he’d love to see her being gangraped by a gang of corrupt police officers looking for some erotic fun. He wanted everything bad to happen to her, even death.

But that wasn’t he was thinking of.

He was thinking of that incident.

God, he would do anything just to rip that memory out of his mind.

That incident, although it wasn’t so obvious, traumatized him. Every now and then that woman’s face would knock into the doorway of his mind, and he couldn’t find a way to keep his doorway locked down. He tried to stay away from the door as far as he could, but he would just open it anyway, as if he was being controlled by an omniscient, invisible being. Of course, he didn’t like it, but whether he liked it or not, he was forced to bear the weight of the fear the green woman gave him on his shoulders.

His body sprawled across the couch, his weakened arms dangling over the edge, he closed his eyes and once again, he sought to sail to the dreamland. This time, he drank sleeping pills, and it seemed like it was taking effect.

The Source

Frederick was still fazed by the horrifying discovery he made while walking through the forest. He was so shocked that he couldn’t even put his utter terror into understandable words. There’s no denying it: he’d seen something he wasn’t supposed to see. And for sure, the menacing image would forever burn in his mind.

Lying on his shabby bed, he stared at the ceiling, perfectly still, trying to void his mind of everything. He wanted the bad things gone, he only wanted to the good ones. He thought about the good things that happened throughout his goddamn life. He’d completed his 200-page thesis, which, quite certainly for him, would receive high marks. A high-paying work as an art director for a game developing company was just sitting at the corner, waiting for him to graduate. Only a few months away and he’d have that rolled piece of paper in his hands. These reminded of something: ‘‘those bad days are now gone.’’ It was worth the wait.

Yeah, he should be cruising around the red light district with his friends by now, flirting up with young, underage lassies and blowing all his greens to booze and bitches like a reverse vacuum cleaner, generally wasting his whole damn life to everything he deemed pleasurable. He’s known to get really naughty…

Then three hours ago, the eager anticipation suddenly turned into a horror so bone-chilling it was nearly unimaginable. He was a real man, for sure, but when he saw that grotesque, bloody thing lying on the scarlet patches of grass, that manliness of him crumbled down like an old ceramic statue. His inner girl would scream and fall ill ever she conjured the nightmarish image of that thing. Nothing in his life had ever made him feel this terrified...

Shifting on his bed, he buried his face into the pillow and put his hands at the back of his head. Then as loud as his throat could manage he screamed, with the noise muffled by the pillow. No one would hear him anyway, but the pain at the back of his head was so damn extreme he was certain he’d scream louder than he should. It was killing him. The first thing he wanted to do was to end this whole damn mess.

After what felt like an eternity, he pulled himself over and sat up beside his bed. A mirror stood just a few steps in front of him, and he couldn’t see anything of interest aside of his bloodshot eyes and sweat-covered face.

I don’t look so healthy, he told himself the fact that could’ve looked so obvious.

He glanced at his cheap Casio watch, and found out it was 9:37 in the evening. Midnight was approaching, but the glaring light, which flowed through the blinds of his room’s windows, made him wonder if he’d ever see the moon again. It didn’t seem likely, considering the scientific roots of this outlandish catastrophe (you can hardly – if not “never” – disprove science), but as his dead mother told him when he was a child, “hope will never die no matter how hard you try to kill it.”

It was damn hot.

And the word “hot”, as Frederick defined it, was “hell broken loose”. Hell came to planet Earth, and boy, he’d give away anything, even his own bank account, just to send it back to the abominable place where it came from.

The forest was everyone’s heaven, although it might not be so obvious with these leafless trees and dried-out bushes. But hey, at least they could still be used despite their grave condition. These dead trees projected the shadows, which helped everyone hide from this haunting, cancerous heat. They’re not as efficient as they were before The Damnation happened, but even if it’s cut out of its leaves, they still provide the “chill” he’d been desperate off one’s rocker for. The irony was there for everyone to see…

Fred looked around him as he continued to stroke himself, his hands sweltering and his body heating up. He could barely see something worth of his curiosity; at least nothing in particular. He looked ahead of him: dead trees and withered bushes. If these wasted things did magic tricks, he could’ve kept his eyes on them...

They didn’t.

He looked at his left: a few more trees and cabins that stood several meters away from his “resting spot” – the cabins, without any doubts – were unoccupied for a seemingly long time. Chipping yellow paint, dusty woodwork, shattered windows, missing doors… it told a story.

Not much of a big problem, he thought. At best he knew that no voyeuristic eyes were peeping at him secretly (?). He could touch himself with absolute intimacy and get away with it without a pair of manic eyeballs finding him.

He looked at his right: that’s when he noticed an odd, black figure from the distance. Fred couldn’t make up any details, as it was too far away for him to see. It’s either a pile of trash bags or a burnt dead body – he like to think of these twisted things. But from this vantage point, he wouldn’t be able to see it clearly – trees are not so known to provide a sharp insight of… things.

But as it had always been, his stroking was above everything else. It was top priority, and Fred took his time to accomplish that. The entire messy, sticky thing took him about two more minutes to finish, and when he came, he quickly wiped himself with the Kleenex tissues he’d brought with him and pulled his shorts up. Sweating like a mad man, he headed for the mysterious figure, which lie only a few meters due north.

Then the smell hit him, like a ton of bricks.

Fred coughed and gagged when the vicious stench rushed into his nostrils and filled his lungs. Far different from the kind of ordeal he’d expected for. The foul odor smelled vaguely familiar – the stench of rotting flesh fused with the sniff of dried blood. It was “vaguely” familiar. He’d been accustomed to this smell since he was a kid, when his father enjoyed his last glory days kidnapping young boys and raping them and murdering them after. But this… there’s something off about it. Something’s not right…

Uneasiness grew in him.

Curiosity’s not going to kill the cat again, he reminded himself.

As he closed in, striding past dead trees and crouching under spiny branches, the smell grew stronger and wilder. The black figure revealed its true color bit by bit.

God, if he could describe the smell, he’d say it was like “dog carcass mixed with piss and blood”. It seemed to be completely appalling by just the sound of it, what more if…

Fred cleared his mind of these nasty things. Albeit a trash bag or a burnt dead body, he didn’t care, and he needed to find out. A hand up to his nose and mouth, he advanced, an unexplainable fear brewing in him. ‘‘Curiosity’s not going to kill the cat,’’ he chanted… When he came close to it, he found out it was neither a pile of trash bags nor a burnt dead body.

It was something far worse than the both.

Help us…

We’re dying…

Like a desert…

Fire everywhere…

Buildings collapsed…

Government has fallen…

Military weakening…

Humanity gone…

Hope gone…

They’re killing us…

We can’t escape them…

Death is inevitable…

We will be torn apart by their hands…

Monsters everywhere…

Black skin…

Red eyes…

Sharp claws…

Jagged teeth…

HELP!’’

Matthew sat up on his couch, feeling the searing heat of his newly-brewed coffee crawl up to his hands and arms. The pungent aroma of fresh caffeine aroused his soul, and with every sip of the hot drink, he could feel his senses invigorate. The low mood he was suffering from gradually receded, and with every second the bad spirit in him died away. The coffee sure woke him up… was it?

Gazing at the living room window with blank, lifeless eyes, he pondered about the horrifying nightmare he had… It was approaching insanity… it was almost unbelievable. Perplexing, he might describe it. Everything had gone by in such a hasty blur, as if he was riding a speeding car, which was driving down a hundred-mile straight road in full throttle, but it all seemed so clear… so ominous… so real. He couldn’t tell if those were just manifestations of his corrupted mind or if those were the actual reality, but he didn’t intend to find out. Perhaps knowing about the truth would just do more harm than good.

He could hear these strange, harsh voices crying out at him. They were telling something he could hardly comprehend – they were begging for help. They said they wanted to be save from these so-called “monsters”, of which he had no idea what. But hell, although the word was a huge cliché, it actually sounded threatening to him. Along with those peculiar cries, he also heard rapid gunshots, deafening explosions, squelching sounds of blood and guts being ripped apart, sharp crunches of bones being shattered and crushed, and several other nasty noises he had thought he would never, ever hear in his living life.

Among those noises, one stood up. That sound was the only one prominent and distinct, and it was most likely the one that sent shivers down to his spine.

He heard shrill, high-pitched shrieks.

Those were the sounds that truly terrified him. One could easily compare the awful sound to the squeaking screeches of a frightened dog, but this… this had a breath of malevolence in it; an evil so obscure and mysterious. Was once an impossibility, but suddenly came true. Those shrieks were like high-pitched roars! Matthew couldn’t see it or smell it, but he could hear it, and most of all, he could feel it – the sensation was hair-raisingly dreadful.

And, Jesus Christ, it was only the half of the whole damned thing.

Despite being only a distorted memory inside his head, he was certain he could recall of every inch of detail of the nightmare he had. The scene was maddening. People ran away in a fit of panic, trying to get out of the place like rats scurrying out of a sinking ship. Soldiers, tanks and countless heavy artillery were everywhere in his peripheral vision, and were moving around the area in a rush, trying to fight those – as he concluded - “monsters” that was obviously causing severe harm. The battleground was as desolate as a dystopian city in a post-apocalyptic novel; buildings torn down to debris, cars flipped over and set on fire, mangled corpses of unfortunate people bathing in their own blood, sprinkled throughout the blood-stained road and pavement like cheese in a pizza… he had seen more than his stomach could withstand.

Along with those nightmarish imageries, there was something else that caught his attention. It was the “monsters”, and to his shock, they conjured an image far devilish than any monstrosity humanity had ever encountered.

Now he knows where those shrieks came from.

The form of their bodies were somehow similar to human’s, but he knew these creatures were ‘‘never’’ humans. They could never be any human being, not a chance of being former human beings, neither. These creatures were tall, approaching seven feet when stood erected (though they looked smaller due to their hobbled posture), they wore a black, rotting skin that seemed as if it was burnt to a crisp, and they sported long crimson claws that awkwardly protruded out of their elongated, slim fingers. But their ruby, round eyes and jagged, corroded teeth were the ones that totally appalled him… their general appearance might have appeared incredible to monster aficionados and comic geek folks alike, but to a normal person like him, it was vile and heinous and repulsive and… everything.

There was about thousands of them – a whole damned army of wicked freaks – and they were literally all over the place. Jumping from roof to roof, leaping over burning cars and huge piles of debris, crawling on the ground, hanging on electric posts, and the list goes on… They attacked any living being that stood in their field of vision with extreme brutality; most only had their necks bitten off, but those ill-fated ones had their limbs and heads torn completely off their bodies, and taking the brutality to the extreme, some had their bodies ripped in half… The soldiers and their advanced counteroffensive machinery, thankfully, were there to ward off these abominations from hell. But they were clearly struggling to fight. Some of the freaks were killed, but the military’s death rate had been climbing up to critical levels too quickly. It wasn’t explicitly shown, but even without visual knowledge, he knew it clear. Their efforts were simply not enough to stop the growing chaos from growing even more. No one stood a chance of putting an end to this anarchy.

Humanity was overwhelmed.

Humanity was bound to destruction.

What does that mean? Matthew wondered as he sipped his coffee, which had already gone cold without him noticing. It tasted cold and bitter, but he still emptied the cup to wake himself up from his dream-like stance. He wanted to believe it meant nothing – that it’s just the twisted side of his mind playing cruel deceits on him. Au contraire, something told him… that was the reality. Even he himself couldn’t make up something out of it; out of the blue, he just had this terrible thought that the “dream” wasn’t actually a dream.

Maybe those things were really happening.

Ridiculous.

Setting aside the glass mug, he threw his legs above the coffee table and reached for the television remote control with his other hand. Turning it on, the television displayed nothing but static, which meant that the antenna needed some fixing. “Fuck it,” he murmured to his disappointed self as he pressed the red button hard with a stiff thumb, leaving the place once again in an eerie, haunting silence.

Oh man, what a life, he thought to himself, realizing today was going to be a really long day.

Not any kind of encouragement – even the honest ones – could pull Esmeralda out of her depression. Her morale had run out to dangerous amounts.

She was going to die.

It was not the illness that was slowly killing her; it was the utter sadness and her desperation for a quick and painless death. Death now meant everything to her – it meant saving hundreds of thousands of lives, it meant letting our Mother Earth escape a devastating catastrophe, and what mattered most, it meant saving her Amy’s life. After she learnt about the disease, all she yearned and pleaded for was the Reaper’s cold embrace of death. Living a peaceful life had become an impossible dream; reality set in so quickly she could barely register it in her mind. She was as desolate as a prisoner, and was about to live a miserable life for the rest of eternity.

She didn’t want that to happen, and the only way to avert her fate was to end her own life.

I think that's all I can provide by now. Don't worry, I'll post the finished ones later. Hoping for your critiques and suggestions, mates! 