Excerpt #2 - a scene revisited

Hello everyone!

Yesterday I posted my 2 starter pages, of which I am very proud. Now, the real beginning of the novel takes place with the same scene from the point of view of Askata, the female victim.

This is an attempt to fully immerse my writing within one of the core principles of good fiction as explained by Will Greenway on his website: stories must be told from character point of views, and not statically as observed by a distant, all-knowing God or alien researcher. This has two purposes. The first is to fully immerse the reader in the story by making him feel part of the story as told by the character, and the other is to maintain some level of mystery by not divulging too much information that is unattainable by the Point of View character at the time.

I have tried, as much as possible, to play the same scene, as seen (and as would be retold) by Askata instead. Switching to a female point of view was pretty hard, and required a lot of work (significantly limiting my words-per-hour count), but I think the result is quite nice, and really not all that repetitive, despite the fact that it really is the same scene.

I would appreciate comments on this multiple point of view idea, which I intend to use quite a bit in my novel, and also on the female point of view, for anyone willing to help me make Askata a real woman, and not basically a man with breasts.

Here is the excerpt:

*********************

Askata felt her head lighten as her stomach gargled. Her bother Zueles had taken her whole meat ration for three days in a row, as he needed the energy for work more than she did, but she had not felt well in the morning either, so she had passed on breakfast also.

As she dragged her feet towards the butcher's stand in the 7^th market tunnel, she could only think about getting to her job and hopefully grabbing something to eat while her boss looked away. She barely heard the recriminations of the men as she crossed a crowd heckling some Union representative, and the smell of coal stiffening in the air did not deter her appetite, inappropriate as it may be.

Finally, after minutes of hustling through the crowd, she reached the other side, perhaps a little more light-headed than when she came in. She felt at this point where the feeling drove almost to a sense of happiness, where all the worries of the world scurried away, released from the sight of the human mind, as the stomach – or hunger, I should say – sat at the wheel and held tight. Things couldn't really be bad anymore. There was food to be had, shortly.

After leaving the protest, she barely had the time to cough up some of the workers' coal that had blocked her nose canals when a hand grasped her shoulder and forced her around.

Now in front of her was a man towering over 6 feet tall, sten black eyes looking down on her and a savage grin manifesting slightly towards the edges of his lips. He said something unintelligible as he looked down on her like he would a dead rat, a “tressaillement” of his mouth and cheeks showing his scorn unabated.

After a few seconds of silence, the chest of the man rose even more, clearly emphasizing his police badge, as he asked for her papers, mentioning something about the protest in passing.

Askata then looked towards the crowd, wondering how she came to pass as one of them, but saw only workers focused towards the front, uncaring or unaware of her plight. Slowly, her trembling pale hand reached for her Union Membership Card in her pants' left pocket. She was so nervous her hand was holding tight on the card as she brought it towards him, so he had to frustratingly snipe it from her hands. He was not going to like that.

It took less than a second for him to flung the card in her face. She tried to catch it as a reflex, and that is when the punches came in. The policeman threw 2, maybe 3 punches at her, and then she was on the floor, defenceless. The crowd was silent now – or was it her hearing that had gone – but the stillness in the air was left undisturbed. The workers did not move an inch. The man had her all to himself, and he had a crowd watching.

She could hear him breathing through his nose, and his grin had widened to what she would have called a smile under different circumstances. His gaze ran over her like a driver checking out a roadkill rat. His toe-steeled boot pressed hard against her stomach, and she had to repress her puking instinct. His face then lowered, and with lips almost closed he whispered:

–                    Do you like fireworks, little girl?

At that moment, the policeman took out a match in one hand and, with the other, pulled a string of small rods that reminded Askata of her brother's stock of miniature dynamite bars he used for his controlled mine expansions and demolitions.

She felt her arms and legs clumsily try to grab onto his leg more than she willed them to do so, but it was too little to late. With a smoker's gesture he lit the match and set the string on fire, then dropped the –

It burned! The firecrackers had landed on her torso and burst there, stinging her skin through her blouse and setting it on fire. The flames subsided right away and then she felt the air against her skin on many places and he was glaring at her now and no one else moved and he was going to see her body and he was getting lustful and nobody was stopping him and he was going to take her and nobody would mind and...

The thoughts flowed in Askata's mind faster than she could grasp them, and she could already see him, a savage beast like those of the tales outside where monsters of fur with the teeth of giants captured children and women and brought them in their caves for meals or worse. His eyes glowed an eery violet as strokes like the blue electricity jolts of a damaged bioarm danced around him.

Suddenly the feeling of sickness on her stomach left, and the pressure was released. Knowing not how she managed, Askata stumbled onto her feet and dragged away, the voices behind her booming as in a Game of Echoes gone wrong. The flashes of the fireworks still imprinted in her eyes, she struggled to find her way, the caves appearing ever larger until she reached the point where she could no longer walk upright.

Her vision began clearing a bit, and despite a massive headache, she tried to stop, calm down, and figure out what was going on.

Minutes passed. She was in a large cave. She faintly saw forms around her. They had to be people. The shadows she saw she tossed aside, for those people did not seem real, and their diffuse voice was devoid of life and meaning, like the promises of a pestering demon whispering in your hear in its language, a confusing set of whispers holding meaning only to the mad and prophets.

Behind those shadows of men was a waterfall, crystal clear in its beauty. As her headache turned into a migraine in an instant, she saw the water flow backwards, rushing from the ground towards its source in the ceiling. Within the clamour of the million of water droplets was a chant, so faint she could not make up the words.

The world had stopped making sense. Askata shut her eyes, and the visions subsided, the chant disappeared, and now she heard only the rush of running water through steel pipes, and her pounding heartbeat, inundating the voices of people who sounded gathered around her, gasping in shock at the sight of a pitiful mad woman, a victim of the contaminated waters from the Gamlors mines, surely. It took even a minute for her to realize she was that woman, and as she attempted a protest, her garbled words mixed up with the migraine taking over again, and when she opened her eyes anew, a terrifying creature, a strange white beast was shooting up towards her, 2 membranes made of feathers stretching on its sides in a manner that brought it aloft, 2 paws that resembled an vice cruelly stretching out to grasp at her, and a hard nose longer than any she'd imagined poised to strike, with its head stretched backwards as a snake ready to bite.

Askata's scream was lost in a rumbling noise reaching through a crescendo a volume that crushed everything else, and as the ground begun shaking, Askata fell to the floor and all fell still.

***

The following scene happens when Askata wakes up in the hospital.

NANoWriMo novel - the first two pages

Laifer cringed whenever his men hit their batons on their police shields. He knew intimidation was the appropriate method to assert crowd control, but mishandling the situation could result in a trample over his men. He could not allow for that. He sought furiously for a means to break the crowd, and then it hit him: there was a woman among the workers!

The tall, gaunt man speaking for the Agricultural Division of the Heimlein Labor Union had by now fully lost control of the situation. Laifer tried to ignore the recrimination yells that drowned out his hesitant excuses for the food rationing he had announced, as the man's lowered head was all but calling for a charge from the miners standing less than a hundred feet from his pedestal. The yells of the crowd reverberated throughout the cave walls and ceiling, increasing its intensity tenfold.

Turning a blank stare and avoiding the frowning gaze of the workers, Laifer passed through the right part of the line formed by his Coal and Iron Police force. The technique was dangerous, but as the protesters' eyes started to turn towards him, and grips on mining picks seemed to tighten, the Union representative made up a “limitation of our ability to provide cooked food due to a lowering of coal production in the mines during the previous quarters”. Really! These men mined so much coal just their smell was flammable!
At least the speech focused all attention back to that idiot up in front. It also started a wave of calls for his blood. Now where was that damned woman? Time was pressing!

The Police Manager's heart almost stopped when he crossed the crowd completely, thinking he had lost her. Just for a moment his blank stare was very real, until the movement just ahead caught his eye. The woman had crossed the crowd just as he had: she was not part of the indulgent, but she would have to do anyway.
A few feet away from the crowd he caught up with her. His gait suddenly changed, his back straight as a wall and his head bent to tower over the woman's miniature frame. He was almost on her when he hailed her.

– Hey!
– Y-yes? The girl turned around, her breath “haletant” from the surprise.
Laifer's eyes got hold not only on her youth, but also noticed her chest for a second. She looked like his kind of woman. Damn it! He'd have to be careful not to let his gaze stray.
– This is an illegal protest. Show me your papers!
– H... huh... wha... The woman stuttered, looking left towards the assembled protesters.
The police manager bent his head a little more, fixing her with a gaze from the top of her eyes. A rictus started forming in his visage.
– I said your papers!

The woman's lean shoulders lowered a bit more as she took her Union membership card from her left pocket and presented it to the scary man. Her head was still timidly looking left and right.

The card was in as poor a shape as any worker out there, really, but the red stains looked like dried blood. Laifer had to focus for a second just to read “butcher assistant” on the half-erased card.

– Participation in an illegal manifestation and destruction of Union Property! (he displayed the card high, catching more attention from the crowd, then looked at it again). Askata Suna, you are under arrest!

Now was a delicate moment. Laifer had to keep the crowd always in his peripheral vision, make sure they were watching, but not advancing on him. Just one direct look could provoke them into a frenzy.
He then threw the girl's card back at her. She raised her arms in fright, as he expected.

– You wanna have a fight!?!

The police manager's left hand took Askata by the throat, threw a jab right to her forehead. As she raised her hands higher to protect herself, he got an uppercut directly to her chin, throwing her on her back.
His grin by now was a manic smile, the kind you read in tales to frighten children. He moved around Askata and noted that the crowd had turned silent and watching. The girl still lay on the floor, almost motionless, her tears the only sign of movement and her gray eyes wide open in disbelief.

Laifer then placed his left foot on his victim's stomach, slowly, almost gently, enjoying the soft feeling of her belly under his steel toe boot. She had become limp now. He took a moment to appreciate her body, then bent over to her

– Do you like fireworks, little girl?

As he pronounced these words, he pulled on a string from his belt and drew out an ensemble of firecrackers. He was gleaming now, or so it seemed, as he lit the end of the string and lowered it to her face. When the first firecracker burst, flames sprouted from it, burning her forehead and left cheek. Then he dropped the rest on her chest, the explosions blackening her work uniform and tearing holes through it, the sent of fire expanding in the cave. She was a screaming mess then, waving her arms up and down like the puppet of a mad puppeteer.

Suddenly he let his foot off of her, and Askata tumbled out of the way, struggled to get up, and ran out crying like a dog that's been kicked.

Laifer, Manager of the Coal and Iron Police's 7th district, stood up tall, ignoring the girl now, catching a whole crowd in a staredown he just knew he would win. The fear of fire was written on their gruff faces, their eyes a little wider then before, the smell of smoke just now reaching their noses, and the silence of the men speaking for itself.

There would not be an outbreak of violence now.

No one, absolutely no one, threatened Laifer's men.