Pellistair - Chapter 1

I've decided to post my first NaNoWriMo book, chapter by chapter. It's very bad, at the moment, have had almost no editing done on it. So please keep that in mind, when you read it.
The name of the book, at the moment, is Pellistair, for lack of a better title. If you think of a better title, please tell me!

Pellistair

By Kristin Emery



Chapter One

Maria woke up in a hospital bed, with a nurse dressed like a cat standing next to her bed. On closer inspection, Maria realized that the nurse was a cat. This cat, however, was displaying some remarkably human behaviors, like standing on two legs, and wearing loose green clothing.

Maria decided she must be hallucinating. It was the only explanation.

The cat looked up. “Oh, so you’re finally awake. That bump on your head was so large, I was afraid it might have caused some serious damage. How are you feeling?”.

Maria stared at the cat, willing it to go away. It didn’t. Instead, it blinked at her expectantly. “Ummm, my head hurts, and I’m hungry," Maria finally said, undone by the cats stare.

“Well, after crashing in your space craft, it’s natural that your head would hurt. It’s a good sign that you’re hungry” the cat said approvingly. “I’ll go get you some food.”

As the cat walked away, Maria closed her eyes and tried to figure things out. The last thing she remembered was being with Robert in the spaceship, with the lights all over the dashboard going crazy and the sight of a strange looking planet with purple clouds out the window. Was she on that planet now? And was Robert all right?

Robert. She was concerned about him. On Earth, people were getting all riled up about how “pure” peoples' looks were. It didn’t matter what sort of looks you had, they just had to be definitely one thing or another. For her, it was fine. She came from a long line of Vietnamese families, so she didn’t have any problems. Robert, however, had a father from Egypt and a mother from Norway, and definitely looked like a mix of nations.

The area where they lived was one of the more tolerant areas, but she could still tell that people had been nasty to him. Around her, nothing happened, but she had the sneaking suspicion that when she wasn’t around, people made nasty comments, or ignored him. He had been getting increasingly depressed, until she had suggested that they go and take the second hand spaceship they’d both bought for their seventeenth birthdays for a ride. They had spent the last six months fixing it up, until it wasn’t half bad. She thought a road trip was just what he needed

She had arranged for one of the spaceferries to take them out past the confines of the solar system. They had both been to or seen all of the planets in the solar system, so she wanted something new to look at.

Unfortunately, the chart they had bought of the region of space they were dropped off in was extremely confusing. Neither of them was able to read it, and they had gotten lost. The ship had a built in memory, so they could have found their way back to the ferry pick-up spot, but something had started to go wrong with the ship. They veered way off course, and eventually the engine failed. She assumed that they’d ended up here.

The cat came back, with a bowl of steaming porridge. At least, it looked like porridge. Porridge wasn’t generally orange with yellow and green bits in it, though, was it? As the cat set the bowl of porridge in front of her, Maria looked at it doubtfully.

“Don’t worry,” the cat said. “It won’t hurt you. In fact, it’ll help your head stop hurting.” Maria got the impression it was laughing at her softly behind its whiskers.

Reluctantly, Maria took the spoon and started to eat it. To her surprise, it was pretty good. Rather like vegetable soup and bread together.

As she ate, she took the opportunity to examine her nurse. The nurse had gray fur, and a white chin, with two black stripes on its cheeks. Its eyes were yellow, and it sat and stared at her unblinkingly .

When she finished, the cat took her bowl, and asked, “How are you feeling now?”.

“Better” Maria answered, glad that the throbbing in her head had turned into a minor twinge.

“Do you feel better enough to go see your friend?”, the cat asked, tipping its head to one side curiously.

“Do you mean Robert? Definitely!” Maria said, jumping out of bed. A minute later, she regretted doing that. Her head hurt more now.

The cat made a mysterious hissing sound, rather like it was clucking its teeth. “Careful, now. Here, let me help you down the corridor.”

As they headed down the corridor, Maria realized that she had been so hungry, and so concerned about Robert, that she had forgotten to wonder where she was, or why she had a cat attending her. She looked hesitantly at the cat, wondering if it were male or female, and how come it knew English.

The cat, sensing her stare, turned its head to smile at her. This was a strangely disturbing sight, since its teeth were much pointer than any humans.

“How careless of me. I forgot to introduce myself. My name is Ishka, and I’m a Pallas’s cat. Also, I’m a girl, in case you were wondering”, Ishka added, grinning wider. Maria again got the feeling that Ishka was laughing at her.

They stopped outside a door. Going through it, they were met with a sunny room, with a large bed at the end of it. There were several other nurses surrounding the bed, but Maria paid more attention to what was in the bed than to the other nurses.

“Robert!” She cried, running towards the bed. She stopped in horror when Robert turned to face her. Instead of his normal light brown complexion, his face was covered with green scales.

He stared at her ruefully, and said, “I think they have some explaining to do,”, gesturing at the nurses.


Ishka stared in amusement at the two humans. At least she supposed they were humans. Only a few off worlders had visited Pellistair, and she had never met any of them. From what she had read in the computer, after the two of them had crash landed, she supposed they looked more or less human.

She tried to feel sorry, or at least concerned, for the two of them, but couldn’t manage to. It was all too amusing to take seriously. She had often been reprimanded for her inability to take things seriously, and her lack of sympathy towards other people. Still, she knew what she was doing, and she made a good nurse, so they couldn’t get rid of her.

However, she didn’t know quite what to do in this case. The few instances of off worlders crashing had happened far away from the hospital, towards the more populated cities, not the little town she lived in. She had read up on the few cases of crashes in the computer while her patient was asleep, and she had sent a message to the nearest city to ask for someone with experience in these matters to come out here. However, she didn’t know when he’d arrive. Until then, she had to do the best she could.

Ishka stepped forward. “Would you two like an explanation?” She hoped she could give them one.


“Would you like an explanation?” The cat who had come in with Maria asked. Robert nodded, his face grim. He had enough problems at home, without having to worry about being stranded on some alien planet with scales all over his face. He hoped there was something he could do about that.

The cat sighed. It seemed a bit reluctant to begin. “You are on a world called Pellistair. All of the inhabitants of Pellistair look like us,” it said, sweeping its paw around to include all of the nurses. One was a mouse, another a wombat, and the last a ring tailed lemur. “We’ve lived here for centuries without any contact with people beyond our world. Then, twenty years ago, a spaceship, much like yours, crashed here. We managed to save the man who was in it. We modified our translating devices,” here it fingered a small black thing hanging around its neck, attached to both its ears (Robert had noticed that both he and Maria were wearing similar devices) “ so that we were able to talk to him. He came from the same world as you, and was anxious to get back. Unfortunately, his ship was too damaged for us to fix.”

The cat trailed off. “What happened to him?” Maria asked, curiously. “Did he ever get back to his home?”

“No, he didn’t” said a voice from the door. Maria and Robert turned to see a light green gecko with white hair standing in the doorway.

“How do you know?”, Robert asked, suspiciously.

“Because I’m him” the gecko said, walking into the room.


Maria and Robert stared at the gecko. “But.. You’re a gecko, not a human”, Maria said hesitantly, not wanting to hurt his feelings.

The gecko smiled tiredly. “Yes, I’m a gecko now, but I was a human when I arrived here. You see, all the people here resemble animals, as you’ve seen. That alone is very interesting, but the most interesting thing is, we humans start to look like animals after awhile. Each human takes a different amount of time to complete the change. I took about a year, and it seems that you”, he gestured towards Robert “take even less time. Other than changes in appearance, and some changes in the things your body is able to do, you’ll remain pretty much the same as you were before you came here.”

“Is there any way to reverse the effect?” Robert interrupted.

The gecko shook his head grimly. “Not that I’ve been able to find.”

“What if we leave? Then what would happen?” Maria asked.

The gecko turned to her. “No one’s been able to leave. All the spaceships that crashed here were damaged beyond repair, and Pellistair has no space ships. Even if they did, I’m not sure anyone would be able to find their way back to Earth.”

Outside, a gong sounded. The gecko looked out the window and sighed. “I must be going. I’ll leave some papers about Pellistair for you to read, and I’ll try to come back soon.” He put down a briefcase like thing he had been carrying, unsticking his fingers from the handle. He had a brief conversation with Ishka, and then he was gone.

Maria frowned, suddenly.

“What’s wrong?” Robert asked.

“He never told us his name” Maria said. “And he looked so worn out…”


Maria and Robert spent the rest of the day looking at the papers the gecko had left for them. The nurses left them to themselves, except to give them water and food occasionally. They seemed to understand that Maria and Robert needed to be left alone.

Maria found the papers fascinating. The translating devices that Ishka had talked about had been designed so that the different species could talk to each other. Since the avians vocal cords were very different from the reptiles, and the reptiles vocal cords were different than the mammals, they couldn’t just come up with one global language. So they had designed translating devices, that translated what you heard into your own language. They had taken almost a hundred years to perfect the devices, and make them available to everyone.

She also found out that every species that was found on earth was to be found on Pellistair, and even some that weren’t. All of the species that were extinct on earth was also found here, although there weren’t very many dinosaurs.

“I think,” Maria announced, “that if I’m going to turn into an animal, I want to turn into a gecko. Then I can hang on the bottoms of ceilings and scare people.”

Robert laughed, more freely than Maria had heard him laugh in months. She looked at him speculatively.

Robert noticed her looking at him. “What?” He asked, curiously.

“Oh, it’s nothing”, Maria said, rubbing her chin. “Only even with the fact that we’re crash landed on some planet far away from home, with maybe no hope of getting back, and you’re turning into a lizard, you seem more relaxed than you have in months.”

“You’re right”, Robert mused, looking thoughtful. Then his eyes widened. “I know why it is”, he said. “It’s because no one has looked at me funny, or made any comments on my skin color, even when I started turning scaly.”


I cringe, every time I read that. It definitely needs editing.

Amadeus reviews

I've been doing some freewriting lately, for the Essay writing book I'm working from. I realized today that some of those freewrites would make interesting blog posts, so I decided to post some of them. However, these are freewrites, so there's not any coherent train of thought that runs through all of them, and they don't really have conclusions.

This freewrite was supposed to be on the different styles of movie reviews, and what sorts of writing tools they use to get their point across. I chose reviews of Amadeus to read for this, which means that in the freewrite, I kept getting distracted by the film, and forgetting that I was supposed to be writing on the reviews.

There's spoilers in here, so if you haven't seen the movie, don't read.

"Many reviews (more than I would have thought) seem to think that Mozart is portrayed as some kind of rock star. Their arguments for this are that he pushes the boundaries of what’s acceptable in music and in conversation, constantly. This is sometimes thought to be one of the only redeemable, grown-up traits about Mozart, is his odd dedication to pushing the boundaries of speech and music, even if he does do so obscenely, most of the time. They also cite his rock star wigs and bizarre coats as references to rock stars. The director is also fond of stories of outsiders, like Hair or One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, so many think that he turned Mozart into an outsider who doesn’t fit into the norms of society. Mozart’s fondness of drinking and partying, and the way he stays up at all hours, is also used in the rock star allegory.
Most of the reviews, even the disfavorable ones, seem to approve of the way music is used during the movies. In most movies, music is just used to underline the emotions that are taking place. In Amadeus, the music is used on many, many layers. It is used to show Mozart’s writing process, near the end of the film, as he dictates to Salieri, it is used to show the Aristocracy’s views on music, when the Emperor says the music has too many notes, and when someone complains that there’s no suitable bang at the end of songs, so you never know when to clap. Music is used to show the differences between Salieri’s music and Mozart’s, where Salieri’s is very good, but nowhere near the same level as Mozart’s. The excess of Venetian society in the late 1700’s is shown through music, at Operas, balls, and parties, even hairdressers. There are many scenes in which there is no dialogue at all, there is just Mozart’s music. Many scenes featuring characters walking through the streets, or the countryside, have only music, not even including the sounds you would hear on the streets. Mozart’s burial in a pauper’s grave is backed up by music, as well.
The thing that made all the reviews interesting to read was the way they all viewed the movie as something different. Some viewed it is as the tale of a misunderstood rock star, some viewed is as a tale of envy and betrayal, some viewed it as a conspiracy theory film, some viewed it as an entertaining film about Mozart’s life. Almost everyone liked it, which would’ve normally made all the reviews boring to read, but since they all had a different take on it, they were still fascinating to read. Even those who didn’t like the film grudgingly agreed that the use of music in the film is exceptional, the sets and costumes are fantastic, and that J.J Abrams performance is wonderful. The things that were generally disliked were Tom Hulces performance, and the actress who played Constanze (I agree with that one). Some also thought the film was to labored and overdone, and over thought.
However, even the bad reviews would’ve made me want to see the movie, if I hadn’t already seen it. All the reviews managed to convey the grand and sweeping style of the film, and the gorgeousness of all the visuals. They also all convey the treachery and plots of the movie, the secrecy and underhanded maneuvers Salieri uses to bring down Mozart.
All the reviews were thoughtful, taking such things into account when they were writing such as directing, the fact that it is an adaptation from a stage play, the film being cast with unknown American actors, instead of well known British actors, the decision to film the whole film in natural light, and many other things."

The reviews comparing Mozart to a rock star can be found here and here, if you're interested in reading them.