Kyra watched intently as the knight seated herself in the opposing booth, the only empty seat in the otherwise packed tavern. She pulled her helmet from her head, short black hair spilling out and framing her sharp features.
“So,” a serious look washed over the imposing knight’s face. “Who are you?” Her chin tilted upward as her hard brown eyes studied Kyra up and down.
Kyra hardly ever found herself tongue-tied, but her smooth-talking streak had to end sometime.
“K- Kyra,” she finally managed. “I’m a messenger from a nearby kingdom. I have urgent news regarding your Queen.”
It was a good first chapter, Ava thought to herself. It was concise and to the point, and it ended on a cliffhanger, an excellent hook to keep readers engaged. Ava couldn’t help but notice how much detail Moore had put into the environment. Moore typically engaged with people and their interactions rather than going into specific details about the setting. Ava scrolled down to check the author's note at the bottom of the page.
Thanks for reading chapter one of The Messenger and Her Knight!!! I’m trying out something different with this one. Apologies if it’s a little rough around the edges, but a thought popped into my head and refused to leave until I got it out. I hope you enjoyed the beginning of the story! -SomeMooreOnTop
Ava smiled to herself. Moore was experimenting with writing styles and it read vastly different than normal. Moore’s writing was never bad, but it did come off as slightly scatterbrained at times, a testament to her first/final draft philosophy. In her own words, the difference between Moore’s first and final draft was “one read through and a spellchecker”. Ava never understood how she could leave her work so unedited, but Ava couldn’t argue with the sheer volume of words the woman could pump out. Moore tended to update three to four times a week, blowing Ava completely out of the water with her once-weekly upload schedule. She’d tried to keep up with Moore in the past but the quality of her work always suffered for it, not to mention how incorrect it felt to upload such raw writing. Ava pulled up her DM with Moore.
VaguelyPoetic: Hey, I read through the first chapter of your new story. So far so good!
VaguelyPoetic: Surprised to see you writing in third person.
SomeMooreOnTop: thanks! im excited for u to see where it goes
SomeMooreOnTop: writing in third person is weird
VaguelyPoetic: I’m sure you’ll get used to it. It reads well so far.
SomeMooreOnTop: that’s good to hear. i was worried that it was really obvious that im out of practice.
SomeMooreOnTop: and now i really need to check out your new story too. gotta return the favor for your feedback.
VaguelyPoetic: Don’t worry about it. I don’t talk about your stories exclusively so you will talk about mine.
SomeMooreOnTop: oh i know! but ive been meaning to read it. i just havent gotten around to it yet.
VaguelyPoetic: Okay. Just don’t stress about it if you can’t make time. It is pretty long.
VaguelyPoetic: Ah shit. My boss is coming, I should probably get some work done right now. Talk later.
As always, work was a slog. Ava certainly hadn’t dreamed of doing basic math all day every day when she was a child. Was being an accountant hard? No. Was it at all engaging or fulfilling? Also no, but Ava was good at it and it paid the bills, so she worked hard. It might not have been her dream job (who even knew what their “dream job” was anyway?) but she had it good enough.
As it did every day, the clock eventually ticked over to 5:00 and Ava clocked out for the day. She packed up her things and waited for her ride outside the building.. Ava had noticed the rain from inside the office, but she hadn’t realized how hard it was coming down. Heavy sheets of rain poured down from the sky, but Ava stayed mostly dry thanks to the cover overhead.
After nearly fifteen minutes, the telltale sputtering of Paige’s beat-up and faded yellow car grew louder until it finally rounded the corner and slowed to a stop in front of Ava.
The window slowly rolled down as Paige manually cranked it open. “Get in loser, we’re going shopping,”
Ava cocked an eyebrow. “Shopping?” She asked. “Guess this is the wrong Uber.”
“Alright, you caught me.” Paige grinned. “Hop in, we’re gonna be late.”
Ava popped open the passenger door and took a seat inside the car.
“Sorry,” Paige apologized. “About being late. My last delivery ran way longer than it should have. Dude would not sign for the package. He was convinced that I was trying to steal his signature or identity or whatever.” Paige scoffed and rolled her eyes.
“It’s no problem,” Ava reassured as she buckled herself in. “Let’s just try not to be any later than we already are”
“As you wish, ma’am.” Ava’s stomach lurched as Paige stepped on the gas
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“Where have you two been!?” Benjamin fretted as Ava and Paige entered his apartment.
“Hey, It’s okay Ben. We’re just a little late, it’s not the end of the world.” Ava tried to calm him down as she finished shaking the water off her coat. Benjamin’s apartment looked the same as it always did when Ava stopped by: lived in, but tidy. He really knew how to keep his place cozy. Several strings of fairy lights cast a warm gentle light on the room, illuminating the first board game of the night already set up on the coffee table. Ava waved a silent greeting to Ryan and Miranda, who were already seated around the table, wrapped up in a few of the many blankets that Benjamin had strewn about the living room for occasions like Friday game night.
“It’s pouring out there! I thought you two might have gotten in an accident!”
“Pfft.” Paige waved off his concerns. “I’m a way better driver than that. It takes more than a little rain to mess me up” Paige smirked. Benjamin didn’t look any less worried.
“Hey you two,” Miranda called attention to herself from the other side of the room. “Did you enjoy your time together?” She teased. Once again Miranda was taunting Ava by implying that she and Paige had any sort of relationship besides being friends.
Ava glared at her prepared to stare Miranda into submission but Paige ruined the silence before it could settle in. “Yeah we did!” She plopped herself on the ground next to Miranda and wrapped herself up in the nearest blanket.
Ava pressed her hand to her forehead. “Paige, that makes it sound like we did anything! You just picked me up late.” Ava turned to Benjamin, who had since taken a seat next to Ryan. “We did not do anything, we were just a little late.”
“Hey, you don’t need to explain,” Ryan said. “Miranda’s just trying to mess with you, nobody else actually thinks you two did anything together, right Benji?”
Benjamin nodded, still looking shaken by Ava and Paige’s delayed arrival.
“Well we aren’t even together or anything! I don’t even know where this comes from!” Ava huffed as she took her own seat around the table. “Now are we going to play some games or not?”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Ava sat at her laptop and stewed on the night. Why was Miranda so insistent on pushing her and Paige together? Was Ava really that obvious? That couldn’t be it. Miranda had been pestering Ava ever since she broke things off with Sasha months earlier and Ava only just realized that she had feelings for Paige. She buried her head in her arms to hide her burning cheeks from the rest of her room. Curse the two of them for being so perfectly good at getting through Ava’s defenses.
She groaned and pulled up the working document for her most recent story, Greenest Skies. Ava reread the first and only chapter, in which Hailey-Ava’s self-insert character-comes to the realization that she had a massive crush on her best friend, Naomi, an adorably clocky trans girl.
Ava scowled at the screen upon finishing her reread of the first chapter, where did she go next? She hardly ever wrote anything without extensively planning it out beforehand. She was in uncharted territory. Obviously she couldn’t have Hailey confess, that would ruin the whole story. Or… Ava could write about what just happened, a mutual friend teases Hailey and Naomi about their non-relationship. Naomi stays totally calm and shrugs it off like it’s nothing while Hailey gets worked up about it.
Narratively, it worked. Hailey gets overwhelmed with the truth that she just realized, and is confronted by how unaffected Naomi is by the teasing. Hailey then comes to the incorrect conclusion that Naomi doesn’t share her feelings. Unlike the real Paige, Naomi actually does have feelings for Hailey.
As Ava began to type out the chapter, a big issue presented itself, it was blatantly pulled directly from her actual life. Sure, she was changing names, locations, activities, and the dialog as she wrote, but the interaction itself was the same: Hailey and Naomi carpool to a bowling alley, they show up late and ‘Lindsey’ teases the two about the lost time before continuing to pester them about it for the rest of the night. If anyone present read what she wrote, it would be painfully obvious what it was and that Ava actually had feelings for Paige. Lucky for Ava, none of her friends knew that she was a semi-popular author on a fiction-sharing website. Realistically, Paige would never ever read it. Ava was more than content to keep it that way, Ava’s stories were for herself and the few hundred people who had somehow managed to find her works online.
After two hours and just over twenty four hundred words, Ava nearly fell asleep on her keyboard, at which point she decided it was time for bed.
an adorably clocky trans girl
What does "clocky" mean, exactly?
Clocky means that you can tell that she's trans.
@LadyViolu That was my best guess, but it's hard to be sure sometimes.
Just a *touch* meta, eh?
Looking forward to reading the rest!
(Hmm, I think I got that bundle some months ago? So it’ll be interesting to see if this ends up feeling familiar, or if there’s a bundle I failed to pick up yet!)