I really enjoyed this! Normally I kinda have this bad tendency to only read slash stories (Big fan of the 'Reflections' series), but I gave this one a shot and I'm really impressed! Read it all today. Seriously, you should publish this someday when you finish it. All the characters are intriguing and believable, the plot line is interesting and obviously well thought out, and I am so very thankful for Shannah not being a massive Mary Sue.

Anyways, I'm glad you are continuing it. - LF

Oh thank God you updated, I was soo gutted when you threatened to drop this, I gotta see what's going to happen! And it would be cruel of you to leave all your loyal readers hanging like that

Schnitzelover, I think I love you. That was basically everything I wanted to say to Ben Tiller and more. You rock! :D

Please don't delete it! this was one of the first stories I found when I signed up on fictionpress and it is still argueably one of the best ones that I've read in regards to the sci-fi section. I'd be happy to beta it, especially since I don't want it to go. there were alot of times during this story that made me stop and go 'wow, didn't see that coming!' and I think that if people are saying i's not up to par should pay more attention to the story and try to accept it for what it is! an exceedingly well written, though occassionally confusing, story that if you ask me, has the potential to someday be published. but hey, don't listen to me! I'm just an ADHD teenager that has alot of free time. *sigh* I really hope you don't delete it, and I'm sorry if you give in to the pressure of those who dislike this story.

. Why do you have to delete it? I thought it was really good! Oh, and ignore the ignorant arse face down there. He's a mean penis. (That made me giggle xD)

It is a sad day when a author says f-k it with a great story like this. When you bow down to there wishes then you have lost your ability to write. You have to have skin like a Rino a hart that is ice as you say to them you are wrong. your writingis your way of saying what you wish. the only way that your writing will get better is to write what is in your hart at the time.

PPS- WTF 'Ben Tiller'? Did you really go through and point out every single line you disapprove of? Really?

Who gives a shit if she sucks at Geometry or Calculus? And if you got the the second chapter, you might realize that NOBODY WILL CARE ABOUT GEOMETRY IN OUTER SPACE.

The CIA bit? THIS IS A FICTIONAL STORY. Nobody needs a reason to send a virus to the CIA. Hell, maybe she was born in Russia -is that too cliche for you?- and is really a secret agent raised to take down America. But you know what? It doesn't matter. BECAUSE THIS STORY IS ABOUT SPACE, NOT RUSSIA.

And, assuming you're male-one with a small ego, at that, because you're randomly trolling on great stories because you have no life and need to retain some sense of masculine identity-you wouldn't understand the female necessity for chocolate. Do you ever bleed from down below? No. When we get that craving for the cacao bean, we get a CRAVING. Anything drizzled in chocolate with suffice. It's only difficult and hard to understand because you're a moron.

I won't even go there with the soap, aside: WTF? Nobody cares.

The blowjobs? My school has caught teenagers sexing it up on the back staircase. Twice. And we're the good side of town. And, though this may be difficult for you to squeeze through your tiny brain, just because there is a sign that says "GIRLS" does not mean only girls go through that door. I once walked into a boy's bathroom by accident. And guess what? THE TIME-SPACE CONTINUUM DID NOT TEAR. I WAS JUST HORRIBLY EMBARRASSED. IT'S HIGH-SCHOOL. WE'RE ALL IMMATURE.

The lame part? Ben, I don't have a clue what's wrong with you, but I bet it's hard to pronounce.

And many countries are known for certain features. Like Africa. You just thought of a black kid, didn't you? But hey, guess what, Africa is capable of producing white kids. It's just the overall stereotype the human race refers to. Norway is known for blonde kids, so this makes sense. Stop being so picky about this.

She choose worms because she WANTED to choose worms. Whether the mental image be ants, worms, fruit flies, cockroaches: IT'S GOING TO BE DISTURBING. Why you have bad grammar?

And yes, you can be bound by sex. Odysseus was bound by Calypso's great sex for ten years. The only reason it seems awkward and out of place is because YOU think it sounds awkward and out of place. I think it's funny.

'Failure' is not a noun. You can't physically touch failure. By definition of 'littered'-objects strew or scattered about- your sentence, "This sentence is littered with failure" makes no sense at all. Next you'll be telling Wanda to go pick up the death I will give you for being such an ass. Unless you named a litter of kittens failure and physically scattered them over those words. The fact that you included the word 'COMPLICATED' simply doesn't make sense.

This is how it should play out: You're an ass. Get a life.

Me: I think you should go.

You: Why?

Me: Because I wish you would.

Makes plenty sense to me.

MY GOD, HAVE YOU SEEN ANY OTHER STORIES ON FP? Does that abbreviation kill you? Me hope it do. I don't have half the grammar Wanda does.

"Should I" and "Do you want me to" are two completely separate concepts. 'Should I' is a moral question, the character asking them selves if an act should take place. 'Do you want me to' is a question of will from a different character. They are both asking separate people separate things. If Wanda wanted to be asking the other character a question, she'd have written it that way. And you know what? It doesn't sound insane. Because insanity is the act of doing something over and over again, expecting different results. You really need to brush up on your manners. I understand you may have the intention of helping Wanda, but if this was on one of my stories, it'd rip me apart.

Would you STOP using the phrase 'This is a total fail'? An object cannot be a fail. It can only fail. Fail is a verb, not a noun. Shows where you learn your grammar-the internet.

Some people find it hard to lie, especially if they're not used to it. I would stutter up a storm. It's such an inner moral conflict to lie. You might be used to it, but this character isn't you. She's fictional.

WOULD YOU STOP BEING SO MEAN! Are you an author? My characters are like my babies! What if someone just walked up to you, holding your kid and said, "Your child is so stupid an uneducated, they might attempt something like trying to be like their dad."

I love author's notes! I LIVE for author's notes! Chapter one is better this way, because you didn't write it! And guess what, it's a DRAFT. OF COURSE IT'S NOT GOING TO BE PERFECT. THIS IS FICTION PRESS. More than half the members are tweens who write up Mary-Sues and don't know how to use basic grammatical skills.

Are you really trying to APOLOGIZE? You just took something she's spent more than half of her life on and decided it'd be your goal in life to point out everything that you don't approve of. Maybe Wanda is so gracious as to accept your 'Ohheyyeah, sorry I just ate your first story and insulted everything about you', but I'm not. This is an amazing story and you keep your dirty ape fingers away from it.

There is a LARGE difference between 'critical' and 'oh-my-God-I-have-no-life-but-this-story-does-so-I-will-try-to-ruin-everything-this-author-loves-to-make-me-feel-like-my-life-has-purpose'.

Sorry if I'm being too critical, I just thought you'd need an internet rant from a fifteen year-old girl who strongly dislikes people who spend their free time tearing down others.

P.S.-On a more negative note, why would you use that terrible metaphor? You thought the mental image of WORMS wasn't pleasing? You just gave everyone who read that cruel review a mental image of YOU being that wolf. That last part KIND-OF confused me, the whole 'blood gushing out' was unnecessary.

That wasn't rudeness, that was just plain mean.

You may think I've misconstrued this review, but if this is your idea of 'critiquing', you might want a Plan B for day jobs.

I'm so sorry you're deleting this ( Can I read an earlier version? even if it doesn't completely make sense I'd really like to find out what happens. I've seen the art on DeviantArt so I know some big stuff goes on haha. Please?

PS- I'd friggen eat nothing but blue cheese for a week to get this many reviews by my 22nd chapter.

NO!

],:

Who was being a bully? I'd kick their butt but there's probably already a huge stick shoved up it.

You're an awesome author-how can this 'not be up to par'? It's just jealousy.

But I guess this isn't just about grouchy reviewers. I'm sad you're deleting this, but I suppose it's your choice. I hope maybe one day you'll start Lost Stars up again, but in case you don't...

Goodbye, Dired. Your loss will be forever mourned in the Schnitzelover household.

My condolences.

I'LL BETA IT :D

"I fail at life". Good start. Very uplifting opening words. Gets the reader interested. In media res and all that.

"I think I might fail Geometry class" Just me, or cliche? A lot of girls fail at math, period, or at least struggle hard in my opinion so you might want to think about delivering a different spin. But you might want to clarify that geometry is NOT useless. Granted, CALCULUS and trigonometry might seem useless when you think about it, but GEOMETRY is so fundamental and used in so many aspects of life whether architecture, engineering, and so on that it makes me want to choke the person who said that geometry is useless.

"A future as a computer programmer or a life sending viruses to the CIA." WHAT? Are you serious? I'm not sure if sending viruses to one of the top, most security-obsessed agencies is going to work, let alone succeed. How would you (or WHY would you) send viruses to an American agency that's trying to protect its civilians unless you're a terrorist or you've got a death wish? What would be the point? Why not just work as a hacker for the CIA rather than against it?

"I need something smothered in chocolate or I'm going to die." Even something spicy, like a chili, or that Japanese spicy stuff they put sometimes in tofu? Got to clarify that or that girl's going to be verbally assaulted throughout her life. Maybe say 'I need some chocolate' I don't see why you've got to make all wordings so difficult and hard to understand. Dumb it down, you know?

"Looking like a shampoo ad". NO! Shampoo ads, not surprisingly, SHAMPOO! Change to 'model in shampoo ads'. Much better.

"Giving out blowjobs in the bathroom?" Really, now? How immature. I don't know if she knew this, but there are seperate bathrooms for girls and boys for a reason. Wow, is this life in high school? I never knew girls to abuse each other so.

"Have you run out of a**holes to harass, Paula?" Getting more and more lame. This girl is psychotic and needs to be locked up.

"Not as blonde as her. You'd think she was imported from Norway." I'm not familiar with this joke. As far as I know from what I learned in biology, blonde hair is a recessive hair color. Brown is the dominant hair color which is why brown hair is more often seen than blonde. So not all Norwegians have blonde hair. Unless I'm mistaken. I don't know what the racism and hair color surrounding Norwegians are. Also, why not try: 'like she bleached her hair golden?' Sounds better.

"We are worms. We are worms." Better word choice? The image in the reader's mind is a little disturbing. Change to 'we are but ants'. Ants are smaller and more insignificant than worms. Why you choose worms?

"Soon you shall be wed, and you will be bound by love, soul, and awesome sex.." This awful word choice is hurting my head. Sex is an action, an activity, you can't be bound by it. Love and soul are nouns and something that you feel within you. Sex just seems really awkward and out of place.

"...are not mandatory, but I might be persuaded to give bonus points to those who need it." This sentence is littered with failure. What do I mean by that insult? You're waffling your words and making the sentence more complicated than it should be. Just say 'I'm not requiring that you complete corrections for homework/is not mandatory, but I will give bonus points to those who really need it, to those who are hovering between an 'A' and 'B' and who need that extra bump.' The fact that you included the word 'PERSUADED' simply doesn't make any sense.

This is how it would play out: "I might be persuaded to give bonus points to those who need it."

A student raises his hand, asks, "Can I persuade you, then?"

Teacher: "..."

Student: "So do I need bonus points? Do I suck? Is that what you're saying? Why would I need to do corrections if I don't want bonus points? The only reason you would CORRECT your test is if YOUR SCORE ISN'T PERFECT. By that reason anyone who corrects their paper has a low A or even as low as an F. Will you give more points to students who're failing class rather than give the students with low A's bonus points? Please? Sir?"

Teacher: "..."

You can see how this would play out so I don't need to continue with my cynicism and sarcasm any more.

'I think you should go' 'Why?' 'Because I wish you would' Another fail. You're making this so much more difficult to read! Just say: 'Why?' 'I want you there/ I want you to go!'

'Should I have to answer that?' change to 'Do you want me to answer that?'

'Wondering if perhaps he'd been persuaded to say an insane thing through slow and long torture'. This is a total fail as well. What is this in reference to? The words "Should I have to answer that?" That doesn't sound insane at all. You need to brush up on your rhetoric and word choice. This sentence doesn't make any sense.

'Um, well...my mom-i have this-skip-lie-...UHM...AH...' wow, fail. Your characters need to dust off their first grade english books and brush up on social conversations. They are total retards if they're struggling so hard to lie. It's like they're trying so hard to fail. English as second language, maybe?

'Maybe we'll find some other way to hang out, yes?' Yeah..like maybe one of them suddenly cracks and pulls a gun on his friend. Would you call that hanging out? I wouldn't be surprised, your characters are so stupid and uneducated that they would actually attempt something so dumb.

'Author's Note' just delete that comment. Chapter one is NOT better this way, I don't know how much more terrible the previous draft was.

Sorry if I'm being too critical, I thought you would need a critic. Your story could easily be ripped and torn apart like a wolf sinking its teeth into your throat and sending blood gushing out, it's that bad.

P.S. on a more positive note, I kinda enjoyed it! :)

Excuse my rudeness.

what an info dump this was Can't wate for the next chapter

Ok, I read up to halfway through chapter 11, but we may need to start seeing other people now. X-) What has kept me going so far has been the expectation of aliens and scifi, since I've really wanted to see what kind of a world you've created. Now, by the time the girls are getting personal instruction in martial arts off-planet from the busy president of a planet who met them an hour ago, what's left is mostly the expectation of space adventure and highschooler girlpower.

I don't want to sound overly negative. You've clearly put a lot of effort into this story and as the overall plot goes it flows nicely and painlessly - if I didn't have so many other stories waiting I'd just finish reading this since I started it and it's ok. And I hope that the review is remotely helpful to you, not just making you cry in the corner. I know I have serious trouble posting stuff I've written for anyone else to see because I just remember the negatives from any critique. It's scary even doing it hidden behind a pen name!

First off, why I'm not finishing the story even though I could easily just go on pressing 'next page'. My main issue is actually simply mismatching (combined with length of course). The characters are too alien to me to identify with (as their human selves; I can deal with the kangaroo-headed president more easily!). I've never been to a US high school, I'm still a bit uncertain what the exact definition of a 'jock' is, and the chicks seem so movie-plot stereotypical it hurts my heart.

I'd be the computer geek, but her role for the last 10 chapters has been mostly to tell the other kids to grow up. I could be the strange girl, but when she's not bashing Kim she's just being in-your-face in any other direction. I could be the main character, strange princess of an alien emperor waiting to be taken away... no wait, I couldn't. I never identified with those. ;) Some of the stuff feels rather strongly US-centric, which is of course only visible in places where the reader's feeling of 'universal' is different from the writer's. But mainly, this rings to me as a book for highschoolers or people who feel they know highschoolers, and I'm just too old and/or foreign to culturally connect.

My main point of actual criticism, on the other hand, is that the story keeps breaking my suspension of disbelief by bringing up the convenient coincidences (like why everyone speaks English), and the science backing is a touch too light for me to recover afterwards. (I have a nasty way of getting caught in details, but it does make me occasionally useful as a spellchecker. ;))

For example: We're told the word 'hotel' is different because there's 250 years of separation between local and our English. Yet words like 'form', 'appointment', 'elevator', 'nutrition' and 'president' are exactly alike. And that English was learned from aliens landing in the US? I'm not horribly familiar with North-American history, but didn't they have to be rather lucky to find the English-speaking colonies there in something like the 1750s? What happened to contact since then, if Holo can even think he remotely recalls what the _CIA_ does? (I certainly don't recall the names or abbreviations of the Spanish or Brazilian equivalent. And those are on the same planet even.)

On the other hand, bringing up the artificial gravity and faster-than-light travel and explaining it off as something "you wouldn't understand" (TM) is a degree less painful, and accepting that e.g. fluid loss through sweating and breathing can be somehow recompensated out of the air by nanobots in a nutrition pill is already actually quite easy when I'm left to figuring them out all on my own.

Oh yeah. The genetics explanation of why the cat-eared folk are extinct is actually something we just discussed in the student room last week: if all of Chuck Norris's genes are dominant, how many generations of his offspring need to interbreed so we know we get an effective Chuck Norris clone? (We came to the conclusion that they may all be girls, so he's got a serious problem here.) But even with dominant genes, if you have two halfbreeds and they make a third generation together (rather than with Chuck), something like 1/4 the times you get two instances of the recessive gene in the split and none of the dominant, and the domination just can't happen - you get a Chuck Norris Jr. with the wrong colour of eyes, or the wrong type of earlobes. :( And with boys and genes in the X or Y chromosomes, there's some additional complications.

I also had trouble relating to why the girls are so suspicious of scientists, CIA, the local government, traceability and all that, yet if they find a very unusual and attention-drawing car outside the house they happily adopt it and expect it's a better choice for running away than any of the normal vehicles they own. (Although I seem to recall that the general cultural suspicion of officials is way higher in the US and the rest might be just ignorance on their part.)

Your language seems ok to me, although you have something like maybe a handful of misspellings per chapter (in 11 there's "au natural" - au naturel, and I'm not sure if the meaning is what you look for; also "secrete funding" - secret; towards the first car scenes Rosie is once written as Rose (second car chapter maybe)). I'm getting driven off the computer so that's it for now.

Ok, enough nitpicking!

I love extensive new worlds, and you've designed an interesting one with various details that get me thinking. That's basically what I've been wanting to read from this, and I was willing to read through many chapters of high school romance in anticipation of that. ;) The basic flow of the story is smooth. I've bookmarked the book and maybe finish it one day, but for now, I'll head out to seek brave new worlds!

Thanks for this. :)

Ha ha, I'm reading this at work... :D

Shoot dem guns, LADEHS! I love how Kim is Shannah's confidante. No offense to Kim, but if I had to choose someone to tell my disturbing and quite possibly prophetic dreams to, I don't think Kim would be my first choice.