Another Little Finger I Cut Off of 'Project Shadolure'

So just the other day, I showed you guys an except focusing on one of the protagonists of my latest project. Long story short, he's a weedy guy who decided to dedicate his life to science, though what's a little different about him compared to characters of that stereotype is that he's inspired to do this by people and social interaction, not the opposite. Cue conscription throwing a spanner at his lab work...

Today, I've decided to carve out another piece of my story to put it in here. The second protagonist can be considered the 'jock' stereotype of western culture, except with much different traits, and of course, genre-defying background:

"“It’s a constant torture that’s been driving me mad through my desire for knowledge,” Xavier reflected as he watched raindrops from the sky streaking past the beam of his flashlight, reminding him of his ocean. They had reached the foot of the knoll they had conquered and left in the dust. A small stream had followed them, stopped at the base just like them. It was another reminder to Xavier of his intellectual stagnation.

“But it’s not just that, isn’t it?” Ziv said. Xavier nodded and concurred with his assessment. It was the beginning of true understanding where previously they had to be content knowing but the surface of each other.

“I understand, I mean, we all have what we want, right?” Ziv continued, “I just happened to be at the right place.”

“But let me tell you, at least you get to do everything you want, no pressure,” the more buff of the two went on. “I may be where I want, but they’re always a message or phonecall away. Or a room away when I’m at home. They want me to rise through the ranks, become a general or admiral or the commissioner of police one day. I’m happy anywhere, really, and happier still if I get to do things with the men. I’d be very happy even if the highest rung of the ladder I ever get to touch is the Colonel seat.”

“Who are ‘they’, anyway?” Xavier asked, his curiosity aroused. They may not be diving in an ocean, but the straits would do just fine.

They were on the half-way mark of their patrol route. Ziv did not answer immediately, but tried to radio in their progress despite the radio’s non-functionality, hoping that Xavier was right about the speaker.

“Not just my parents. The entire clan. That’s how it is when you’re part of a rich Peranakan family,” Ziv finally fed Xavier a morsel to satisfy his info-hunger. The latter security trooper could feel that there was more from where it came from. Ziv wasn’t answering merely for his sake, but his own. “My ambition isn’t my own, and neither is my love. Have you ever fallen in love with a girl, Xav?”

Something clenched inside Xavier’s guts, between stomach and intestines or gullet and stomach. He couldn’t tell, and uncertainty unsettled him. What he knew was that he hated talking about love.

“Y–yes. I guess. Yeah,” Xavier blurted out. He had wanted to lie about it, but knew in the end that it was truth that will set one free.

“Is that right?” Ziv questioned not just the person, but also his reply, incredulous. The thought of Xavier with a girl, if nothing else, had put a smile on his face. He was always used to the idea of Xavier the Hermit, the scientist who was madly in love with his books and test tubes and projects. Not that he thought there was anything wrong with that, of course. “How was it like?”

“Well, I urm, it was, urm,” Xavier tried to start, his mind tunnelling back into the past, but he had regressed to bashfulness as a side effect. “There was this girl, Nina, in secondary school. I kinda liked her. Told her as much on Valentine’s Day in secondary four. I think I was a little too honest and open about it. It didn’t work out.”

“Did you see her again after secondary school?” Ziv interjected, impatience seeping in. Ziv thought the cold and wet environment was getting to him, if the monster of earlier didn’t.

“Yes. Yes, I did. I saw her again in class reunion a year ago. We were at the chalet, and we went outside to sit. And talk. And look at the night sky.”

“Romantic,” Ziv commented in between Xavier’s words.

“No, not at all. For all my knowledge of the sciences and the universe, I was still stupid with my mouth. I couldn’t shut up about the age of the universe and the stars and the probability of earth-like planets, and I’m not even an astronomer,” Xavier lamented with clenched teeth. Ziv thought that, at the very least, the conversation was distracting them from the grip of shadows and fear. “She gave me a peck on the cheek and told me that I’m the kind of guy girls are looking for. Then she got up and left. That was it.”

“Lucky you,” Ziv said. Xavier turned abruptly at him.

“How is that lucky?” Xavier said with disbelief riddled in his eyes and voice.

“Like I said, my love isn’t my own. There were girls I love, not just one, but out of all of them, there was only one I thought I could live with forever, have kids with, that kind of stuff. She’s not the one my family wants me to marry,” Ziv explained, his eyes turned down in reflection as he did, even as they were walking over rough terrain. His auto-piloting instincts were doing a fair job as his mind was burdened with an old chain. “Too poor, too independent. That was just before NS, too.”

“Arranged marriage?” Xavier ventured to guess. Ziv nodded gingerly.

“Yeah, impossible to believe, right? Right here in the twenty-first century,” Ziv spat, anger creeping into his voice, though it wasn’t quite his own. He had been angry for a long time, and he was done being angry about it a few months ago. Now, it was just sadness and grim acceptance, or at least that was what he was supposed to feel. Something was making him mad again.

“I suppose it’s been done for a long time, so there’s bound to be some of it still left in the twenty-first century,” Xavier theorised, though he couldn’t say he knew about human culture confidently. “There’s still such a thing in China, right? And amongst the Malay?”"

Okay, it shows a little more about Xavier as well, and not enough on Ziv. Other parts of the story is supposed to shed light on Ziv's background. You get bits and pieces along the way... But long story short, Ziv is supposed to be a rich dude who's athletic and wants to do something that's military or police-related. A jock, but he's not going to be brainless and all muscles. In terms of intellectual pursuits, he's good when it comes to language. Furthermore, he's not a womaniser, but someone who's forced to give up true love for a girl his family chose. Yep, he's an Asian spin on the jock who's mired in family politics. He's a Peranakan high-born.

A Little Something from My Latest Project, 'Shadolure'

So I've been busy... Working on this latest project set in the world of Pulau Purba. Other than that, I've been working on a screenplay as well, for a friend of a friend. But enough about that. I'd like to show you guys a little of what I've done.

Let's just say the story is going to intersect with the original debut novel, 'The Keeper of Pulau Purba' a little... But I'll keep that as a bit of a surprise and focus on the duo who are the protagonists instead...

Today, let's look at Xavier...

The following is an except from 'Project Shadolure':

"It wasn’t an immediate change, but there was this once when Xavier had decided that he should be walking down the path, the path of knowledge, wisdom and science.

It had only been a few years ago, and the Xavier of present day would have been amazed at how much change had happened to him in so short a time, as if time dilation had expanded his mind beyond the usual flow of time.

The conclusion of his stint in secondary school had given him much to think about. Sitting behind his desk, which doubled as his altar as he was surrounded by charts depicting animals and the tree of life and anatomy, with books and an iPad filled with endless morsels on the various schools of biological facts, he had been ruminating for hours, going back in time to observe the past, then snapping back to the present.

He looked out the window, and above, he saw a clear azure sky, hardly clothed in clouds at all. The sun shone openly above, half an hour or two from its highest point. Xavier admired the sun where others abhorred it for its radiance and warmth, though he looked upon it only briefly. Even that was enough to leave its imprint upon his vision. He knew it for what it was, a great big ball of practically endless burning fuel, a natural power plant on the extreme end of cosmic scales.

He had just returned from receiving his ‘O’ level certificate. He was still in school uniform, the last time he would be wearing the ugly off-white shirt and dark blue pants.

School, his second home where much of his previous ten years were spent, had been a wild ride. It wasn’t in his studies where much of his adventures were had – he saw the various disciplines of science that engaged him to be more of a journey, a cruise through the stars. No, instead, the very human drama exploding all around him was responsible for much of his misadventures.

Girls who behaved in extraordinarily air-headed ways, boys who revel in violence and mistakes simply because they didn’t know any better. Girls who were spoilt rotten, gifted everything they could ever want and weren’t expected to give back. Boys who, fancying themselves reincarnations of chivalrous knights of old, entertain such girls. Girls who teased Xavier with fake flirting he fell for (at first). Boys who beat him up to prove to their urban tribe how manly and warrior-worthy they were. Xavier had no idea what kind of bravery there was to be found in boys who ganged up on him three to one, all bigger than he was. It was just a fact of nature he had come to accept and deal with

But there were also girls who took pity on him, boys who became his closest friends and advisers. Girls who saw him for who he truly was, felt for him. Boys who understood what he was going for when he studied beyond the syllabus on science.

Reflecting on what he’d been through, the thick and thin he’d slogged through with his closest friends and without, he realised that people were infinitely complex. There were as many permutations of physical appearance and behaviour and psychological make-up as there were people, where previously he’d imagined that they were all the same.

Pulling a drawer open, Xavier pulled out an old lecture pad. It was an object of worship to him, it being a souvenir he had received from the National University of Singapore. NUS was said to be the best institution of learning in a country where the standard of education was one of the best in the world, enough to drive some to suicide off a building via academic overexposure. He had been there once on a school excursion a few months before the ‘O’ level examinations. It was an idea of the principal, who wanted to put a goal in sight of his students.

It’d worked for Xavier.

Placing the NUS lecture pad gently on his desk, he took a pen from the stationery basket. On the top line, he wrote a title: What I Will Do for the Rest of My Existence – By Xavier Wee. He had even concocted a subtitle for what would be the most important composition of his entire life: A Treatise on The Experiment of Life.

It was a start. The first two lines of the document was all that was sufficient to change his outlook in life. As words trickled in like raindrops down a hill, it would all coalesce into a stream, then a river, a rapid that would evolve him to what he was by the time he was in Pulau Purba.

Where previously he was just a boy getting by, who happened to be good at the sciences, he had become a man on a mission, a voyage through his heart and mind to explore the complexities of life.

It had taken him a few days to finish the treatise. It had become his ocean, and he would spend the years ahead diving into it, discovering how deep he could go.

When he was done, he framed it, hung it on the wall at the foot of his head where he could see it every time he woke up. So that he could remind himself of his mission every single day, to take a dive into that ocean to see how much water there was.

It’d turned out to be pretty deep, and he’d estimated that it would be deeper than the Mariana Trench. He hadn’t just gone to biology, but also the life sciences and medical studies. He would go off the beaten track sometimes to ponder on other topics, topics related to what made people tick. Sociology. Human Geography. Philosophy. Junior college was just a distraction to him.

And so was the army when the time came that he would be conscripted for National Service.

The army: where his two-years stint in junior college would at least provide him with more instruments to probe his ocean at the best of times, the army had torn him away from his beautiful waters and dragged him inland.

Where the ocean was easy to sink into, the land was hard to dig into. Too much time spent making trenches during outfield exercises in both BMT and vocational training. Too much time being force-fed SOPs and procedures to be used outside the lab. By the end of each day in the army, he would be too exhausted and mentally drained to take his daily dive into his ocean. His books would lay nearly unused in his locker day after day.

He had since given up even trying, as trying to study under the conditions a security trooper had to endure would be a mockery of the true pursuit of knowledge. A constant torture that would drive him mad through his desire for knowledge."

He's a lot like Alex Kee, but of the scientist type, rather than the writer type... But there are other differences as well. His pal, Ziv, would have a very different personality.