I am putting the newly revised/polished version here. I have the rough draft at the first site in my signiture, and will leave it up for a while if anyone wants to read that and compare the two (not that I'm asking anyone to do that, and will be surprised if anybody who has not already been reading the story there does). It's mostly just me being lazy - I don't want to update my site until I have more stuff than just this to update with.
Anyway, this is a science fiction short story that runs, roughly, for 22 pages (12 point Times New Roman type in Word). The word count is 11,126, just to warn of quite how long it is. It isn't quite novella length, but it's long for a short story.
It is rated PG for some mild violent images (descriptions of corpses of people killed in a spaceship crash, one scene where a character is preparing a wild bird for cooking) - warnings for the extremely squeamish, though what is in here isn't really bad, and is more tame than most of the anime most of the members have seen. Also, there is one, and ONLY one "naughty" word, but I only included it because I thought it was in context. The character was understandably angry at the time, and really did, at the moment, wish for a character to go to that not-so-nice-place. "Darn you!" just wasn't going to cut it for the scene.
I was complimented by the youngest member of my writer's group (Dynamic Christian Writers), on the fact that my story was "not dark or evil as most science fiction is." and was "just a fun science fiction story." Therefore, I think it is appropriate to post here. Though I wrote it with an adult audience in mind, and rate it officiall PG, I'm sure that children could enjoy this under a "Y7" rating.
Anyway, the story is about two children who survive the crashing of their schooling spaceship on an alien planet. They are taught to survive by one of the native inhabitants.
(There are a lot of odd words/names in the story. A breif list of pronunciations: "Xlyiss" = * "Zil-iss", roughly*, "Xklanthu" - * "Klan-thu", the X is silent*, "Mah'rrhai" = * "Ma-ha-rai" *, "Tszyl" = * "Si-ul" * ).
Now, the story! Yay! Apparently, posting it in chuncks on this board is not going to work, so here it is as an html file, uploaded to my server, under a slightly diffrent filename than the story on my main site.
Xlyiss