Short Story - Fantasy - The Emerald of Secrets, Pt. 2

Years after I wrote "Natalie the Necklace Fairy," I tried to adapt it into a story separate from the Rainbow Magic series. I read through it again, looking for a title, and found that "the emerald of secrets," the magic gem that protected the fairy world, sounded really cool.

So, I planned to make that the series title. The first book would be called The Search for the Ruby Necklace. I started it on my laptop, I'd assume somewhere between the second and third drafts of The Secret Portal during my second grade year.

The Search for the Ruby Necklace starts with a prologue in the third-person perspective of Jacob, which is the unthreatening name I gave my villain--though I will give myself credit for starting in his perspective. His realm of goblins and trolls was called "Warnog" and the fairy realm was called "Teria," which are two names I don't know how I feel about. He's also implied to be a misogynist, so that's...fun. Anyways, Jacob breaks into a fairy's house to steal something, but then she returns. He casts a spell to make her freeze and forget, then steals her necklace.

I find this prologue interesting, because I was very clearly trying to set up the magic of the world before my main characters just happened to find it, but I don't love how it's written. It's a step up from Draft Two of TSP because I started to use em-dashes and italics for emphasis, so that's really nice to see, but it still has a bit of an immature writing style. Jacob doesn't have a good villain one-liner even though I tried to give him one, and I was so vague in what was happening that I feel like it would be too confusing.

I then go onto Christy Banks arriving at her new school. I changed her appearance slightly, giving her dirty blonde hair and hazel eyes when I'd drawn her with brown hair and eyes in my original fanfiction--but I decided that because she and Trish both had that, I should make them look a little different. Christy meets Trish in her math class just like last time, but here I have Trish smile so sweetly, that "Christy nearly forgot she was the new kid" so I think this is another example of my queer self not realizing I was queer and making another accidental sapphic relationship in my stories. This happened a lot.

Christy began reading a book about American history. A girl named Aria makes fun of her for it, but Trish tells her not to listen. Christy asks Trish what she likes, but she's a little dismissive when Trish says she loves fairy tales, even believing them, but Trish does not take offense, and Christy goes onto make friends with Adeline and Dave like she did in the last draft, but with more conversation. It's ironic that I decided to make this chapter called "Being the New Kid is Never Easy" when Christy easily makes three friends on her first day.

Over the weekend, like last time, Trish takes Christy to Potter's Stream where they run into Natalie. Unfortunately, I fell back into the habit of all-caps during this encounter, but just temporarily. I don't really like this scene, because I had a lot of down-to-earth stuff, and I could have done a little more with that. Natalie just accepts seeing humans for the first time, exposits everything, and most of the writing is just awkward as Trish and Christy immediately agree to help her.

Most of Natalie's information is the same as in the previous draft, with the changes I already mentioned earlier and the clarification that there are seven jewels protected by seven fairies. There's a typo where I refer to Jacob as "Johoby," as I believe that was his original name before I went with Jacob.

The gobbies are still here and Natalie turns the girls into fairies and they follow the trail to the same cave as last time, though I try to exposit that the fantastical world was in an overlapping dimension to our world--which is an interesting sci-fi-esque twist to it.

They see the gobbie and that's where this draft ends. I guess I got bored of it because I was just adapting almost exactly what happens in the original.

There are a few things that need a lot of overhauling, obviously. I still want to adapt this idea into something interesting, but I'm thinking of making it a lot darker, but we'll see.

What's actually really funny is that there are like three times where I thought I was being a nerd and referencing Hamilton, but I looked at when I last modified the original document, and it was a year before I even listened to the musical. So that's a coincidence, especially since I made Trish love the musical in the next draft because I was in that phase.

Speaking of which, I'll go through that tomorrow.

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