The Story of the Wicked Bat

Alice Liddy could see the box being closed up on top of her, and saw her mother's face as the woman sealed the box shut. 'I'm a doll,' the young girl thought, 'I've actually been turned into a doll because I was a bad person, and now that other girl is running around in my body. I can't move or anything so I'm stuck here.' Suddenly, Alice's mind seemed to slow down and she felt her consciousness drifting away.

Alice then saw a blazing bright light envelop her entire field of view. She looked down and saw her hands, and then noticed the rest of her human body, which appeared to nude. 'Wherever I am I seem to have my body back, but not any clothes. What is this place.' She continued to ponder her predicament until she heard a young male voice behind her.

"You may want to picture some clothes for yourself, so you're not standing around naked," the voice said matter-of-factly.

Alice turned around to see a young man who seemed roughly her own age, as well as a small bluish creature that hovered around the boy's head. The creature had half of its body light blue, while the rest of the creature's body was purple. It had a pair large purple wings on its body, with a small blue piece seeming separating the wings into two separate parts. Eyes didn't seem to be present at all, but the creature did have large ears with a purple interior, as if it was making up for its lack of eyesight. Four sharp fangs were in the creature's large mouth, and it had two long thin objects coming out from its backside, almost as if they were a form of tail.

The young man wore a black shirt with writing that Alice was unable to read and blue jeans. She quickly put her hands over her private areas and slowly responded. "Who are you, what is that thing next to you, and what do you mean 'picture some clothes'"?

The young man sighed and replied. "Let's go in order. The name's Leo, the thing next to me will take some time to explain, and as I said, imagine some clothes you want to wear, perhaps a favorite outfit or something." As he finished speaking his shirt changed into a blue plain t-shirt.

Alice nodded slowly and began to picture her favorite outfit from home, a green tank top that matched her eyes and a comfortable pair of pajama pants. Suddenly she looked down and she was now wearing the outfit. Alice smiled towards the young man and introduced herself. Well Leo, my name's Alice Liddy." She beamed slightly, moved her hands and began to walk towards the young man. "So, Leo," she began, "how did you get here, and what is that thing?

"Well," the boy replied as he moved his hand through his dark-brown hair, "it's a bit hard to explain. Perhaps I could try to show you. This place seems to be some sort of holding area from the real world while we wait for our year to be up." As the boy continued to speak, he waved his hands and a white view screen appeared in front of the pair.

Alice watched as Leo was shown on the screen. He was running down a sidewalk and appeared to be wearing some kind of track outfit complete with school colors; although the young woman was unable to tell what school he went to based off of the uniform. The scene then changed to Leo inside a home, presumably his own, and he was talking to two adults who Alice assumed were his parents. Although the audio was muted, the young woman could tell by his facial expressions and his parents reactions that it was not a pleasant conversation.

"Yeah," the young boy began as he saw Alice cringe at the video. "I wasn't exactly that pleasant of a guy to be around. I would get into fights with people for no reason, and would always be yelling at my parents. I don't even know why I was that way, but everything changed on my 17th birthday."

The scene on the viewer shifted, showing Leo and several other guys at a party in his home. Leo received numerous gifts from both his friends and family, but never seemed happy with what he got, as if he was expecting something better from them. Alice's eyes noticed a small, square black box that was left amongst the few remaining presents, and immediately she began to shudder. "I got a similar box like that, and what was in it is why I ended up here," she told the young man.

"I figured as much, but keep watching," he replied, staying focused on the memory he was displaying. Alice then found herself seeing through Leo's eyes as he opened the box, unable to stop him from finding what she presumed he would.

As Leo opened the box, he found a small stuffed animal resting at the bottom of the box. Alice recognized it as a stuffed animal that looked exactly like the small creature she had seen earlier standing with Leo. 'Aww,' she found herself thinking, 'normally I'd consider that really cute, but I know what that is.'

Leo looked disdainfully at the stuffed animal, and after starting at for several minutes he threw it into the garbage and went into his parents room. "Who gave me a crappy stuffed animal, you know I was expecting a guitar and amps, not some silly kid's toy."

His parents looked back at him confused for several seconds, until his father began to speak. "What stuffed animal son? Also, you know that we don't have a lot of money right now. Your mom and I were planning on getting you a guitar for Christmas. Do you think you can wait a few months?

Leo shook his head and looked in disgust at his father. "You know I've wanted a guitar since last Christmas when you got me an Xbox 360 with Guitar hero, couldn't you guys have saved some every month so I could have one in October instead of December?" He then angrily stormed out of their room, slamming the bedroom door as he did so.
Alice could then hear Leo's thoughts as he walked away from his parent's room. 'I just want to make sure I get what I really want for my birthday. I don't want some other disaster or problem to come up before Christmas that makes them be unable to pay for my guitar. With my luck the refrigerator will die or the washer will stop working again'. Frustrated, Leo went into his room and threw himself onto his bed and quickly fell asleep.

When he woke up, the first thing Leo saw the next morning was the plush that he had thrown into the garbage sitting in front of him on his bed. Leo stared at the stuffed animal oddly and casually tossed it onto the floor of his room. 'I wonder how that got here,' he thought as he got dressed. When he looked down at his arms as he pulled his shirt on, he could swear that his skin looked like it had a blue-ish hue to it, the same light-color of blue what was present on the gift he received. 'Woah,' he thought at he examined his skin, 'I'm turning into Nightcrawler from the X-men, that's totally wicked.' As he finished putting on his shirt, he looked again at his arms and found that they were back to their normal white color to match his Caucasian features. 'Awe,' he thought sorrowfully as he looked at his normal arms, 'I guess I don't have superpowers after all.'

Alice face-palmed as she continued to watch the scene unfold as Leo was projecting his memories. "You boys can be so clueless sometimes. When I started to notice odd changes I immediately took notice and told my mom about it, but she just brushed me off as she didn't see what happened." She then heard Leo's voice in response to her comment.

"Yeah, but I'm also a big comics nerd, I thought I had finally developed an X-gene a couple years too late." He then laughed and the scene shifted to Leo arriving at his school later that day for classes. The young man had gotten to class an hour late, but did not seem to care as he strolled in past the front desk of the main office.

A young woman who appeared in her 30's, called his name and Leo turned to face her. Her tan skin and brown hair matched well with her brown irises and thin face. "Leo, you do know that you're an hour late to first period, right? This will be your second tardy this month, and overall your 10th since the quarter started. Just because you're on the track team doesn't mean that you have a right to come to school whenever you want or to do whatever you want when you're on campus. I got a report from Vice Principal Deen the other day that you were caught bullying freshman again. The only reason you're not suspended right now is because your victim decided to say you were just messing around and that it was consensual, so our hands are tied." She began to glare towards Leo awaiting a response.

The young man laughed and smiled at the woman. "Sorry Principal Higgans, but we both know I'm important to the track team. If you suspend me, I won't be able to play, and you'll lose your best athlete in at least four different events. I know Coach Matthews would be up in arms at the next teacher's meeting if this school lost because I wasn't allowed to play; so please don't act like you really couldn't do anything when I gave that Johnson kid a swirly. You can, but you just don't want to because you know a losing track team doesn't make the school any money to pay the bills." He smiley coyly and then turned away and began to leave the office. "Have a nice day teach," he yelled as he walked out of the room.

As he kept walking down the school hallway, Leo began to feel conflicted about what had just happened. 'I know I shouldn't bully kids,' he thought, 'but sometimes I just like to let people know that I'm in charge. I just feel so powerless since I can't control anything at home, and since at times we live paycheck to paycheck just to pay the rent and afford food.' He sighed as he went to his first period class for the remaining twenty minutes of class, and then continued on for the rest of the day until a break between sixth and seventh period.

Leo saw a small freshman by the name of Conner Lewis, a young boy who didn't look more than twelve despite actually being closer to fourteen or fifteen. Conner was standing in front his open locker, gathering his books for next class, and Leo quickened his pace to get behind the boy. 'This is too easy,' he thought, as he prepared to shove young Conner into his locker. Leo knew that Conner disliked being in close spaces due to claustrophobia, but that didn't matter to the track star at this moment. 'This kid is always answering questions in mixed-grade Chemistry, making all of the sophomores look bad. This will teach him to be smarter than people who are better than him.' With one swift motion, he thrust both hands forward and Conner was slammed into the inside of the locker. Given his small size, the young boy actually fit inside the locker, making it much easier for Leo to slam the door on him before his victim could turn around and identify his attacker.

"Hey, whoever did that, let me out of here," Conner wailed. "I don't like darkness or small spaces, I really freak out if I'm in a closet even for longer than a minute, so please let me out!" His pleas fell on deaf ears as Leo walked away from Conner's locker, chuckling to himself as he heard the boy begin to try to scrape at the door using his fingernails as he fell into a panic.

Alice broke the connection with Leo for a second and glared at him, staring intensely into his eyes with a look of disgust. "Seriously, you put that helpless kid into a locker? I thought I was pretty messed up when I was mean to people, but I never even did anything half as bad as what I just saw. What do you have to say for yourself, Leo?"
The young man looked sheepishly back at Alice and responded. "Yeah, as I said before I was pretty messed up. I didn't care about who I hurt as long as it made me feel better, and I paid the price for it, same as you. Now I know I need to be a better person in order to get everything back to normal." He looked down at his feet for a couple seconds, and then continued with the replaying of events.

Alice found herself in Leo's body in the flashback once again as he prepared to leave the school for the day. As he opened his backpack at his locker, he noticed an odd stowaway that didn't seem to be there when he checked the bag earlier throughout the day. The stuffed animal from his party was under all of books, pointing upward and looking directly at him as he opened the bag. 'Wow, you keep showing up in the weirdest place,' Leo thought, 'it's almost as if you want to follow me or something, little buddy.' The young man quickly zipped up his backpack and drove home, and began to lie on the couch for a nap with the blue stuffed animal perched on his stomach.

Before he was able to fall asleep, he heard a low noise that roused him from his potential slumber. Leo opened his eyes and saw that the stuffed animal seemed to be flying around the living room in a circular pattern. 'Wow, this is so cool,' he thought, 'either I'm dreaming or this is some epic kind of animatronics in that plushie. As soon as the young man rose from the couch, the stuffed animal flew down and perched itself on the top of the couch and began to speak.

"Hello, Leo," the stuffed animal said, "I know you probably think this is all a dream, but I assure you it is not. My name is Jonas, and I used to be human just like you. I was sealed in here because I was rude to everyone and made my family's life a living hell. I received a small black box when I turned fifteen, and found this inside. I didn't think much of it at the time, but that was the day that would determine my entire life from then-on. I was told by the plushie a day after I received it that it was a test to see if I could be a better person, a test that I had failed. It too had the soul or consciousness of a human inside, and it said that since I had failed to change my ways that it would take over my body, just as the previous occupant had taken overs its body when it was still a human. Apparently the only way to break the cycle is to have someone actually change within twenty-four hours; if that occurs everyone will go back to their original body and it will be as if this curse never existed. Although getting out of this form would be nice, I wouldn't want to deprive anyone else of their existence in order to make my life better." The creature seemed to sigh for a moment and then it continued to speak. "You have also failed the test, Leo. You could have shown restraint and respect for Conner's intelligence, however you were jealous and took your anger out on him instead of trying to calmly talk to your parents about what was troubling you. I'm sorry, but I assume you know what comes next?"

Before Leo had a chance to respond, the stuffed animal flew directly at the young man's head, crashing into it with a force that knocked Leo to the ground. He could feel something changing inside of him, and when he opened his eyes, he saw his own body as if he was looking from another perspective. Suddenly, everything made sense as he pieced the parts together. 'I'm a stuffed animal now? How is that even possible? Was that bat thing telling the truth? How do I get out of here.' His questions went unanswered as he saw his body get up and grab hold of the stuffed animal in which he now resided.

"I'm sorry it had to come to this Leo," his body said. "I take no pleasure depriving you of your rightful body, but I have no control over how the curse happens. I can only hope and pray that whoever finds you next manages to break this awful chain so that everything can be as it should be. Goodnight Leo, you should wake-up again in one year's time, as someone else finds you in a box. I do have a plan to try and help though, and I'll do what I can to end this once and for all." Leo's world then went black, and the replay ended.

"So," the young boy finally said while looking at Alice, "this is how I got here, and you seem to have a similar story. By chance did you find a doll of some kind? Black and white, quite gothic looking?"

Alice quickly nodded her head in agreement and replied, "yeah, it was exactly like that, how did you know?"

Leo sighed and placed his head to his forehead for several seconds.
"That was Lydia then, she left this place a few days ago, which would make sense given when she got here and when she told me she found the doll herself. She always struck me as liking the curse too much, she never really seemed to want to try and help get rid of hers. I gues she figured any life that she could steal was better than the life of a doll. Plus judging from you I'd say her new body is a vast improvement over her old one."

Alice let a light blush color her cheeks, and then she looked down for several seconds. "You said you had a plan, a way to fix everything, to get us all back into our original bodies? How would you do such a thing?"

The young man chuckled and nodded his head. "Well, when I came here, Lydia told me that Jonas tried to get her involved with some sort of plan to fix the whole mess. He said once he regained a body he would try to track down the doll and place his old vessel, the stuffed animal, nearby in the hopes that whatever force is causing all of this would group them together or treat them as one object. It's a farfetched idea but it's better than nothing. If our transference back into our vessels happens at the same time, through some prodding or meddling by Jonas, we could try to use our strengths together to get both of the new victims to change themselves. If that happens we can go back to our old bodies and everything." Leo then smiled and held out his hand for Alice to shake. "So, Alice, are you interested in helping me?"

Alice quickly grabbed his hand and shook it. "Yes, of course I'll help you," she yelled emphatically. "I want to get back to my old body so much, I don't think I could ever be happy stealing someone else's body."
"Good," the young man replied, "I hope that Jonas can actually do his part, then. Otherwise he's going to be stuck in my body forever, and I don't like that idea one bit." He smiled and looked at Alice "I think my time is about up now, if I kept track of the days correctly. I'm not sure if time here is the same as time there, so even if you end up where I am, you may be stuck here alone for a while. I hope you're ok with that."

The young girl slowly nodded and spoke. "I don't enjoy being alone, but I guess I can always try to imagine things to keep me company while I wait. " She smiled at the young man and the two of them talked for several more hours, until his body began to fade.

"I guess my time's up," he called to her as his body vanished. "No matter what, remember the plan. Even if we don't end up together at the same location, still try to influence your charge to be better any way possible. At least one of us should be able to fix themselves, and then we can always try to help the other."

Alice smiled at him as he disappeared, and she began a long wait that seemed to span weeks if not months. It wasn't until her own body began to fade many months later that she finally knew her time had come. 'Either way,' she thought, 'whatever happens I'm going back to my own body. I will find a way, just like Leo told me to.' As she closed her eyes and re-opened them, she found herself back in doll form, starting up into the eyes of a young red-headed girl, no more than 15 years old. 'So, it begins,' Alice thought as she was lifted from the box in which she resided.

Trying to capture: Zubat (5-10k)
MCR: 19316

 

Slogging through the backlog, slog-a-log, slog-a-log

claiming

 

Hey, sorry for the wait; this was a doozy. Same message about contacting me for questions applies here (although, heads up, I have wonky offline IM’s on my current AIM client, and sometimes I get them, and sometimes I get them two weeks later, and most of the time I don’t get them at all, so it may be best to discuss questions over VM/PM instead.) That being said, allon-zy.

THE INTRODUCTION STUFF

We continue on almost directly where we left off in ‘The Black Doll’ (henceforth known as TBD) As a standalone story, starting in the middle of the action is a nice stylistic choice: it lets us get the ball rolling, introduces the plot right away, and allows you to basically just jump right into the events of the story. Here, the creepy getting-placed-into-a-box-as-a-doll aspect is pretty cool, and it certainly introduces enough plot to be a solid hook on its own here. This is good!

You get a little bogged down, however, because this isn’t a standalone story, and you kind of get muddled up trying to recap the events of the previous chapter when your main focus should be this one. Mainly, with this sentence:

This doesn’t really feel like a realistic thought, for a bunch of reasons we’ll touch upon in the future, but my main qualm here was more that you seem to have this desperate need to recap the entirety of TBD in a couple of lines of dialogue/thought. It reads a little awkwardly: you’ve got this lovely hook, and there’s all of this terrifying action going on, and then you disrupt it with a pretty mundane sentence retelling all of what happens—in essence, you cut down all of your buildup for the second chapter because you’re so wrapped up in retelling the first.

Honestly, this segues quite nicely into the next part, so we’ll just segue straight into:

THE EARLY PLOTTY STUFF (CONTINUITY)

As you start writing chapter stories, or at least stories that have more than one part, you need to start considering why you’ve chosen to divide your story up the way you did. I like to look at chapters like paragraphs or sentences, kind of—you start a new sentences every time you start a new theme/plot/idea, and you’d start a new chapter every time you begin to approach a new theme/plot/idea as well (although, obviously, chapters operate on a much larger scale than sentences would). You can make a story that’s several chapters, or you can make a story that’s one chapter, but you really, really wouldn’t want a story that’s only half a chapter, because that’d be like having a setnence that

^look, it’s meta!
Basically, each new installment of your story doesn’t need to wrap up everything, just like a paragraph in a story isn’t responsible for carrying the entire arc of a story (although some paragraphs/chapters are more/less instrumental in completing the story than others). But a chapter needs to have something happening in it, and that something should be at least a little different from the something’s that happened in previous chapters.

In this case, the plot here is basically the same as that of TBD. There’s a little bit of stuff added on the edges, and the characters and circumstances are a tiny bit different, but the central story is basically the same—an asshole kid gets a magical doll-ish thing that’s cursed and possessed by another soul whose duty is to get the kid to change her/his ways, but ultimately s/he doesn’t change, and then s/he gets sucked into the doll. There’s some added bonuses at the end with a plan to change things, but we don’t even get to see that, because (I assume) it’s saved for a future installment.

In essence, the new ‘sentence’ of this essay is basically an elegant restatement of the first one.

The new ‘sentence’ of this metaphorical essay that you’re writing is basically just saying the same thing as the first one, with some added stuff at the end that doesn’t really go anywhere. (I’m sorry for the repeated meta/if you find it condescending, but I find that using examples is usually the best way for me to get more abstract ideas across D

Honestly, there’s so little original plot here that I have to wonder why you told this story and TBD as two separate entities at all. Again, to reiterate: not every installment of your story needs to be world-altering/deliver the climax of your plot/make the readers laugh and cry and cheer, but each installment needs to do something, and that something needs to be unique from what the other installments would do. Otherwise, you’re basically saying in thirty thousand characters what you’ve already done quite nicely in fifteen thousand.

THE OTHER PLOTTY STUFF (GENERAL; CREEPY THINGS)

I ended up splitting this into two sections because it looked a little intimidating, and also because there are really two separate things being discussed here.

It looks like you tried to address some of the commentary I brought up TBD, which is good!

…I’m still not really sure how this works, though, and my same concerns from earlier are still here: there’s literally no incentive for the doll-occupant to try to make the doll-victim try to change. If doll-occupant doesn’t make doll-victim try to change, doll-occupant gets a new body, which you just acknowledged is probably better than sitting in a white room for years on end. If doll-occupant does make doll-victim try to change, then… no one really knows, actually.

You mention that if someone actually changes, then everyone gets fixed, which seems nice on the surface, but that kind of just makes more questions—if everyone gets fixed, then who was the first occupant of the doll, and where do they go? How long has the cycle been going—if the doll-occupant changes every year, will there be issues when someone gets back into a body that they haven’t actually been occupying for decades? If a former doll-occupant has been occupying someone else’s body for a long time, is it even better that they go back to their old body anyway? What if someone goes back to their original body to find that someone else fucked it up?

And is kind of the most chilling question that never gets addressed—what if the kids end up getting better in white-room-purgatory, like this guy did? He seems like he’s honestly grown to regret his decisions (especially since it’s been a year of waiting in complete isolation), and really the best he’s going to get is someone else’s body, even though he’s basically repented for some of the shitty decisions he made as a teenager.

I guess this also ties back into that rant about fairy tale morals/learning/improvement that I made in the Phantump story—once again, you’ve set up a situation that by definition ignores any and all character development, and that kind of drives you into a dead-end. Here, say Leo improves and manages to make himself a better person (which isn’t shown here), but that means absolutely nothing—the result would be the exact same if he remained a shitty person, like Lydia did.

Actually, on that note, I don’t see why purgatory is really a bad place, or why Alice and Leo didn’t imagine, say, a television or a stack of books or literally whatever they wanted. Honestly, they basically get to live in a world where they can create whatever they want by thinking it into existence. Why can’t Alice just imagine that she’s back in her old life, with all of her friends/family/stuff? Does the room do only clothes? And telescreens that show Leo’s memories? And some other random stuff?

I try to refrain from injecting my personal opinion about some things into grades, but I just wanted to point out these two bits because I think you should reconsider what you say here/how you say it.

Lydia said something similar in the previous installment, and I still think it’s really objectifying, uncomfortable, and creepy as fuck. Even from a realistic standpoint, it’s fucking weird—Leo has just finished explaining how they’re all cursed and their best bet is a long shot, and they might never get to live this way again and by the way Alice you’re hot.

I get that bullies often come from broken homes, and they often are re-enacting violence and trouble that they experience in their home life, often for the reasons that you touch upon above (attempting to re-assert power that has been stripped from them otherwise). However:
=Most bullies don’t actually rationalize it like this (as in, they aren’t acutely aware of the circumstances that drive them to lash out), or if they did, they:
=wouldn’t actually admit it, especially this bluntly—this is flat out a smack-down of Leo’s character, given by Leo himself
=If this is an attempt to make us somehow feel bad for Leo, who apparently lives paycheck to paycheck with his parents but still gets showered in gifts, it really doesn’t work, because as sad as having a broken home life is, it doesn’t justify beating the shit out of other kids or knowingly triggering a peer’s worst fears because the kid is good at chemistry
=This is a really general statement of what is otherwise an incredibly complex and nuanced situation, and you’re oversimplifying a bunch of stuff waaaaaaay too much

THE MECHANICAL STUFF

Most of your grammar is pretty much the same as it usually is, so pretty solid. I noticed a lot more typos this time—some dropped periods or quotation marks, a couple of missing letters, and so forth. Nothing that another editing read-through can’t fix.

Also, the ok/okay thing I pointed out still stands.

So does the comma-before-addressing-someone stuff.

Seriously, I get if you’re going to have a different writing style than I am, and I don’t expect people to roll over and change because I write a paragraph of suggestions, but grammar stuff is pretty much set in stone. Please don’t make me point out the same iteration of comma or spelling rules in three different stories. >.>

Otherwise, solid here.

THE PRETTY STUFF

Let’s try the show/don’t tell thing one last time, and this time we’re going to focus exclusively on your characters and making them more human—in essence, this is going to be a diatribe on realistic reactions.

So the order and amount of description that you allot to things is actually pretty important. Logically, things that a character describes first or describes the most are usually things that said character finds the most important—after all, that’s where the emphasis is. Let’s take a look at one of your paragraphs of description:

Sorry for the long block quote. For reference, this is pretty early on in, just after Alice ends up in purgatory.

Here’s the order of description:
=I’m naked (not shown, but previous paragraph)
=There’s a man here (also I’m naked)
=there’s another creature here, and it’s blue and purple
=the creature has purple wings and something about blue pieces
=the creature has eyes and ears
=the creature has a mouth and tail
=the creepy man staring at me (hi I’m naked) has some nice clothing
=oh yeah maybe I should do something about being naked
=oh, hmmm, what’s going on?

I would argue that the driving force that would keep readers going throughout this section would be the desire to find an answer to the last question—“hmmm, what’s going on?” However, the majority of these two paragraphs is spent giving a Bulbapedia-esque description of a Zubat, with some other attention given to the clothing of Leo. From a stylistic standpoint, this is kind of a questionable decision, because you’re basically forcing the reader to focus on something that’s minimally important to the story later on.

From a realistic standpoint, this also doesn’t make sense: if feels like Alice is focusing a ton on the details of the Zubat, when really her more pressing concerns are probably the fact that:
1. Her soul got eaten by a doll
2. It appears to be permanent
3. She now has no idea where she is and what’s happening
4. There’s a guy who’s staring at her, naked

I also still see absolutely no reason why you thought it would be funny to have a naked underage girl in the introduction of your story. There’s really no point, the creepy aspects don’t really help to set up Leo as a sympathetic character, and it literally serves no role in the story (outside of maybe “oh I can imagine things into reality in purgatory,” and there are a billion ways to do that that don’t require humiliation of a minor).

Basically, sometimes your character’s reactions don’t really fit in with what should be the focus of the scene. Is it really vital to my understanding of the story that I know that Zubat has x-characteristic and y-trait and purple wings with blue spirals? Good description is good, yes, but putting it here severely undercuts on any tension that you’ve built up in your introduction—we get some nice suspense, and you put it all on hold for an anatomy lesson. Try to focus on describing the most important things first—you’ve got the entire story to tell us about the precise coloration of this zubat (who, really, plays no role in the story, but hey), so don’t feel the need to rush it.

THE FINAL STUFF

Lengthwise/numerically, sure this works. Well over the requirements for a Simple-ranked capture.

Pacing-wise, the only original content comes in at the end, and the entire ending feels really rushed anyhow. A lot of that is from the focus in description thing I brought up previously—you should try to describe important things more than you’d describe less important things. In this case, you speed through Alice’s character development in purgatory in less than a paragraph—which is, for reference, about the same amount of space you devoted to describing the shape of a Zubat.

Some elements of this story were a bit questionable at best. I get that this is a Simple-ranked capture, again, but (again) a lot of the things mentioned here are things that you’ve heard before, almost literally dozens of times. Things from old grades that you should consider:
=The grammar stuff. Seriously, I don’t type out those paragraphs for nothing and those are actually concrete rules that are set in stone.
=Description, showing/not telling, emphasizing important things with more description than less
=Showing character growth within the plot, or having characters behaving realistically/writing people like people (this grade was already a little bottom-heavy by the time I got here, but I also maintain that none of Leo’s reactions to the Zubat doll literally coming to life, turning his skin blue, and appearing creepily in random places, are logical responses that any teenage boy would have to the situation).

These are all things that you’ve probably seen in your other grades, and these are all strong candidates for improvement here.

I’d also like to re-visit my qualms about how you basically wrote the same story (unappreciative kid is mean to parents, unappreciative kid gets a magical cursed toy, unappreciative kid is mean to schoolmates, unappreciative kid discovers that the magical cursed toy is evil and then they get sucked into the toy because they are bad people) as you did in TBD, with some filler bits on the end. This is hardly a new plot from a story that you wrote less than a month ago, and the themes/content/characters/morals aren’t really different enough to warrant writing something so similar again, I think.

Also, pretty minor at this point, but Zubat plays basically no role in this story. If I were to replace the Zubat plushie with, like, a teddy bear (or, idk, a Gothita doll), the story would be exactly the same.

For the reasons listed above, I’m going to have to side with Zubat not captured. There were the groundworks for a story here, but the lack of original plot really, really hurt you a ton—this is the part that I’d like you to focus the most on. Maybe try telling the story from a different angle, or reimagining the plot altogether, but your current story is too similar to your previous installment for me to really give many originality points here.

Obviously, the stuff mentioned in previous grades is also pretty valid here, I think. You should work on cleaning up your description, especially focusing more description to more important things, and you should definitely work on developing your characters/their growth more realistically throughout your story.

Also, seriously, those comma rules.