Seventh Messenger wrote:

Yes, this fic may be bad, and telling me about it is all very fine and
all, but would somebody please mind telling me just what's wrong with
it? Without proper C&C, I can't improve the story. Thank you very much.

I'm not a big EVA person, but I'm going to look at your fic and see if
we can figure out where to apply the 3D Character Texturing, as it were.
^_^  Major snippage and nit-pickage ahead.

[After doing the commenting...] I hope these comments are helpful
because this work has a lot of problems and I do not back away from
pointing them out.

Revelations 0:1:1
the calm before the storm

You really *should* capitalize your title; it's just good grammar. It'd
be different if it was a rendered logo.

   There is a small child on a hill in the plains, standing in the tall
grass. It's stormy, though there's no rain, only violent winds that

You should spell out "it is," as two contractions on one line is kind of
choppy. Actually, those lines could stand rephrasing due to choppiness. 

cause the grass to ripple. It tears at the child's long ragged shirt,
but he doesn't seem to notice.
   He's talking to someone, a specter of a woman.

<shudder> Present perfect tense? It's a tricky tense to write a story
in, and rather wearing IMHO. You can sometimes get away with writing
dream sequences and stream-of-consciousness segments in present perfect.
Howver, to underscore, it's tricky.

[snip]

   With a gust of wind, she blows away like a cloud of smoke before the
child's eyes. The child looks up at the sky.
   "I remember your name. I have lost you once, and I shall never lose
you again."

"remember your name" and "have lost you once" are different tenses. You
could mean several different things here and tense disagreement confuses
it.

1. I [now] (implying the immediate moment, now that you just left)
remember your name.  I (drop the have) lost you once (before, implying
some kind of a repeating time cycle) ... shall never ...

2. I remember (implying that he does know, and did know her name) ... I
have lost (implies that the losing perhaps just happened...)  ETC

Yes, this is clearly supposed to surreal, but it's murky too. WAYYY too
murky for an opening bit.

Chad Yang presents
Revelations
a fanfiction

Layer : 01

   Inside a gothic church, a few old ladies listened intently to a

Ok, we're to past tense, a signal that we're in 'normal prose'
territory.

sermon. The speaker is Ikari Gendo, but he's . . . different. His face
is almost . . . kind. Standing at the podium, he smiles as he speaks,
with a sort of a wild gleam in his eyes, a passion that we've never seen
before.

This is script-type reference and does not belong here. You need to say
something like (pardon the rewrite; it's just to show technique, not
word choice):

"The speaker is Ikari Gendo. When he speaks, he smiles, and there is a
wild gleam to his eyes; otherwise his face could be called 'kindly.' "

   ". . . you can spend hours, days, even weeks arguing whether >    "Amen," returned the mass. The old ladies begin to leave.
   Gendo smiles. He gets down from the podium and makes his way to the
office.

Tense error! Should be 'Gendo smiled.' You've clearly switched to
standard past tense as part of the prose, yet here, you've left
present-tense script instructions in. In future, I'll just flag "tense
error!" everytime you lapse into present perfect. 

   There's a girl, a Japanese girl, sitting in an armchair within
Gendo's office, looking at the lunchbox on her lap. You can take a
closer look if you want. She's fifteen, average height. She looks . . .
remarkably similar to Rei. But she's not an albino. She's normal.

... bad Tense Error.

"When Gendo entered his office, there was Japanese a girl sitting
there." ETC

Quieter than normal, almost part of the office itself, but still normal.
   Then again, you can never tell.

"Show not tell."

   The metallic clank of the doorknob sounds, and the girl looks over 

Tense Error

to

the door. She appears slightly worried, a bit surprised. Why? We'll know
soon enough.

Tense Error. Your omniscient narrator is annoying - Stop breaking the
4th wall and talking to the readers. Say something like "She appeared
worried, and rightfully so." The difference is that there the narrator
is imparting the knowledge that Not_Rei actually *knows* something,
whereas in your line, the narrator directly tells the audience that HE
(you) know something.

   Gendo opens the door. Blinks.
   "Chie! Why are you here?"
   Her expression changes slowly to a nervous smile.

Tense Error ... I'm going to stop flagging them and leave the cleanup to
you as an exercise. =)

<Five Years Ago>

   Ikari Shinji's standing on the shores of the Tokyo-3 lake.
   "Will you come with me?" asks a girl.
   "Yes."

<Now>

... You've watched Death & Rebirth a lot haven't you? Maybe too much.

_<

Race: Angel; Archangel
Class: Unlimited
Category: Unlimited

Sounds like an Ah! Megami-sama reference, and seems jarringly out of
place. Even if it's _not_.

the new pilot, Saotome, are preparing now."

WTF? No, no, no ... just bad. Not here, not now, not this tone of story.

   Ranma, however, doesn't notice. He looks at the plug suit Misato 

I disbelieve there is _any reason_ to plunk him into this. 

   "Well, you're manly," she says, laughing.

Just a guess here but ... wildly OOC for the ice maiden? I know there
were multiple Reis though...


------------------------------------

This fic is nothing but a series of surreal snapshots of strange
incidents. There is very little actual character action or dialog. There
is no sense that it is going any where and no sense of plot to hook you.
The first scene was mildly intriguing but there was no delivery along
that line anywhere in this first bit that would keep a reader
entertained. The reason why it is regarded as 'flat' is because the
characters do nothing, say nothing, and feel nothing. Even an angsty
anime like EVA has the characters fleshed out with shadings of
perception, personality, emotion, and action. 

Your perception that 'prose' is a just a format to shape the words to is
incorrect. Prose is a technique, a writing style that tells a story
using a careful blend of physical description, character dialog, and
narrative statements that represent the most important internal
processes of the characters.  Contrast the following two paragraphs
(sorry, it was the first example of extreme action that popped to mind):

"Shinji is angered so turns and walks away. Rei sees Shinji's suit fall
down. Her face pales. She is horrified by the sight of him."

with

"Shinji turned and stomped off, his face flushed with rage. However,
he'd only taken a few steps when the unsealed plug suit fell right off
him. Rei gaped at the sight; she'd never before seen a boy's naked
behind and for some reason she felt oddly queasy."

Now in the first, the action is all there, but it just lays there like
cold grease. Yuck!! In the second, you should get a sense of the events
occurring, with the characters experiencing emotions. Just from the few
facial details - Shinji's face flushed with rage, Rei gaping like a
fish, you get the sense the characters are _living_ and _experiencing
emotion_.  

Also, you should know that it is generally believed that you should
master prose before doing script. "Walk before you run," basically.

Overall, my suggestions to fix up the story would be:

1. Outline the story as completely as you can. Use a second outline
column, if necessary, to track the flashes out of the main prose stream.

2. Make sure the "flashes" out of the main prose do not confuse the
reader; remember, Death & Rebirth was more of a visual storytelling, and
you just can't pull that off here. I would further suggest you
deliberately limit those flashes and link them together. Or at least
create a sense of links.

3. Ranma has no place in this story. (If he really does, you need to
start at the beginning of his story, not jump into this.) 

4. Re-write this story from scratch. Do not attempt to fix your badly
tensed recycled script. If the story is there, you can make fresh prose.
Revising this file will probably just lead you into the same traps and
produce stilted prose. (Certainly, you can repeat the same dialog, but
try to write it from the memory of the story you want to tell.)  Learn
to flourish your dialog so as to identify the speaker now and then, and
integrate some ongoing action. 

Ex: 

Asuka turned to Rei. "How did you know?" she asked breathlessly. She
stepped closer. "How did you know I wanted that?"

Rei made a sligh shrugging gesture. "Why are you surprised?" she asked
in her usual near-monotone. She turned and stared at something off to
her right. Anything was more interesting than meeting Asuka's angered
gaze. "You wrote down exactly what you wanted for your birthday. It
should not be a surprise."

"Wrote it down? You bitch! That was my diary! What were you reading that
for!"

"You left it open on the bed. I thought that was what you intended."

Asuka clutched the Gekiganger UFO catcher doll to her chest and scowled.
"Next time keep your hands off my stuff, Wonder Girl!"

5. Try to convey a sense of what this story is about early on. You can
LIE and reveal something different later that the starting part is just
a bit of (Mark Page does this in Sailor Investigation Unit, pretty well
actually) but you must give the reader something to build on.

6. Get pre-readers. 

7. Brush up on your verb tenses and their conjugation. This is an
important grammar skill and you _need_ it. (But you apparently spell
checked it so yay for that!)

Good luck,

Nightman