Applemancer: With a piece this short, I cant help but find the frequency of similes and metaphors to be a bit overbearing. Even if this were an excerpt from a longer piece, itd be a bit much to just string them together like that. Which is a difficult place to be in, because clearly that was kind of the point of this one to be heavy on evocative imagery and symbolism, but theres not really anything else too it than that. Guess it works as poetry, I suppose?
Aaron: How smart could this guy be if he didnt even have the foresight to tether himself to the hull? Im almost 1000% positive that is SOP for any spacewalk procedure for obviously reasons. Its conceivable that the explosion might have cut the line or something, but not addressing it at all is kind of the Why didnt the eagles just fly Frodo to Mordor? question of the story. I liked the build up and the reveal, but was ultimately disappointed that Petes treachery and Curtiss menace amounted to so little in the end.
dangerbyrnes: The core story was pretty good, though heavily indebted to Reign of Fire and the fact that dragons are the deadliest creatures in the universe but they only send one guy is a bit much to swallow. Delivery is key, though. Right from the start, Id peg the opening paragraph as being extraneous. Prologues of that sort are the embodiment of telling instead of showing, and there wasnt any relevant information conveyed that couldnt be inferred from reading the actual story itself. The quantity of technical errors (verb tense disagreements, punctuation and capitalization errors, awkward sentence structures) creates a lot of stumbling blocks while reading.
Tangent: At first I thought this was a really good embodiment of both primary and secondary objectives. Im not strong on Hindu mythology, so I took it at face value that this was a colloquial retelling of an established myth, which was mildly disappointing since I think there are ways to do that which would be more interesting than just updating the language. But then we got to the part about the white mouse and laboratory research, and I appreciated the cleverness. Then there was the line about all his success only increasing the average lifespan by 1.8 years, which had me laughing out loud. Then we got a dig in on Trump to boot. Talk about a slow burn joke.
Mike M: As I said, I didnt get to crank out as many iterations as I usually do, so I never felt like I got this one fully trimmed and into fighting shape. It was kind of a slog to both write and read, despite it being one of those story ideas that manifested in my head fully-formed. I cant help but think if the fact that dialogue was so sparse made things difficult for me, as Im not used to writing long blocks of text without breaking it up with people talking. As dangerbyrnes points out, the car mimic was absolutely inspired by the mimics in Dark Souls.
Cyan: I think this has something to do with the Wild Hunt? My only familiarity with that comes from playing the Witcher 2, where it didnt feature too prominently. Ill play Witcher 3 someday. Someday...
Nezumi: Kind of an uncanny amount of overlap in subject matter between our two stories. Spooky. There was one part where there was a scene break in between two lines of dialogue, which it more than a little confusing when I first encountered it. The idea for the story was good, but it could have stood to have been longer and a bit more developed. MIght want to tuck it away to revisit on a later day.
mu cephei: I really dug this, though I found it odd that Silas wouldnt bother to check with Lily if she even wanted to go camping on the surface before taking such a risk. Also found it odd that there was so little in the way of accommodations for engineers to get where they needed to be when there was clearly a need to have them since they were sending Silas out to fix stuff. Not sure I understood what the second guy was there for, unless he and Silass boss was aware of the animal burrow ahead of time?
FlowersisLate: Some errors slipped under the wire on this one. Amnesty instead of animosity, and an instance where the dialogue tag for Allen asking a question itself ended in a question mark. I think this needed a better explanation for what benefit the town got out of its bargain with the mothman, because I have a difficult time imagining that the entire town would be party to the knowledge of what it was costing and stand idly by (especially since the mayor was giving a list of names). It keeps bad things from happening, and it only costs bad things happening, seems like a poor deal. I liked Allens duplicity, but other than that this story was arrow-straight with no surprises after Glenn gets shot. Lloyd is out to kill the monster, finds the monster, kills it, roll credits. There are no reversals, setbacks, or complications to speak of for him, which made everything pretty dull in the end.
Votes:
1. mu cephei
2. Tangent
3. Nezumi
