So, um, anyone who decides it takes too long to read my entry is entirely pardoned for that, haha. I do believe it is fairly readable, but there can be any number of reasons. Mostly time-related reasons. It's only 3073 words short of half the first Harry Potter book in word-count, after all. Haha.
The hider currently located at the end of my entry was really only intended for Terminal where I included it in the PM, but he seems to have included it for all to read, so allow me to share that it was influenced by my emotions at the time and should not be taken seriously. If/when you get there. Haha.
All of which is contained below are my own opinions and that's about it. Just thought some people would want to have some reviews. If not, oh well, here they are.
Yepp. That's a thing. It's rather nice of you to take a time and place in history and then change that in some way to make it an entry. It's also one way to make an offer for their families. All of their families that has EVER LIVED were at stake, eh. Interesting! XD
… Still, the absolute lack of any characters at all throughout the entry made it kind of boring to read, I'm afraid. Since half-way through, we already pretty much knew what was going to happen. There wasn't much excitement, just brutal slaughter. Felt like that dragged on a bit. But still, your writing is quite nice. So that's about that.
Still. That makes me wonder how this labour will work when you make the main character “All Humanities' Armies”. Would it then technically be alright to leave all these armies alive even if the entry kills their families, would it be alright to leave whole armies alive? … No point in asking, nobody survived. XD
... Yeah, you're right, it is confusing. I had no idea what was going on at all during the first part, and while the second part explained most of it to the degree that I actually didn't need the explaining notes, you're right, I can't really say that it forgives the entry. I've never been a fan of either confusing nor negative entries. This is both. Though, the story did make me interested in what's going to happen to Taina from now on. But, suppose, that her life kinda still exists. … I do worry a little about “Both the old and young need to be amongst their number”, but eh. Otherwise, it follows the labour rather well, and it does tell a story that I understood by the end of it, which is alright.. Yeah, that's about it. I'll leave the rest to Terminal.
A problem I had with this labour was that, the things that this labour demands to happen, they're not things that should be completed in a short span of time. Sure, one COULD just have had the character in question say “NO WAY!” instantly and then see everyone they love die, but to me it feels like that would have made the story very hurried! And then, when I had decided on a character and a turn of events to happen, I couldn't just have her change her mind too quickly either, that'd feel too abrupt! She had to have gone through a few battles first!
… So, in the quest of somehow completing this labour and simultaneously make a good story with reasonable pacing, my entry became a little lengthy. A little. … And then I was randomly inspired to throw in more things to more properly give each character a reason to be there, so my mind wouldn't feel they were fillings that didn't have a reason to be there other than souls to talk to. And this was the result. I didn't actually start dividing the story into chapters until I realized that my story was becoming too long not to have them. So, yeah. I apologize to those who had to read my very long entry. Still, I hope it was at least reasonably enjoyable. Haha.
I rewrote the entity of the last battle the last day because I felt it wasn't personal enough the first way I wrote it. It became a lot longer. I hope it became better. Haha.
I will have to say... GIVE ME A CLEAR DESCRIPTION ON IF THE MAIN CHARACTER IS A MERMAID OR NOT TO BEGIN WITH. XD … Alright, there it was, in the fourth paragraph. I was straining myself up until that moment. Haha.
… Alright. It kind of feels like that ended way too quickly. You spent such a beautiful amount of time setting things up and developing things, that when suddenly this magic, that demand, that stab and those consequences happened a little too quickly. That's actually kind of something I was afraid would happen with my own entry when this labour was presented, hence partly why my entry is so long, I didn't see a way to make this labour justice without stretching things our a bit. But, still, that was a rather interesting world you set up (obviously reminding me of the Little Mermaid) which I would have been interested to read more about. Yet, now it ended so abruptly. Oh, well.
… Oh, yeah. It was you who said you had to end it quickly because you had no time. Yeeeaaah... I can see that. Too bad. Oh, well!
Oh, THAT'S a solution to avoiding a longer entry. … Yeah, this is a good entry. There's sadness, but the main character took the “follow their demands” route, so it spared his family with reasonable degrees of hope by the end of it. It isn't clear if we should be happy or sad, something's definitely wrong here, but all things considered, it was very realistic and life-like. It feels like this is how some such encounter really would happen, and the solution was pretty reasonably good for the main character, as far as outcomes that completes the labour goes. Still, the request of the enemy wasn't particularly hard to accept. In any case.
As far as I can tell, you've done it again. Haha.
... So, you've been dragged through the hole to hell, and there's still this much left of the entry. So, aaaaaare you going to have a positive or a negative ending? Wheeeeeere are you going with this?
Oh, alright, to a “to be continued”. Indeed, this rather simply completes the labour that is around this time around. I will, however, rather easily admit to not having been particularly interested in the descriptions of the depths of hell which you have provided here. I'm unsure where you're leading this tale, but, um. If you make Michael act against Xantier at any time later in this, and that then does NOT result in the deaths of this family, won't you have failed this labour that perhaps this chapter on its own clears? … Am I thinking too deeply? Haha.
Otherwise, your writing and imagination is fine enough. Yeah. Haha.
A note for all reading my story: ending was soooo premature. I don't know how many words my entry was, but I had around 5000 by the time I realized I wouldn't be able to finish it in time. It was at a point in the story where there was no possible way for me to end it there, so I decided I would have to backtrack and delete a whole bunch and put in an ending somewhere. This is in no way the ending I intended, I had such bigger plans for this entry, but time constraints made it impossible for me to put as much effort into this as it deserved.
... So, you've been dragged through the hole to hell, and there's still this much left of the entry. So, aaaaaare you going to have a positive or a negative ending? Wheeeeeere are you going with this?
Oh, alright, to a “to be continued”. Indeed, this rather simply completes the labour that is around this time around. I will, however, rather easily admit to not having been particularly interested in the descriptions of the depths of hell which you have provided here. I'm unsure where you're leading this tale, but, um. If you make Michael act against Xantier at any time later in this, and that then does NOT result in the deaths of this family, won't you have failed this labour that perhaps this chapter on its own clears? … Am I thinking too deeply? Haha.
Otherwise, your writing and imagination is fine enough. Yeah. Haha.
Positive or negative ending, from whose perspective? :P Maybe it'll be both!
I'm not going against the labour with the rest of the story. I don't think it's right to submit this for the labour and when it's over turn around and make a happy ending for everyone. I suppose I could as it will technically not be a part of the labour anymore, but it just feels wrong. It feels like cheating and I don't want to do that.
There will be some deep debate about contracts and souls in the second part (so close to finishing that), but Michael knows he agreed to a deal and that Xantier is both strong enough and willing to go back to the world and kill every single one of his relatives if he breaks it. So (spoiler alert) I'm not going to have Michael go against the contract he signed. Still, there's plenty of time left for a bit of adventure in the demon realm :)
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Today, we came very close to a new first for the Twelve Labours.
ALMOST everybody remembered to tell me I could include their names with their entries! Only ONE omission this time. So close.
Oh, we also we broke the character limit twice.
Also, sorry about that... I'll do my best to remember for the next round. Since the 8th labour is going to be so amazing it deserves to get a new first, right?
Teh-heh. It was a bit of fun thinking which of you the last entry belonged to. After all, I knew Athinar was writing on an entry, but would WiseDragonGirl really let this labour go by without her providing an entry? ... Turned out that, no, she wouldn't. Haha.
@Athinar Ten paragraphs? That's still considerable. Too bad. I'll look forward to potentially seeing you next time, then! Haha!
... I made sure not to read if I passed or not before I had read through the review, but after the review, I was still unsure if I had passed or not. Gosh. ... I'm scared. Anyway. I'm going to respond, here.
The thing I want to make clear immediately is that overall, this story both shows that you are continuing to improve, steadily if slowly. The entirety of your entry, both parts of it, were lightly sprinkled with typos, awkward grammar, and inappropriate usage of verbs. However, this is perhaps the first time I have read through one of your stories without actually becoming overtly bothered by their frequency. If I had to pick one, I would say your usage of appropriate verbs still needs the most work, 'blasting beams of power' by way of example. Keep at it.
As far as your actual arrangement goes, there is a certain lack of descriptive/visual imagery. I barely have any idea what any of the characters look like or how old they are. You do a decent job of capturing the states of mind as well as their tone of voice and expression, but otherwise I may as well have been reading about stick figures. This also extends to scenery, incidentally. Aside from the brief description of Earth and the rings of Saturn, there is very little depth in your manner of presentation. A good example of this would be the armor our Plutonian heroes wear, which is never described as anything except, vaguely and unhelpfully, as 'armor' with a random color permutation. I have no idea if these are skin-tight suits, streamlined power armor, bulky environment suits, etcetera. Just a little bit of elaboration right at the beginning of the story would have massively improved the visual aspects of the whole thing. A similar problem is observable in the helmets everyone wears that grants them complete, total awareness of the entire battlefield - without telling us how. You do not need to provide a technical explanation, but providing one at all, however flimsy, would have been nice. Is it a telepathic effect? is it wired directly into their cortex? What is going on? No idea. In the future, you might want to elaborate more on such details. Not necessarily anything elaborate or fancy; a single sentence can sometimes have tremendous, far-reaching influence on the entire story (Be thankful you did not inadvisably provoke detailed inspection of the scientific aspects of your story like @mdk did).
I liked the arrangement of dialogue in the story, at least for the most part (refer to the first paragraph). The flow of conversations is remarkably smoother than in the past, and well put together. It still is not perfect, but represents a marked improvement over previous submissions.
I also liked your characterization of Eviri. You did a good job of conveying her conflicted state of mind; her wanting to protect Pluto while struggling over whether or not she was really doing the right thing. Her actions during the mutiny and later, during the fight over Earth, are a neatly structured staircase of character growth and progression. Although I did not actually like the character herself, I did appreciate the depth she acquired over the course of the story-arc. Well-handled.
Perhaps the single biggest problem I have with this story is that, given the effort and length, the actual plot and its logical rigor are both rather weak. Juvenile, in fact - the whole time I felt like I was reading a children's adventure novel. Given your statement that the story is basically of the magical girl genre, perhaps that sort of arrangement is inevitable, or else I simply do not enjoy the sort of over-embellished logic inherent in such stories. From my perspective the whole of the story is beneath your skill, or at least it should be. I was never engaged and, to be honest, I felt like my time was being wasted while reading through it. The story clears the basic standard of quality expected of good storytelling, but in part only because I decided to lay aside any misgivings I had concerning the sophistication of the plot since there was a significant chance my opinion would then be swayed by a preexisting bias against the genre. This is a bad way to have cleared the challenge. Under normal conditions a story should be of sufficient quality to win past the misgivings of a judge who is not making an effort to be objective. I am seriously considering revising the rules of judgment and have each submission reviewed multiple times in order to circumvent this problem in the future, so let it be known: Going forward I will expect better from you.
Also, I get that Aimer was a bit dumb, but descentry is a made-up word. I made it up. It is not actually a valid word. I was trying to sound cool. Please do not take my usage of a nonvalid word as an excuse to use it unless you also happen to want to make up words to sound cool.
... I'm currently afraid that, should I look directly at any of these typos, awkward grammar or inappropriately used verbs, I won't see it. I MIGHT see it if it's pointed out to me, but it could impossibly be pointed out to me by someone if I just typed it down on a blank paper and then just read through it myself. ... Oh, well. I'm happy you weren't overly bothered with it, and that it seems like I'm improving. I DID take a bit more care with each sentence I wrote this time... A bit. And only mostly on that point. Haha.
I'm aware I skipped out on a lot of descriptions. That's partially because I'm not comfortable writing descriptions. When I read descriptions, I often find that my mind forgets them within seconds and I therefore don't really have a use of them, they just hold the reader up before getting to the action which would be remembered. Though, suppose that's the wrong way to go. And, haha, I intentionally avoided thinking about how the stuff they used actually worked, because Plutonian technology's supposed to be so super-advanced it's basically like magic. That was the wrong way to go there, too, huh. Alright. On those parts, I'll attempt to do better and not avoid it in the future.
I'm happy you liked the characterization of Eviri. That little thing is like, um, the most important part of the entire story. It's the part I created and molded first of all and created the rest of the tale to fit it, and you liked that. Everything else was secondary. I'm... I'm most happy about that. If you had disliked that and liked everything else, I would have felt worse than I do right now. Haha. ... And yes, as a person she's not very interesting. That was intentional. Haha.
And that (second to) last paragraph... it scares me. Partly because I don't know what part of the story you don't like. Is there any of my stories that haven't been juvenile? I'm not sure what you're referring to "over-embellished logic". I'm not sure what here is supposed to be beneath my skill. Minus killing all the characters and their home this is pretty much the kind of story I want to write (only referring to the story, not my writing of the story). But, even more than so, I don't know how I would have otherwise have written a tale which accomplished the terms of the labour that still would have made a good story. I'm sorry for having made you feel like you were wasting your time, I have no idea how to change that. I'm scared that, when I sit down to write again, I have no idea how to write something that doesn't make you feel the same way as this one. I basically want to write things that feel like Disney classics or Miyazaki's movies, the ones that would appeal to pretty much any ages, with bright endings that'll make the reader feel that the heroes accomplished something, without necessarily needing to go super-dark and such (though, of course, with my own style). Does that give some form of clarification? I want to write fantastic worlds that makes impressions and write about meaningful characters doing their best in such worlds... ... ... Is that in itself juvenile? ... Then maybe juvenile is the way I want to go. Haha...
Maybe it's Umeron being such a stupidly dark villain that was juvenile? Well, I needed a guy that wouldn't hesitate to destroy Pluto. ... Can't imagine any other sort of guy that'd do that. Well, any other sort that isn't considerably boring. I even had the explanation that he put a chip in his own mind to kill off such emotions to find ways to defeat Plutonian technology, yet it killed more of his humanity than he intended and he became that.
Maybe it's Eviri being put in charge here that felt juvenile? I didn't want her to be someone who was originally in charge, I didn't want her to have experience feeling pressured by such responsibilities. I feel it wouldn't have given as much of an impression if she just handled it with such professionalism.
Or maybe it was Sewbrig? He was more of a joke than anything else, I'll admit that he was most likely the most juvenile part of everything, sure, but I want to have a jokish element to my stories somewhere, he was mostly created for the moment when Eviri hit him. Eh... Was it a mistake to include him? But, I really wanted a character like that, who yelled at them from behind. Could I have done him better somehow, would that have made the entire story less juvenile?
Was it the actions of the other nations being conquered? Would they have joined their armies up or- no, I don't have a bloody idea what they should have done. I'm no military expert. I did my best to give Eviri a believable journey of conquest through the Solar System which she had been forced on by the threat of the annihilation of her people. Is that juvenile? I dunno.
Was it the fact Eviri's companions were such obvious attempts of just getting a colourful cast that made things just feel like their forces were led by children, or something? I really didn't want to make the characters just military officers. Those kinds of stories just following military officers are usually the kind I enjoy the least. I want myself brave young souls daring to take on the world. Is that desire juvenile?
... Or is it just everything altogether? Then I don't know what I could have done instead right now, since the above is basically a gathering of the logic which I applied to make it a story I myself would enjoy reading. I don't know how I'd otherwise do it. ... Sigh. I sure don't feel like I passed any labour, right now. Oh, well.
... And acknowledged. I won't use your made-up word in the future. I only used it because "Terminal used it, then it has to be a real word". I'll make sure to do proper research before using such words in the future. XD
It's not, I swear. I mean, the 'cowboy' angle might be a little hard to read. I just *did not* have time to flesh out the setting.... so it's gonna be hyper-confusing hard scifi. My real-life obligations really sabotaged the contextual detail.
Speaking as one of the few hard-sci-fi experts here on the guild, I will now be sure to include critique on the scientific aspects of your story, if the other judge does not select it.
Good thing you mentioned that, huh?
You evoked the fiend. Now prepare for the Rhino's Bargain.
First, let us talk about lightspeed for a minute.
The speed of light also demarked as C, or 300,000 kilometers per second, is a universal constant. It is the greatest achievable speed possibly by any form of matter/energy on a local basis (this is not entirely true but is observed as enforced on a macro scale by discrete particles if not necessarily by the propogation of their patterns).
That does not, however, mean that objects cannot move faster than light. The classic, and perhaps overused example of superluminal travel would be an alcubierre drive. The vessel within the alcubierre field moves at nominal velocity with nominal acceleration; on a local scale it is not moving faster than light. It just happens that its speed within the distorted region of spacetime that is the alcubierre field permits it to move faster relative to light outside of the field. More specifically, light outside the field is still moving faster than the ship in question, but covers less distance in the same amount of time because the ship does not need to move as quickly in order to cross the same amount of space.
The more relevant implications reflect upon the perceived duration of travel. Since the ship itself is (presumably) not moving at relativisitic velocities locally, minimal time dilation occurs and the distorted region of spacetime within the alcubierre bubble operates on a geometric degree of relative compression; thereby the perceived time needed to travel between two arbitrary points is nearly the same from internal and external perspectives.
With that established, let us now review your mode of FTL travel.
In a place so black and desolate that the whole of the universe seemed a single point of dim light, three blights flashed white-hot and blue. Smallships in lunar boom decelerating past lightspeed and erupting with the gathered optic flash of timeless energy crashing against the abyss in a brilliant and terrible instant. The smallships slowed and circled and winked at one another in the language of jackals, pointed shapes bristling with impossible power. A voice on omnidirectional transmission cackled.
“The longest ten minutes in history,” it croaked. A man, or something alien but man-like and vicious. . .
Rupp waited in a bright room once familiar and full of pain, no longer familiar. For the room and the world it occupied she had been gone a lifetime, though it seemed to her less than a day. Besk and GN conferred outside with an aged man who scarce resembled the villain she remembered. His dark-haired scowl was ringed instead with gray and white, and filled now with regret in place of greed.
There are not many modes of useful FTL travel that necessitate severe time dilation as described in the story. It could just be that I am not familiar with them since all of the Space NRPs I have participated in required competitive designs, and in interstellar warfare the potential schisms that can occur while a fleet is in-transit assuming slow FTL is being used would doubtlessly lead to tragedy once the shoe drops. Getting to the point, the way in which you describe your superluminal transit permits the following speculation:
Your ships are, somehow, impossibly, moving faster than light in a direct fashion without any distortion of spacetime (happens more often than you think).
Your ships are distorting spacetime and are merely accelerating and decellerating across nominal velocity thresholds.
If the former is true, your ships would move backwards through time as they move towards their destination in space, and then would move even further back in time on the return trip - returning before they leave. Contrary to common expectation this does not create any unusual problems concerning causality due to the nonlinear nature of time; the issue lies in the now defunct utility of your chosen FTL drive since its operators would cease to exist in the observable universe (appearing in another freeform instance), thereby precluding further development and usage of your phantom drive in the first place. Following that chain of logic, the FTL drive used in your story either did not exist or else, from the perspective of the viewpoint character only exists up until the last moment she makes use of it - all subsequent usages of the drive by others would, from her perspective, fail and cause the users to vanish (since in her particular stream of consciousness the operable feasability of the drive remained at a constant so long as she herself continued to use it, though this would create large amounts of relative causticity in instance fidelity between jumps). However, we can rule both of these scenarios out as true since an extended amount of time passed between departure and arrival both ways and hence, this particular hypothesis has been definitively debunked.
If the latter is true, almost no time should be passing for either the observers or travelers and so the whole time dilation segue is likely to be wrong. I will permit the possibility of some weirdo drive that locally distorts space without also locally distorting time - I have never attempted to use or else implement such a drive in any of my own efforts and the utility of such a design escapes me. One would think it would be even harder to design than the already conventionally impossible mundane FTL drives seen in literature.
If I had to guess I would say you knew enough to determine that time dilation occured as a traveler approaches C, but the way the equations are set up the time dilation does not increase beyond the constant. The only way so much time could have passed in your story was if the smallships were travelling at just under the speed of light. As a reminder, the speed of light is 300,000 kilometers per second. There are 150,000,000 kilometers in an Astronomical Unit, the Solar System is (by some measures) around 150 AU in diameter, and the average distance between most stars (and thereby planets in star systems) is several lightyears. It would take you nearly a full lightday to travel from the sun to the boundary of the solar system, which makes the 'ten minute' jump to the colony ship even more perplexing, assuming it had passed beyond the heliosphere. The distance and local perceived time measurements remain around the same even when you start going faster than light, meaning it would take nearly the same amount of time from the point of view of the traveller assuming they were moving literally faster than light. The only real way to save on time in this equation is to go so explosively far beyond lightspeed that you could outstrip Spaceball 1. In fact, here is the specific calculation for you.
A single lightyear is approximately 9.5 trillion kilometers. Let us generously assume the generation ship in your story was around 3 lightyears away from Earth (although without FTL that takes generosity to a new level). Most stars would be more than twice as far from each other under normal circmstances, so this is not an unusual interception distance for our purposes.
The stated transit time is ten minutes, which means the smallships had to cover a mere 2.85 trillion kilometers every minute, meaning that they had to be travelling at around 9.5 million times the speed of light (that goes down to a mere 3.166 million times at one lightyear). The equations for calculating the exact degree of reverse time dilation are faintly arcane but, nonetheless, would likely take exception to these shenanigans and spit you out somewhen around the beginning of time. The universe is still an infantile 13.7 billion years old, I will remind you. Thus my confusion with your choice of FTL method.
If I were to go by the aside note at the bottom of the story, one might be able to interpret the colony ship as moving near lightspeed, which would then explain the time dilation if one also assumed a more convention FTL method was being used by the smallships. However, you do not actually clarify that matter in the story itself, and the way in which you have written the scene almost makes it seem as if the time dilation was due to the passage by the smallships rather than by interaction with the colony ship. I know you were trying to be unclear, but you surely succeeded far too well. There is an uncharacteristic lack of detail in this story of yours, so much so that it evokes your submission in the first labour. This is the skeleton of a story.
Aside from simply being dominated by ambiguity, the details of the scenes and characters are extremely vague. Beyond the initial introductory scene and the description of the colony ship, there is almost nothing. I have no idea what these characters even look like. I have no idea what our more alien characters are like. I have no idea what sort of place Rupp has her meeting with Leon and Taina. You also, to your own detriment, omit critical details at multiple points - the paralytic brace on Lupp's wrist, for example, changes the tone of the entire scene but comes across as unintentional and probably should have been mentioned immediately.
As a minor aside, there is a faint internal error with the plot. Leon specifically states to Lupp that she can have her daughter back in approximately forty years, with serious surgical/tech assistance - although he is already aware of Lupp's actions and has undoubtedly already made his decision to kill Lupp and send Taina into assisted living. One could assume that was just a natural instance of a Human being awkward mid-conversation, as they are wont to be, but given the topic of conversation and his actual plans it seems curious that he would have not have been more careful in what he said, let alone put forth an illusion that served no purpose.
I also spotted one or two misspelled words and minor typos. It would appear whatever eldritch being you bargained with to grant you magic fingers has left you by the wayside. Perhaps next time.
Finally, this story does not really come across as a Space Western, though I get that impression in part from what I said earlier. This is a skeleton of another, greater, better story. Presumably one where Taina grows up and then decides to settle affairs through gratuitous applications of violence and space dogfights.
The actual reason Abyss failed the Labour, apart from its overall barren semblance, is that it simply did not meet the challenge criteria. The challenge clarifications specifically stated that you need more than one relative on the line, and that you needed both the old and young amongst their number - you gave us one vegetable.
I think I got the gist of at least 50% of that, but goodness. This is why I write almost exclusively fantasy as opposed to sci-fi.
So, um, anyone who decides it takes too long to read my entry is entirely pardoned for that, haha. I do believe it is fairly readable, but there can be any number of reasons. Mostly time-related reasons. It's only 3073 words short of half the first Harry Potter book in word-count, after all. Haha.
I've not yet had the chance, and I don't know when I'll get it. But I will definitely read your entry before the next RPGC voting goes up.
The sheer number of characters was slightly confusing; thank you for color-coding the dialogue. [...] I’m really eager to see what happens to Antsi. If you ever write a sequel/followup, do let me know.
Certainly I went over-the-top with the Naksa tribe—before writing the story, I went ahead and created their whole family tree. Part of that is due to me using a different world for each Labour, and this one just so happened to be the one in which I've done the most worldbuilding. I am tempted to use it again in further Labours, but... we'll see.
Antsi il-Naksa in particular I came up with when I was twelve, but back then she was named Andeela Anteex. This whole worldbuilding venture has essentially been my attempt to take the dumb ideas I had as a kid and turn them into something useful.
Not quite up to par with your usual entries, in terms of final polish / proofreading, [...] There are just a few little typos that kept me from awarding this one with an Accolade.
I'm not sure when I've ever been good at proofreading. I don't really think I'd have deserved the Accolade even without the typoes, though. Still, thank you!
Labour #8, now. What with all the demoralization I've been getting from @Terminal, if there's one Labour to get an Accolade, it's gotta be that one.
My entry was a feverish sudden-motivation that I soon dropped after I hashed out a basic idea, and the entire thing took me maybe 2 hours in all. I went in expecting 'this is so shit the text is brown and smelly' so my loss didn't come as any surprise.
ME AND THE ELDRITCH ARE COOL, WE TALKED ABOUT IT, THEY SAID IF I KEEP WRITING THAT STORY THEY'LL COME BACK
The colony ship was moving at barely-sub-light, but I certainly wasn't doing any math (though I'll have to, if I keep this up). The thematic significance of technology was the uncertainty (and horror) of advancement -- so a lot of theoretical things which may or may not happen at or above lightspeed were intentionally smudged.
Other point -- and this one, like... okay I had very limited time and space, and I wasn't about to split the photon on a piece this short, but THIS ONE I should've been able to make clear. Leon was supposed to intend all along to let Rupp have her kid back. If she'd done the job the way he expected, she'd be reunited with Taina (and also sadly screwed). When she went ahead and killed everybody, that freaked the other two crooks right the hell out, so much so that they talked Leon into killing Rupp instead.
So this story was supposed to go very differently. It originally had three parts: Ascent, Struggle, Descent. Things that were supposed to happen include:
Lumina going to the surface with the help of Ulsa's transformation cloak Lumina meeting Princess Erica, the daughter of the leader of the island tribes Lumina going to the Iron City, a dark and industrial place. Lumina finding out that the island tribes hunt Merpeople and have killed her oldest brother. *this is as far as I got in writing* Lumina running away with the help of Erica. Lumina and Erica fall in love. Lumina and Erica fight Ulsa as she comes to the surface to reclaim her seashell necklace, since Lumina failed. Ulsa was in love with a human: Erica's father. He has the necklace still around his neck from his younger days, and his boat is swept out to sea. Lumina and Erica fight Ulsa out at sea, Lumina tears the necklace from Erica's father's neck, and throws it at Ulsa. Ulsa smashes the necklace. It represented her last shred of humanity. It was the only thing holding her back from becoming a god. She vanishes after zapping Lumina with lightning, which makes her permanently a human, but also a cripple. Erica and Lumina live together away from the tribes in a hut, where Erica tends to Lumina for the rest of their lives.
In order to give time for the results of RPGC#8 to be posted, the long awaited TTL#8 will be coming Objective Midnight, Friday. Which is either today or tomorrow, depending on where you are.
In the absence of the possibility of victory, new reckonings and modes of thought may be discovered. Flaunt your imminent fall from grace at your peril!
... Alright. That threw me for a loop. Allow me to go and consider for a while what that kind of character might be before I even open the "The Challenge" hider...
1x Thank
I don't really think I'd have deserved the Accolade even without the typoes, though. Still, thank you!
