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Post by Kwan on Jan 6, 2014 16:54:50 GMT -5
* * * Introduction * * * Crouched beneath the windowsill, Freddy took the moment to consider how he’d arrived at this point in his life, while he waited for the family to settle down and fall asleep. The contract could wait and he’d only cause a ruckus if he rushed in there. As he grew up he wanted to be a scientist or a mechanic, something that required brain-work - not that his current position didn’t need a whole lot of planning and thinking! He could remember taking apart his first wireless radio and putting it back together again and how proud he felt at that exact moment. He’d even showed his father even though the old man didn’t understand it. His teenager rebellion years had been slightly geeky and spent in a garage tinkering with things. This job was far from what he’d wanted to be but it was what paid the bills. It had happened by accident, just as he entered his twenties, helped along by a little pushing from Idris. Once he’d completed the first mission there was no turning back. Freddy wasn’t even sure how he’d managed to kill a human being, let alone as many as he had done, but that was the work of an assassin. Now they required him to kill the daughter but never gave a reason. She’d be asleep soon and in the room above his head, according to the briefing.
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Post by Kwan on Jan 13, 2014 19:39:06 GMT -5
Entry One Crouched beneath the windowsill, Freddy took the moment to consider how he’d arrived at this point in his life, while he waited for the family to settle down and fall asleep. The contract could wait and he’d only cause a ruckus if he rushed in there.
As he grew up he wanted to be a scientist or a mechanic, something that required brain-work - not that his current position didn’t need a whole lot of planning and thinking! He could remember taking apart his first wireless radio and putting it back together again and how proud he felt at that exact moment. He’d even showed his father even though the old man didn’t understand it. His teenager rebellion years had been slightly geeky and spent in a garage tinkering with things.
This job was far from what he’d wanted to be but it was what paid the bills. It had happened by accident, just as he entered his twenties, helped along by a little pushing from Idris. Once he’d completed the first mission there was no turning back. Freddy wasn’t even sure how he’d managed to kill a human being, let alone as many as he had done, but that was the work of an assassin. Now they required him to kill the daughter but never gave a reason. She’d be asleep soon and in the room above his head, according to the briefing.The briefing was important. It was a lifeline thrown into Freddy’s increasingly bizarre and disconnected universe. There was a steadfastness in the briefing, in addition to profound and life-saving utility. It told Freddy the things he needed to orient himself, and to keep on living. It told him about Mr. Pentecost’s trick hip, or what prescriptions Mrs. Lattimore had in her medicine cabinet. It told him when the binding energy between atomic nuclei was marginally decreased, or that the local brisance of nitroguanidine explosives was slightly higher than expected. For this particular contract, most of the local metrics were within safe tolerance of the baseline. There was evidence of an inexplicable extra neutrino produced in Lithium-7 fusion reactions, as well as a previously undocumented genus of toxic annelid worms, but as long as Freddy steered clear of proto-stars and oceanbed volcanic vents, neither one should pose any serious problems. A light clicked off inside, and Freddy shifted positions with a gentle sighing of rhododendron leaves and fullerene-laced ballistic fibre. The house was a large and rambling complex of single-story wings, splayed haphazardly across three acres of uneven terrain. Boxy, modernist rooms clustered around pools and gardens; rain-shielded colonnades ran along favourable sightlines; broad stairways and narrow bridges zigged and crossed up and through the public places. A riot of creative architecture and casual affluence, nestled in a copse of manicured woodland twelve miles from the nearest town center. The perimeter wall had been bypassed easily enough. Guards slept peacefully under the oversight of a powerful barbiturate, and all electronic security was similarly waylaid through the influence of soporific AIs. The interior compound was a shell of deserted capillaries through which Freddie moved like a virus, ghosting silently towards the scattered pockets of warm-beating occupation. He slinked along an agora done in white plaster, brushed steel, and tempered glass, following from a distance the warm black and yellow silhouettes glimpsed through frosted windows. Crossing a slender suspension catwalk that spanned a gurgling waterfall, he instinctively avoided the wobbly third stone step—slick with gentle spray—remembering past carelessness that had nearly led to disaster. Freddy had been to this house before, in another time and another space. It had been a visiting uncle that he’d targeted then, and somehow that had been more palatable than his current task. There was no objective reason this should be so: the uncle was a thinking being in his own right. In another frame of reference he was father, husband, son; yet somehow the description of him as ‘uncle’ in this context had lent numbing distance. An uncle was a bit player, connected by thinner threads than those of the central nuclear familial unit. Excising those threads had been an easier burden to bear than what Freddy currently faced. The fact that in this world the uncle was alive and happily living in Scarsdale offered little solace. Imagine the universe in its totality, ripe and heavy, laden with space, energy, and potential. Now add a second universe, and a third, squeezing in from top and bottom, each one as vast as the first. Continue imagining to the nth power. Infinite universes above and below, stacked like turtles, all the way down in both directions. A great flapjack array of branes connected in parallel—the bulk. Take this vertiginous column; project it forward and backward as well. Snapshots of the whole riotous affair at each Planck instant in time. An endless wall of echoed moments, held barely distinct, but vibrating with the harmonics of their proximity. Now into that mess add the causal termites that are sentient beings. Pedipalps of free will burrow a juddering path through the phase space of all possible life choices. Turn left, turn right, pull the trigger, eat the cheesecake. Lifelines cross and merge, intertwine and separate, and sometimes the shapes they trace drop right out of reality. Quantum tunnels collapse an unstable vacuum to its lowest energy state. The last scissor cut intersects with the first, and craftpaper snowmen accordion their way to apocalypse. That was where Freddy came in: cut the problem lives short before they became an issue. Surf the gamut of realities looking for telltales of disaster. That grandma in Mozambique shouldn’t have become a drug dealer. Why did the bioluminescent whale person have to ask his waitress for a receipt? Big and little things add up, but a bullet (or a harpoon) solves either one. Like soldering circuits in a wireless radio. Movement stops and lights dim, so Freddy creeps closer to what he knows is the girl’s bedroom. Father and Mother tuck Daughter in for the night, and Freddy still doesn’t know why she needs to die. It’s better that way, sometimes. He only completed two semesters at MIT before the Program recruited him—before Idris took him into her bed, then her office, then her shooting range—and certain finer aspects of multispatial pan-dimension interferometric game theory are really more of a third year syllabus. The lights blink out, and Freddy feels a muscle in his jaw tense involuntarily. He blames the metachem scrimshaw that sits on top of his baseline neurology; some of the fast-twitch fight or flight hardcoding has been buggy lately, and is in sore need of an RNA oil change. 538.29 seconds tick by on his built-in hypothalamus clock as he waits for the parents to retreat to distant quarters, and for everything but the accent lights to be switched off. He’ll turn those off as well on his way out, he decides. Spare this environment a few thousand joules worth of CO2. Freddy moves to a sliding glass door and inserts a waxy lump of programmable matter into the analog lock. It becomes the key and twists itself with a proud flourish, and Freddy moves the tall glass pane silently to one side. He stands in the shadows of a hallway outside the daughter’s room, and draws a boxy sidearm with a squeak of oiled leather. The weapon can manufacture its own slugs in a variety of solid, semi-solid, and warhead configurations, and it can also project an ultraviolet excimer laser in the precise frequency for human tissue to absorb its energy and disintegrate. The girl is already asleep when Freddy gets inside, more at peace with the world than he ever was; as a child Freddy would lie awake for hours some nights—still would, in fact. The room is dimly lit by a night light, and he can see the various plush detritus it has accumulated very clearly. Rabbits and elephants flopped in boneless languor. On a desk in the corner, Meccano or something similar has been coaxed into the shape of a little robotic crane that moves blocks between two buckets. He doesn’t hesitate as he raises the gun and fires twice. It was chambered for simple 9mm Parabellum rounds, so the holes they leave in his brainpan aren’t enough to immediately overcome his augmented system. Thoughts are beginning to dribble out through the leak, but very little blood follows them, and what little there is will be gone by morning—gobbled up by engineered mites that are meant to keep him from leaving a DNA trace. Every agent gets here eventually. The only lifelines more damaging than the problem vectors are those of the people who eliminate them, so it’s in the contract that a job can be completed either by acquiring the target, or by taking yourself out of the equation instead. Neat little self-closing loop for the bosses, and you get to go out feeling semi good about yourself. Freddy feeds a macro into what’s left of his cortices while he still can. The kid doesn’t need the kind of aggravation that would come from finding him when she wakes up, so his ruined brain will drive his legs out of here before it shuts down for good. A great edifice of logic architecture crumbles while he shuts the door behind him, and suddenly there’s very little of Freddy left at home. The briefing is cached in a hardened lobe, and it whispers to him as the darkness closes in, and his body zombie-walks down a gently sloping arcade. It gives him something to hold onto at the end. There’s a poison worm living on the bottom of the ocean. Mrs. Lattimore takes a blood thinner for her thrombosis. There’s a man named Freddy living happily in Scarsdale.
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Post by Kwan on Jan 13, 2014 19:40:17 GMT -5
Entry Two
#8
Crouched beneath the windowsill, Freddy took the moment to consider how he’d arrived at this point in his life, while he waited for the family to settle down and fall asleep. The contract could wait and he’d only cause a ruckus if he rushed in there.
As he grew up he wanted to be a scientist or a mechanic, something that required brain-work - not that his current position didn’t need a whole lot of planning and thinking! He could remember taking apart his first wireless radio and putting it back together again and how proud he felt at that exact moment. He’d even showed his father even though the old man didn’t understand it. His teenager rebellion years had been slightly geeky and spent in a garage tinkering with things.
This job was far from what he’d wanted to be but it was what paid the bills. It had happened by accident, just as he entered his twenties, helped along by a little pushing from Idris. Once he’d completed the first mission there was no turning back. Freddy wasn’t even sure how he’d managed to kill a human being, let alone as many as he had done, but that was the work of an assassin. Now they required him to kill the daughter but never gave a reason. She’d be asleep soon and in the room above his head, according to the briefing.
Occasionally, the moon would battle its way through a cloud and reveal Freddy to would-be prying eyes. The house that he stalked, though, was hidden away from the world. While the rest of the city slept in open view of each other, Freddy's target was down a long drive and flanked by old birch trees. Freddy waited. He looked down at his watch. The hand nudged eleven and he gently eased open the window that he was waiting beneath. Once, long ago, his pulse would have sky-rocketed. Now, it didn't even flutter.
One of the earliest rules Idris had taught Freddy about being an assassin is that you don't look at the paraphernalia of your target's life. Don't look at the family portraits on the fireplace. Don't look at the laminated certificates on the floor. Try not to comprehend the name written in pink upon the bedroom door. Because of these rules, Freddy didn't notice the smiling family of four staring back at him. The sickly pink drawings were out of sight as he moved down the hallway, his hand sinking into the pocket of his jacket as the smooth grip of his pistol rubbed against a stone dry palm. Pushing open the door, cringing at the moaning hinges, Freddy stepped inside the daughter's bedroom. In the back of his mind, Idris's words floated through his head. Don't look around. Ignore the bookshelf and the desk assorted with crayons. You're here to send a message.
The girl was asleep. Before he could stop himself, Freddy began to compare her to children he knew. She was bigger than his younger sister's child but smaller than his girlfriend's kid. The cogs of his brain kicked into his life and the number six jumped into his head. She was six years old. Freddy didn't want to know but the facts were laid out bare in front of him. Six. His stomach didn't church. His eyes didn't water. Freddy merely sighed. Like a clockwork toy, he pulled the pistol free from his pocket. The girl laid sleeping, the blankets slowly rising and falling with every breath. Freddy took aim. He pulled the trigger.
And the girl died.
Before even the first footsteps could echo through the house, Freddy has reached the bedroom's window and pulled it open. He caught snatches of mumbled, scared, hurried conversation through the walls and then he was through the opening and into the quiet garden.
He didn't look back at the body. He just walked away.
Because this story isn't about Freddy.
***
The man of the girl who died wasn't a bad man. He didn't kill people. Corruption wasn't a word associated with him. There had never been a case where he had blackmailed a stranger. Nor, it must be said, was he a very good man. When the Red Cross came to his door, he would pretend that he wasn't home. He had smoked for twenty of his thirty-nine years upon this earth. Once or twice, maybe after spending one hour and several too many drinks at the bar, he would return home and lapse into a funk that would leave his children cowering in their bedroom. Not in fear of his hand, no, this man wasn't a bad man. Merely in fear of him snapping and yelling at them when they had done nothing wrong.
This man was just a man.
A man who unfortunately owed money to Frankie Arton.
The night that Freddy killed his daughter, though, he stopped. Everyone did in that household. His wife sobbed and cried and didn't leave the house for half a month. His older child, a strong boy who played wide receiver at his high school, spent hours within the classroom staring through windows out at cloudy skies. Eventually, painfully, time undertook its medical career. If it was incapable of healing the wound, it at least went about patching it up. The boy would find a teacher who could shake him free of the inky darkness and meet a girl who stood watch for that great black dog. With the help of those wonderful life-long friends, the wife would slowly return to the world of the livings. Her daughter's memory would change from a shackled weight to a protective cloak.
The Man was left untouched by time's healing hands.
From nine in the morning to nine at night, he would stare: at the wall, at his family, at his work. He would do nothing but stare. He didn't budge when, with a sad shake of his head and a conciliatory handshake, his boss had to let him go. There was only a hint of movement when his son left for college; the boy's bedroom emptied into boxes. When his wife could take no more, when she had to go, to move on, he merely moved to the window and watched her drive away. He only stared. Except, it wasn't staring.
The Man was waiting.
It took two whole years for Freddy to return. To people who didn't know or understand Frankie Arton that would seem odd. It wasn't. Frankie didn't need your money. He did, however, need your fear. Because with that fear, he got everybody else's money. It didn't matter if the Man paid up his debt after his daughter died. Why? Because everyone was scrambling behind their sofa to find the last cent to pay off their own loans to the crime lord or fear losing their own children. The Man could be left to grieve. After two years, though, it was time for Freddy to return and send another message. This time the Man had to pay.
Freddy waited beneath the same windowsill as he once did. He reflected upon the same thoughts as he had before. A wireless radio came swirling to the forefront of his thoughts as his increasingly lined forehead glistened with the sweat from the summer night. Nothing existed within his memory of the girl Freddy had killed; he simply couldn't remember who it was he had killed that night. All he knew now was his orders. He was to take the money of the man who lived here or he was to put a bullet in his head. Freddy's heart still didn't stir at the thought. With the barest sense of deja vu, he reached for the window, pushed it open, and climbed through.
Everything went black.
Like the most frustrating of alarm clocks, a dull thumping awoke Freddy from his slumber. Colors assaulted his eyeballs. Rope dug into his skin as the assassin went to gingerly feel the bump that he was sure was forming at the back of his skull. His eyelids shooting open despite the harsh light, Freddy writhed against the chair that he was tied to. Hands were trapped behind his back, his feet securely tied to the bottom of the chair. For a second, he thought he was having a heart attack. It was such a foreign sensation to feel his heart-rate climbing higher. His body just didn't do that. The air seemed thicker as it slipped between his lips. It had to be pushed down his throat.
Blurriness slowly solidified. Freddy could make out the room around him. His heart skipped a beat; his lungs felt as if they were being filled with water. Like the briefest taste of a grandparent's favorite candy, memories came flooding back. The little girl's room. She was six years old. Now, unlike before, Freddy had little choice but to dispense with Idris's advice. Muscles straining into action, his head twisted and turned as he scanned the room. It hadn't changed. There was still the drawings pinned to the wall. Photographs of the little girl stared back at him. The little girl that he had shot in her sleep. Stay calm, he thought to himself. Stay calm.
The words had barely floated through his mind before the door swung open and the Man walked in. He was wearing a white jumpsuit, as if he had casually stepped in from painting the dining room. He didn't say the word. He didn't slow in the face of Freddy's frantic appeals. The Man's eyes were bloodshot and his face was a mess of uneven hair. As silent as Freddy has been entering the house that faithful night, he took a syringe from his pocket and gently eased it through the barrier that was Freddy's skin.
Freddy's head flopped down onto his chest.
By the time the sedative had wormed his way through his body and Freddy had awoken, the room had changed. The drawings remained. The carefully made bed, all neatly tucked in at the corners, was still sitting next to Freddy and his chair. The photographs of the little girl had disappeared. Instead, the frames were filled with grim faces crammed into black dresses and suits. A coffin was being lowered into the ground. The girl's smiling and laughing face that had been staring at Freddy from the bedside cabinet was now watching her own wake. Freddy couldn't look away. His eyes were drawn to the clustered memories of the funeral that he had created. They encircled him. There was no chance of escape until the Man emerged again and once more plunged the syringe into Freddy's arm.
And so the game continued on. Freddy would awake, see the horrors of his own creation, and then be plunged back into darkness. That clever part of his brain, the part that had once taken apart a wireless radio, desperately searched for an escape. There was none. He was so tightly secured to the chair that he could hardly move. Even if he did break free, every way out of the room was deadlocked. There was no weapon to attack the Man with. There was no hope. All Freddy could do was watch as the bedroom slowly turned from shrine to coffin. With a twinge of salty wetness against his tongue, he realized that he was crying. Tears of pain, insanity or delirium, Freddy couldn't be sure. The framed photographs were now those out of a crime programme. Except it wasn't a dead prostitute laid across the slab of a forensic centre in Miami. It was the little girl. And the hole in her head hadn't been put there by some slicked hair fictional psychopath. He had put it there. He had shot her.
“Please,” Freddy had croaked as the Man entered again. His throat felt as if he had walked endlessly through the Sahara. “I'll do whatever you want.”
“You made me,” the Man grunted.
Freddy didn't move. He didn't understand but nodded all the same. “Yes, yes, I did.”
“You made me,” the Man repeated, dropping down to kneel in front of Freddy. The assassin could smell the stomach-churning cocktail of alcohol, cheap takeaway food and the stench of unwashed body hair. “Who made you?”
Blinking, Freddy moved back against his chair. Anything to gain another inch of space between himself and the Man. Could he really not know who had sent Freddy to kill his daughter? “Frankie Arton.”
“No, no, no. Who made you? Frankie sent you. Who made you?”
“I don't understand,” Freddy blurted out, his voice shriller than even his prepubescent years.
“Who led you to Frankie? Who made you?”
Freddy wasn't sure if the Man already knew the answer, if he was testing him. His mind that he had once prized as long since shrivelled into a darkened corner to hide at what he had done. “Idris. Idris Davids.”
The Man didn't respond. With one final piercing look into Freddy's eyes, he rose to his feet and reached into his pocket. Freddy began to blabber, fearing for the syringe and what he would see next upon awaking. Maybe, the father had the daughter's body waiting to be sitting across from Freddy. Instead of the glistening surface of the syringe, though, the Man pulled out a rattling white pot from his pocket. From the label, Freddy could make out some type of prescription for sleeping pills. Without a word passing between them, Freddy understood what the Man meant as he opened the pot, placed it upon Freddy's lap and walked slowly from the room.
The room has become a coffin.
***
And so the Man hunted. For months he followed Idris and put together the history of his crimes and then he struck like he had struck Freddy. The tall, handsome Idris was left to wallow in the misery of his own work as he was locked within a small kitchen with the memories of his own victim. The Man moved on, searching to find who had “made” Idris and then onto the man who had made him. Scratching their heads, the police were left to ponder the mystery that was left in front of them. Months turned to years and the heart of Frankie Arton's criminal network was torn to threads.
My criminal network.
And so I sit here, waiting. I know he comes for me. It is only a matter of time until he meets a man who can name no one but myself as the person who made me. In that moment, maybe, the Man might smile for the first time in a decade. But it will not last for long. He will come to me and torture me. I will have no escape. Neither will he. For when he tortures me, he will ask who made me and I will be left as dumb as a man pondering the intricate nature of the universe. I don't know who made me. I am what I am. And so I will take my final revenge. Society made me.
And so he will keep hunting even when I lay dead in this office of mine. An office which will soon become a tomb. It doesn't matter if you're a good person or bad. He will come for you. It is all he has left.
He is here now.
He is staring. But it's not really staring...
He is waiting.
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Post by Kwan on Jan 16, 2014 14:00:41 GMT -5
Entry One Reviews Show don’t tell. I liked the world you built but I would have rather lived in it than read about it in a school book. Other than that, descriptions and pacing felt good to me. * * * The pick of the round in my view. A fair bit of jargon could have really dragged you down, but it didn't. The prose flowed even with atomic nuclei and nitroguanidine explosives being thrown about within the first few paragraphs. I must say, though, that the story didn't quite grab me. It was beautifully written but there wasn't much of a connection between story and reader. I buckled in for the ride but I felt unaffected by Freddy's end. The description of the house was stellar. The act of Freddy moving through it was almost a bit too sterile. Even considering that, the story is really elevated from some of the others due to the flashes of sheer brilliance found within an otherwise great, though not amazing, story. The paragraph about the uncle was superb. The causal termites paragraph was simply exquisite. In fact, as I'm reviewing the story, I'm willing to forgive you for the lack of a connection just because at how well the entire piece is written. Definitely, an interesting and entertaining plot. I enjoyed reading it. My only concern with the plot is the ending. I may be dense and missing something, but I'm not sure it exactly works. Sure, Freddy kills himself and closes the Bruce Willis loop... but what about the girl? Doesn't she still need to removed? Doesn't that thread need to be cleaned up? That was the only bit at nagged at me. Maybe you were hoping that we made the leap in logic that the girl still need to be removed and Freddy's sacrifice wasn't all that flash because another agent will step up? If so, perhaps that hint was a tad too subtle. Or maybe I was missing something. * * * That was great fun. I probably enjoyed this more than I should have. The time-travel, the ideas, the everything. It was fun and I got the feeling that you really enjoyed creating it as well. The only negative comments I have are about the ending. It all happened a bit quick and because you did what you did I was really confused. I had to pause and check that I read it correctly and that it wasn't just a mistake ("he" instead of "she" or something). It was really quickly and not only that it came as a shock. I know you intended it as a shock for the audience but it didn't seem like he'd put any thought into it? It was like he just decided: you know, fuck it, why am I doing this any more. Maybe if you'd added more about why he made that decision it wouldn't have felt so hasty. You couldn't use guilt about killing the girl since he'd been in the business a while but maybe feeling tired or something? Make it a little more real or give us some more insight into Freddy. * * * This was kind of brilliant. I didn’t like it at all, but it impressed me. The amount of jargon injected into the prose coated the reading experience with a thin film of 200 ml of some inexplicable fluid that reflected a wavelength that fell somewhere in the spectrum of purple. Reading this felt clunky and difficult – besides the vocabulary, the change in prose and the attempt to insert a very creative but kind of complex concept into such a short story. I respect this story, but I didn’t enjoy reading it. I walked away feeling definitively that it was an objectively good story, almost, even, a fun story. But it didn’t read well, or easily, or enjoyably. Entry Two Reviews I was worried when you wrote “This story is not about Freddy” that you were about to cop out and write the story you wanted instead of the one you got. But you fooled me. You did a great job with this. I loved the structure and the way you turned the focus of the story on it head. Good job. * * * Didn't see that coming and in the end enjoyed the story. There was a darkness that you captured very well. I felt haunted by the father. I felt his pain and wanted him to get his own back. The ending was also very well thought out. I liked that you turned around the whole story and made it not about Freddy. That was clever – especially as you gave him a satisfying end and didn't just excuse him. I do feel like you should have spent a little more time explaining how the family eventually was able to rebuild and move on. That part was rushed and it showed. Also, to show the father's descent and waiting. A bit more repetition might have helped in this case to really show the passage of time. * * * That was interesting. I wished it was longer, which is one of the bigger compliments I can give – but at the same time, it’s a flaw. It didn’t feel long enough. I really enjoyed the plot you developed, the characters, the twists. I liked even the little things about it. But it didn’t exactly feel full or finished. It could have used some more meat to it. Ultimately, I think the little details and the general fluidity and style of the writing was more enjoyable than the competition. While history and intuition tells me this story’s author likely won’t advance to the next round, I hope I’m wrong. This had potential, as long as more flesh is put on the bones of the next story.
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Post by James on Feb 8, 2014 15:47:55 GMT -5
Number Two was mine.
I'm a little embarrassed that it won.
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Post by Kaez on Feb 8, 2014 15:56:54 GMT -5
Number Two was mine. I'm a little embarrassed that it won. I voted for it. The other one -- Taed's, presumably -- was really clever and all. But I enjoyed reading yours more.
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Post by James on Feb 8, 2014 15:59:15 GMT -5
Number Two was mine. I'm a little embarrassed that it won. I voted for it. The other one -- Taed's, presumably -- was really clever and all. But I enjoyed reading yours more. I jolly well hope it was Taed's or my review looks really stupid.
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Post by Matteo ((Taed)) on Feb 8, 2014 18:43:36 GMT -5
I don't know what you guys are talking about. I've never heard of nitroguanidine in my life.
I went out in the first round! That's never happened before! *uncontrollable sobbing*
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Post by James on Feb 8, 2014 18:47:28 GMT -5
I don't know what you guys are talking about. I've never heard of nitroguanidine in my life. I went out in the first round! That's never happened before! *uncontrollable sobbing*I actually think that our two matches in the first round of an Arena have both probably gone the wrong way. I genuinely think you should have won this one. My non-humble side also thinks I should have won last year's match-up.
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Allya
Senior Scribe
My Little Monster!
Posts: 2,271
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Post by Allya on Feb 8, 2014 19:41:50 GMT -5
Taed, sorry if my short review offended. I've been short on time lately so I made my reviews short and direct. I also did that so people were less likely to know it was me reviewing as I'm typically overly positive.
What I was referring to was when you told the reader to imagine...you broke the fourth wall and took me right out of it. I should have conveyed that better.
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Post by Matteo ((Taed)) on Feb 8, 2014 20:41:45 GMT -5
lol No, not offended. Just an excuse to use that Futurama clip. I am curious to hear what other people think, though. Personally I think the imagine thing was okay. You see that kind of infodump a lot more in older sci-fi, but it's still pretty common. I agree that it's usually better to try and work those details in naturally, but if you can tell me how to 'show not tell' the idea of quantum tunnelling through an n-dimensional brane space in a 1600 word story, I'll be very impressed
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