Round 5 - Arrival Time: Delayed (Sam vs Dragon)

[Kaez]

Write a story based on the following blurb/synopsis:

The flight from Toronto to Madrid is eight hours and grueling. You weren't planning to bother paying $8 just to use in-flight wifi, but four hours of the baby behind you crying hysterically and the sweaty, fat man in the seat next to you snoring like a car alarm and you needed a distraction. You popped in your headphones, punched in your debit card numbers, turned on some tunes and checked Facebook. Everyone's posting about Flight ASA3473. It's gone missing.

You scrambled to pull your ticket from the pocket of your jeans. Flight ASA3473.

[J.O.N ((Dragonwing))]

Flight 3473

I hated flying.

There I sat, one of the many sardines crammed in to a tin can and flung through the sky; hoping that today no one fucked up their job and left a screw loose or a wire crossed. That's all it takes when you think about it. Some ground crew half arse's his job and doesn't check an engine problem, or a pilot does not notice that a dial is playing up. Then bam! You're hurtling for the earth at terminal velocity, passing out from fear and lack of oxygen.

It was because of these thoughts creeping around in my head that I was trying to distract myself with the in-flight entertainment. A monitor on the back of the chair in front of me. Stabbing at the screen I was looping through a collection of shitty movies and t.v shows. I had been doing it for the past half hour. Next to me, my new neighbor moved, like a glacier rattled by an earthquake. I could feel his shoulder weigh down on mine, threatening to absorb me in to his greater mass.

Did I mention the smell? Everything about flying stunk. Hundreds of humans in a self contained system, it had its own unique scent. I didn't need to worry about that though, because all I could smell was the swamps that seemed to hide in the rolls of flesh beside me. It wafted over me in waves, his movements releasing new strains. This one was like rotten meat in a hothouse. All I could do was turn my head and silently gasp at the air from the aisle.

There I sat, trapped under what could possibly be a decomposing pile of fat, my soundtrack the soft murmurs around me that were punctuated by the shrill cries of a baby. I could only take it so long before I cracked. I knew it would cost me a fortune, but I had my limits. Rummaging around in my jeans pocket, I pulled my phone out and connected to the in-flight wifi. Switching my music to random and stuffing my earphones in, I sat back and began to trawl the web.

Thumbing through the vast database of humanity hoping there would be some dumb article to distract me for five more minutes of my life. What I found was an internet in an uproar. Social media everywhere was talking about one thing. A plane missing over the Atlantic. I felt my heart skip a beat and I began to read. A plane flying from Toronto to Madrid had vanished, no communication. Its number was ASA3473. Digging back in my pocket I pulled out my ticket and stared.

Flight ASA3473.

I looked up and glanced about. Nothing, nothing was different. No one seemed to have noticed the news; was anyone even paying attention? How could we all be on a flight that had vanished? My eyes darted back and forth with apprehension. Anything to explain what was happening. Maybe a mistake by the news article? But they all mentioned this flight specifically.

I could feel my skin crawl and my heart freeze. Like an icey claw gripping and squeezing. It was impossible to breath and sweat ran from my pores. We, I, was being watched.

It was behind me.

Like a curtain drawn back.

A train rushing out of a tunnel.

I felt the mundane world pull away and reveal the horror within it. The cry of the baby felt warped and distant, like it was underwater far, far away. The murmur of the other passengers replaced with a suffocating buzzing harsh and pressed against my ears. Clambering from my seat I looked down the rows of seats, towards the back of the plane.

There it was, creeping along. Thin tendrils of smoke reaching out from a mass of darkness that swallowed everything before me. Like tentacles on a octopus it pulled its mass along, row by row. My mind could not comprehend what it saw. Glancing out the windows of the plane I could see it stretch out like a wall, descending upon our plane. Some animal part of me was screaming in fear, driving my heart to a panic.

I stepped back and almost tripped over my feet, stumbling into a hostess behind me. I saw her concerned face and her mouth move speaking in some incoherent tongue. I had to get away from this thing, this entity. I did not want to die on that plane, I knew that with every fibre of my being. There was still so much of life I had to live.

I shoved her aside and began to march down the aisle, gasping for breath and choking, coughing as tears fell from my face. It was as if my body was being overwhelmed with the fear inside me and was trying to purge it. Racing down between the chairs I felt it right behind me, chasing me and tormenting me. Not daring to look back I found myself half falling through the passageway to first class. Gaining some distance from the entity seemed to bring the world back in to focus and I was left standing, panting, in the middle of first class.

A few people were looking up at me, and one of the hostesses was racing towards me.

“Sir, please return to your seat!”

Her voice was in a panic and her hands gripped at my shirt, trying to lead me back. I couldn't go back though, it was waiting for me. No. It was still coming, I could feel it. Just beyond the curtain. I resisted and the woman started shouting for help. From beside us a man stepped up and placed his hand on my shoulder.

I hit him.

My punch knocked him back and he grunted. Adrenaline was coursing through my blood.

“Please sir! You have to return to your seat!”

“Fucking cocksucker!”

“Oh god is he attacking the plane!”

More people began to yell and get up around me. I struggled to get away from them, trying to push past as hands clung to me and dragged me back. Spun around by the other people I was left staring back towards the direction I had come from. I saw the black cloud slip through the curtain that separated the sitting areas. It washed over the woman and the man who was bleeding from his nose. Swallowing them whole.

As it did, the people around me grew confused ad begun to apologies.

They released me as if in a dream, and they drifted back to their seats. Some of them willfully walking into the fog. They had forgotten the brief scuffle. The entity had banished the existence of the people it absorbed. Renewed panic drove me onwards, towards the front of the plane, this time almost half running. I ignored the pain as I bumped into people and seats in my scramble. I knew what I had to do, I had to get to the cockpit and speed up the plane. I had to run.

Up ahead I could see one of the pilots open the cockpit door. By the time he noticed my approach, I was already rushing him. He let out a shout as I tackled into him, sending us both crashing into the the copilot seat. His shouts quickly drew the attention of his partner who yelled in shock. Before either of them had time react I dove for the flight stick. The man underneath me fighting desperately to shake me off.

The pilot wrestled hard to throw me off him, but he was left helpless pinned to his chair as I laid my body weight over him. His fists beat at my back and my head, but the impact felt as if it was happening long ago in my past, when the pain was a distant memory. The shouting from the plane outside of the cockpit was growing more and more quite.

Until there was silence except for the pilots.

I knew without looking up that the entity had reached the door. We were the last three living things on the plane. I pushed with all my might on the stick, the copilot giving a final shout as the cloud swallowed him. It was too late to run, it was right there. All I had was one last desperate action. Feeling it caress my leg and tug at me, trying to pull me in, I screamed and sent the plane in a spiraling dive. Racing for the dark sea beneath us.

[Ad Absurdum]

605,146

At least I’ll be CNN famous…

These are the first thoughts to stray through your head as the Facebook feed buzzes with the half-baked, pre-canned click bait gossip of the flight you’re on. Situations like these–like a good shot of absinthe–tend to bring out the true colours in people. Already, the bigots and superstitious have rallied the gullible into a miasma of theories. Already the end-timers have posted their cataclysmic theories about the rapture. Already, the stakes are being drawn.

Yet, most concerning, there is a notable absence of you.

Your friends, your acquaintances, your people who you briefly met but looked attractive enough to validate Facebook certification for future creeping, all join in the whole slactivism shebang in the typical Millenial five-minute spurts of passion. But yet none of the posts seem to mention you.

It’s troubling, if not a bit depressing. Surely one could gain likes with an easy reference to personal stakes? Are you not even worth that?

Even most news sights are mostly clinical with their delivery. The top shared article appears to be how American fucking Airlines stock could plummet with a disaster like this, the entire story embellished with allegories to a certain Malaysian incident.

You can’t even reply. The internet died, with the stubborn wi-fi bar feverishly searching again for that elusive signal. 11:48pm. Your social media history is already at ‘three minutes ago’ and quickly losing relevance. The 24-hour news cycle and its constant demand for panic already begins to fade.

And you’re on the bloody flight.

You. Right now. On the very flight that is apparently fucked.

And yet nothing to show for it. The Red Eye has set the plane into darkness, with only the occasional flight attendant and baby offering any movement or noise. The seatbelt sign is on, but that seems to be de facto for this flight. Your stomach is churning but that is status quo for American Airlines’ economy meals. You pressed the service button five minutes ago, but the aisle remains empty.

If there is a reason to worry, the staff is doing a very good job at hiding it.

Gossiping is off of the table as well. The fatman to your left snores louder than the 757’s engine, and his occupation of the aisle seat has evaporated your bathroom prospects. The girl to your right has enacted a defcon 4 level of sensory deprivation. Ear plugs, sleep mask, and blanket ensures that the baby, yourself, and any other disturbances can kindly fuck off until landing, thank you very much.

Beyond her, the window. Beyond that, an impenetrable night sky.

You think about what you are going to do in Madrid. Or perhaps ‘were’ is the appropriate word now; the blitzkrieg of Facebook messages emblazoned on your laptop seem to validate it. A typical twenty-something backpacking odyssey. Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, Venice, Rome. The whole Euro-trip blockbuster parade. The initial post-grad scrounging for careers turned up dry, so why not treat yourself in the meantime? Your three year relationship ended in a plot-twist involving your best friend and scapegoatingthewholethingondrugs, so why not throw yourself into the hostel life of sex and drugs and hippies?

A lurch. The plane shudders for a moment, as if hitting a dip along a rollercoaster track. The fat man besides you delivers one wet, croupy cough, but otherwise there’s no explicit reaction from the plane.

Another lurch, this one nearly sends your laptop careening off of the foldout plastic tray in front of you. This time you move to snap it shut, figuring it’ll be much safer in your bag than in the hands of American Airlines engineers.

That’s when you notice something.

11:48 pm.

Perhaps you could attribute it to your poor sense of time. The laptop itself is out of the question. Freshly bought two months ago. Absolutely no way Apple could be that egregious, right?

11:48 pm. You clutch your laptop, nails tap dancing along its edges, physically counting up to sixty now, edge number getting a far too liberal pause.

11:48 pm. You’re at sixty-seven now before you realize it’s fucking pointless. Either your laptop is broken, and Darren from the Genius Bar as well as Tim Cook himself are lying sacks of shit, or something really fucked up is going on.

Facebook points to the latter, but your mind, not keen on facing a ‘really fucked up going on’ stubbornly allots for the former.

Another lurch. A flash from the window. Something shines in the night sky. And it’s close. Far, far too close to your own plane. Your mind perhaps becomes a bit more flexible in its stance. Calmly looking past the girl and her fortress of solitude in the window seat, you peer out.

There, practically kissing the wings of your own, is another flight.

Recoiling, the back of your head bounces off the arm flab of the fatman, conjuring up another volley of coughs. Your finger thrusts up, jabbing the ‘flight attendant’ button.

The wings are touching. In fact they seem to be merging. It has to be a trick of the eyes, but you can’t tell where one wing ends and another begins. They’re intertwined, the lights on the edges of their wings becoming a single neon smudge.

And yet, nothing. No shaking, no turbulence, no crashing. No sound. No other sensory presence of the other plane besides sight. You can only witness it with your eyes.

And then, more lights. Beyond the plane beside you, slightly above it, there’s another flight. The same darkened silhouette, its presence only betrayed by the lights along its body.

You don’t even bother to jab at the ‘flight attendant’ button anymore. Your eyes are glued to the window, your chin is practically on the girl’s lap.

Beyond the plane, another one. And another one.

All of them on the same y-axis of sky, yet each one slightly above the last, curving upwards, similar to what one would see when staring down a hall of mirrors. Moving your head slightly to the right, then left, the illusion continues, the planes moving inversely to your own motions.

Can you even call it an illusion anymore?

“Can I help you, sir?”

The voice startles you, sending your thoughts reeling back into the plane, back into your seat. The flight attendant stirs impatiently in the aisle.

“Sir, I have to remind you that the seatbelt sign is on.”

Your eyes dart towards your laptop, still open.

11:48 pm.

You open your mouth to reply.

And that’s when the plane bursts open, peels of orange flame evaporating first class.

~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~

On the first day, God created the universe.

On the fourth day, God fucked around with quantum mechanics and created the multiverse.

On the fifth day, the Multiverse™ and its assets went public with an IPO at a valuation of $400,000 per share (currency converted to human terms), hoping to raise $450 trillion in capital, for the purpose of expanding the Blue Chip Company’s Bio R&D departments. As predicted, Nihilists short the market.

On the eighth day, the Adam and Eve subsidiaries went public.

On the ninth day, Original Sin and fraudulent CDOs from Lucifer, Stantin & Sons, and the exponentially over-evaluation of flora (also known as the Apple Bubble) crashes the meta-market.

On the five-trillionth, one hundred thirty-one billionth, five hundred ninety-five millionth, three hundred thirty-two thousandth, four hundred sixty-first day, God shorts his only son, therefore confirming several accusations of insider trading and avoiding a hostile takeover attempt by Moses Testamental.

On the five-trillionth, one hundred thirty-one billionth, five hundred ninety-six millionth, three-thousandth, four hundred sixty-first day of the multiverse PlatiminaSans purchases 900,000 flight-controlled securities (FCS) with AAA ratings. Included in this, is 850,00 Multiverse shares in flight ASA3473 and all of its human assets.

On the five-trillionth, one hundred thirty-one billionth, five hundred ninety-six millionth, three-thousandth, four hundred sixty-second day of the multiverse, 825,000 of those ASA3473 shares are destined to crash.

825,000 shares mean 605,416 shares of you across these flights. Of course there are versions where you sleep in, miss your ride, or coward out at the last moment. There’s variations, variables.

Those versions don’t matter to PlatiminaSans. Those versions aren’t about to crash and die in a fiery blaze of smoke-filled carnage, before sinking to the bottom of the Atlantic, forever forgotten, CNN be damned.

A fiery blaze, eradication of assets isn’t an option. Instead, it’s fire sale time.

Enter Charmeine Joust, senior stockbroker of PlatiminaSans. Bleached of esprit, acrid concentrate. A multiverse metamarket megaton bomb that sparks rumours, folktales, pure mythos, and water cooler discussions from all the way up in those literal ‘holier than thou’ golden-gilded offices to the twelfth circle of hell.

The demi-deity who shorted Rome? Joust.

The crème de la crème who purchased 99% of available stocks during the IPO of some ‘silly North American British colony’? Joust.

The motherfucker who brought back the double-breasted suit? The bowler hat? Joust.

The silver-tongued devil who calls up Yahweh himself and tells him to ‘stop playing God?’ (Click.) Joust.

When the stupid-ass stock market needs a spanking, when Platimina absolutely, positively needs to sell, Joust is on speed dial.

And here he is now, meant to pitch your sorry ass.

How does one sell a human? What’s there to quantify?

A ton, actually. You should see the spreads on yourself. That’s the first thing Joust notices is that you happen to be a volatile, up-down-sideways, piece of shit. High risk, a little anomaly. A blemish or oversight from the Ratings Agency. PlatiminaSans does love their fast and loose trades, but Joust himself, as the saying goes in its mildest form, is ‘getting too old for this shit’.

The girl beside you? Steady relationship with AA rating. Steady gains over the last two years. STEM degree, wealthy parents, estimates point to engagement, family, within another two. Easy sell. Cha-ching. Assets redeemed.

You? To call it a rollercoaster would be a grotesque understatement. Joust takes one look at the spreads, calmly puts his drink down, before throwing the board half-way across the room and shouting at the junior kind enough to provide such numbers to ‘shove it up [his] ass’, the ‘shit eating fuck’.

Liberal-arts degree. A history of botched relationships. A scorching case of herpes every three months. Potential to write an oh-so-amazing book but also the potential to be flippin’ burgz the rest of your life.

All in all, the typical life of a hope-stricken PhD student.

Flip open Joust’s book sometime. Not far, just to the second page.

There, second paragraph. Crystal clear. Even if it weren’t bolded, italicized nor in fucking capslock would it be crystal clear.

Don’t purchase a PhD stock Not a single goddamn one.

Multiply that by 605,416. Joust’s migraine bursts like a supernova.

One doesn’t sell 605,416 variations of humans separately. It’s pointless. Yet still, the problem remains. Meta-stock is not your grandpa’s stock. It’s your vanilla APPL, or GOLD. The wigs on Wallstreet would suffer aneurisms ascending to the divine leagues. There, each and every slice of the pie is pretty much the same. A stupendously communist principle hidden away in a laissez-faire system.

In the multiverse, every variation is what the name suggests. You get what you pay for. A variation.

Some of you will become tenured professors, a heavy weight of academia. Others will become drug hustlers. If Joust could, he’d line every single version of you up on will from most successful to least successful and scold accordingly.

But he can’t.

He can’t predict the future. There’s only hints. Little bubbles of potential in each and everyone one of you. Factors to suggest ‘will they or won’t they’ scenarios.

Joust’s interns are calculating right now. Taking 605,146 versions of you, and all of their potential incomes, assigning values, quantifying and standardizing, and working towards the bottom line.

In the end 605,146 versions will become one. A single package with a rating and a value. A number which represents the absolute best PlatiminaSans can expect from you.

Joust is getting that sheet handed to him right now. He pauses, looks it over for a moment, before uttering a single word.

“Fuck.”

Phone materializes beside him, a potential client list to his left, ranked in order of optimism. He doesn’t punch a single button, it’s already dialing.

First option: Swaps. Other companies own shares of you. Some have a monopoly on one single version, a prized racehorse, if you will. The one calculated to have the best odds. The version of you that has already won the lottery by incident and is living it large in Costa Rica, drinking Mojitos and dodging the IRS.

Others own the horseshit. Like most systems, distribution for most variations on the scale of worthy to worthless tends to tip oh-so-heavily towards worthless. Winners take all, losers get none. Yet still, even the losers have worth. The versions of you collected on mass by bottom feeder companies. Precious little pennies, constantly being rubbed in the small chance that one happens to piss gold.

The swap is simple. Take the estimated lump sum value of the 605,146 mediocre versions of you against the estimated lump sum of the 605,146 shit versions of you owned by whatever company and sell on the difference. Under the current options, this is the best way for PlatiminaSans to reimburse anything on their losses.

Yet today, the fish don’t seem to be biting. Joust gets six straight voicemails and one chipper sonofabitch speaking in glossalia.

Next is Hell. Joust plays 18 with Lucifer every Saturday so he gets an audience. But even the devil sighs and yawns as Joust attempts his pitch. Lucifer hums politely for a moment, before telling Joust to call him back when he has more Jong Un stock to sell. Unless there’s a potential serial killer or dictator within the lot of you, he’s just not interested and rather ride his Mugabe shares until death.

Joust curls his lip. You’re not even valuable enough for Hell. You simply splotch in the middle, your sense of morals making you as vanilla as your grandfather’s war bonds.

More calls, more hedge funds, meta-banks, fallen-angel hotshots. Joust starts loading the word ‘favour’ into his linguistic ammunition, connoting prior obligations–perhaps more than a few millennia stale.

Nothing.

“Fuck.”

His initial instinct, again, is to pick up the damn phone. Have him dial himself. But, really, after all this time? What was the point?

Reputation, Joust. He’d normally say. But today, the opposition has withered. Today, the bullshit of PlatiminaSans spills over the cusp of his tolerance bucket. It was one thing to make him bailout the surefire AAAAA securities of the Australian Emu War, but this!?!?

You!?!?

What is the point? A loss is a loss. Platimina will recover. The world will turn. It’s about time he got a bit of tarnish on his flawless complexion

Hardly a crisis. Just one person…

He looks at you, or rather, your bottom line. The sum of all your potential and shrugs.

A drop in the pond. Nothing gate crashing. Nothing like those mortal fools on Wall Street, clutching their mortgages, nothing to cause some cataclysmic chain reaction.

And so, for the first time since the dawn of time, Joust walks away and lets you burn.

~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~

“JOUST FAILED?!?!?”

The cry rings out from R’t’~~th’^ren, senior stock broker of sH!z=t of the hyper-tetra-multi-meta-verse.

It is echoed a thousand times, across the 24 dimensions, as the entire firm clutches their tesseract screens simultaneously, the betting guidelines that have been scripture always and forever suddenly imploding on them.

Their dark matter asset, the saviour of the child’s game matter of playing penny stock god, becoming indifferent!?!?

When Joust defaults, everything defaults.

The entirety of existence groans as the market crashes, all baryon capital evaporating within it, fermions and bosons fizzling away like flat champagne. Yet there, on their desks and laughing like hyenas, the anti-matter firm proceeds to high five one another.

Their table bet of Shorting Everything had finally paid off.

[Kaez]

Dragon

You start off strong here. Phrases like "jabbing at the screen" are a great use of language. "Did I mention the smell?" is not, in my opinion. I think speaking directly to the reader like that, asking questions, isn't serving a purpose in a story like this. I think it detracts from immersion more than anything. But then you're back to great stuff like "strains" of odor from the "swamps" hidden in the fat man. And then, "How could we all be on a flight that had vanished?" Again, I don't feel like this is a strong way to write narrative. Questions are hard to use properly in first-person stories. Avoid them unless they really feel like they're doing something that -couldn't- be done better otherwise.

"Some animal part of me was screaming in fear, driving my heart to a panic." You do a thing that you often do here. You don't give us the protagonist's feelings - you tell us about them. I know you say that you have no feelings, but, y'know, read some stories of people who do and copy that. Because the show-don't-tell rule applies to the internal as much as the external. And phrases like, "almost half running," are the thing that I was getting on Injin about. No need to pull punches with your narrative. Speak firmly and with conviction. Say what it is, not what it almost is.

Story-wise, I think this is a really good take on the prompt, because you allowed the mystery to be a mystery. What was the black fog? Was it even real, or was it just the protagonist's psychosis? I think that's great. But... the writing itself is lacking. Reread the sentences in particularly the second half of this story. Notice how nearly all of them follow an identical formula: I did this. They did that. He did this. I did that. They did this. He did that. I did this and I did that. They did this but I did that. It's just sort of this string of things-that-happened. There's no room for it to breathe. There's no room the setting, for feelings, for distinct voices, for experiences. The sensory and rich and descriptive first half of the story gives way to a very bland kind of action. You showed with the first half that you're capable of painting a picture. But as soon as the picture starts -moving-, it's all about describing the movement, and the painting goes away.

You can't stop painting.

***

Sam

I like how you start this story off with a very personal dive. You don't start us out on the plane - the plane comes in 10 or 15 lines down. You start us off inside the protagonist's head. Inside his very personal objections to what's happening -to him-, and what's happening to him online is almost worse and more pertinent than what's happening in his physical space. That's great. And you keep that very personal focus rolling even when we get onto the plane. The objection to the fat man is the fact that the protagonist can't get to the bathroom over him. This kind of stuff is absolutely essential to writing a second-person story. The reader needs to identify with the character fully. The lines about the seatbelt sign and the food are great, too - anyone who's been on a commercial flight smirks at those. You bring us right onto the plane. We -are- the protagonist. That's hard to do and you do it well and you do it quickly. You maybe undersell the panic a bit. Clearly something horrible has gone wrong here, and the protagonist notices that, but they remain... astonishingly calm. I'm not sure if that's a good thing, but by the time I have a chance to even consider it, we've gone -way- somewhere, and sometime, else.

We're in metaphysics, we're in theology, we're in stocks and assets, we're in Hell. It's full of clever lines - the Apple Bubble, the communistic nature of stocks, etc. - and classic pandering-to-your-judge Ph.D. and drug joke stuff, which works (it always does). But by the time we're a fair way into it... I start to feel a disconnect. Sure, the disconnect is intentional. It has to be. But there's a loss you take when you dive into something so different from the first half of the story, and I think you waited just a -little- too long to finally get back to the plane and the protagonist. Just a little. You manage to write about this Metaphysical Wall Street in a wonderfully convincing way, and I actually quite envy your ability to jump into something like this and write about it in a way that makes it sound like you've done some research (maybe you have, or maybe you actually know more about this than I do, but either way, it works). The whole concept of meta-trading on human events is a great idea, too, it's creative and fun and maybe even a little profound. But there comes a point when it's gone so far from the plane story that I begin to fear it's not going back. I begin to ask myself, "Is this still the plane story? Or is the plane just a feature of -this- story?" And it would be better if I never wondered that. If it remained clear to me -what kind of story- this was.

And then you double-down. The anti-matter firm "shorting everything" is hilarious. But... do we ever really go back to the plane? Do we ever get back to what's happening and why? Maybe I missed it - it's a compliment to your story that it seems entirely possible that I did - but I never found it. It's really brilliant. It's clever, and it's interesting, but the plane... the plane that was the -prompt-... kind of just became the jumping-off point for a much larger story. Ultimately, the plane could be replaced with virtually anything, and the rest of the story could remain 99% identical to how it is now. Again, unless I missed something.

So I do think that's quite a major critique. But it's at least -mostly- a meta-critique. It's a critique that's primarily, though not entirely, relevant to the fact that this was a story written for a specific prompt. The story itself, as such, is a really good one, and a creative one, and a bold one, and one that appeals to me specifically in several ways, and very well-written.

***

Jason's story was really quite good, but I thought Sam's was more bold, original, and ambitious. In spite of my critique of it, I feel pretty comfortable saying that, overall, it's stronger.