[quote=Euripides]...As Hercules guided the shame of Minos from that broken land; the Lord of the Seas did permit his passage, as the hero was but of passing notice in Poseidon's tragedy.[/quote]

[center][b][i][color=black]Those of you who have completed this task - the essence of mortal foibles gluts upon the compounding of souls, but a lone sacrifice might starve the beast. In choosing whether to slay or abide the fiend, all illusions are shaken and truth unveiled. You are hereby worthy of bearing the title...[/color][/i][/b]
[h3][color=coral][b]Audacious Cretan[/b][/color][/h3][/center]

Congratulations to the winning authors of the following stories:
[b]-Plutonian[/b] by [@PlatinumSkink].
[b]-Generation Lost[/b] by [@Holmishire].
[b]-The Contact[/b]

Your stories have been added to The Twelve Labours [url=http://www.roleplayerguild.com/posts/3451258]Victory Archives[/url], to which there will be a permanent link in my signature. In addition, your victory has been announced in both the [url=http://www.roleplayerguild.com/posts/3325556]News[/url] and [url=http://www.roleplayerguild.com/posts/3325555]Roleplaying Discussion[/url] Subforums!

Alas, none of the winning entries were deemed to have earned the distinction of the [color=coral][b]Hemic Legacy[/b][/color] challenge accolade. In keeping with the last time this happened, I will hold onto it until the Final Hazard, when I might find some new use for it.

[hider=RomanAria's Reviews][hider=Lumina’s Loss]
[@Luclovers]
[b]You have failed The Seventh Labour.[/b]

I really, really liked your story. Let me start by saying that. Beautiful description, vivid imagery, good use of a first-person writing style. Also the fact that it’s underwater adds an easy point or two to the total. Good characterization, though in some spots all the asides/random exposition seems a little clunky. Like when Lumina is introducing all the races.

The reason I failed your entry is because the ending was kind of ambiguous. And while that’s totally in keeping with the entry’s writing style, the flashes as the narrator is being changed—I expected to see more of it. We have all of that beautiful imagery, all of that fabulous description… and then one paragraph. That’s all we’re given. No answer. For all I know, that whole set-up was just an illusion, a hallucination caused by the smoke. The Atlanteans aren’t really dead, Lumina remains unchanged, it was just a trick that Ulsa played to make herself feel important. It could have all been a nightmare, even. After all, she is just a child. That’s where the voice you chose might be working against you; in a first-person limited narration, as you used, you really can’t show things beyond your narrator’s interpretations and observations and that rather leaves things to be desired.

But anyway, going back to the story components: That finish with the shell necklace was a very, very nice touch, though I wish we could have seen more about it. Inferences say that it was the symbol of the ruler of Atlantis, buuut…. I’m not getting much else.

[b]In summary:[/b]Brilliant idea, lovely setting, lovely mechanics, but does not clearly fulfill challenge parameters.
[/hider]
[hider=Generation Lost]
[@Holmishire]
[b]You have succeeded in the Seventh Labour.[/b]

Not quite up to par with your usual entries, in terms of final polish / proofreading, but still head and shoulders above the rest. The sheer number of characters was slightly confusing; thank you for color-coding the dialogue. All in all, I really, really enjoyed the story, though I wanted to see what happened next.

For the rest of the authors in this contest (I don’t know if you even read the reviews written for other people, but I suppose it’s worth a shot), the ones whom I said needed work on their characterization, look at this piece. From the dialogue alone, we can just [i]see[/i] that Magka is a kind soul; look at how, war-hardened or not, she took pity on Antsi and her children. We can just [i]see[/i] that Murgol is a war-hardened brute, thinking only of glory and gain, by how he acts, the way he handles the women and the barbaric deal he strikes with Talahn (and the way he goes back on it afterwards). None of this is stated in exposition; this is just what we see and know from [i]how the characters act.[/i]

Anyway, back to the review. Talahn did exactly as Murgol wanted (agreed to the fight), and so, he died, but his family was allowed to walk (more or less, anyway) free. There was no rule that said the family was [i]required[/i] to walk free, and it really adds to the characterization, and the plotline, that you didn’t actually give everyone else a ticket home free.

I’m really eager to see what happens to Antsi. If you ever write a sequel/followup, do let me know.

[b]Conclusions:[/b] Fabulous as always. There are just a few little typos that kept me from awarding this one with an Accolade. But good sir, you sure brought it to this contest. Lovely characterization, just enough description without it being an infodump. Right at the beginning the character introductions were a touch confusing, but you handled it well. Marvelous job, sir.
[/hider]
[hider=The Napoleonic Wars]
[@WrongEndOfTheRainbow]
[b]You have failed in the Seventh Labour.[/b]

It was clear that people were dying, and demons were dying. I suppose this is what you’d call a “pyrrhic victory.” I don’t know though; it all seemed kind of distant, like the kind of thing I’d read in a history textbook. Which is fine, if that’s the style you’re going for, but it’s not a style that I, as a reader, particularly enjoy.

The reason that I failed your entry is because it did not meet one of the challenge parameters, or at least it did not explicitly illustrate this: The “family” lost must be both ancestors and younger generations. Now, while inference (the army sweeping the land and assumedly destroying all in its path) says that this was fulfilled, the only losses you harped on were the ones of the army, which are typically of younger men exclusively.

Overall, I really would have liked to see a more personal effect; this story just kind of gave us a summary. No real shock value, no empathy for the characters. Ho hum, lots of people died, lots of demons died. The number usage seemed kind of cheesy, not to be rude, but: Really, 66 legions, 666,666 troops, 66 columns? A single “66” is all that’s necessary to convey the point, and it seemed out of place to specify this in such great detail. 

Also, plothole: …Don’t all humans die and go to Satan’s realm eventually…? What, exactly, did killing them all do, except ultimately denying Satan his subjects? I just… don’t understand the logic here.

[b]In Summary:[/b] Unremarkable plot, no noteworthy characterization; iffy grammar and syntax in multiple places. Did not fulfill Labour parameters, nor did it fulfill the ‘basic standard of quality of good storytelling.”
[/hider]
[hider=The Contract]
[B]You have succeeded in the Seventh Labour.[/b]

I am just going to say that it is very, very grudgingly that I passed this. While it fulfills all aspects of the labour, I am less-than-entirely-dazzled by the grammatical errors and typos that could have easily been avoided if it had been proofread by hand, instead of just by SpellCheck. There are plenty of run-on sentences and just awkward wordings and syntaxes; (If you would like these to be explained in detail, send me a PM after the contest is over.)

Technically, your entry fulfills all aspects. The whole family is put into danger; Michael bravely sacrifices himself. Your story also makes use of good internal thoughts. I actually felt a little sorry for Michael by the end. I see a bit of characterization here though it could have been worked better. Perhaps a bit more internal deliberation could be useful at the beginning, when he’s trying to decide to give his soul away or not? It [i]shows[/i] through his actions that he just signs his life away like it’s no big deal, but then later on, you [i]say[/i] that it was the hardest decision he’d ever made. 

Good work on the setting; it seemed a bit info-dump-ish, but kind of in a way of observing an internal monologue, like rambly and somewhat nonsensical to everyone except the one actually thinking it? Yeah. I see what you were trying to do, though, expressing emotions on paper, words that are very hard to express in words. Good effort.

[b]In conclusion:[/b] A for effort. Less-than-stellar grammar and syntax, but good descriptions, a good attempt at characterization, fulfills the challenge requirements. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt on the “quality” because I can see that you really did make an effort and you’ve got the roots of a good thing here.
[/hider][/hider][hider=Terminal's Reviews][hider=Abyss][quote=Terminal][quote=@mdk]
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. 
[/quote]

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?[/quote]

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 [i]local[/i] basis (this is not [i]entirely[/i] 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 [i]local[/i] 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 [i]relative to[/i] 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.

[quote=@mdk]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.[/quote]

There are not many modes of [i]useful[/i] 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:
[list][*]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 [i]are[/i] distorting spacetime and are merely accelerating and decellerating across nominal velocity thresholds.[/list]

If the former is true, your ships would move [i]backwards[/i] 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 [i]just under[/i] 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 [i]literally[/i] 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.
[hider=Space]A single lightyear is approximately [i]9.5 trillion[/i] 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 [i]2.85 trillion[/i] kilometers every minute, meaning that they had to be travelling at around [i]9.5 million times the speed of light[/i] (that goes down to a mere [i]3.166 million[/i] 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.[/hider]
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 [i]skeleton[/i] 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.[/hider][hider=Plutonian]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. [i]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] 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: [i]Going forward I will expect better from you.[/i]

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.[/hider][/hider]