On a second thought, I have this done, I might as well post it. First, I’ll reply to that review.

[hider=mdk reply] [quote=@mdk][hider=just take a stroll][@platinumskink]

I swear, you are having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have. 

This is *cough cough* [i]almost[/i] the longest entry in the group. It’s the longest one of yours I can remember off the top of my head. To be clear – [i]length is not strength.[/i] Just being longer doesn’t make something better. That said…. [i]Dude, the length was perfect,[/i] says this casual reader. The complex-ridiculous-ness of a genius slime colony worshipping the mighty god Adidas, the heartache after catastrophe….. wait do Ghinites have hearts? The simple-organ-ache after a catastrophe. Vows of tiny revenge. I mean [i]come on.[/i] It’s brilliant. It’s possibly certifiably insane – but it’s brilliant. 

If it weren’t so brilliant, there’s a lot of things I would complain about. Like, jumping from a lab room straight into an alien landscape was jarring and made me wonder all sorts of things – has [@platinumskink] finally lost it, for one? And lots of variations on that, but also some ‘uh what’s this doing here’ and ‘what the hell is supposed to be going on’ and ‘what’s a ghinite’ and ‘is that Adidas like the shoe or a plural of an adida or what?’ [i]It turns out, though, that these were all the right questions.[/i] It wasn’t random at all – it was structured and paced and okay, maybe the structure was made of see-through goop and it was really weird, but [i]jesus it was perfect.[/i] I mean [i]bloody perfect.[/i] At every turn. 

Alright. So story wise, I’ve got nothing to whine about. Surely I can poke holes in character development, right? Well….. KIND OF. I mean, Doctor Hogan is a fun villain, always a little creepy and blossoms into a genuine hateable guy. Aaron doesn’t get it, and I don’t like him because he never gets it, and at the end he’s like oh, I think I get it, I’ll be cool….. but that’s not really a weak point because, I mean, how in the hell would he have gotten it? So he actually rings pretty true – a little on the simple side, maybe, but nothing wrong with that. The Ghinite characters are one-dimensional I guess, but….. I mean….. they practically ARE one-dimensional, so come on. So if I was going to poke holes, the hole I’d try to poke is “There isn’t a whole lot of character development – any, maybe.” But there doesn’t need to be. Here. Other stories, less crazy stories, you’ll need that – but not here, honestly.

Writing-wise – I had my eye open, desperate for anything I could complain about. I remember spotting only two things. Well, three – one of them was the food-god Adidas, but that turned out to be awesome. First – when describing the Ghinites, you said something along the lines of ‘this would look creepy to a human.’ Don’t say that! Just describe it in a way that’s creepy to humans. On the one hand, showing is better than telling – but on a more (less?) practical level, Ghinites have no concept of how they might seem to humans, so that doesn’t make sense. Yes – in a story about cancer-curing slime creatures, I’m complaining about a description making sense. Deal with it. Second, there’s still that running tendency of yours to just leave thoughts from the narrator as things go along. I’m growing accustomed to it, it doesn’t necessarily bother me as much – but it’s still kinda sloppy to actually write out “Eh, suppose there’s nothing else to it, then?” Sounds like you ran out of things to say and [i]wrote down[/i] the part where you ran out of things to say, and only then went on writing. Eh…… well I guess that’s it then, on to the conclusion.

[b]I’m allowed to do that. I’m critiquing.[/b] You’re telling a story!

Bah. Well the point of saying ‘I only found two things to hate’ was that, look, there wasn’t much to hate in this entry. I mean core concept, if a person doesn’t like what you’re doing, you’re not gonna win them over – but damn it, [i]you’re writing like you[/i] and it really feels like it’s….. uh…… [b]gelling.[/b] So stick with that. And can I remark, too, that there are some [b]objectively fantastic[/b] parts strewn about in this story – I’ll highlight one that I really liked.

<Snipped quote>

Brilliant.

Okay. Okay. Moral is…… damn good job. I don’t know what to call this genre but you’re all over it like a pig in mud. It suits you exactly, and you suit it, and it’s…… it’s awesome. [/hider][/quote]Oh, geesh. Can’t I give you a like, a laugh and a thank all rolled into one? No? Oh, too bad.

I’m very happy the entry had the intended effect on you. Yes, that switch was very much intentional, because, yes. You’ve outlined the reasons. I’m really happy it worked. Even if I totally fail the labour by any reason, I’m not totally satisfied with how my entry turned out thanks to knowing how you reacted to it~ 

And yes. I do need to get that out of my texts. I was actually avoiding writing comparisons to humans, but seems a few still leaked through. Probably because I wanted to enforce their aura, and there’s no easier way of enforcing an aura than to actually tell the readers what aura they’re supposed to feel. Guess I shouldn’t do that, huh. And, um. Cases where I write things like “Eh, suppose there was nothing else to it, then?” … That’s the thought of the character that we’re currently following. Not mine. I can’t really write their thoughts within speech, and putting it in italics feels like a waste because the thought isn’t important enough. It’s difficult to write “, Aaron thought” after such a line because it can disrupt the flow of the sentence, and it works weirdly with a questionmark. Eh, guess I’ll find a way to avoid it, then. Oh, well.

Thank you very much for the review. I’m really happy you took the time to write it, because I’ll likely return and read it once a month to smile happily to myself. But of course, there’s the future, too, so yeah~! I’ll keep doing what I do~! And yes, I enjoy writing [i]out there[/i] things, so I am very happy to hear that it suits me~

Now, then. Speaking of things that suit the author… No, wait, that's not right. Pretty sure you could write [i]anything[/i] and [i]make[/i] it suit you. Haha.[/hider]

Alright. Coming at ya, [@mdk].

[hider=Act One]… Can I just pause here while I’m reading and tell how much I DREAD the coming of whatever the subject of this labour is about? I just want this story to end blissfully happily, damn it! :(

Holy wow, this is getting intense.

[quote]“Lady,” he said, looking right into her visor without batting an eye, “at this moment you’ve got more firepower watching your back than the president.[/quote]
Ptt- the-heh. I like that line. … Which makes me notice, there’s no closing quotation-marks. … Eh, details.

[hider=The Hider for Irrelevant Point-Outs of Things that Do Not Belong in the Story that You Already Know About][quote]“In the expositional overflow her author had almost forgotten about it, but it came flooding back all at once.”[/quote] … What? Um. If “expositional overflow” were to be replaced with “all that she had been told” and “her author” were to be replaced with “she”, then this would make sense. Now, it totally sounded like… XD

[quote]“On the one hand, most of what Bunsen told her was thematically irrelevant to the rest of her experience, and probably should have come up much later in her adventure, piecemeal, in an organic way that introduced the concepts of lightspeed as a criminal enterprise more credibly and built up her antagonists into the more nuanced characters they were always meant to be. And of course, having the whole theory based on a wild speculation after a strange fistfight and coincidental knowledge was extremely hand-wavey, which she hated – she wished that Bunsen had taken Besk’s name and description, done a little actual investigating, maybe incorporating some conflict with his upstart partner Anyang, and come to his conclusions a little more naturally. His little interview should have just been a folksy, irreverent display of how he actually does care about Taina’s cold case, and how he was going to be an unlikely ally in the future. But, on the other hand, the way things were revealed all at once meant she and Tony had a better idea of what was coming, and they could get to the bloody point – which was certainly a relief.”[/quote] That, uh. That paragraph sounds very, VERY odd. Especially because I was trying to read it as part of the story in my first read-through. That, uh, didn’t make sense. Especially how you somehow mix in the character’s opinion on the way that you wrote the entry…

[quote]“We gave him a lot, and he magically knew a lot more because the author’s tired”[/quote] OY! XD

[quote]“It’ll make the editing process easier.”[/quote] I can’t tell if this is an actual serious line that I don’t get or if this is another joke from a tired mdk.

[quote]“All of this would have been a better way to work through that massive exposition-splosion, but that ship has sailed, so just pretend we covered that here differently and it made more sense or something, Idunno.”[/quote] Oh, c’mon, I wouldn’t even have noticed it if this kinds of things weren’t included in the text itself…! XD 

[quote]“You remember those ships I told you about, in that exposition?”[/quote] Geeeesh. It gets even WEIRDER when you mix that into actual in-story dialogue!

I don’t know if you edited it afterwards, but I actually really LIKED the exposition! It was an amazing realization, and it made Bunsen out to be awesome, clever, and that he got the job done! It also made Taina thoroughly badass by suddenly showing the things she’s capable of! Don’t do that to your text…! XD[/hider]

… Ooooh. So she heads out with Bunsen and becomes an unlikely duo that’ll fight crime together? He’s the unsuspected genius detective that’ll unearth all the plans of the criminals, she’s the cybernetic unintended super-soldier with a bone to pick with them, and together they’ll strike fear into the hearts of all the scum of the universe? I lllllllllllike it! Alright. Now, let me go on and start more properly commenting on your entry.

It’s great. You really caused me to care a lot about this girl, and really, REALLY made me want to see her succeed! You had a relatively small cast, but honestly, this is a good thing! Each one of the main souls got the attention and traits that was needed to make them feel like excellent additions, and the text is littered with the tiny little jokes that normal humans do to bring smiles to faces, and it WORKS! It makes it very entertaining to read, because all the characters feel so very much alive! So little was actually happening, but it was great to see the small improvements as they made their way towards getting her to become a functional part of society and such!

Then, of course, there came the ”gotta catch the criminals” part of it. That was great, too. I could get excited, wondering what was going to happen. The fact she also could kick ass made Taina all the more likable in an unexpected way. Who doesn’t like a chick that can kick ass? Especially when it was this unexpected! Haha! She really is genuinely likable. Pryce turning his back to the company orders brought a nice smile to my face. Oh, and that exposition? Sitting down with Bunsen and hearing all this? How you mixed in the fact about the previous entry and made it make sense? The fact that the entire story actually made sense? … I LOVE IT! Proved that Bunsen was the genuine article who had done his research for her sake, and made the final scene when she joined him SO MUCH GREATER than it would have been had he not been given that. Not to mention, how EXTREMELY WELL “Abyss”, which I read before this, actually worked as an introduction to this entry! It was very confusing on its own, but like this? Heck, prologues are SUPPOSED to be confusing, so the reader doesn’t start feeling at home before the story starts! And this entry eventually came to tying up the loose ends, EXACTLY in the way a story should eventually explain its prologue! I really, REALLY liked how you set this up!

So, there were a few misses. You seem not to have liked that scene as much as I did, since you COMMENTED ON IT THROUGHOUT THE ENTRY AFTER THAT. Yikes. I wouldn’t even have noticed that was the supposed exposition had you not been doing that. I was just imagining four pages of just paragraphs telling me of things happening around her in her life that was going to totally disconnect us from her. But, it all happened as she heard it. Show, don’t tell, was it? Well, you had Bunsen SHOWING the fruits of his labour! Very much different from just having had the narrator tell us, because now I still felt like I was deeply connected to the main character, because I learned of the things just as she did. What DID disconnect me, was when you strew strange references through the rest of the story. That was really, REALLY weird, but you hardly need me to tell you not to do that, so… XD

Alright, so the reveal about Anyang. I think that was a reveal. [quote]“Real name Anyang. Associate fed up with his bullshit, existed as a pain in my ass for five years, refuses to vanish. FML.”[/quote] … Er. That was a reveal that he was Besk, right? But… Anyang wasn’t a lizard, was he? Er. I’m confused. So, that didn’t really work, I think. Had he had an operation, or something?

There was one part I got bored and had to put down the entry for a bit on. It was in that middle part when she just had Tony steal all the equipment and took the Maggie and Al to the festival. Looking at it now, it doesn’t look that difficult, but eh, I was tired after a lot of reading. Putting it down probably made me enjoy the last bit more. Haha.

The part where she left… I didn’t understand it. Alright, so she had continued trying to recover her memories. That, to me, is her choice. While I understand Maggie’s and Al’s anger… … … I suppose I just can’t really enjoy that part. Tony just vanished? What for? Sure, they might have thrown him out or something, but he couldn’t even see her? Wouldn’t take her calls? What for? I assume this is the point where the labour’s supposed to be being cleared, but, in that case, who has Taina been the tool of? The labour needs the character to be used by another character… which I can possibly see that it could be the case, but, it isn’t explained in the entry. Looks to me like this was very much on her own, not her being used by someone. Is this another case of you coming at the labour from an angle that I just can’t see, again? Will I go “OH! So THAT’S what was…!” once again? I don’t know. I’ll leave that to the judges.

But all in all… I really, REALLY liked this entry. The characters were amazingly life-like, I really started to honestly desire that this was going to become- *realization*- ah. That little thing just before the final part… the ones who used her via the labour was Maggie and Al, wasn’t it? But, the ones that they used her as a tool to unintentionally hurt… was herself? No, wait, does that even make sense? I, er, I THINK I’m reaching in the right direction, but I think I’m not entirely grasping it… Egh…

Well. In any case. I liked it. I like what you’re doing. This is amazing. Good job. The little details, like the Ramen-Ya and the police officer who jokingly asked her to marry him, the reference to Hitchhiker’s Guide and more, I love them, the entire piece feels so extremely alive. Well, maybe a bit less towards the end, but you get the point. I really like the thought of the crime-fighting duo of talented detective Bunsen and don’t-bloody-underestimate-her Taina. Not sure if that’s where you were going with it, but I like it. Haha. Gosh.

I also really liked the time-travelling pirates plot. I’m not entirely sure how the guy got caught after it, but eh, maybe that’s another side-plot. It’s the future. Maybe that was someone with a similar face. XD Eh, I’m sidetracked. I liked it, okay? I’ll leave the rest to Terminal. Nicely friggin’ done. Haha.[/hider]