[quote=Euripides]...Hercule's might abandoned him in his pursuit of the Hind of Artemis, and so he relented and turned to the trapmaker's art.[/quote]

[center][color=black][i][b]Those of you who have completed this task - you have grasped the hubris in trying to reach for the Heavens with but hands alone, and discovered the worth of flying too close to the Sun. You are hereby worthy of the title...[/b][/i][/color]
[h3][color=coral][b]Ceryneian Hunter[/b][/color][/h3][/center]

Congratulations to the winning authors for the following stories:
[b]-Forever Powerless[/b] by [@Psyga315].
[b]-A Change of Heart[/b] by [@Holmishire], which also won the [b][color=coral]Divine Absolution[/color][/b] Challenge Accolade.
[b]-Stained Snow Melts Last[/b] by [@Sen].
[b]-The Lost Dagger of G'Narv[/b] by [@WiseDragonGirl].
[b]-So Much For the Woman[/b]
[b]-All Or Nothing[/b] by [@Blitz].
[b]-Little Guardian[/b]

Your stories have been added to The Twelve Labours [url=http://www.roleplayerguild.com/topics/79562-the-twelve-labours-victory-archive/ooc]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/topics/80220-the-twelve-labours-contest-winners/ooc#post-2615881]News[/url] and [url=http://www.roleplayerguild.com/topics/80221-the-twelve-labours-contest-winners/ooc]Roleplaying Discussion[/url] Subforums!

All trophies and titles will be handed out shortly, barring any unforeseen complications with the new system (which is still undergoing development).

A special call-out to [@Psyga315], [@Holmishire], and [@WiseDragonGirl]. You continue to impress. Take this Labour to heart lest you falter in the trials to come.

[hider=RomanAria's Reviews][u][b]RomanAria:[/b][/u] Yay, reviews.
[b][u]Terminal:[/u][/b] Damnit Aria, did you pass EVERYONE you reviewed?
[b][u]RomanAria:[/u][/b] But...they're all so perfect!
[b][u]Terminal:[/u][/b] DON'T REMIND ME.
[hider=Disclaimer]
Just because I am an official Judge doesn’t mean I know what the hell I’m doing. Please take my reviews with a grain of salt the size of Mt. Everest.
ALSO: No six-trait rubric this time!! The rubric seemed too clunky and concrete, soo….. I scrapped it. Expect reviews to either be much improved or much unimproved.
[/hider]

[hider=Forever Powerless]
Paging [@Psyga315]
[hider=decision]
Congratulations, Psyga! You have succeeded in the Third Labour! Zack is a character of a very ambivalent nature; he seems to have tried the same way of acquiring his power multiple times, and every time it eludes him. Your writing is (as always) of better than “decent storytelling” quality. In short, I have absolutely no qualms about passing your entry. Congratulations, again, for succeeding in all three Labours to date![/hider]
[hider=review]
Well… I like that your story was short and sweet. You did well, keeping it concise. Personally, I love, love, LOVE your little poetic lines. 

“I wanted to put the rumour to rest… or rather, a test.” Yess. Psyga, you’re awesome. And the descriptive passages are wonderfully minimalistic. Letting the readers do the work in their own minds. I really like that, in this kind of semi-speculative tone of writing.

This being said, I just have to nitpick for a moment. There are a couple of places where your punctuation and sentence syntax just don’t [i]quite[/i] work. Also, it seems as though you kind of confused your tenses a little bit: 

““Huh?” The guards notice the sound I made and I instantly made a dash.”

I think it’s most likely that you just forgot/missed the “d” key here… But proofreading should catch little incongruences like that.

Finally, this is what probably bugged me the most. In your conclusion (which is an absolutely wonderful concept, by the way) it seems like you might have been better-suited if you had switched to present tense. Also, there were a couple of grammatical mistakes (like the subject-object agreement of “power” and “them”) which somewhat took away from the overall effect. You had a very strong concept, but perhaps it could have used a little more polishing in the final stages.

In conclusion: The nitpicks take up more of the review than the actual plusses, but that’s because I’m one of the nittiest of pickers. I really, really, really like your writing, Psyga. I think you just need a little more polish here and there, and then you could do anything you wanted to as an author.[/hider]
[/hider]
[hider=A Change of Heart]
Paging [@Holmishire]
[hider=Decision]
Congratulations, Holmishire! You have triumphed over the Third Labour. I kind of had to twist my head around to figure out how this fulfilled it. It took me a moment to see that the challenge to fulfill was not actually in gaining the souls, as I originally thought (in which case I was going to dismiss this as being “merely difficult”.) But now I see: The challenge was for Caerys to maintain his humanity throughout this ordeal. An internal, not external, challenge.
Anyway. Congratulations. You have not only succeeded at the Third Labour, but you have also earned a CHALLENGE ACCOLADE!
[/hider]
[hider=Review]
Like… okay. I can’t even. How am I supposed to review perfection?!

I guess… Alright, let’s start with Odio. I have no idea if this was your intention, but… “Odio” is “I hate/despise” in Latin. How perfect is that?!!?! Sorry. Sorry. But seriously, awesome job on the name. And on the characterization.

But seriously. Caerys. I love Caerys. He’s like… just… I can’t even. Your characterization of him is fabulous. I especially love that little tiny flashback/nightmare thing… SO MUCH GOOD CHARACTERIZATION there. And the way you describe him and show, actually SHOW the relation between him and Neikel? *swoon* You, sir, are a brilliant author.

One… ONE itty-bitty itty itty bitty nitpick. The only thing I could find wrong in the whole darn thing. “The last he saw of the scene was Pedrel swinging the flat of his blade at Caerys's head.” This whole section is in third-person limited, following Caerys. It kind of seems redundant to call him by his name in this particular phrase? But that might just be me desperately needing something to critique you on.

In short: Your descriptions, everything, are absolutely wonderful. Absolutely freaking wonderful. I cannot comprehend your awesomeness. How do you do this in TWELVE DAYS?!

Seriously, awesome job.
[/hider]
[/hider]
[hider=Stained Snow Melts Last]
Paging [@Sen]
[hider=decision]
Congratulations, Sen! You have succeeded in the Third Labour.
This was a hard decision. On the one hand, Lynn got what she desired with seemingly little struggle. On the other hand, she had to give up one of the people she loved most in the world. One could actually argue that, if her objective was love, she actually gave up what she most craved for the sake of her research, or curiosity, or whatever it was. Lovely dual-edged sword, in any case. Nicely done.[/hider]
[hider=review]
Hmm… I liked the entry, although the setting seemed a little peculiar. I sense there’s a huge enormous story all around this, but… I just had too many questions while I was reading. It’s not bad, I just… I couldn’t get into it because I didn’t know the rest of the story.
  
I guess… I don’t know. This was just… hard to get into. I feel like I got to know the characters on a surface level, but maybe not even. There could have been a whole lot more characterization… but then, I’m a sucker for flashbacks and internal thought, which wouldn’t have fit well with this whole action-packed story. Not a criticism, here. I thought you did the best you could with your action-filled storyline (because such internal monologues would have been sorely out of place) I’m just saying how I might have approached it differently.

I like your formatting. A+ for effort on getting the indentations to work. Seriously. So often it is that people forget that, but it’s just little things that make it so much prettier and easier on the eyes.

Hmm. Your grammar is good… it seems like there might be a couple of spots where you should revisit tenses. Things like “She wanted to scream as loud as she can” which might be better off phrased as “She wanted to scream as loud as she [b]could[/b]”. Just to make the reading flow a  little easier.

All in all, excellent work. The subject matter somewhat confused me, but then, I’m easily confused. You rendered it well, in any case, and your formatting efforts resulted in a nicely polished piece of writing.[/hider]
[/hider]
[hider=The Lost Dagger of G’narv]
Paging [@WiseDragonGirl]
[hider=Decision]
Congratulations, DragonGirl! You have conquered the Third Labour.
At first I wasn’t terribly sure that this one would pass. I mean, Trevor pretty much hired mercenaries, stormed in, and took the dagger, and all was well and good and happily ever after.
I suppose, however, that it takes a total change of his heart to trust the creatures who killed his brother. He pursued means that he would not have considered, had his desire for his prize not been so great. Therefore, he fulfills the challenge.
Congratulations.
[/hider]
[hider=Review]
I love your writing style. Your descriptions are impeccable. I can pretty much see all of the characters running around inside my mind now. And your description of, say, the Bardugs? While it was short, it gave me enough of an idea that my mind hastened to flesh it out. I love descriptions like that: enough to give me a good idea, but not so much that I feel like I have to read pages of just description.

Your characterization is wonderful. I’ve never really read anyone’s works where they do most of their characterization through dialogue, but you do an excellent job with it. It seems natural and yet still providing plenty of story-relevant information, like how Trevor’s brother died.

There’s one thing I have some problems with, in this otherwise impeccably-written story. You seem to have some issues with commonly confused words, or sentences that are phrased strangely, and perhaps some punctuation where it might not be necessary. It’s mostly minor stuff that’s fairly easy to miss when proofreading. Not anything to really worry about, except maybe give your writing a bit of a closer scrutiny? Sometimes it helps to have another person read it over, or to read it out loud to yourself.

All in all, this is a fabulous story. I love your work, DragonGirl. Keep it up.
[/hider][/hider]
[hider=So Much for the Woman]
[hider=Decision]
Congratulations. You have passed the Third Labour.
This was a hard one to decide on. It was decidedly hard to read into Temmel and Ames to figure out what the ulterior motives were. But then, they wouldn’t be good outlaws if they were easy to read, now would they? For Ames, he always wanted to be “good enough” for Luanne, but he couldn’t give up his way of life for it, and he died for it. If that’s not a “suitable punishment” I don’t know what is.
[/hider]
[hider=Review]
The first thing that needs to be mentioned is how wonderfully old-timey Western the writing seemed. Absolutely authentic. And the dialogue was fabulous, too. You sure put a lot of thought into this, and it clearly shows, and I applaud your effort. Wonderfully, wonderfully done.

Now, let us start on characters, I suppose. I had the hardest time figuring out which characters were which, and I’m not entirely sure why. I thought that Temmel was Luanne, for a while at the beginning. And… I’m not really sure who else I had mixed up, specifically, just that I had characters mixed up and it was confusing me. In any case.

I really like the job of characterization you did—or the somewhat lack thereof. Ordinarily I’m more like “CHARACTERIZATION^1000” but… I don’t know why, but the lack of seeing inside their heads really… worked, for these characters. I would have loved to see more, don’t get me wrong, but I’m honestly not sure how you could have done that without compromising the tone of the whole story.

One little thing that caught my attention so much that I just had to mention it: “She cast lungful looks at him as she dressed” … I don’t understand what you mean to say here… Perhaps “lungful” was an autocorrect of “longing”, or something? In any case, that was the only real typo/spelling/grammar snaggle I noticed. You’re very good at this whole writing thing.

In conclusion, this is an impeccably done story. My only regret is that I don’t know the characters better. It’s not really in a style that I personally like, but nonetheless your way of rendering the story is FABULOUS. Nicely done. I look forward to reading more of your work.
[/hider]
[/hider][/hider][hider=Terminal's Reviews][hider=Notice]Since the winners are flat-out stated right above, I decided to forgo addressing the hard reasons for accepting/failing submissions immediately in each review in favor of 'Rambling incoherently in the vague direction of the point I was trying to get across' until I felt I had sufficiently lain out most of my thoughts, so if you're looking for a 'why' then you'll have to read the whole thing. Sorry.[/hider]
[hider=Forgotten Dream]Now here's an interesting entry. There's no rule saying you can't submit poetry, so it's definitely valid as a submission. The tricky part came in determining whether it had enough substance to clear the challenge. I've stated on the record before that it is hypothetically possible for entries shorter than three paragraphs to win, but I have not yet seen one that has. You need space in order to set up an appropriate narrative framework and context.

Poems work differently though. Rather than establishing a scene, they convey an idea and establish a condition - platonic storytelling, almost. I was and am not quite sure to make of the entry. It's like some fascinating insect I have pinned in a glass box because of how weird it is.

But let's get basic. What we are told is that there's some girl, and she wants to be loved, but Hell Is Other People. So she starts making suicide threats. Either that or she commits suicide in order to posthumously be loved. That plan does not go too well for her. She winds up dead and forgotten.

The problem here though is context. There's a clear goal - Acceptance, Love. It's clearly difficult to get. But I do not know enough about this hypothetical girl to know whether or not commiting suicide is pat for her. There's always the possibility that she attempt to use suicide as her alternative approach, paid for it, and failed anyway - but I have literally no way of telling.

I cannot in good conscience pass this Forgotten Dream. If the Poem had more firmly established the prior nature of its subject, perhaps it might have cleared the challenge. Alas, some things are better off buried and forgotten.[/hider][hider=All Or Nothing]I was particularly impressed by [@Blitz]' usage of Expectation as an impediment for the character to overcome. That's a sort of finesse most people should envy, especially the ways in which its used to obstruct Max. Perhaps I shouldn't be giving too much credit here since the story is allegedly inspired by actual events, but even if so the written rendition is excellent. 

The story is nearly free of typos, grammatical errors and structural problems, such that it's almost pointless for me to address them. So instead I'm going to hammer on the internal consistency of the story. 

Firstly, why does the brief segment where Justin tells Max about cuts even exist? All it does is mislead the readers (which can be desirable and in this case is well done - just unnecessarily). It either establishes an expectation that does not pay off (he doesn't make any team at all) or it never becomes relevant (the natural end to the story would be the end of tryouts even if everything went well). The only reason I can think to have included it would be to illustrate how circumstance conspired to screw Max out of an almost sure deal, which is already done in spades. The segment isn't bad and I liked it for that very reason, but it still seems out of place.

Secondly - what the heck was up with Coach Robinson? A PV Coach deliberately advises a JV coach to try out a player for defensive backs when he already knows they aren't cut out for it? Literally every character mentioned in the story directly mentions Max' light frame, even after all the training, and the JV coach doesn't even try to establish his own opinion in a safer training environment (which he'd have plenty of time to do since he can cut Max at any time after tryouts)? Even Max himself points out that the change in heart seems abrupt. It makes me suspect that either Robison was wearing rose-colored glasses (unlikely, since literally everybody else including Max seemed aware of Max' limitations) or else has some hitherto unknown motivation to try and sabotage Max. Either way his insistence to place Max on Defensive Back seems incredibly out of place and inappropriate. I'm getting the whole circumstances conspiring vibe and such, but it still bugs me.

Thirdly -  where the hell did Mr. Palmer go? He drove both of his sons directly to the Tryouts in his truck, and according to Max he had promised to come and watch both of them. Even if he didn't come to watch Max, everything we've been told says he'd still have come to watch Justin. Did he fall down an open sewer main? Did the school Superintendent corner him? Is he hitting on someone from the cheer squad? I get that shit happens but the parking lot was literally right next to the field and he had plenty of time to get there while everybody was being sorted. It makes for a perfect closing despair-line but is also inexplicable! 

Maybe the point is that all these people are asses.

Oh, and you cleared the Third Labour by the way. Good job. Character had a clear goal, had clearly immense difficulty attaining it, pursued alternative means of achieving it - and failed regardless. [/hider][hider=Snatcher][quote=@Blitz]Okay, if you hadn’t put in your preface that this was a summary and that paragraph transitions would be choppy, I would’ve been genuinely upset with your entry. But you seem like you can really spin up some nice tales, just by the way your writing is, so I’m obviously not going to sling anything mean your way since you already acknowledged it.[/quote]
Your paragraph transitions are choppy! I am genuinely upset with your entry! I am going to sling mean things your way despite your having acknowledged them in advance!

I will commend you for doing what you could to eliminate as many of the problems as you could in the time that was available to you. Real life comes first and twelve days is a short amount of time for any contest. That said, this story is easily the most disappointing of the four I reviewed.

The tenses, as you said, are particularly askew in relation to Matt and his scenes. Your grammar is sloppy and the overall structure both of individual sentences and of your paragraphs is extremely awkward. Your transitions are not, in my opinion, choppy insomuch as they are jarring. The narration leaps between character viewpoints freely as if it was in the third person but the tone of the entire story is written as though it was supposed to be in the second. The exposition you use to explain the devices and past shenanigans involving Matt's powers is both rushed and clunky. You use so many sentence fragments that even I have to call foul on it (and I use sentence fragments as though they were going out of style myself). There are even portions of the story where you simply break off mid-sentence to leave the paragraph off.

[quote=Paragraph 22-23]Matt was the ‘class-clown’ type personality.  Why not cause some ruckus at the party.  He even thought that his idea of creating a manifestation of 

At the party...[/quote]
If there was a single paragraph that encompassed everything that was wrong with this entry, I would probably have to pick THE climax. Let's go over it.

[quote=Paragraph 23]At the party, Will, Kyra, and Kelly arrive dressed as Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, with Kelly dressing as a genderbent Iceman.  They mingled a bit until "Matt" crashes the party.  Will was uneasy about the situation because Matt's appearance had changed.  Approaching the three ‘Amazing Friends’, Matt gave Kyra a gift, claiming that it was an almost month late birthday present.  She respectfully accepted the gift and opens it, confused that there was a single card inside the box.  Then, Kyra dropped to the floor in pains.  Matt called her a harpy, noting how that word means snatcher, as she snatched his friend away from him.  Eventually, Kyra morphed into the creature on the card and flew off away from the party.[/quote]
You unnecessarily quote Matt to indicate his projection, which is ambiguous and lazy. The sentence itself abruptly shifts from past to present tense (it should be 'until Matt's proxy crashed the party.'), the prior sentence is stated in the continuous present (addressing the same direct objects in the same inferred time without use of an appropriate conjunction or preposition), and the proceeding sentence is abruptly in the past tense again and your use of the conjunction is ambiguous and does not stand by itself. The fourth sentence shifts tense AGAIN, you use quotation marks to inappropriately emphasize a facetious designation, the verb connected to the indirect object is used incorrectly (Matt could only have handed the gift to Kyra after approaching her, not as he did so). The next sentence shifts from a third person narrative to a second person narrative and is inappropriately structured due to the absence of a conjunction and conflict between the actions of the direct object taking place simultaneously during different points of inferred time (Kyra cannot be confused by the card until she sees it but manages to do so anyway before she even opens it because of the way you phrased the sentence). You shift back to a third person narrative in the next sentence and have Matt speak, but only convey what he says through abstract narration (which is valid in certain cases but not here, because of the interference of tense in the next sentence), and you flip tenses yet again in the process of doing so.

The last line is the most incredulous though, because it implies that everyone patiently waited for Kyra to transform into a Harpy, writhing on the floor in agony all the while, until she 'flew away' - somehow, despite being in an enclosed space. Perhaps a window was open, although I have no way of telling because of the utter lack of detail and description. It's implied that Matt's powers also passively manipulate everyone's' memory in realtime, except that can't be the case here since everyone panics afterwards - but not until after the implied and inexplicable passage of time. Was the transformation supposed to happen faster? Perhaps, but Matt clearly had enough time to go on what in reality would have been a complex, three-sentence-minimum monologue (which was lost out because of the abstract narration), while her friends, the partygoers, and Will just stood around doing nothing in particular. Perhaps that's not what you wanted to convey but that's how it came across.

I am sorry to inform you that, while there is certainly enough substance here to make an interesting story, it falls short of the expected standard of quality expected of winning entries. You have failed the Third Labour.

My recommendation for future submissions is simply to spend more time on them. You implied that you were operating under time constraints while writing this one, and your disclaimer shows that you are aware of the faults present - and the nature, length, and relative complexity of the story have me convinced that if you had just been able to give the story more time and thought that the final draft would have come out much cleaner. Your tenses are so chaotic that it was easier to think through the time travel in [i]Little Guardian[/i] than it was to understand what was going on when in your paragraphs. Keep things consistent and make sure to bridge your tense transitions appropriately.

Also, the word friend in the fifteenth paragraph appears to be in bold for no apparent reason. What's up with that?[/hider][hider=Little Guardian]Your decision to remain anonymous aside, know this: I was genuinely impressed by this entry, and it's easily the best out of your submissions thus far. You've cleaned up basically everything I criticized your previous entries for. The establishing scene and the transition immediately afterwards is somewhat repetitive, but even once I read it the second time around I found that I didn't actually mind. The pacing is nicely balanced, each action is sufficiently descriptive while remaining succinct, and you do an excellent job of conveying both thought and emotion through simple visual descriptions and abstract thought narrative. The entry is cleaner overall, with few typos, grammatical errors, contradictions of tense, or structural errors. I spotted the occasional letter here and there that should have been capitalized and wasn't, but that's a minor nitpick. One thing that I did notice though, was a few awkward of narration - here for example.

[quote=Paragraphs 8, 9]I sat instinctively politely, my hands together, staring blankly forward at the young man that had visited me. He didn't look very enthusiastic, either, leaned back relaxed in the chair opposite the table. [u][b]On top of the table, as ridiculous as it sounds, was a twelve-inch tall fairy[/b][/u], dressed in a tiny green dress and vibrantly displayed in bright and comparatively long green hair, her large transparent butterfly wings waving slowly behind her. She looked at me with lively though worried eyes.

"So, I'm Calan, a History Guardian. This is Miliana, a Time Fairy of Aeternam. We're here because you've been found to have used unauthorized time-travel." The boy explained, sounding like he did take his job seriously but against his own will, practically bored with it. I stared back at them. My head repeated the line. [u][b]You got to be kidding me.[/b][/u] A paranormal phenomenon allowed me to influence the actions of my past self, splitting her off from this reality. In some god-forsaken future, that was illegal?[/quote]
While your first-person narrative is unbroken, the underlined pieces are contextually inappropriate relative to the rest of their paragraph (and to most of the story as well). In the first case you act as though the narrative were a retelling rather than merely a third person continuous present narrative. In the second case, you literally narrate what her thought is, which disconnects with how you convey what she's thinking in the rest of the story - through the use of abstract narrative or through simple emotional/facial descriptions. That doesn't mean you can't narrate her actual thoughts; just be sure to use an appropriate narrative transition first. Here's a few more examples from later on as well.

[quote=A Bit Later]I made sure all the flashing instruments were accurate, as I put in the desired date into the computer, like Nyssa had shown me how to do. I was now to become a normal time-traveler rather than a History Guardian. [u][b]Let's see, machine, what you can do.[/b][/u]

I sat down, and strapped myself in place. The fairy felt the movement from my hand, and complained loudly though I held in front of her mouth with a finger. [u][b]Oh, dear, is it supposed to spin this much?[/b][/u][/quote]
Also present were a few awkward choices of subject/verb usage as well as a few instances of ambiguous reference- check the first quoted passage above again. 'Bored with it' (his job or his will?), 'My head repeated the line' (Clunky choice of subject that doesn't work well with the chosen verb), and 'that was illegal?' (subject is in a previous sentence). In the future keep a look out for sentence subjects that do not seem to make complete sense as well as for sentences which cannot stand on their own.

The biggest problem I have with this story is something which you have absolutely nothing to do with: These time fairies are complete idiots, and so are their human pets. For beings who possess passive, reflexive time manipulation they seem ill-prepared for even simple Gambits.

I also had a little bit of trouble believing that your character had any compunction about killing Miliana Prime. She seemed to be rather pragmatic in all-but-name at other parts of the story, especially when she double-crossed Nyssa, knocked out Calan, and outright attacked two other time fairies - nevermind the temporal shenanigans that basically ensured none of them would (technically) die. However, you do linger on the event and the complications involved sufficiently to make me at least believe such reluctance was possible. The Labour did call for an ambivalent character, but you probably could have found a way to foreshadow her reluctance more directly.

Keep at it, you are definitely improving - by leaps and bounds, as it were.[/hider][/hider]