I have read everything now. Time for a word of feedback and the most difficult part: the vote. So, I'm going to skip grammatical feedback. Going over the stories I didn't see any grammatical errors, but that doesn't mean they aren't any. I tend to read over small mistakes. I hope the feedback will be good enough. If anyone has additional questions, feel free to ask them. [hider=Protection] [@NarayanK] I'm not an expert on poetry, so it's hard to give feedback to this. There is some rhyming, but not following a pattern. Now, I don't know about the rules when it comes to poetry, but personally I like to see consistency and I'm missing that here. I suppose that is just personal preference though. The story portrayed here is intriguing, [/hider] [hider=What war takes from me] [@Dewey Deftones] It's a heavy subject to write about, but the story itself feels a bit impersonal. We as readers are being told what happened, but we don't really get to know the characters and therefore it's hard to sympathize with them and feel their pain and fear. I can understand how the main character feels and the imagery of the battlefield is well portrayed, but the story lacks a certain depth. [/hider] [hider=Kitsune] [@Dedonus] At first when Kyra looks at herself in the mirror it feels like it's normal to have ears and fox-tails. I was already imagining the entire family to have features like that. It's not until the next paragraph I realized she has to hide that from her family. Maybe it would have been better if she looked in the mirror and showed surprise or worry or something to make the reader realize something is not right. Of course it's not normal to have a fox-like appearance, but in fantasy stories anything goes. So there's that. We don't really get to know why she has these powers and her family doesn't, what these metahumans are. It would have been nice to have that explained. That would also explain why she has to be afraid her family finds out. So that's a detail I'm missing here. The story has a nice flow to it and it's detailed enough to see what is happening. Kyra's confusion when her family doesn't notice anything when she feels they should is the same as the reader's confusion. I liked that. And it was nice to read she wasn't alone with her powers, but the final paragraph does lose a bit of it's impact because the reader doesn't know why it's a bad thing to be a metahuman and what happens when people figure that out. [/hider] [hider=The trees] [@mdk] Disturbing contents, that's true. It's a proper horror story. I assume the mother died, but I don't really get why the tree wanted the boy to watch that. Or how they took away his speech and ability to understand others, although that could be explained by living through a traumatizing event. Parts of the story are a bit confusing (which could be just me), but it's really well told. (I read what you wrote in your reviews about your own story...what homeless guy?) Also, I get why you censored the cursing, but I seriously thought 'farting kid? what? that doesn't make much sense...'farting come on'?... oh, right!' So yeah, it took me a bit to fill in the blanks and come up with a more logical word to put there XD but that has nothing to do with your writing, I thought I'd share it for a good laugh. [/hider] [hider=Damocles] [@KeyGuyPerson] That warning was well deserved, disturbing images and a grim future, but it certainly was a good story. I read your notes and I have little prior knowledge about air-warfare, so you could have described any kind of far-fetched manoeuvres and I would have been fine with it. The fighting scenes were well described, there was enough action and it was easy to visualize what was going on. We get to know the important characters gradually and I enjoyed reading about them, everyone was normal and likeable and the interaction between them was enjoyable. It certainly helped to feel for them when things went wrong. What I miss in your notes is a translation of what those Chinese people said. Something I personally try to do when I add a foreign language in a story is adding a translation for those who don't know it in a footnote or something, somewhere after the initial conversation. I really want to know what was said and I get the main character doesn't know either and to gradually figure it out what is going on with the main character works great in the story itself, but as a reader I would have loved the insight after the conversation was over. A very minor question that got raised during reading it is why Dione had to run to another classroom with a radio when most students had their laptops with internet connection on it. Going to an online radio seems a bit faster, but for the added drama and suspense reading how she ran through the school and back to the class did add to the story. The way the living corpse was described was quite detailed and the scene heartbreaking. Just like the travel to the safe haven afterwards. Good job on that. The story is certainly believable, it's detailed and the characters are wonderfully displayed, which only helps to feel for their fate. [/hider] My [@vote] is for [@Keyguyperson]. While I prefer lighter happy-ending stories, I can't deny this story is of high quality.