Thanks for clearing that up BrokenPromise.

I too want to reply to the people who reviewed my work so far. And if there are people who read it and couldn't add their review yet, I'd love to know what you thought about it.

First off, a big thank you for everyone who took their time to read the story and review it, your advice will help me improve my writing skills.


[@Silver], thank you for the wonderful review, I'm glad you liked it so much. I will go over the story to see if I can find those moments of clumsy syntax and exposition. 
I am planning to continue this story and I roughly know what I want to happen, so it's just a matter of finding the time to write it all down.

[@PlatinumSkink], thanks for the review. I will read it over again to see if I can make it more interesting, more alive. 

[@Exit], I sincerely apologize for teasing you like that. In the end I wrote on this story every moment I could, but it wasn't enough time to tell the entire story. I'm glad you enjoyed what I had and I will finish it. 
For some reason I saw the prompt and my mind went 'steampunk dwarves, let's write about that' 
I agree I didn't give Mikhal really colourful lines, I'll see where I can add a bit more bard-like sentence to avoid that setup and no payoff. And in the future I will be more mindful about the scenes that might serve the bigger story, but are unneeded for the competition.

[@BrokenPromise], thank you for reviewing my entry. The story does need a bit more finetuning. I'll definitely have another go at that scene you mentioned.
The story I posted was written as it played out. I didn't plan much of it and I admit I rarely do. I generally just write and the story unfolds, and in this case it lead to some scenes that, in hindsight, weren't needed for the competition or could be condensed. 
You'll be glad to hear that I did skip two scenes I came up with, but of which I decided they weren't needed in the story (lemitsa actually taking lady Catheryn to the port city and Lemitsa meeting the thief).
I'll take the advice of a word budget in consideration, but I honestly have no idea on how to guess the amount of words I'll need to properly do a scene or a conversation. As I write I don't pay attention to the word count because I found that hinders the creative flow, but I can look things over afterwards and decide for every scene or every line of dialogue if it's really needed or not.
The discoveries about the steam tech were planned for the second part of the story. The reason for their invasion was mentioned, although not obviously stated, as wanting more coal and needing more water.
[quote]They started building mines to mine for more coal. (...) While they didn’t let any human near the coal-mines or any of the factories, they did let the humans gather water for them, which wasn’t as abundant in their own region as it was here. [/quote]