tadk, I read your story. Remember that English is not my first language, and read on if you will
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I'd call your story a typical "first round"-story. People haven't yet adapted to Ceramic DM's time requirement, and some things get rushed. There's a lot of good here, but also some bad. First off, it's confusing. You mix up the tenses and use pronouns that have no correlation in the narrative. When you introduce a character without descirption simply as "he" or "she", I have nothing to hold on to. Who are we talking about? There were one or two instances where you even talk about a group of people and then continue with "she", and not "them". Clarity is extremely important in a story.
Second, you use a lot of metaphors and similes, as well as other evocative vocabulary. That's not bad in itself; for me, it became too much to compute. It's just sensory overload. Imo you need a few simple sentences in there to tell me what's actually going on. Or some dialogue to break the spell.
That said, each paragraph in itself was tremendously enjoyable and atmospheric. I just couldn't get through the whole story at once. And I'm not sure what exactly happened, but that might be me (remember the second language thing). I also didn't recognize what happened in speaker's story. In any case, thanks for sharing
And let me reiterate that I really, really enjoyed the "steampunk"/"cyberpunk" atmosphere here.
pictures
Aaargh! I looked for the wrong pics! See my apology later on!
I can't really place all the pictures into the story. In the actual contest, if you have problems with links, try something else to denote a picture. For example "Henry stepped on a snail (snail pic)." Or "Henry picked on a snail (1)" with a foot note explaining "(1)=snail pic". Or even just a foot note: "snail pic: Henry stepping on a snail."
I noticed the tiger was used in the hunting sequence, and I guess it was a robot tiger controlled by the doctor, but I'm not sure. As I said, the plot or your story remains a little foggy to me.
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I hope that helps.