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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Piratecat" data-source="post: 3361898" data-attributes="member: 2">Thank you so much to Berandor, who made me work my butt off. I think I wrote a story that people either really liked or were "eh" on. I was on the former side. This may be the piece I'm proudest of from all the things I've written either in or out of Ceramic DM, which probably says something telling about me. I did exactly what I set out to do - so if you think the story failed on some level, at least we know it's a failing of the author and not an eccentricity of the time limit or the prose.  I specifically tried to make the story seem more like a live documentary than anything else, written by a reporter whose job it is to keep his personality separate from the story. More of his personality seeped in, but what you're seeing there is very deliberate. This story evolved from a conversation I had here at work with the co-worker who had grown up in the "cult-like" church I mentioned earlier. "If only 144K people get into heaven," I pondered, "can you increase your odds by killing the others?" That seed grew into this, and I think it works much better this way. As one of the judges said, usually these stories have a secret society trying to protect the messiah. I realized that there were enough plausible reasons to instead kill him off for the story to work.Some excellent criticism, however, and I agree with quite a lot of it. Thank you - it's making me think, and re-evaluate some characterization that was inconsistent. Also, thank you to anyone who read the thing more than once, and thus picked up some of the layered sub-text. Finally, a shout out to everyone who just saw me write "layered sub-text" and thought "Do you think he meant to sound like a pretentious wanker?" - 'cause I totally did.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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