CONTEST RESULT & SUMMARY
First: Untitled
Prompt: Non-humanoid narrator
PrudentViperYou challenged me. You thrust your weapon through the air, and invited, dared me to do the same. With tangible trepidation, I chose to answer.
Righteous battle had henceforth commenced, both parties fully committed to the clash.
You were strong, stronger, perhaps. Your dark armour bore the scars of a thousand skirmishes, yet still remained secure. Your eyes were filled with burning hate.
The first blow was yours, a testament to your unbridled ferocity. It shattered across my breastplate, with the force of a thousand ungodly suns.
You, my worthy opponent, followed it up with two more quick strokes. The pain was excruciating. I would have fallen within that first conflict, had I not the love of my fair lady.
Her heavenly beauty became my armour, I had stood my ground. Her immeasurable grace fueled my attacks, I returned a hard riposte. Perhaps you had staggered, perhaps you were stunned, but I do not think that is true. No doubt you had withstood my hits through force of your endless will.
I cannot imagine any different, for you were the better warrior.
We two brave knights grappled for hours, perhaps days. It felt like lifetimes, the world aged around us as we fought, though that is surely an impossibility.
We traded blows, and as our blades clattered against each other's shells, one of us began to weaken. Born out of the relentless clangour of battle, exhaustion became our true foe.
Only one of us would succumb. Only one of us would emerge the victor. Only one of us had received a fair lady's love.
You tired, and that made you foolish. I parried, and exploited the gap in your defense. With god given strength, I tossed you off our wooden battleground.
You had hurtled through the air, pulled into the ground's uncaring embrace. A sickening crack. A desperate gasp. I looked on in relief as you stood up unharmed, and scurried swiftly away from the sullen oak tree.
Farewell, dark knight. May your chitinous carapace remain sturdy, and your horn ever unbroken. We shall meet again.
For now, I raise my own horn aloft, my many legs twitching in excitement.
For I go to see my fair lady.
I understand that the story is supposed to blur the distinction between two beetles fighting for a mate and two knights dueling, but I think it should have been “You thrust your horn through the air” to show that the narrator is, in fact, an animal and set the tone for the story. Since midway through the story you mentioned them having shells anyways the reveal of the narrator’s insectoid nature at the end would have already been hinted at. On the other hand, you could just change it to “our blades clattered against each other's armor” so that the ambiguity is preserved until the climax and the reveal that the combatants were beetles. This is probably a minor point, though.
That aside, I liked the romantic feel invoked in the story which captured the popular preconception of a gentleman knight. The clash to win the hand of a lady helped the metaphor that compared beetles with jousting knights. The action sequence didn’t draw on too long or had any unnecessary parts, and each blows and hits were filled with emotion.
Prompt: Prehistoric settingHugoLumanThe skies were clear and blue, as they often had been in recent times. The morning sun shone brightly and warmly, even through all the trees on the mountainside, beckoning the flowers to open in the meadow clearings. Only the mountains and the glaciers stood in its way, casting deep blue shadows in the valleys and the lake over which the ice loomed.
The only sounds were the breeze blowing in East from the sea, over the lake and up the mountains, and the low rumble coming across the lake from the North. Slowly, the rumble rose from a low murmur in the air to a tangible vibration, resonating in the chests of every small creature and either freezing them in place or sending them scurrying for cover. It rose and rose until at last there came a thunderous crack! that echoed throughout the valley.
Huge chunks of ice peeled from the blue-white wall, thundering and booming as they broke and fell, striking each other and the glacial cliff before they crashed into the water below. A cascade of white powder met the surface and exploded into a spray of white mist, which spread outwards into a great ripple, a wave that slammed against the rocky shore and sent boulders rolling uphill.
There was silence as the lake settled and the sun shone upon the new face of the glacier. A huge, dark line curled across it, like an enormous eel frozen mid-struggle. Then, as the sun warmed it, it began to stir. The three great bulges on its back opened slowly, huge, green, dome-like eyes that had not felt the light for twelve-thousand years. The ice around it began to creak and groan, ever so slowly at first, but louder and quicker as the stone-like skin worked against it, crushing the ice to powder. Even under this pressure, the ice seemed to hold fast, shaking but not giving way, but then, with a mighty wrench, the worm tore its head free and shattered the glacier once more.
As it dove into the lake, it sent tree-high waves thundering across the surface, but before they reached the shore and smashed the nearby forest to pieces, it was sliding over the strip of rocky beach the separated the lake from the sea, sending more waves into the ocean with its bulk. It could feel the bones of the giants in the earth as it swam, and knew it was now truly free.
I like the sense of deitific awe that the forces of nature give, which I think was interesting in comparing how we used to worship forces of nature as paranormal phenomena beyond our control and how we take it for granted in our modern day. The giant worm recall the sense of everything being so huge and powerful in prehistoric era, like the megafaunas that predated mankind.
The pacing of this story was great and captured the gradual but ceaseless motion of nature well. However, I felt that the worm’s appearance was a bit abrupt and out of place. I think the story would benefit from some mention of the worm a little earlier in the story or at least a hint that something living is trapped inside the ice. The struggle which I felt was the conflict that built up in the story was too short and climaxed too fast, and I kind of expected some more earth-shaking battle between the worm and its icy prison as it shook free.
Prompt: Non-humanoid narratorGiglameshDespairWhat you don't understand is we aren't you.
You have a set form: limited, fragile. You see with balls of goo, filtering light onto nerves that fire with electrical signals. You started as mere cells, and we watched with interest. Ah, had we destroyed you then – if only! Ah, but you grew, and in mere millions of years you were shambling around, cells clinging onto and into a calcium frame. Seeing. Feeling. Thinking.
You're too real. That's the problem. You spread across the world, and you took your reality with you. Where we once danced in shadows, formless, unconstrained, you forced us away or into shapes that haunted you. Demon. Bogeyman. Trapped in a set form – how horrific. No wonder you impose your reality on everything – you all must be insane, tormented, spreading your miserable 'life' everywhere you go. But still, you were trapped on a single planet, and we had a universe to cavort in, free and unique and the same, all of us. A few managed glimpses of us, almost as we really are, and you had the gall to call them mad.
But now you're escaping. On pillars of fire you've broken the bars of gravity's prison, a rule you submitted to yourself. The others cry with grief, because even the loveless stars won't kill you off. But not I. This form your reality imposes on me... tendrils endless in number. A billion eyes, those vile goo-balls you see with. I, once infinite in size, am little larger than your world. This is what you fear in the depths of the cosmos? I see Earth, and I reach out. You try to communicate, try to launch missiles. All futile. We are not you. We are not real.
I am become eater of worlds, and I feel hunger for the first and last time.
First off, this point might be a bit pedantic, but I think the aphorism at the end is sort of unnecessary. I assume it’s supposed to be a reference to the words from the Bhagavad Gita, but I don’t see why you should reference it, really. A cosmic horror devouring the world wouldn’t make for a good aphorism. It’s my opinion you should’ve went with normal grammar and go with “I have become the eater of worlds, and I feel hunger for the first and last time.” which would have retained the same effect and not invoke the irrelevant misquote from the Bhagavad Gita. I would even say that it ruined the Lovecraftian feel but since this story is about giving forms to the formless I suppose that point is moot. It’s really up to you and what you think, though, since I spent nearly an hour overthinking this and decided that it’s not that important anyways.
With that aside I like the way you put the point of view of the narrator on human clearly without dwelling too much on “Hahahaha we’re totally alien from your preconceptions.” I personally like the idea of memes shaping the forms of those they address, and that seem to be the point of the story: The human’s beliefs turning these quasi-real entities into creatures. I feel, though, that the story is a bit inconsistent since the narrator mentioned being given physical form by the humans, but then became invincible due to the fact that it’s formless? It’s like saying that you can't break a wall of ice because the wall used to be liquid. This seemed like a plot hole to me and you should have had the narrator mention its form imagined by the humans to be too powerful and invincible for the missiles to faze it, because it's obviously real and tangible enough to take hits, or maybe you could address it by the narrator not being “real enough”. I’m just throwing out some ideas here which would have been more logical.
Then again, maybe what you meant is that humans can’t grasp these beings’ true form, and so imagine something tangible to stand for them. So the narrator is still invulnerable because it’s still a vast, infinite space horror, but this would also create another plot hole since it meant the narrator could have destroyed the humans at any time without having to wait for it to be given form.
I’m not asking you to clear out the ambiguity because that would destroy the mystique, but I think you should do something about the contradicting information, or maybe I’m just overthinking this.
I like how the goal of the narrator is quite clear and in this story it seems that the fast resolution is pretty interesting. The entity eating the world instead of just destroying it gave a sense that the world was so weak that it could just simply prey upon it with its vast, unstoppable physical form.
Prompt: Non-humanoid narratorCryxis, Prince of DoomI sat with master one evening, he always like to tell me of stories of when he was young. I didn't understand age very well but I don't think we age like he did. He liked to tell me of how he used to work on his fathers farm and how glad he was when he inherited the farm when his dad died. I don't know what a dad is, nor what death is. Maybe those are only things that humans have.
He always complained of how he wished he was young again, that his body was old and frail. I don't know why he got weaker as he got older but I guess that's what humans do.
He began to retell one of my favorite stories of how he used to brand the cattle with his father before they got helpers and workers like me to do all the farming tasks. In the middle of the story he grabbed his right arm with a firm grasp and took in a heavy breath. He fell to the ground and began to ask for help before he shut down. I got up and walked over to see what happened, he seemed to have just powered off so I pressed where the start button would be but my fingers just broke through his data storage compartment and a strange viscous fluid poorer out and covered my fingers. I wasn't sure what was happening so I flipped him on his back so I had access to his service panel, I got out my emergency knife and opened his chassis. There was a strange row of bars on the upper half of the compartment that were hard to cut through. The strange viscous fluid covered the floor, inside the chassis I only found strange soft sacks of fluid and strange brown matter. I was unsure the purpose of these parts and left to find the mechanic.
He told me that humans did not have the same anatomical set up as the FW-S1 robots and that Master would not be rebooting but he said that he was dead. I wasn't sure why the mechanic couldn't fix my master though I guess Master was of a dwindling race compared to the robots that few manuals existed on their repair
I’m going to pretend that this is an original idea entirely by you and not by your friend as you have stated, since it would make it easier to look over it. As you know already this does not quite fit into the prompt, but I’d argue that the prompt is supposed to be a starting point, not a cage, so it’s excusable. It lend some originality to the story since the narrator speaks in a mechanical tone, yet with the sentimentality of a human instead of the cold technicality of a computer.
In this story the conflict was set up quickly and simply in the short amount of time between the robot and the human when the old man had the heart attack and the robot tried to fix him, but it seems that the robot was still too sympathetic toward the human for something that was briefly alluded to as usurping humans as workers. It wasn't really made clear what the nature of the robot was. There isn’t anything that explain its instinct to want to fix the human the way it would fix a fellow robot, and the conflict doesn’t seem to line with the theme of human becoming obsolete established in the story except for the fact that the robot was too advanced to understand human biology.
I also feel like I should mention that your tense is going all over the place, which would need some more editing. There are also occasional typos all over the place which in theory would create some ambiguities or draw the attention to them instead of the story itself.
Another thing that I should note is that I find your lack in any actual dinners in the story kind of jarring, but that’s just me. “I sat with my master one evening” doesn’t give any implication that it’s a dinner.
The story has a lot of potential, but it needs some more polishing.
Untitled
Prompt: Prehistoric setting
(Disqualified due to being too short.)
ArxA light moves along the wall, flickering in the breeze. A voice shouts from beneath it.
"I hail your light!"
"I hail your light!"
A ritual as old as time. Muffled clinks, the squeaks of leather, the rub of cloth on cloth as they approach each other.
"The darkness does not dare to encroach upon our bounds?"
"Not tonight, sister," the customary reply. "And I shall fall before I see it so."
"As it should be, brother. Hail the light!"
"Hail the light, sister."
He passes her, ever wary with crossbow in hand. The glorious Empire of the Light stretched behind him, a field of stars glittering above and below. No shadows to hide the creatures of night, and the world was as it should be. Tomorrow, the light would grow further, and he would walk a new border. And every tomorrow, forever after.
I liked the spiritual theme in this story. The refuge of the humans in the safety of light against the unknown that lurk outside invoked the religious feeling in a setting where religion would not have evolved yet, and gave glimpse to the formation of values and spiritual connections to symbols and objects, and the way you described the coming dawn was interesting.
The only main beef I had with this is that because you didn’t finish it yet there was no conflict built in the story. It had the setting and theme but no plot. There are also some minor details which I found strange given the setting such as the phrase “A ritual as old as time” which seem kind of inappropriate in the land before time, and the use of crossbows where bows would have been suffice, since crossbows seem to carry a technological connotation in medieval setting, and something that feel high-tech in the Middle Ages have no place in the prehistoric era if you ask me.
Prompt: Non-humanoid narrator, and prehistoric setting
(Disqualified for fairness because it was written by the judge.)
Objective
The grey wolf strode proudly as her subordinates bounded and loped, stray eyes occasionally scrutinizing her for any signs of weakness. She knew that with their home gone things will change quickly. Her mate was dead, his skin adorning the head of the Other Things that were clearly systemically hunting her kind down. She no longer has a protector, and the challenger she killed yesterday showed that her power is being questioned.
She surrounded herself with the counsel of the same sex, a motion that her tribe is surely waiting for the moment to discredit her on. The advantage of having voices she could rely on not to be too ambitious and cocky outweigh it. She growled, beckoning her head to the edge of the cliff they are standing on. The pack watched her, motionless until she herself walked to the overlook. Below them were carcasses of mammoths and other beasts, fashioned into grotesque caricatures of their former owners. A small furless creature poked its head outside like a fly surfacing from gangrenous flesh, then disappeared back into the corpse.
The Alpha Female's snarl was joined with the others. They loom upon the aberrations of nature with disgust as the intention of their leader became clear: to wipe them out. She howled, signalling their strike. Giant grey forms blurred down the cliffs, poising to strike before the Other’s hunters returned. One of them saw her and screamed, but went no more than five steps before she was upon it. A quick jerk pulled off its head, letting out a spray of blood. She bounded away, leaving the corpse for others to feed on.
The screams burned in the sun. The skirmish was short and bloody, and her brethren stood victorious. A wolf approach her, growling his displeasure at having to slay such helpless preys. She growled back, reminding him of their slain young.
A howl signaled their departure after the feast. Leaving the rest to the flies.
I felt a bit biased choosing PrudentViper's story as the first since I'm a bit of a romantic, but hey, I'm a single person, not an unbiased hivemind. vov
PrudentViper will be choosing the next two prompts. I'll be waiting until the end of Wednesday.
I'll also have to change the date rules because as you can see I'm not good at keeping on schedule and I felt it would be unfair to reduce the window of time allowed to write.
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Topic: ___/The Writer's Apprenticeship\___ (Read 309236 times)