NEW LAN WORK :pog:
How delightfully abstruse. This is great, first of all — fantastic stuff. I could gush on and on about the prose and how it was tight and evocative and stellar at mood-setting and so on and so forth, and all of that is true. It's amazing, and you outdid yourself. Your consistent ability to write prose that's incredibly oblique and incredibly good is impressive as hell, but what's more impressive is that it's engaging — your works tend to trend longer, and this is one of the longer entries in the contest, but at no point did I feel bored or drifting away, which tends to happen a lot with writing like this. I was hooked the whole time.
The story is great, if a bit… well, oblique. Around 2/3 in I was mildly miffed that we weren't really getting an explanation or indication of wtf was going on, but that last conversation made that a lot better — added in a lot of implications, but more so than that it doesn't matter if any of this is really going on or not. Goddamn. The dialogue is stellar, the prose is stellar, the story construction is stellar, the visual flair is stellar. Outdid yourself.