Re: Fortnightly Writing Competition: Re-Write (Results)

[Sinitrena]

Re-Write

Sometimes, a story doesn't turn out as one hopes it does. Maybe you realize that you should have told it from a different point of view. Maybe the ending just didn't work. Maybe you were in a rush and couldn't give the story as many details as you wished. Maybe you realized too late that a scene was completely useless and the story would have been better without it. Maybe someone commented something about your story that made you go: "Wow, I should have done that!"

This FWC is about re-writing a story you already entered into the competition at some point in the past. A re-write is not the same as simply editing a story. A re-write is more. Basically, it requires you to tell a story again. Of course, you can look at your old work to do so, but just changing a sentence here or there, removing a paragraph or adding one is not enough. Your job is to re-tell the story, as if you were writing it for the first time (though keeping sentences or paragraphs you particularly like here and there is okay). You can change major elements, but it should still be recognizable.

I realize that the topic as stated above would not allow newcomers to enter, because it requires an old entry. Considering how few people enter, and those that do are regulars, I don't think it will be a problem, but I do offer an alternative: You can also re-write the story of someone else who entered the FWC at some point in the past, though only if you never entered here before. And if possible, ask for permission from the original author.

In short:
- Re-write one of your old entries.
- If you never entered before, re-write a story from another participant (but ask for permission).
- Post a link to the old story, so that we can compare them.
- Get everything done by 21. July.


Edit:
One point I forgot to mention: You are not bound by the rules of the original competition. If your entry was for a 500 words story, for example, and you want to turn the re-write into a 30 000 words monster, that's completely fine.

[Stupot]

This could be interesting. Thanks Sini.

I was thinking of expanding on one of my 144-word flash fictions, but there are a couple of stories which I was quite unhappy with and wouldn't mind giving a rematch.

[Sinitrena]

Well, you could always post more than one entry. 

[Mandle]

Back from my jaunt over to Australia and, despite overexaggerated claims on the internet about how dangerous it is, only lost two limbs and my eyebrows in the process.

Congratz to Sini for the win on the last round. Never got the time to read the entries but I plan to soon.

New topic sounds great!

[Sinitrena]

Welcome back, Mandle.

How's it going so far? Are you all busy writing or is it too hot to even move a finger where you all are as well?

[Mandle]

Welcome back, Mandle.

How's it going so far? Are you all busy writing or is it too hot to even move a finger where you all are as well?

It's like the air is about to catch on fire here. I'm catching up with some duties I had backlogged over my trip. Started writing a story that has been bumping around in my head for a while, but not a rewrite of a FWC entry so probably not gonna make it in this round.

[Stupot]

I've managed to bash out a draft of something. It needs a heavy edit and I have more ideas for it if I can find the time, but in the worst case I feel I can submit what I've got.

[Mandle]

I've managed to bash out a draft of something. It needs a heavy edit and I have more ideas for it if I can find the time, but in the worst case I feel I can submit what I've got.

Can't wait!

[Sinitrena]

Nothing yet?
You stll have a couple of hours left.
But we also have a weekend right in front of us. Take it, for some last minute writing. Deadline extended to the end of 23. July.

[Baron]

Original Story: "The Survival Imperative" (For the "Shipwrecked" competition, August 2021). https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/competitions-activities/fortnightly-writing-competition-shipwrecked!-finished/msg636638564/#msg636638564

The Price of Freedom

    The Plutonic Angel heaved distressingly in the giant waves, causing gear and crew members to lurch out of their stowed position.  Xander, the old sea-dog with the glass eye that always stared askew, laughed at the land-lubbers as they flailed helplessly like toddlers let loose on a jerking subway car.  The assistant cook Viola, really just a girl, vomited into her plastic shopping bag and looked absolutely miserable.  Cora, a paramedic by training, rubbed her sympathetically on the back, muttering soothing words that she knew not to be true.  Jonah, one of the scientists, stared into space, his mind detached from the churning sardine can that was all that kept them alive in the inhospitable Southern Ocean.

    "This is nothing!" Xander bragged.  "We once had to sail through hundred foot waves off Wilkes Land.  Hundred foot waves!  They tossed this tub about like a rubber ducky in the Niagara Gorge.  One of the scientists would have been killed when he was flung head-first into the metal hull, except that his barf-bag acted like an air-bag on impact!"  The ship reeled again, as did Viola's stomach.  She heaved her guts wretchedly into the plastic bag once more.

    "I don't even know where you'd get a plastic shopping bag these days," Xander mused obnoxiously.  "China, maybe, because they don't give a shark's tit about polluting my fair ocean.  In the water they look like ragged white shits, floating at the surface.  Up here, in the dry with all that stomach soup weighing it down, it looks like a bull's scrotum."

    "What, are you trying to castrate me?" Viola spat, a bit of bile still dripping from her chin.  She offered the bag to Xander, and it swung in the air like a pendulum due to the rolling of the ship.

    "What's that guy saying?" Cora asked, trying to change the subject.  The man strapped in behind Xander, Roberto on his nametag, was talking a nautical mile a minute to himself as if in prayer.

    "Beats me," Xander said dismissively.  "I don't speak pidgin."

    "It's a Filipino dialect of Spanish, I think," Jonah spoke up for the first time.  "I can only understand pieces of what he's saying.  He's praying for mercy from the Invigilado, whoever that is."

    "Mercy!" Xander scoffed.  "Out here on the blue we make our own fate.  A sailor that relies on mercy is as good as drowned!"

    "Speaking of being a sailor, shouldn't you be up battening down the hatches or something instead of cowering down here with us?" Viola yipped like a small dog yearning for respect by nipping at the heels of the bigger dog.  Her little teeth found flesh, for Xander looked truly wounded by the question. 

"If you must know," Xander sniffed, "the captain assigned me to babysitting duty on account of a little misunderstanding over the-"  Xander never finished his sentence, for at that moment the ship lurched violently to one side and there was a deafening sound of metal twisting and tearing.  An alarm started ringing, barely audible over the surging roar of water flooding into the compartment.

"Bloody hell, we must have hit something!" Xander shouted.  "On your feet!  To the rafts!  Follow your training!  Don't forget to-"  His final instruction was cut off as the ship lurched violently in another direction, flinging the crewmembers against the far wall before half-drowning them in a surge of sloshing seawater.  After that nothing seemed real as they half-waded and half-swam through the churning flotsam of the compartment.  Breathable air came in patches, most of them too small to be useful.  Sound and light waxed and waned like a frantic tide.  Debris pounded them from all sides as if the hatch out of the compartment were now a gauntlet designed to weed out the weak.  Somehow through the confusing, angry, inverting torrent they struggled, more by instinct than design, into the corridor.  From there the frigid waters sucked their bodies away along with their consciousness.

*    *    *    *    *

Cora flitted in and out of self-awareness, like a drunk at the end of an epic party.  Slowly the world distilled itself into a gravelly beach, and she was vaguely aware of being uncomfortably cold.  There was the med kit, lying about a foot from her head, its strap still securely fastened around her arm.  She turned her head to see a plastic bag, washed clean by the might of the sea.  She struggled to raise her head and saw a mattress just beyond her grasp.  In fact, she realised, she was surrounded by miscellaneous detritus from the Plutonic Angel.  She heaved herself up into a sitting position, her head reeling like the ship had done the night before, and tried to work out where she was and how on Earth she had survived. 

The weather was typical of the antarctic summer, windy and grey and only a few degrees above zero.  As members of a scientific vessel they had all worn bright orange survival suits that were both buoyant and cold-resistant, although her bones told her not exactly cold-proof.  A few feet away the Southern Sea churned and roared, and she guessed a storm surge must have thrown her up onto the shore.  She shivered.  There was no sign of the ship, but judging by the amount of flotsam around her it was just possible that some of her crewmates had survived.

Cora stood on shaky legs, still trying to get her bearings, and was nearly blown off her feet by the wind.  She considered using the mattress as a shield against it, but she reasoned it would probably work more like a sail and carry her right back out to sea.  She slipped and stumbled, and noticed that the ground here was still frozen just an inch below the gravel.  In fact, all around her the land seemed to be composed of the most bizarre sculptures of frozen gravel, like the wind-worn rocks of some exotic desert, only without the heat and the relative security of nearby civilization.

"Cora!"  She thought she had heard a voice, but the wind had snatched it as quickly as it had come.  She stared around aimlessly, still disoriented.

"Up here!" Jonah shouted from atop a pillar of icy gravel.  "Thank god you've found a med kit.  Roberto is horribly injured, and needs help right away."

*    *    *    *    *

There were five of them who had survived, although four and a quarter might better describe their active roster after subtracting for injuries.  Cora and Jonah were unscathed except for minor gashes and bruising, as was Viola, although her soul seemed scarred by the fact that Xander had survived as well.  For his part, Xander had a broken arm and a severe cut that required Cora to stitch up as best she could.  Poor Roberto was by far the worst for wear.  Both his legs were broken, one with bone jutting alarmingly out from the skin.  Just as on the ship the whispered prayers never seemed to leave his lips, except for when he frequently coughed flecks of blood that belied his serious internal injuries.

"This man needs a medical evac immediately," Cora announced, stating the obvious.

"We ain't got no comms," Xander pointed out, ever the one to spoil a perfectly good shipwreck experience.  "There was a transponder on the ship, but that's gone now.  We're as good as fucked!"

"Our survival suits should have tracking devices," Jonah pointed out, "but they're only detectable at short range."

"They'll send a rescue mission, won't they?" Viola asked, shaking from the cold and the anxiety of their predicament. 

"They'll know the last coordinates of the ship, and they'll find us?"

Cora nodded.  "Except they'll probably wait out the storm, since it would jeopardise the rescuers."  As a paramedic used to extreme environments, she never let hope get in the way of practicalities.

"That's if our kit was working properly," Xander griped.  "GPS had us a hundred clicks from the nearest shoal, and sonar should have warned that we were about to strike a rock.  Lotta good it did our ship!  Damn Chinese tracking chips are probably junk as well."

"We didn't strike a rock," Jonah pointed out.  He waved around him, indicating the landscape.  "This is a till-laced glacier fragment"

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Xander asked, his glass eye squinting suspiciously.

"It's a really dirty iceberg," Jonah explained.  "It's kind of my specialty.  There are parts of Antarctica that are cold deserts, too dry for snow to fall and thus free of ice.  Windstorms can pick up the sand and pebbles there and transport it hundreds of miles, where it piles up layer by layer along with the snow.  Over time it is all compressed together to create glacial ice with a lot of sediment in it.  Finally, when the ice melts, the sediment accumulates on top, like a snowbank in early spring.  This particular specimen seems to have calved off the main floe."

They all stared at him blankly.

"We're literally on an ice island," he explained using simpler words.  "Or a really dirty iceberg, if you prefer.  Which means when the rescue planes start flying by our last known coordinates we may well have already drifted dozens of miles away."

"Well for shit's sake, that's a comforting thought!" Xander barked sarcastically.  Viola cuddled into Cora for comfort.

"Be that as it may, they can't rescue us if we die of exposure," Cora remarked sensibly.  "We need to find or make some shelter, and then a heat source.  After that we should scour the island for food and a means of communication, like radios or signal flares.  Sitting around here talking, we're just going to end up as sediment in the ice ourselves."

Tired, hurt, and half-frozen, the survivors nonetheless agreed to her plan of action.

*    *    *    *    *

The sculpted gravel of the ice-island was as labyrinthine as it was treacherous, but it was also full of little caves and hollows.  They chose one relatively near to the shore, to minimise the distance they needed to drag their findings, of which there were a lot.  Soon the little cave was made into a comfortable nest full of blankets, mattresses, pillows, coats, and other clothing.  Unfortunately all this material was still wet, but even still it was more comfortable and a lot warmer than the frozen ground exposed to the vicious wind.  In terms of finding a heat-source they were much less successful, for they found little that was burnable except for fabric, and absolutely nothing close to dry.  Xander found a lighter, but its fuel seemed to consist entirely of seawater.  Jonah found some scientific equipment protected by a hard plastic carrying case, but the faint glow of its LCD screen did little to comfort the group.

"What does it even do?" Viola asked.

"It's a radiographic spectrometer," Jonah explained.  "When calibrated properly, it works a bit like an x-ray machine to measure the density of glacial sediments."

This produced a groan from the group, for they had dared to hope that it might be something useful.

They were able to scavenge at least a little food, mostly granola bars that floated in their sealed packaging, but not enough to last more than a couple of days.  And they did find a hand-held radio, although it held more seawater than some of the clothes they wrung out to dry in the wind.  A mop and a broom sacrificed their sturdy wooden handles to create a travois to safely transport Roberto back to their cave shelter, but he screamed and shouted at the prospect of being left alone.

"No, por favor!  El Invigilado!" he cried through coughing fits.

"What's he saying?" Viola asked.

"Something about invigilating?" Jonah guessed.

"It's pretty clear he doesn't want to be left alone," Cora said.

"I'll stay," Jonah volunteered.  "Maybe I can splice the radio into the spectrometer?"

"Good thinking," Cora agreed.  "The rest of us will explore further afield, to see if we can't find more useful gear."

*    *    *    *    *

"So I said to the Harbour Master, just look at my hairy balls!" Xander laughed.  They were maybe halfway around the ice-island by this point, and Viola had had enough.

"No one's interested in your crude little testicle jokes!" she snapped.  "Of all the creeps in the world, why did you have to wash up alive with the rest of us!"

"Oh ho!" Xander smirked, apparently happy at any kind of attention from a woman, be it ever so negative.  "It's a live one I've reeled in this time!"

"Shut up!  Shut up!  SHUT UP!!" Viola screamed, throwing some of her scavenged items at him.  A vial of fingernail paint hit him square on the glass eye and he winced.

"Look at the fiery temper!" Xander joked back.  "That's good, cause I'll be needing to curl up with something warm tonight."

"I'd rather sleep with Roberto's cold dead corpse!" Viola screamed, this time finding a rock to hurl.

"Hey, cool it Missy!" Xander raged back, losing his temper.  "If I didn't have this here broken arm, I'd learn you some respect right quick!"

Cora felt obliged to step between the two at that point, although honestly she sympathised with Viola's predicament.  Xander stormed off in frustration, not along the shore but off through the maze of gullies in the interior, probably looking for a shortcut to the cavern like he had been crassly looking for a shortcut to Viola's bed. 

"Fucking dirty old man!" Viola called after him, but the wind stole the words before they ever made it to him.

*    *    *    *    *

"No success with the radio," Jonah said when Viola and Cora returned as dusk was falling.  "Where's Xander?"

"What, he didn't make it back first?" Cora asked.  "He took a shortcut through the middle of the island and should have beaten us here.  He must have slipped and fallen." 

"Good riddance," Viola grumped, trying to get comfortable in their nearly-dry nest.

"We should go out looking for him," Cora said, although her heart really didn't back up her words.

"It will be too dangerous at night without a light source," Jonah pointed out.  "This kind of ice can be riddled with dangers like crevasses.  We will have to try in the daylight when we can see better."

Cora knew this to be the best option, which was just as well, all things considered.

*    *    *    *    *

The following day Roberto was too weak even to speak, although the pang of distress on his face showed that he still feared being left alone.  Nevertheless, the group considered it safest to explore the interior of the island as a group, just in case there was an emergency.  Slowly, carefully, they picked their way through the whimsical shapes of frozen gravel sculpted by the wind, and in almost no time at all they summited the strange island to see more ocean in the distance on the other side.

"All these passages are a bit like a maze, but only an idiot could actually get lost up here," Viola remarked acidly.

"We should scour the passages on the way down to the other side," Cora decided.  "Unless Xander became disoriented, it's most likely that we'll find him down there."

"Hang on, what's this?" Jonah asked, and they were all drawn to his discovery.  It was a large boulder, scarred and pockmarked and three-quarters frozen into the dirty ice.

"Holy crap, it's an asteroid!" Viola gasped.

"I guess it's possible," Jonah mused.  "Realistically a meteor of this size would have melted through whatever ice it didn't shatter on impact, although I suppose it's possible that it ricocheted and ended up mid-ice elsewhere."

"Maybe Xander found it, got distracted, and then forgot which way he'd come from?" Cora suggested.  Jonah shrugged as if this were equally possible.  Viola didn't care, and just traced her hands along the meteor, entranced.

At length they were able to tear themselves away from the mysterious stone and continue their search, but despite scouring the larger share of the island they were unable to find even a trace of Xander.  Not quite sad, they trudged back to their cave-shelter fatigued and perplexed.  Nothing confused them more than their arrival at the shelter, however.  Roberto had also vanished.

"There's no way he walked or even crawled away in his condition," Cora judged.

"It must have been Xander!" Viola gasped.  "He was jealous of Roberto, and disposed of him!"

"Not even Xander is that twisted," Cora commented, although the how and the why of the mystery was baffling to her.  They spent the remainder of the day looking for either of their missing crewmates, but not a trace could they find.

*    *    *    *    *

In the night Viola woke several times due to nightmares, raving that Xander was going to get her.  Each time Cora and Jonah were able to console her under the light of the spectrometer's LCD screen, but as the night wore on and their exhaustion mounted their attempts became less and less energetic.  When at last the pale light of another cold dawn woke them, Viola was nowhere to be seen.

"What the actual fuck?!?" Cora asked as they looked around for even a hint of Viola's whereabouts.  "There's no way Xander could have kidnapped her in the night without us realising it."

"I think..." Jonah began, "I might have dreamt it, but I think I remember her getting up in the night.  She probably wandered in the dark and got lost."

"One person wandering off and getting lost is plausible," Cora said.  "Two, it's at least possible.  But three?  Despite debilitating injuries and an intense fear of being gotten in the night?  Something is seriously wrong here."

Jonah nodded pensively, and then pointed.  "Hey, what's that?"

"It's a little book!" Cora said.  "Do you think Viola dropped it?"

"Diccionario inglés español," Jonah read the spine.  "So it was Roberto's.  But it clearly wasn't here yesterday when we searched.  Roberto must have had it on his person, and dropped it in the shelter, and Viola must have somehow grabbed it when she left."

"Unlikely," Cora mumbled, grabbing the book.  "It's just as probable that the wind blew it here after it washed up."

"What are you looking up?" Jonah asked, bemused.

"That word that Roberto kept saying.  Invigilo?  Invigilidio?"

"Invigilado," Jonah reminded her.

"I don't see it here," Cora said, flipping through the pages.  "But here, look, 'vigilar' means to watch.  So 'invigilar' would be to... unwatch?"

"El Invigilado," Jonah said, repeating what Roberto had raved over and over again.  "The Unwatched?"

Cora froze, and not just from the temperature.  "He was petrified of being left alone, remember?  Think about it.  Everyone who disappeared was out of sight of anyone else!  Xander, when he struck out alone across the island.  Roberto, when we left him to look for Xander.  And Viola, when she sleep-walked out of the shelter!"

Jonah scratched his head studiously.  "You can't seriously be considering the rantings of some superstitious Filipino sailor as truth?  For starters, what's his back-story?  How would he even know about a mysterious floating island where people disappear when they are alone?"

"I don't know," Cora said, casting a random glance over her shoulder to see if she could catch a glimpse of whatever The Unwatched was.  "The thing is, it's the only thing that makes sense since we washed up here."

Jonah shook his head.  "We need to think rationally about this," he said.  "This is not a fruitful line of thought.  Look, I'll prove it to you.  I'll walk up there, through the gullies just out of sight, maybe fifty paces at most.  Then I'll come back, and you'll see this idea is about as scary as a ghost story in the light of day."

Cora nodded, but inside she had her doubts about the wisdom of the plan.  "Count out loud, so I can hear you," she demanded.

Jonah sighed and began pacing, calling out the numbers as he went.  By the time he crested the slight rise to enter the maze of gullies, however, the omnipresent wind had snatched his words away.  Cora waited with trepidation for the count of ten, and then dashed up to the gulley herself.

Horrifyingly, it was completely empty.

*    *    *    *    *

Cora rushed back to the cave-shelter, desperately looking for something to use as a weapon.  She was torn between the tiny scissors in the medical kit and the spectrometer that emitted some kind of radiation to take its measurements.  In the end she grabbed both, for she was determined not to go without a fight.  Turning on the spectrometer she carried it like a rifle, sensor out, its screen spitting out readings that might as well be Greek to her.  Cautiously she followed Jonah's route, hoping against hope that she might find him alive and not be alone on this cursed floating island.  She turned quickly to ensure that she wasn't followed.  Nothing but ocean.  And yet this caused her to marvel at the cleverness of whatever creature inhabited the island, for by floating away from the scene of its crimes who knew how long it had remained undetected.  A flash on the LCD screen drew her attention back to the apparatus, and she noticed that as she swung it back and forth there was something that set off the spectrometer in the direction of the middle of the island.  Cora was alarmed by this apparent presence on the island with her, but at the same time morbidly curious.  She moved by inches, constantly spinning to watch all sides for threats, creeping ever closer to whatever the spectrometer had detected.

The screen suddenly flashed brightly, and Cora looked down to see what all the excitement was about.  She never saw the tentacle that took her from behind.

[Stupot]

Sorry. I have been unable to finish my entry.

Instead. I have something very strange and messed up to share.  This morning, this text appeared in my email inbox. I have no idea who sent me it. Possibly someone from these forums having a joke. If so, I admire and appreciate the work.

What you are about to read pertains to my 144-word story "Faceplant" from a few months ago.

Everything below is as it appeared in my inbox.


My name is Philip Lane. My birthdate is July 14th 1983. I reside at 42 Teatree Lane in Heathhurst, Susshire.

On the 8th of March, a short story appeared on a small community forum for point and click adventure game enthusiasts. The story, titled "Faceplant", is presented as a creepypasta, a kind of urban legend told for fun and intended to entertain. Here is the full text:

No-one was home, but James locked the bathroom door through tears and washed his face. This time they'd thrown him face first into a pile of fertiliser for the hell of it. He rinsed and noticed a tuft of fluff on the space above his top lip. His first moustache? Running his mum's leg razor over the fluff, and still half crying, and still stinking of shit, he celebrated this milestone inwardly.
But it seemed he had missed a patch. He applied foam, shaved and rinsed. The patch was gone at first but it quickly returned, faster and thicker than before. This was not right.
James dropped the razor and started desperately yanking at the tendrils now sprouting from all over his panic-stricken face. But he couldn't keep up as a thorny tangle of vines and nettles wrapped themselves around James's head and squeezed.

I'll get straight to the point. This story is true. I know this because, much to my regret, I was the boy who threw "James" into the "fertilizer" (his real name was Simon Thorne and it was fresh cow pat). I am not proud of my behaviour as a child and have spent much of my life since that day trying to find out exactly what happened to Simon. I have undertaken this task privately, so you might imagine my shock when this story came up in my Google Alerts.

The user who posted "Faceplant", a frequenter of the forum by the name of Stupot, seems rather unremarkable, perhaps even boring. His posts lack much substance and he seems to be a generally liked, if not particularly influential member of the community. He appears to have presented the story as his own work, not citing any sources nor acknowledging any real-world basis. Of his honesty and integrity, I have no query. I am in no doubt that he believes Faceplant emerged from his own grey matter. And yet... here we are.

Perhaps this would be a good point to retell the story as I know it:
I attended Blackbridge High School from September 1994 until my expulsion in February 1998 for an unrelated offense. Simon was a quiet boy. He cried easily, which made him an easy target. I would frequently threaten to "get" him after school, and me and Neil and Tim would watch and laugh from the third-floor corridor as he ran across the playground and out of the back gate without even looking behind him to see that we weren't even chasing him. On a few occasions, though, we would follow him and try to make him cry.

Friday, June 14th 1996, after school. Neil was setting fire to some dry grass in the corner of the cow field, and I looked up and saw Simon. He had seen us and began backing away. It is too painful to remember the exact words I said to him, so I will not record them here. I called him over and told him not to tell anyone he saw us setting fire to the grass. He nodded. I knew he wouldn't tell anyone, but the cruel schoolboy in me decided to go further. I tripped him up and dragged him by his school shirt over to a fresh cow pat and rubbed his face in it. I should have known I'd gone too far when even Neil stopped laughing.

"Here you go. Have a pat on the head." I said, and watched as he stood up and ran away. I thought I was so clever, but when I turned around expecting Neil's usual smile of approval, he just said "What the fuck, man?"

I felt shit. For the first time, I realised that Simon was just a kid trying to get through school, like everyone else. I decided to go after Simon and apologise. I left Neil behind with his lighter and exited the field. Simon was already way ahead of me, but I knew where he lived, so I wove my way through the estate until I arrived at the front of his house. I took a few minutes to work out what I was going to say: I'm such a dickhead. I'm sorry for everything. I promise I will leave you alone.

The truth is, as much as I knew I should apologise, I was about to talk myself out of it. Ahh, everyone picks on him, not just me, he won't forgive me anyway, so what's the point. I can't tell you whether or not I would have gone ahead with the apology because all of that became completely irrelevant, when I heard Simon screaming from inside the house.

My first thought was that he'd killed himself. I was sick to my stomach that I might have been the reason for someone to do that to themselves. I banged on his door, but it was clear no one else was in the house. I ran round the side of his house and found a back door, mercifully unlocked. I ran through the kitchen, the living room. He wasn't downstairs, so I bolted up the stairs, my heart was thumping now from fear as well as exertion. The screaming had stopped, but when I reached the top of the stairs, I could hear a rustling noise coming from behind the only door that was closed. I ran at it and turned the knob, but it was locked.

"Simon!" I screamed "Come on, Simon. Open the door." I banged on the door harder. Behind the door those rustling sounds were joined by whipping and snapping. I stood back and kicked the door inwards. It came off its hinges easily, and behind the door was Simon. He was dead. Surrounded by a twisting, writhing jungle of vines and branches, pulling and constricting the poor boy's body.

I stood and watched in horror. There was nothing I could do to save him. Then I realised the branches and plants were receding. They had killed their prey and were satiated. But it was a moment or two before I realised, they were receding into Simon's face, as though his body was where they had sprouted from.

As the last of the vines was sucked back into his chin, his face was left a contorted, deformed mess. And he was covered in cuts from the thorns. In his hand was a broken razor, and the blade was on the bathroom tiles covered in blood. Not a trace of the foliage remained. This was going to look like a suicide or a murder. Either way, I knew I was going to have a lot of explaining to do.

It was indeed registered as a suicide. Although my actions were inexcusable, it transpired that he had made such attempts before, and I was not regarded as legally responsible for what happened. But I am the only person in the world who knows that, whatever happened to Simon Thorne, he did not do it to himself.

I have never told anyone about what I saw. Not a soul. Not until now. But enough time has passed, and seeing Faceplant online made me reconsider my silence. The story is true. I have no idea how, but this Stupot was somehow able to channel Simon's story into his own work.

Spoiler

I didn't have time to make the edits I needed to so the above is still the same first draft I mentioned the other day. I just don't have time to sit down with it. I may go in when I get some spare seconds so correct a few italics etc, but I won't change any of the prose.

[close]

[Sinitrena]

And we have two entries. That makes this a competition, right?

The entries are:

- Baron: The Price of Freedom (based on The Survival Imperative for the topic Shipwrecked)
- Stupot: <No Title> (based on Faceplant for the topic 144-Word-Stories)

All in all, you have 3 points to give this time:
- 1 point for the best improvement of the previous story.
- 2 points for the best story this round (you cannot divide these 2 points; give them to one entry).

I prefer open votings, and I love comments, so put your votes and thoughts in this thread please.
Voting is open until  31. July.

[Mandle]

I have read both entries and here are my votes and feedback:

BARON FEEDBACK AND VOTING

Spoiler

Baron: I really enjoyed your story, and it reminded me a lot of the setting and paranoia of The Thing. The most exciting part for me was the shipwreck itself. I could see in my mind the characters fighting against the churning water coming in. Then it got a bit vague for me. I found I couldn't keep track of which characters were who during the middle section, although I could tell you were dropping hints as to who each were along the way. Might be more a "me" problem.
The story point that the island was alive with or embedded with some kind of monster was understandable.
I understood that the cast was slowly getting whittled down one by one but didn't really feel their absence until later when Cora found herself alone, and then the bleak ending which I liked. Yeah, it's kind of impossible to tell such a multi-character horror story in such a brief time and expect the reader to feel the impact of it. It would make a very nice outline for a sci-fi horror episode of a Twilight Zone kind of TV show where the viewer sees the faces of the characters and knows who is who a little better than I did.

I did try to read the original story and got partway through it, then skipped to the end, but formatting issues due to (I suspect) updates on the website made so many punctuation characters change into weird stuff for me and I had to give up.

Not for this reason alone, I am voting:

Best improvement: Baron 1 pt.

[close]

STUPOT FEEDBACK AND VOTING

Spoiler

Stupot: I loved the basic pun of "Faceplant" that obviously inspired the original 144-word story. Then I read the expanded version and, yeah, it added everything that a reader of the original would have wondered about. The little details like the bullies getting caught setting the grass on fire, and the over-the-top actions of the main bully, and his line "Just a pat on the head" already sold this for me, but then the bully going into the house and seeing the tendrils retract and everything... Horrifying very much in a "The Ruins" way, especially the boy's attempts to cut it all out of him. Also, it being a creepy pasta type story originally and you adding an extra layer of storytelling on top of that with the "this arrived in my email" conceit was a lot of fun.

For the above reasons I am voting:

Best story: Stupot 2 pts.

[close]

[Baron]

I vote best improved story and best story this round to Stupot - 3 well-deserved points.

STUPOT FEEDBACK

Spoiler

Best improvement marks first, I really appreciated the added character depth for Simon/James and Philip.  There is the slight difficulty that the rewrite makes no sense without the original embedded into it, which makes this technically an expanded draft more than a rewrite, but I'm willing to let that slide due to the new moral analysis of bullying, the deepening mystery in that the plant tendrils entirely disappeared from whence they came, and mostly for the "pat on the head" zinger.   The implication that you have developed the clairvoyance to channel past crimes as a short-story writing hobbyist is surely the set-up for some sort of Miss Marple/X-Files crossover serial.

As for best story marks, I think the genius of your entry is its simplicity.  There aren't a lot of extra characters running around, only three main events (the bullying, the vine strangulation, and the discovery), and a setting that is vaguely English enough that it really demands no description to be entirely understood by the reader.  Obviously you were advantaged in this regard by choosing to rewrite a 144 word story where getting to the main plot points quickly is paramount, but I think your story-telling instincts served you well in this regard.  I, on the other hand, chose to rewrite one of my most unwieldy and bizarre submissions that bombed for good reason (which is saying something, given the number of unwieldy and bizarre submissions I've written that have bombed... ), with some rather predictable results.   

[close]

[Sinitrena]

This is your friendly reminder that votes are love and comments feed starving artists.
You still have a bit of time, use it and vote!

[Stupot]

My 3 points go to Baron.

Feedback incoming

Excuse the late feedback. I've got a newborn baby and a wife on maternity leave. Ironically, I am typing this at work, where I actually have a moment to breathe occasionally.

@Baron - I had to enjoy the story in a few small chunks, but I did enjoy it. I read it with no memory of the original and then went back and re-read the first one. While I think I preferred the mysterious boulder in the middle of the island to the sudden tentacle, overall the rewrite was definitely better.

The biggest improvement for me is that the characters were more far more distinct and their interpersonal relationships added more to the story. In the original there was a lot of "they did this, they did that", whereas in the rewrite there is more individuality for the characters.

The ending was rather abrupt. I suppose it has to be, but perhaps it could have benefited from some kind of climactic showdown or fight with the tentacle/island.

Overall, great effort.

[Sinitrena]

Baron: Comparing your two versions, the new one feels far more personal and in the minds of the characters, while the old one was stronger on the mystery part. I like the setting and the details we get of the characters, making them far easier to distinguish than in the original. Unfortunately, there is so little focus on the mystery of the island now that finding the meteor feels like a completely random event that has nothing to do with the plt at all. It's just there. Overall, both versions have flaws but combined they'd make a great story - with the more character driven approach for the second version and the more mysterious atmosphere of the first.

Stupot: Your story follows an ages old tradition of pretending it wasn't written by its author - which leads to the interesting phenomenon that your authors note at the beginning must be read as part of the story (while the one at the end in spoiler tags clearly isn't). But this necessity to treat the comment in the beginning as part of the story leads to a bit of weirdness later on: "The user who posted "Faceplant", a frequenter of the forum by the name of Stupot, seems rather unremarkable, perhaps even boring. His posts lack much substance and he seems to be a generally liked, if not particularly influential member of the community. He appears to have presented the story as his own work, not citing any sources nor acknowledging any real-world basis. Of his honesty and integrity, I have no query. I am in no doubt that he believes Faceplant emerged from his own grey matter. And yet... here we are." Soooo, you, Stupot, received this paragraph in an e-mail? The e-mail-writer didn't adress you, but wrote a paragraph about you in the third person? Yeah, sure. I mean, in the end we all know that you wrote this yourself, but the literary illusion you were going for still falls completely flat here. Nobody would write like that about the receiver of the message.
Compared to your old version of the story, there's a whole lot more here, of course. I think its slightly unfortunate that the universe seems to hate James/Simon even more than in the original. Not only was he bullied, pushed into dung, eaten by plants - no, it was also later treated as a suicide, which is very much stigmatised. There weren't even consequences for Philip, he didn't even seem to have learned a lesson from this. Even though he went to appologize, he was still kicked out of school later, so we can only assume he was still a bully or otherwise troubelmaker.
In short, the second version of your story adds so much to it that it almost becomes a different story. The core is the same (to the letter, as you quoted it) but the original was a horror creepypasta, while the second is a morality piece (with morality very much lacking.)


And the results are in:

Best improvement:
Baron: 2 points
Stupot: 1 point

Best story:
Baron: 2 points
Stupot: 4 points

Overall:
Baron: 4 points
Stupot: 5 points

(And this breakdown would have made so much more sense with more votes...)
And that means we have a winner by one single point.

Congratulations, Stupot!

You're up next!

[Stupot]

Thanks for the votes, peeps.

And thanks for your feedback, Sinitrena. I would like to address your main criticism if I may. Although I agree it was perhaps a little unnecessarily convoluted a gimmick, you do seem to have missed something. I said at the beginning that I had no idea who sent me the email and even thought it could be an AGSer pranking me. It was never supposed to be that Philip himself had sent me the email (otherwise he would have referred to story Stupot as "you"). In my mind, this Philip had written his version of the story, maybe posted it online somewhere and then someone else had seen it and emailed a copy to me, knowing that I was the author of the original Faceplant story.

Meh, it's still crap either way but I just wanted to set that straight.

Look out for the new theme soon

[Sinitrena]

I really seem to have missed this - or rather, I understood it differently than it was meant. I understood it to mean that you do not know who this Philip person is, as in, you don't know him personally and also don't know what his online name might be. I did not understand it as Philip and the sender of the e-mail to be different people.

[Baron]

Ironically, I am typing this at work, where I actually have a moment to breathe occasionally.

I remember when my kids were young, I'd always joke about going to work to get a break.  The funny thing was, ironically, that it wasn't really a joke. 

Congratulations x 2, Stupot!