Their magic was all theory and no practice

I kind of want to see some more development of how he understands this to be the case. The argument he was having with the professor in the first scene seemed the opposite, where the professor said not to worry about formulaic things the magic was supposed to do and just go on the feel of what it actually does. Seems more like the professor is on the side of practice, and while Polaris might have an interpretation that cuts the other way, I'd like to see his line of argument laid out.

Given how much conversation happens during their attempt to work on the scrolls, things transition over to being more summaries once they come back out of the cave, and it's an oddly distancing effect, as if none of these events matter as much anymore at that point. I wonder if that was just you running up against the deadline and needing to get it finished in a hurry. Then the actual ending also kind of comes out of nowhere. it must really be a new idea to start a new university or else Polaris surely would have heard that about his idol.

With the number of extremely close similarities, I assume this is an MLP story idea that was transitioned over to a general fiction adaptation of it. We have clear analogs of Twilight, Celestia, Spike, Starswirl, Neighsay, and Rainbow Dash, unless I miss my guess. Nothing wrong with that, though I wonder whether you'll post this as an MLP story on FiMFiction or submit it to a fantasy publication (possibly the former until the latter happens).

Anyway. Very cute story in the author's distinctive style, and it reads much more quickly than the word count. A bit rushed at the end, but overall this was a lot of fun.

A few typos, like you call your main character Bundi a number of times. If that was intentional, the purpose of it went over my head.

I found the first interaction confusing. Budi disappears, and it does say he goes to the office, but never has him pop to the pickup location, so it seemed like the client was at the office. Then for that matter, the narrator stays behind to say that, even though it'd been in Budi's perspective and he's gone. Then you do the same thing again when he drops the client off. You shouldn't have a limited narrator telling me things the perspective character can't possibly have witnessed.

Why is Budi paying the helicopter pilot? He's just doing his own job and presumably getting paid for it. A refund for not being able to take it there himself? But then that means the pilot was the client, which doesn't make sense.

The scene in the hangar is cute enough, but you throw so many characters at me at once that I can't keep track of them all. I guess only the one mostly conversing with Budi is important, but she can get lost in the mix.

It ends up being more of a slice of life story, which wouldn't necessarily be a problem, except the way you ended the penultimate scene teases something eventful is about to happen, only for there to be no payoff. I do wonder why he didn't get a tip, since that's a standard kind of thing to do for his service, so either the customer was oblivious to that (including even normal comparable transport) or dissatisfied, but the narrative never hints at the latter.

I do wonder how you got this idea from the prompt picture used.

Cute story, and I like this look at someone wanting to use his powers for more mundane purposes.

Insofar as in some lighting conditions snow and sand can look alike, I've been sitting on a story idea for years that would have fit this perfectly. Oh well.

Seems like a theme this author likes to write about. It's not a bad one.

The rhymes are all clean, but the rhythm of "The wilds pressed right to their ragged edge" requires "wilds" to be pronounced as 2 syllables, which is on the odd side, and the stress pattern of "To bear due humane grace or charity" is kind of mangled. The structure is otherwise clean.

If there's a purpose in italicizing the middle lines, I'm not seeing it. I looked for them to strike a different tone, or perhaps to have a different meaning if removed and read as an isolated stanza, either in order as-is or assembled according to the prevailing rhyme structure, but it doesn't have an obvious different meaning that way.

I like the message, and there are several poignant lines, like the wood of the house having once been a forest itself, and an artificial substitute for the rain being necessary, then all of this displacing and killing the wildlife. It's got a nice atmosphere and an urgency to it that's become a hallmark of this author.

I like the structure and rhythm of this, but I must admit I'm lost. Taken literally, I have no idea what's happening. Given the last line, it suggests maybe this is nonsense verse, which is fine, but in case it's a tad more than that, I went back through looking for puns and couldn't identify any, so if they're present, they're going over my head.

I might not have figured it out without the prompt it was written to, but I guess the speaker is a phoenix? One that's been confined, it seems, but why is unknown. Interesting that the B rhymes are ones that can be taken as either one syllable or two (though it technically doesn't matter, since the form doesn't require meter; with the two-syllable version, it's all the same meter on every line, or for one-syllable versions, that still persists for all such lines and is consistent). And that structure! A rondeau redouble, which I wouldn't have known, except I just wrote one a month ago. And what a pain it is to write since it's a long form to use only two rhymes (much easier to do in the original French, since they have so many more words that rhyme). I'm impressed you found that many to work with the two-syllable rhymes. (In my case, the half-line at the end also rhymed with the A lines, but that's also not a requirement). Well done.

Ah, a haiku. Or a senryu, I guess, since there's no seasonal reference. It creates a nice image of rebirth in the midst of destruction.

Is this a form you made up? I like the way the rhymes work and how the interstitial stanzas are shorter. The rhythm isn't always clean, but mostly so.

My read on it is that the speaker is walking down a street at night and musing how things like the buildings and the artificial light are spoiling nature and supplanting habitat.

Interesting in that it's unclear whether the eyes are watching the stars or if the star is also an eye of sorts.

One moon circles...

If the prompt hadn't already made me think of that episode, this art sure did.

And the same thing again. I assume it's the same author, and then my question is: why are these two separate poems? If there was a purpose in differentiating them, I can't tell.

So it's just a list of anagrams for the prompt? I mean... it's a thing, but I don't know what a reader's going to get out of it as a poem.

Perhaps the author has personal experience with this? I suspect a British author, as an American one wouldn't rhyme grain/again. Though I do wonder what the title has to do with it. Nothing in the poem speaks to something unique to farming, I suppose unless the specific grass is wheat or oats or some such. I do like the way there's almost an additional rhyme: stain/again works (inasmuch as grain/again does, depending on nationality), and nascent/grain is kind of close to one.

The rhymes mostly work, but the meter gets hammered out of shape in a few places. I like the mood this strikes, and as far as I can tell, the speaker enjoys reading but gets interrupted. The only specific interruption mentioned is music from passing cars, though it's not clear whether the speaker dislikes all the music. It had a similar feel to me as "The Raven," though it's structured differently.

At first, this seems to fit the title, just a person taking in the natural world around them, but at the end it loses me. The "your features"—is the narrator speaking to one of the elements of nature? The hawk? The reader? I'm not even sure what "features" refers to, unless it's the terrain. And the last stanza went over my head. I don't know what the glow is or why slime would be hard. Structurally, it's mostly blank verse, though by being organized in stanzas, it may imply some organization of ideas. There are some big breaks to the rhythm, though. "Van Gogh's" doesn't fit, "water" has an extra syllable on the end of a line (which can be done in sonnets, but typically only formats like that where the corresponding rhymed line does the same thing). If there's a reason you broke from the stanza pattern to do a three-line one and a standalone line, that also goes over my head, and the first line of the former doesn't fit an iambic meter at all. I do like how the speaker's attention goes all around, so that they're noticing a great variety of things, and it creates a good atmosphere.

The rhymes all work, and the only place the stress pattern breaks is "covered." My reading is that this is a person who likes to observe nature, something like a birdwatcher, but who also appreciates the intricacies of an ecosystem so that even the less-desirable parts have their necessary niche. I can't come up with a relevance to the prompt, but I've never cared too much about that. I leave it on the honor system that the author was somehow inspired by it, even if it's not explicitly included. "Naturalist" doesn't single out insects, but they get the bulk of the attention here, with birds only mentioned in passing and the plants and earth not at all. I don't think it's necessarily an issue of rescoping the poem, but maybe the title needs to match the content a little more closely.

This has a more complex structure that it initially appears. Most lines are 12 syllables that start with a detached word, then seem to use alternating stressed and unstressed syllables, though it's forced in a few places and I can't tell if it's intended to have a rhythm at all. The final line of each stanza is 14 syllables and does appear to be iambic.

What caught me by surprise was the internal rhyme of each 12-syllable line, where the first word rhymes with another about halfway through. In fact, the final line has enough of a slant rhyme in the same manner (bliss/loneliness) that I thought you might be doing it there as well, but the first stanza has nothing close in its finishing line.

As to meaning, it goes a bit over my head. It sounds like a person going through a gate to a faraway place (or alternate reality), seeking some kind of affinity for nature, and finding none, gets disappointed. Which is kind of anticlimactic and seems like the opposite of the prompt. Some of the first lines hint that it may be the person returning to a once-familiar place and finding it's still suffering from what made it alien in the past. It feels like it's probing toward setting up a coll situation, but I never quite connected to what it was.

Like the recent short story event, I'm sorry i was out of town and not able to comment/vote before the deadline.

Hm, there are a couple of ways I could take this. One is the secret desires that people hold as they trek to and from work. The "secret lives" seems to support that, but I could then also interpret it as the personas these people inhabit when they're gaming online or some such. Until I got to that line, I was taking "the line forms" as meaning these people were all in the same line, and it put me in mind of them waiting their turn at a travel agency of sorts that could make these fantasies come true.

I like the "slalom salaam" wordplay. It's weird, but it also works. More or less free verse, so there's no structure or rhyme to analyze. Maybe the "stretches on" is repetitive with the earlier "stretches on hot sands," and if that was intentional, it didn't seem to be.

Given this author is probably the one who submitted the prompt, I assume this is the idea he envisioned going along with it from the start.

You don't need to put the title in the text. The site already puts it at the top, so now you have it twice.

I like the initial scene-setting, but you also get repetitive in the first paragraph (you use some form of "remain" three times), which creates the impression the whole story is likely to suffer from the same thing. It does pop up again some.

Interesting idea that some dinosaurs actually did have a civilization, though one that was a type that didn't leave any evidence behind. I'd kind of want some more world building to see how that was possible, given that humans left evidence from before they were civilized, but I can accept that as a conceit of this story. Also curious whether this is a situation where then entire planet can be evacuated or just a select few. And how we have the technology to do mass space travel like that but not adjust an asteroid's trajectory far in advance...

I didn't exactly see that ending coming, at least not until the final scene began, but it is a story type done many times before. Good example of it.

Sorry I wasn't around to comment or vote before the deadline, but I was out of town all week.

I started to compile notes on the proofreading things I saw, but there were too many, so I'll just say it needs a thorough editing pass. There are some breaks in perspective. Here's an example:

Thank goodness this contest was based on size alone

This is clearly Twilight's thought process, but it's being presented as narration, thus you're using a limited narration. That is, Twilight is effectively the narrator. But then in the following paragraph you explicitly tell me that these are things Twilight didn't see. If she's the narrator and she didn't see them, then the narrator didn't see them either and doesn't know about them.

It takes the story a while to get going too. It starts to drag in the middle where there's lots of unneeded exposition (Floral's background as a hygienist is irrelevant, for example, and is never given a connection to the plot). Likewise, the first scene emphasizes at least three times (I stopped counting) how hot it is, and that also barely has any plot relevance, only insofar as it explains why someone might want a snow cone.

The ending pun is okay, but I really wasn't following the plot at that point. The plant gets violent as soon as it's threatened, yet when it's scared of Twilight measuring it, it's suddenly going to be docile? Why? It's vaguely cited that it finds Floral's presence calming, but it also expresses that it has no particular reason to trust her, so I don't understand its behavior.

Is this Jackie Chan's uncle? (In looking up whether he had an actual name, I was surprised to learn that Jade's VA was also named Chan but is apparently unrelated, and now works for Google News.)

Reminds me of the skinks I always find in my garage, but they somehow end up desiccated rather than skeletonized...

Looks kind of like a naga when it seemingly has no back legs.

Trying to remember whether I've seen this. It puts me in a mind of something like The Virginian, but I bet it's that Twilight Zone episode where the little boy is all-powerful and everyone is scared to make him unhappy.

Ah, a sonnet form. No problems with the rhyme or meter. I get the gist of the ending, but not exactly how it applies to the cat. I'm guessing it has something to do with how cats abruptly decide petting is over, but I'm not sure how that relates to the truth/lie topic. I guess just that the speaker finds the cat companionable, and the cat's mood can turn in a way that shows him that the truth can hurt? I'm a little fuzzy on that.

These were both really good entries. Only one can win (unless another voter goes opposite me and forces a tie, of course), but they're both very worthy entries.

Well, this was really good. One of those forms that makes you recycle lines, though I don't recognize the particular form. The rhymes and meter are all good. I think the message is rant against people who aren't truthful, and it must be referring to some very important truths since it's worth it to the speaker to poison them. The tone of the poem directly follows from the prompt's continuation. Well done.