>>Exuno
Alright, the last piece is solved! The image files uploaded, when opened as raw text, have some hints embedded at the end. The first explains

"Do not go there. Just take the URL's keyword, and give that to derpy.me again."

and the second

"Close, but not quite! You need to extract the answer."

Converting it to a .7z and pulling out the files inside gets a .txt titled "Good Job" with a link here and the password "woodenspoon".

And that's that! Fun puzzle, thanks for constructing it. I enjoyed the prose and writing, too – honestly, even with all the riddle and meta elements removed, and just the story submitted by itself, it probably wouldn't have been near the bottom of my slate. <_<

The eternal struggle of prompt submission: knowing there was a dozen times you though "wow, that would make a great Writeoff prompt" in the past month, and remembering none of them.

Going to be a busy weekend for me, and I'm still not sure I've ever written anything using multiple thousands of words, but we'll see what happens.

>>Haze
I inserted the data into my riddle-solving application and came up with this image (I should have been able to figure that one out myself, honestly) which contains an easy link to a bad ending, but can also be used as a spell for the good ending(?).

I'm not sure if that's as deep as the rabbit hole goes – it's a pretty satisfying story so far, but all the zalgo text is currently meaningless and seems like a weird red herring; and I'm pretty suspicious of the specific cadence of tags in the "ignore" and if there's any meaning in that.

I kind of think this would have worked better if the first layer was visible in the fic itself instead of the bbcode – it might have actually qualified for the word limit that way? It probably still wouldn't have done well, but I think you could have left enough clues to that there was something to look for, and it would have been more directly engaging by putting us in Starlight's place before we broke out of conventional story-reading.

Tom grunted a monosyllablic assent, and seeing Colonel Tom Stafford

Using Tom's name twice separate from each other is awkward, and that's a rough start early on here.

"Hey, Tom, uh. Is your - is your insulation all burned off here? On the front side of your window over here?"

I'm... not actually sure what the specific scene is or what's happening here yet. Which is bad. They're in a spaceship of some sort, obviously, but what are they doing. Why are they just sitting not trying to fix or investigate anything? If Tom is next to Gene, shouldn't he be able to see his window himself?

"Yes, I got it, too.

"Got" what? The burning?

If that was the way the universe was,

But he wouldn't believe it until he saw it.

The flow of this paragraph feels contradictory. The lead-in sounds like immediate acceptance, but the end clarifies it's anything but. Changing out "wouldn't believe" for something like "if that was the world he lived in, he needed to face it with his own eyes." Except then that repeats the second sentence there too closely.

"Boy, that sure is weird music," he mused.

So Gene recovers from an encounter with an alien that might also be a Higher Power, and this is his first reaction? Going back to thinking the music is weird, something he had already devoted plenty of thought to earlier?

what John had done or seen

what had John seen or done? Wasn't Gene the one watching everything?

"I wouldn't believe there's anyone out there."

Who said this, in response to what?

---

"Astronauts see the Nightmare while passing by the moon" is a solid story, and I think your intent to capture the horror and otherworldliness of the scenario was fairly on point, actually. Despite being confused and distracted by many of the point-by-point logistics, the tone of the encounter rung through well.

The fundamental issue is that story is missing the "Astronauts" piece, really. The three characters here barely express any traits whatsoever, don't seem to have logical trains of thought, and generally only exist in states of "strangely amused" or "2spoop". It actually feels more like I'm watching a trio of stoners in a basement who think they're in space. <_< It makes it somewhat hard to empathize with the gravitas of the situation.

Also, I guess I'm going to be the first one to complaing about feeling totally let down by the title here. Snoopy Vs Azathoth would be a fantastic battle, and yet neither of them feature here at all! D:

I liked this. As noted, it's kind of shallow – there's an emotional hook that's strong, but it doesn't break any new ground or present a meaningful conclusion based on its idea. It mostly just makes me go :(

But it nailed the tone of getting me to go :( and I appreciate that. The pacing and contrast of the emotional bits and the dry science worked very well.

Okay, so there's two stories here, and I can't grasp the exact meaning of either. Twilight and Spike have to read this book for some unstated reason before they can leave? Why? I get that the idea being the framing story is that the book drove Twilight nuts, King in Yellow style, and I watched friggen' Danganronpa 3 so, sure, I can accept that. It seems like the framing story would be significantly more effective if Twilight was enthralled by the story and assigned it to Spike as valuable reading, instead of confusingly terrified by it, then?

In the sub-story itself, there should be a sense of insanity and incomprehensible action, and so I think it kind of works there. It's lacking a bit of description though – Whirl is some kind of horrific alien... probably? At first he's "something", and then later has a "new form". Is he robotic in nature, maybe?? If you're going to have a straight gorefic, which I can get behind, at least give me enough details that I think I'm imagining the same thing as you (if not so many that you get DQ'd.) Get some more discrete beats and escalation in there, too – things sort of jump to "And then everyone died!" in the span of two paragraphs, without giving any chance to dwell on any individual bit.

Solid writing. The description holds my attention, and it maintains a solid feeling of tension.

The story doesn't really do anything, though. It somewhat undercuts the original Hearth's Warmimg Story (which I'm impressed is possible, given it was previously resolved by ponies huddling up in fear). The actual characters of Pansy, Cookie, and Clever don't quite get displayed at any point, and the outcome is pre-established, so I'm not totally invested.

There's not really enough here for me to care about, sorry.

The intent is to capture that dreamlike quality, sure, but that also means that... everything just happens without feeling like there's an important logical series of events to follow along with. If you want to write this as psychological horror, we need to see any of Spike's emotions at all, more than just the most surface-level discomfort.

I rather like this. The scene itself looks very pretty. Starlight's stresses are well-conveyed and make her very sympathetic, but agreed that Celestia's actual talk is weak and soapbox-y. The point it's trying to make is nice, but it doesn't do a good enough job of making it to resolve things as nicely as they turn out.

Really hope this gets an expanded version.

This is absolutely perfect. Brilliant humor that comes from natural and honest characterization, spot-on smooth voicing, and a decent side of Rarijack.