Too bad it wasn't finished. I liked the lore in the beginning - wasn't very interested in the climbing man, however. If you ever revisit this, I say write more about the fairies.

the Castle in the Clouds is where you can catch a fairy of your very own

And then you go on to say you have to be invited to even get there.

edit: If the stuff about fairies didn't really matter and the whole point was the ending, that's pretty clever, but not really a story and a bit too meta.

I like the idea behind this story. I really relate to the end. It fits with the prompt. If it's intentional (i.e. it wasn't because you actually ran out of time), I like it. If it's not intentional, it comes off as lazy. Now, all that said...

Now that I think about it, it feels sort of... cheap? Not in the obvious way, as in the author wrote the end because they actually ran out of time and couldn't think of an ending. I mean that this ending could be applied to almost any story. So why this one, a sort of fairy-tale type story?

Is this meta commentary, where you're shining light on people who write fairy tales for O-fic rounds because they saw someone else do it and it worked but they can't end up making it work because they don't yet understand why it works? Is knowing a fairy analogous to understanding why the story works, and the long and shaky ladder analogous to trying to write without knowing why it works?

If so, I like it. But I have a feeling I was overanalyzing there, and I'm not sure I can give it the benefit of the doubt, because the easiest interpretation feels like the likeliest one in this case. And if that's true, you published a story without thinking of an ending, so I can't exactly award points for that.

Well, I think that there's a start here, but you should have not panicked and just kept going through to as close to the end as you could muster.

Unless this is some sort of meta joke that I'm missing.

The beginning was great, the middle was great, the ending made me want to leave a collection of meme instead of a review.

If you ran out of time, which is unlikely considering the lengh, you should have just had the guy fall off the ladder and die, easy to write, somewhat satisfying. The way you went about it was boring, unoriginal and annoying.

If you didn't run out of time, and meant the ending as some sort or joke or comentary, I didn't get it, and I don't really care to get it. I don't like meta in my stories. It feels line a cheap cop out designed to make people laugh.

In conclusion,
3 meta 5 me, and this is the writeoff, but every time something is meta we all die a little inside.

0/10

uhm, wasn't there an easier way up to the clowds?

Sorry if the story was less than .. just all the gaming of how great it was without actually getting the point to the finish.

and no, the man wasn't exactly the one to root for, I guess. Never really got to know anything of him. Just the end of his day.

Castle in the Clouds
TAILS (sum of 20 points)
T-N/A A-N/A I-N/A L-N/A S-N/A
Gestalt (Considered) : Abstain

Technical (Correctness) : N/A
"Adequate" vacuuming system to exsanguinate your sorry self.

Abstract (Clarity) : N/A
You die.

Impact (Consequence) : N/A
You are definitely going to be dead and no one will be able to retrieve your corpse.

Language (Congruence) : N/A
This is only partly why.

Structure (Composition) : N/A
It won't be easy to build, neither the neutronium-like bullet nor the platform for it, but it will absolutely be worth the doing.

So like, if this joke is going to work, you really should have actually cut it off early instead of where this little parable was clearly set to end. Like, cut it way back at the point where you start talking about the wise man.

Beyond the, narrative could be cleaned up a bit (assuming things there aren't also a joke). Brevity is the soul of wit and all. Things like "as everyone knows" could easily be cut, leaving better sentences behind.

That said, yeah. I'm no fun policing this. While it technically extracted a very brief smile from me and certainly fits the prompt well, this is ultimately super unsatisfying by choice.

No, I'm probably not going to fuck you.

I think this would work better by saving it until the last sentence and coming up with something more original, like, (Story to be continued four Writeoffs from now, rules permitting. Let me read up on sequelae—well, fuck.)

ok first of all castle in the clouds was a big joke. I thought up the ending first and then made up half a story to slap it onto. any parallelism is accidental/subconscious. I was imagining about the yugioh card "Sanctuary in the Sky" while I wrote it. I wanted it to sound like a children's fairy tale for maximum tone dissonance with the ending.

I didn't actually run out of time but fun fact I did procrastinate around and waste time all night/morning until I had fifteen minutes left to write the ending so it wouldn't be entirely a lie