>>25349481

"A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, 'You are mad; you are not like us."

>>25349481
We have /wg/, /wng/, and /sffg/, yet you chose to kill a thread with this. Jesus Chris.

>>25349618

I'll take something like this over another religion or gender/romance circlejerk.

>>25349481

So, I made it the whole way through for some damn reason, and here's my initial impressions:

Good:

1. The core premise (rapid mutation induced by audio signals) is intriguing and legitimately unsettling. I see an element of King's Tommyknockers, Heinlein's Puppetmasters, or I Am Legend here, and all of it seen through the perspective of the creatures that used to be human.

2. The sheer randomness of the sonic effects is also interesting: some become invalids and die, the "successful" specimens become nigh-invulnerable abominations fusing random debris into their bodies. Those even less lucky regress into pre-human or even pre-mammalian beasts. The post-humans consider this acceptable.

3. All the characters do have unique voices; that's hard for even plenty of published authors to pull off. And the I.R./Specs dynamic actually is endearing.

Bad:

1. "Archaea phonic cosmic sonics" is not a good way to start a non-humorous story, at least in my opinion. The cheery sing-song tone which pervades Cosmic Sonics is very hard to take seriously, it's frankly impressive that I made it past the opening performance, and I don't know if I would have had I not been running it on TTS.

In fairness, I think this is partially intentional. The tone is SUPPOSED to be weird and discordant; a sort of veneer to conceal the underlying horror which also reinforces the core theme of mutagenic alien sounds. But it still annoyed me. Song and poem are always heavily subjective, I know; but with verses like "always part of team"/"of less use to We," I think it's fair to say that the author is no Tolkien.

2. The characters do not speak in a natural human tone, and that's a real problem given just how dialogue-heavy the narrative is (more on that later). This likewise might be a stylistic choice on the part of the author, as these characters are most emphatically NOT natural humans, but that doesn't make their stilted, meandering dialogue any more pleasant to slog through.

3. There's a lot of punctuation, spelling, and homonym issues (e.g. it's supposed to be "on cue", not "on queue"). Not so bad that I ever failed to understand what was being said, but bad enough to distract when reading the story.

(From line 178: elliptic. Epileptic?)

>>25349481
>>25349820
Ugly:
1. So very, very Infodumpy. The whole thing feels like a worldbuilding outline haphazardly turned into a three-way conversation. Pip is often less a character himself and more a walking microphone through which the reader learns of the mutants' world; that's pretty much all he is after mentioning off-hand that his wife took a near-miss from a tomahawk missile and wants to use the downtime for some upgrades. Basically, when it ain't open mic night, the story is 90% characters sitting in a booth or a jeep and recounting the interesting stuff that already happened.

2. The asylum riot is confusing, chaotic, hard to follow, and feels to me like it should be the climax of the story rather than something told as a distant recollection. We get a blow-by-blow of a fight that happened 13 years ago, while the current air-raid sirens and explosions outside the diner get glossed over in two sentences. It feels like there are other things happening in this story that should be more pressing to the main characters.

Assessment:
It doesn't suck, but it's a rough and early first draft at best. Personally, I would restructure it quite a bit: use the performance and convo with the janitor as a framing device, set the main part of the story back in the riot/asylum breakout, then epilogued back in the present. But that's just me.