Whose Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf

Here's a little summary: you are an officer in a cyberpunk sort of world, tasked with retrieving a high-ranking individual's children, who have been kidnapped.

The story starts off with a stylized opening that really got my hopes up. Unfortunately, what followed absolutely dashed those hopes. It is abysmally written.

However, you can take steps to improve, and I will try to give as much advice as I can to help you, because at least you published this pile of shit, and you still haven't gotten a comment.

Firstly, your biggest issue is what appears to be an allergy to commas. This compounds with your tendency for run-on sentences in a lethal fashion, giving your writing the same flow as a waterfall, while a good story should be a river with calm parts and rapids. The key to good prose is variety, and this is an impossible feat when you only use the period (and even this, sparingly). For example, "Before you get time to inspect the room too closely a cybernetic mutant picks you up and throws you against the wall" is a sentence that should have at least two commas.

"Before you get time to inspect the room too closely, a cybernetic mutant picks you up, and throws you against the wall". This sentence just went from trash to passable, with just two commas. Now, if I were to correct every single lack of a comma, this comment would end up longer than the story! Here are your general guidelines: if you have a member of FANBOYS (For And Nor But Or Yet So), there should be a comma before it. If you have an independent clause followed by a dependent clause, you can connect them via comma, no FANBOYS necessary. See what I did there? In conclusion, go read Gower's articles on sentences, they're in Help and Info.

Even when you have perfected the comma, there are still things you can work on. In your case, it would be utilizing more punctuation. Just look at all these silly symbols that you're neglecting: ; -- (imagine that's an em dash). Semicolons are an especially easy one to implement. I guess lots of beginner writers are scared by them because they're weird-looking; however, they actually have pretty obvious use cases. Em dashes are also great in dialogue and action sequences--they allow for quick, sudden transitions that other punctuation doesn't facilitate. Colons are a classic: they're definitely not full of shit!

Just as you're terrified of the comma, you must be intimidated by the period, because even with commas in all the right places, your writing would still be littered with overly long sentences. Sometimes, a rambling sentence can serve a good purpose, but it becomes monotonous and boring when every one is ten lines long. You need short sentences. There's just no way around it.

As this is a contest entry, I know that it was written under time constraints, and trust me, I know how that final crunch feels. Regardless, you can't be this sloppy, and I highly recommend that you proofread your writing, because there are so many minor errors.

"the report he’d had drawn up"
"'Of course,' you say. 'Let's try to figure out what the hell this is all about." (this sentence hurts, because it's your most grammatically correct, but you forgot the end quotation mark, goddammit!)

Now that all the technical stuff is out of the way, let's see how the substance of this story is (spoiler alert). Well, this aspect is also not great. The aforementioned cybermutant is introduced so jarringly, with no description of it, or even words signalling its appearance--simply adding in "suddenly" would make this make sense. Another detail that makes no sense is you turning the simulated fireplace "real". A simulated fire should still hurt other people in the simulation, or at least make them feel like they're in pain, so what does it even mean to turn it real? The conclusion also makes no sense, because it states that you fail because you've conjured too many things in the simulation, yet you escape anyways. Why do you all of you spawn inside a warehouse, even though you entered the simulation from two different places? You imply that you "tagging" the girls is the reason for them being able to leave, but don't elaborate on this process at all. In a sci-fi story, these factors need to be considered, at the very least.

Overall, I could voice more critique, but this should be plenty for you to digest. With all of that said, I do think that you can do better (and you've shown that you can, with Christmas Crossing). Comparing that game with this, I can attribute some of the failures to contest panic, but this story is still unacceptably riddled with errors.

At least you published something! Nice try Axxius, keep it pushing!