Hello writer

This is the last one for me.

A slow burner, I skipped a bit, to begin with - nothing really started happening until page 5 - that's a long time to wait for a short.

Do tunnel diggers have a linguist on standby? seems odd - but so far the story tells me you either know a lot about this stuff, or you did a lot of research (or at least good at faking it) - So I beleive you that this is a thing.

Shit has hit the fan and I'm not entirely sure why. It went from hearing something inside the cube to the place collapsing around them - a little jarring

Pacing feels off - panic, run for your lives - wait a sec while I check my laptop - the linguist happily replied very quickly - OK, run for your lives again

A lot of promise with a good premise - too slow to get going for a script this length. weak suspense and I struggle to find much horror.

I'm a little disappointed it was the Devil in the box and that it seemed to stop before the real story got going.

Very unique choice of vehicle, it played a big role in the story and featured in the majority of it. well done for that.

well done for completing the challenge

Matt

Holy shit, that was amazing!

Feels more like the start of a feature though. A really good feature. I hope it's a monster and not actually the devil. Whatever it is, I want to watch it!

The writing is good here. Great descriptions, the dialogue is decent, for the most part, and the premise is cool. I felt confident that you knew what you were talking about for the drilling and the machinery.

There are a few issues. There's no conflict for the first few pages. It's more like a guided tour for the reader with lots of exposition about why a layperson would be down there to give an excuse for the guided tour. The pace suffers with the verbose descriptions when the action picks up. The dialogue does get a little on the nose and repeats what we see on screen at times.

The crew reacts quite strongly for very little happening. They make a giant leap of logic to conclude the cube is made of some alien material just by looking at it, and it seems a noise coming from it is enough to make them fear for their lives. Bad comedic timing with a one liner kills all the tension of the scene, so the resulting conclusion doesn't have the same effect as it would have if the tension was still high.

Why on Earth would a drilling crew have a linquist on standby? A linquist capable of reading an obscure variant of Latin? This isn't archaeology.

Overall it's still a decent entry, and with some fixing it could be great. I could see it being done as an animated short, kind of like a Love, Death and Robots episode.