Double-edged Sword

by fic Write Off

RESULTS

Here marks the conclusion of the second /fic/ Write-off. Before we even begin I'd like to say that we had some seriously fierce competition this time, and I believe everyone well-exceeded expectations. The stories in this event achieved an average score of 6.4, easily dwarfing the previous event's 5.6. Even if you didn't come first, even if you came last, you're still a winner, because you got something written down. But enough chat. I'm sure you're all wondering, "Who won?" Well, without further ado, here are your champions:

(Right after the break)

...

(Elevator music) [Automated Operator]: "We'd like to remind you that the top five stories were sorted by judge rankings, and that all other stories were sorted by score from public votes."

—————

Top 5

Gold Medal
Sword, Hammer, Stallion by Redsquirrel456 (8.22)

Silver Medal
Minotamed by Silverquill (7.09)

Bronze Medal
A Game of Twits by Cassius (7.17)

Copper Medallions
I Dream of Daisies by Ezn (7.61)
The Ueton Game by PresentPerfect (7.29)

Top 10

Murky Medallions
FLaSHBA-CK by Derpyanon (7.04)
For the Love of All by Casca (7.04)
Pieonic by Duskwing (6.65)
A Case of You by Anonymous (6.32)
Pinkie Pie Learns About Double Edged Swords by Grif (6.22)

Top 20

Participation Certificate
A True Magician by The Great and Powerful!Trixie (5.96)
Creepy Doll From Down the Lane by Dublio (5.95)
Pinkie's Panic by Bidoof (5.92)
Correspondence by Cainiam (5.77)
Harmony by theworstwriter (5.71)
Piercing Octaves by RogerDodger (5.62)
Call Me, Call Me by StarmanTheta (5.52)
Shadows by Kurbz (5.48)
Benefits and Consequences by LunarShadow (5.09)

I extend again a congratulations to everyone who participated, no matter how well you performed!

—————

Full vote breakdown: http://i.imgur.com/AEc54.png
Total number of voters: 26
This time we had more voters and more votes per voter, and all with fewer viewers! That's pretty cool, I think. Clearly the story quality was so outstanding that it kept people reading.

Giant spreadsheet full o' numbers numbers and graphs and stuff: http://goo.gl/IVx23

The Judges
The final five were sent to a panel of four judges: Corejo, Pascoite, Thanqol, and Vimbert. Their comments and individual rankings: http://goo.gl/FlpOH

Each judge ranked the final five from best to worst, 1st–5th. The scores for the finalists were calculated by the following: 20 – (sum of ranks). For example, a story that that was ranked 5th by all four judges would get a score of zero. Judge tally: http://goo.gl/Yn7BN

—————

Now for the esoteric awards:

Someone Drooled over Your Story
Sword, Hammer, Stallion (9)
A Game of Twits (2)
For the Love of All (2)
Pieonic (2)
The Ueton Game (2)
A Case of You (1)
Creepy Doll From Down the Lane (1)
FLaSHBA-CK (1)
Harmony (1)
I Dream of Daisies (1)
Pinkie Pie Learns About Double Edged Swords (1)

Someone Wants to Send Your Story to the Moon
A Case of You (1)
A True Magician (1)
Benefits and Consequences (1)
Call Me, Call Me (1)
Sword, Hammer, Stallion (1)

Now for the graphs (everybody likes graphs):
• Story Views Against Word Count: http://i.imgur.com/HXjYls.jpg
• Word Count Against Rating: http://i.imgur.com/oqMbes.jpg
• Story Views Against Rating: http://i.imgur.com/asXgBs.jpg
• Story Views by Position on Fimfiction Listing: http://i.imgur.com/D7iH6s.jpg
Whole album: http://imgur.com/a/3ngKV

QUESTIONNAIRE TIME
What did you think of:
• The time limit: too long, too short, just right?
• The start/finish time: bad for you, good for you, indifferent?
• The voting stage: too long, too short, not promoted well enough?
• The use of judges to sort the finalists?
• The prompt?
• The formatting of your stories?*
*Anyone who sent me a .docx and complains gets a slap.

Again, thank you all—voters, submitters, spectators, hecklers, spacemen, admirals, etc.—for your participation in making this a great success!

Comments

[RogerDodger]

I'll just leave this here...

In reverse alphabetical order because I said so.

The Ueton Game
The first half of this story was very engaging and hooked me well enough to want to keep reading till the end. That said, the ending was a bit anticlimactic, to say the least. Within the time constraints of the contest, and seeing how you still had the longest story of the lot, this is to be expected. But the story still has ways that it could be improved. Justification for the mane-6 to have gotten a free ride into the game-winning zone seems to be the most necessary thing. “We get to fight Nightmare Moon because friendship,” really leaves a sour taste in your mouth.

The prose described the events excellently and the dialogue was fluent. I definitely felt like I could trust that what was written was what was intended to be written, and I couldn’t find any major issues with the mechanics. (However, double-spaces after full-stops are unnecessary, and you could have done a find-and-replace to turn those double-hyphens into em dashes, but these are minor niggles at best.)

On Vimbert’s point as to why Twilight wouldn’t ask Celestia for help: it’s just a sad nuance of putting Twilight in any sore situation; she has this “get out of jail free” card from her relationship with the princess. There’s no way to avoid it. I guess more work could have been done to imply Celestia wouldn’t have been able to help (that the image of Luna could solve the problem implies that Celestia could, at least by proxy), but it still seems to me like an unavoidable bit of fridge logic.

Overall, an enjoyable story that could do with a few extra scenes.

Sword, Hammer, Stallion
Second paragraph:
>He glanced at his son after each hammer stroke. Dark blue eyes, cool green hair that made Cross Tree taste mint whenever he saw it, a dark green bush of a mane. Tough little muscles on his ungainly coltish limbs. Little Reveille still wasn’t quite used to the loud noises of the workshop, and his eyes and ears still blinked twitched with each resounding whack of hammer on steel. He had once shied away from the sparks when he was very young, but now he stood firm in his oversized goggles and thick apprentice apron, watching the sparks dance.

Two sentence fragments dedicated purely to the physical description of your character. I had to read through this some three times to actually understand what this was saying, and even now I don’t quite get it. This information should be slipped in through more subtle and rigid prose, because now I’m going into the story not trusting your mechanical diligence in your work. Fragments should only be used if the reader trusts you enough to give you that artistic license, and even then, only if the fragment adds to clarity of what you’re trying to express. “blinked twitched”? I think you missed an “and” in there. Also, it might do you some good to hyphenate your compound terms: dark-blue eyes, cool-green hair (or is it cool green-hair? I can’t even tell), dark-green brush (what does this even mean? The brush is green? Isn’t brush used as a verb here? I’m so confused). Rule of thumb: if there is any ambiguity without the hyphen, use the hyphen.

>The weight… every blow that goes into creating it.
More sentence fragments...
>Needing, wanting to cut and stab.
These fragments give me that feeling.

>Rakes, water pots, helmets, armor.
You love those fragments, don’t you? I think now might be the time for you to learn to love the em dash (—). I’m getting nit-picky at this point, really, but you’ve given no reason to justify this use of language.

>You can see the glow, this baby’s hot.
Comma splice.

>Another day, another sword.
See this? It’s good use of a sentence fragment. It acts like a phrase or interjection and isn’t so long that it feels confusing to the reader.

>A little ways up that path was a single Guard outpost, the final checkpoint of ponydom before the rest of the wild, untamed world claimed the land.
Comma splice.

>That single road out of Equestria, out of everything he’d ever known, shrouded by trees and possibly crawling with monsters.
Fragment.

>If you go up that path, and there’s no telling what can happen.
Unnecessary "and".

I stopped at the end of the second scene-break. At some one third of the way through a short story, there’s no hook here to keep me interested in reading this. The dialogue is plagued by ellipses that make the dialogue sound stilted and awkward, and the plot will develop as such: grave warning from wise man is ignored; protagonist gets in trouble as a result; protagonist gets out of trouble and sees the wisdom in the original warning. I can know the plot of a story and still enjoy it if the prose is engaging, but your first third has given me no reason to believe your story will deliver that.

>Read the whole thing you bum.
All right, all right. I simply got bored ‘sall. It’s not a jab at you but a bit of info that might let you know where the problems lie.

>The noise of his blood pounding in his ears was louder than anything he’d ever heard. Opal Eye suddenly starting to shake beside him felt like an earthquake.
That first sentence is strange to say the least. The second sentence is all kinds of awkward. After three re-reads I figure that “Opal Eye suddenly starting to shake beside him” is supposed to be a noun clause or something. But even if it is grammatically correct, it reads terribly.

Well, I can’t say the prose was as bad as the first third, but I still don’t think it’s a very interesting story. What was Opal doing out in the forest/fields/not-in-town? If her parents had actually told her it was entirely safe, and it apparently isn’t, and so she just hung about there all the time, how on earth was she not already wolf chowder? The ending also seemed very extended. I mean, closure is nice, but the meat of your story is the ~1,000 word scene in the middle. This story just seemed chocked full of words that don’t really engage the reader at all, which was why I was lead to abandon it in the first place.

Sorry that I can’t really be of more help. This is just my take on the story, and my take isn’t at all definitive.

Shadows
>The essence of the alicorn flowed around Trixie, and into her ...
Sounds hot.

>She was laying on a wooden table, shackled and bound so that she couldn’t escape.
Oh dear...

>Trixie closed her eyes and sobbed quietly, already knowing her fate.
Oh my.

>pressing in on her from every side.
[George Takei] Ooooh my.

Hmm, somewhat of a nice introduction to what seems to be a larger story. However, I think the discussion between Nightmare Moon and Trixie became a little too casual and ended too abruptly. That is to say, even in the face of Trixie’s “new found leverage”, I think that Nightmare Moon should still try and wear an aura of dominance over her, rather than just going “okay, whatevs sista, we be partners now oy-oy!”. Feel free to disagree.

There were quite a few typographical errors, but seeing as they weren’t systematic I’m sure that you’ll find them yourself when you do some editing.

Alone, this story doesn’t stand well (much like my own), but it has potential to expand into something interesting.

Pinkie’s Panic
>“I'd love to...” she glanced around, wondering if there was some way she could avoid it. “...but I [...]”
Eh, nope. This doesn’t work. Put em dashes on either side outside of the quotation marks if you want to punctuate your dialogue like this:
>“I'd love to”—she glanced around, wondering if there was some way she could avoid it—“but I [...]”

Eh, I don’t really know what to say of this. The prose was mostly confusing and far too often over-stayed its welcome. What could have been said in few words took many. What Twilight said about Pinkie was true, I suppose, to some extent, but it feels like the entire story is just a vessel for you to regurgitate Twilight’s essay to us. It doesn’t read much like a story at all, and like others have said, Pinkie’s reactions was far too contrived, especially considering what she learned in Party of One.

Pinkie Learns About Double Edged Swords
>No, It was something subtle. Something in the air.
Improper capitalisation and a sentence fragment.

>”You want to...” Pinkie lowered her voice conspiratorially, “... prepare Spikey-Wikey together with Rarity aren’t you?”
Eh, nope. This doesn’t work. Put em dashes on either side outside of the quotation marks to punctuate dialogue like this:
>”You want to”—Pinkie lowered her voice conspiratorially—“prepare Spikey-Wikey together with Rarity aren’t you?”
Also, the second half of the sentence reads strangely, but it kinda works, I guess.

>There seems to be a desk set right at the end of the tent.
Present tense out of nowhere.

>[...] examining this err... precious stone tablets.”
“these” or “tablet”

>you’re the goto pony
I’d say hyphenate to “go-to” if you want to use it as an adjective, since it’s not really a standard word.

>a heavy bags
Eenope.

>artifact
If you’re using British English, it’s “artefact”.

>All I know that she came
You accidentally a word.

>“Well, I thought you were telling me that my parties were no fun anymore and...” Pinkie’s voice softened a little. “... you wouldn’t want to be my friends...”
Again, use em dashes for this.

>The lavender unicorn […]
Oh dear.

There were a few other errors in there too that you should be able to pick up in editing.

Story-wise, this seemed pretty similar to Pinkie’s Panic. As in, it was pretty slow and not much happened. The “Pinkie thinks her friends don’t like her anymore, but instead of asking them directly she snoops and makes assumptions” thing has already been done in the show, so I’m not sure why you’d go for that same angle. The rest of the story, i.e., the whole double-edged sword business, didn’t seem to have much impact on it at all. Rosetta Stone? I didn’t really get the final scene either. But maybe we can chalk this up to me not being a very perceptive reader. I feel like there was supposed to be some irony that I missed but can’t figure out what it is.

Piercing Octaves
Well, I can’t really review myself now can I?

I’ll say what I have already said though: the ending is intentionally awful, monotone, etc. If you want to give feedback on its current state, I’m interested in knowing your impression of the world and story before Frederick takes W.T. to Octavia’s. The line, “See, now you are free,” is, in its current state, the end of the first chapter, to better let the reader understand the differences in tone between the two parts, since the differences between the game and real world (and therefore how the story reads) are like night and day.

I do remember someone saying there’s a problem with referring to hell, e.g., using “bloody hell”. Equestria has Tartarus, and hence the Underworld, which was commonly referred to as hell in Greek mythos. (Equestria is also littered to the dunes with Greek mythology.) That there would be a hell in Equestrian parlance is not exactly far-fetched. And for Christ’s sake, half of our interjections don’t bloody work in the pony world as is. Cut me some slack, willya! Making ponies talk naturally is hard when the words I want to use “aren’t allowed” for the sake of your headcanon.

Pieonic
>Last month was water breathing, the month before that was research into wing spells -which still had many advancements to go before they evolved past the fragile butterfly wings that were gifted to rarity -before that was astral projection, and before that was scrying.
Comma splice. And gah, your em dashes are hyphens...

>However, almost all of the books she had put on the reserve for the subject did just give the instructions and insight to simple tricks. Though a single book by her favorite unicorn, Starswirl the bearded, did give advanced insight into the otherwise hopeless field.
Your usage of “did” in both of these sentences destroys the flow of reading. Compare them to:
>However, almost all of the books she had put on reverse merely gave instructions and insight into simple tricks. [...] unicorn, Starswirl the Bearded, gave advanced insight into the otherwise hopeless field.
Often, using any “be” verb will stilt the flow of sentences and throw them into passive voice, and you end up with all sorts of confusing stuff like above. See how once I remove “did”, fixing the rest of the sentence becomes pretty easy. Also, I’m not sure if the “the” in Starswirl’s title should be capitalised, but “Bearded” sure should be.

>Feeling this topic was much more important then next month’s choice (illusionary magics), she decided to extend its length for another month.
“than”, not “then”. Usage of brackets in prose should be avoided as much as possible. That appositive would work far better if it were appended with em dashes. And I don’t think magic should be plural there as it reads oddly, but that’s a minor niggle at best.

>Opening up the book to the pages labeled with notes on what traits best attributed to a successful experiment.
Fragment.

>might just do a lot more then slow her down.
than

>“But Twilight, this is me we’re talking about, why would you think that I would be able to ‘free my mind’?”
Comma splice.

>LEAST
Italics for emphasis, please.

>it’s that Starswirl creates the most safe and dependable spell analysts anywhere.
He creates analysts, i.e., ponies that are skilled at analysing data? I think you want “analyses”. Even still, I’d end the sentence at “spells”. Maybe append “in all of Equestria” if you want some zest.

>“Okay, Twilight, if you say it’s alright,” She agreed with a slight uncertainty.
Improper dialogue punctuation.

>“Any time you could take off each day?”
This sounds really weird. I don’t really know if you need to bother with this, since you skip straight to the scene with the experiment anyway. Just get them straight into it once Pinkie agrees and stop waffling.

>Pinkie spoke as she headed out the door, any second thoughts on what she had agreed to dispersed to see the librarian so enthusiastic.
This doesn’t really make any sense.

At this point I’m going to ignore any grammatical and stylistic errors and focus on the story. I think it’s obvious that the mad rush to get this many words out in such a short time has plagued your story with errors that could probably be fixed with a little self-editing.

>”If you could lay on the couch I’ll be right over.”
Should be “lie”. I know I said I wouldn’t do anymore line-by-line, but this shit is pretty hard to get right, so I’m assuming that you might miss this in your own editing.

>One week later
You... you can’t do that. This information is conveyed in the next paragraph anyway, so you could just get rid of it.

The first scene where Twilight is testing Pinkie’s magic is very... well, monotone. The systematic nature of it seems characteristic enough of Twilight, but somehow you’ve got Pinkie Pie in the room without anything happening. Make her do some quirky things that gets a bit of banter going on between them to keep the scene engaging. Right now, it just reads as Twilight saying, “Do this,” and then Pinkie doing it without a hiccup.

>At this last bit of information the purple pony broke out into a poorly silenced giggle. “Oh come on, Twilight, I don’t want to use this as a tool for gossip.”
This is extremely weird and out of character for Pinkie Pie. I cannot imagine her saying that in the slightest—specifically “as a tool for”. (Edit after having read the story: if you’re trying to show her changing, she wouldn’t be this un-Pinkie already.) And who’s this purple pony, Twilight? She’s lavender. But this is Pinkie talking. Why do you have a beat (action before dialogue) with Twilight as the subject and then Pinkie talking? It’s confusing.

Twilight’s field tests. Ugh, what is going on? The prose here is so confusing and filled with passive voice that I’m wracking my brain trying to figure out what you’re trying to say. You need to say what’s happening more clearly so that the reader knows what’s happening.

>humanity
Enope.

>effected
affected

Welp, the prose in this story was just painfully difficult to read. I hope I don’t offend by assuming English is not your native tongue. The story could have worked well with better execution, but it was just so much waffling and “this is happening” combined with confusing sentence structure. I probably missed half of what happened too since by the end I resigned to reading each paragraph only once.

Minotamed
Fluttershy is using “The Stare” on something that trivial? I get you want to show her being more assertive, but The Stare is a bit extensive, I think. Maybe just have her give Angel a stern talking to.

>her animal friends
her animal friend

>fifty pages
Mein Gott.

>backsass from the maze
Hehe.

>Fluttershy giggled, proud that she’d written something good enough for somepony to consider it worth memorize.
worth memorizing

All right, I really enjoyed this story. I could hear Iron Will’s voice just coming through the pages (screen, whatevs). The dialogue was in character enough to make the whole thing feel like “Putting Your Hoof Down”, only with the roles reversed. The prose was well written and easy to read, with the only errors being typos. This had all the elements of a good short story and read almost like an episode of the show. Nice work.

Minor nitpick: your em dashes were hyphens.

I Dream of Daisies
>Pushing her nervous aside for a moment
nervousness

>a few a tricks
“a few tricks”, unless you’re trying to make her sound hick.

>felt to numb
too

>she was able to think with the utmost clarity
unnecessary “the”

>Daisy's vision was fuzzy, her ears were ringing, her legs were wobbly, and she felt sick to her stomach.
Comma splices, but it’s not so big a deal since all the clauses have the same subject and have similar form. Up to you if you wanna get rid of ‘em (the splices, that is).

>pull of
pull off

>Rainbow Dash in the shower-room underneath the stands, alone.
fragment

>the the
the

>and probably seen a few magical wingspan enhancements in her day
has probably seen
“in her day” implies she’s retired
It seems weird that you’d use “his daughter” as the subject instead of just “her” when the paragraph is focused on her.

>I know, you've told me.
Comma splice.

>competitors of your
competitors of yours

>ariel
aerial

>, "we
. “We

>sharp white teeth
“sharp-white teeth”, or “sharp, white teeth”? It’s ambiguous.

>The screams of the ponies who had been sitting there were short and bone-chilling, as they all fell into the creature's mouth.
The comma before “as” uses it as a coordinating conjunction meaning “for the reason that; as a result of”. Without the comma it uses as a subordinating conjunction meaning “at the same time that”, which is what I think you mean to say.

>wicked will, and finally
no comma

You have a lot of cases where you use Mr/Ms without a full-stop after them. You’re supposed to have a full-stop after abbreviations.

Overall, I enjoyed this story. The prose was fluent and described the events that occurred well. Sans the mistakes pointed out that seemed to me more typos than overlooked things, the story was well written. I especially liked the interaction between Nightmare and Daisy where Nightmare said a whole paragraph before being rebutted with with some variation of a sarcastic “Sounds wonderful.” What exactly happened to conclude the dream could do with a bit of a touch-up, I think, but otherwise the story’s events were solid.

Harmony
>A distraction, to avoid having to think about the implications of his return.
Fragment. Previous full-stop should be a comma.

Well, this was short. Very short. The dialogue was fun and engaging, but the whole “Contrary to popular belief, the Elements did not banish Luna to the moon” thing felt a bit unnecessary, since it leads into “Celestia is a tyrant” territory, which just doesn’t sit well with me unless it’s an actual plot device (which your story really didn’t need, being so short). It was written well, although it’s not too hard to be rigid in prose over such a short piece.

Also, double-spaces after full-stops are unnecessary.

For the Love of All
When you have excerpts omitted from a journal entry, you should use spaced ellipses instead of giant loads of white space, e.g., “and she . . . so I didn’t read aloud anymore.” Why is this a good idea? Because a lot of places and software will cull any space after the first (Ponychan and LyX, for example), and, well, it makes the paragraphs look a hell of a lot nicer. Giant gaps of white give the paragraphs a weird look.

>I just know that there were shouting things about me
“they” instead of “there”? Not sure if intended since it’s a juvenile diary.

>doing Fluttershy a kindness
Eh... Again, diary format gives you a lot of wiggle room, but I don’t know if you really want this.

Well, wow. This was definitely an interesting story. Epistolary stories have a way of getting you engaged, don’t they? First person is definitely my favourite perspective, anyhow. Fluttershy being an abused orphan isn’t new, but I liked this take on it. The tie-in with the prompt was very well done, also. The implication that her suppressed, infectious aura is the source of The Stare is also very subtle.

FLaSHBA-CK
>“Colgate,” she yawned, holding a hoof to her mouth, “you’ve been down here all night. It’s morning now.”
Since most people don’t consider “yawn” a speaking verb (you can’t yawn and talk at the same time), you can’t do this. If you swap the commas for em dashes, you get the intended effect without it being incorrect (at least to those who would say that yawning isn’t a speaking verb):
>“Colgate”—she yawned, holding a hoof to her mouth—“you’ve been down here all night. It’s morning now.”

>light blue glow
“light-blue glow” or “light, blue glow”?

>“You! Are seeing me! Working on...” She tossed her mane back and raised a hoof, striking a pose that one would see from a statue. “...The FLaSHBA-CK!”
I’d lowercase the words after the exclamation marks since the words are forming the full sentence. Also, use em dashes to punctuate the dialogue:
>“You! are seeing me! working on”—she tossed her mane back and raised a hoof, striking a pose that one would see from a statue—“the FLaSHBA-CK!”

>This lets whoever sees the recent past of whatever the wearer’s looking at.
There’s a lot of things this could be trying to say. I’m guessing “sees” should be “see”.

>Runs on science I don’t fully understand myself a bucketful of unicorn magic.
You’re missing a bit of punctuation somewhere. Try “Runs on science I don’t fully understand myself—a bucketful of unicorn magic.” Hm, yes. Em dashes make everything better. Mmmmm, em dashes...

Sorry, where were we? Oh, right.

>“With this, we can see...” Colgate threw out her free hoof, making a arcing wiping motion. “...The future!”
There’s an em dash for that. Also, “an arcing”.

>I can imagine a lot of...” She wracked her brain for an appropriate word. “...Imaginative uses for this, but I think most of them aren’t legal.”
There’s an em dash for that.

>but they .
Oops. I think you accidentally a some words there.

>ooh’d
“ooh” is a standard verb. It doesn’t need to be italicised, and it doesn’t need the “e” in the past tense form to be contracted.

>dark gray coat
“dark, gray coat” or “dark-gray coat”?

>By the by
By the bye

I enjoyed this story. The way you’ve written Colgate is fun to read—an eccentric and live-in-the-moment kind of mare. Lyra running away to her “thing at the place” was great too. The message of the story was pertinent, very true: ignorance sometimes is bliss, haha. We all have our secrets, don’t we? Everyone needs a bit of privacy. Fun story. A good read.

Creepy Doll From Down the Lane
First off, "from" in the title shouldn't be capitalised since it's a preposition.

>A diamond necklace laid inside the box.
lay

In English there are two different verbs, lay and lie, that do similar but distinct things. To lie is to "be located or situated somewhere; occupy a certain position". To lay something is to "cause to have a certain (possibly abstract) location".* The main distinction between the two is their valency, i.e., how many arguments they take.

Lie takes one argument: the subject which is lying.
Lay takes two arguments: the subject which is laying, and the object which is being laid.

Sounds simple enough, right? But then when you get into the verb inflections, it turns out that the past tense of lie is lay, which causes all hell of confusion. The full set of inflections for each verb are:

infinitive, past tense, past participle, 3rd person singular present tense, present participle
lie, lay, lain, lies, lying
lay, laid, laid, lays, laying

So yeah, that's that. Since the quoted verb has only one argument (the diamond necklace), your base verb is lie, whose past-tense inflection is lay. (Don't confuse "the box" as being the object of the verb when it is actually the noun associated with the preposition inside.)

*These are just the primary definitions. Of course like other words they also have abstractions.

>That's okay, you don't have to speak.
Comma splice.

>for awhile
for a while
Awhile is an adverb, while while is (in this context) a noun, and prepositions (in this case for) associate with nouns.

>gawked for her for awhile.
at her for a while

>blankets and pulled it
"blanket" or "them"

>she saw... a doll and a tattered dress.
Unnecessary ellipsis.

>An exact duplicate of Bon Bon.
Fragment.

>It felt... friendly somehow.
Unnecessary ellipsis. Try "It felt friendly, somehow," for the effect you wanted.

>Looking closer, it felt like deja vu somehow.
Poor sentence phrasing, especially since somehow was has a couple sentences ago.

>I’m sorry, I’ll do better!
Comma splice.

>Lyra screaming
Present tense out of nowhere.

>I'll guess I'm eating sandwiches then.
I guess ...

>She wasn't sure but it sounded like it was coming from... under her bed.
Unnecessary ellipsis. Comma before coordinating conjunction but.

>Inside was... the doll
Unnecessary ellipsis and Object-verb-subject phrasing make this sentence very awkard.

>Confused, she looked back in the room but the doll that was sitting on the floor was gone.
Comma before coordinating conjunction but. The sentence also doesn't read too well (or at least, I had to read it thrice to understand what it meant). Consider "Confused, she looked back in the room where the doll should have lain, but it was gone."

>“Don’t you recognize me? "I'm Bon Bon."
Misplaced quotation marks.

>on," Lyra grabbed
Grabbed isn't a speaking verb.

>"I'm sorry, "Lyra whispered.
Misplaced quotation marks.

>repeated
repeatedly

I think you have a bit of an issue with using ellipses in narration. It's not good if your narrator is confused. Unless your narrator is a character or flavourful (which your narrator is neither), restrict him/her/it to saying what is happening. If you need to pace things, try to do so without ellipses, please. If you’re feeling like a more colourful narrator would suit the story better, that’s cool, but confused-objective doesn’t fly.

The story was okay. The prose was very confusing at times when it really needn’t be. The dialogue read well, even with your apparent ellipsis-philia. I don’t really know what else there is to say. [Fluttershy] It’s... nice.

Correspondence
>I hope your still
you’re

>When you went off after that fight with dad; I didn’t think that I’d ever want to talk to you again.
Remove semi-colon, replace with comma if desired. “When” subordinates the clause on the left of your semi-colon.

In just the first paragraph there’s multiple cases where you didn’t put a comma before a coordinating conjunction (e.g., “but”).

Well, yikes. The story was interesting, but the execution was just... well, it needs help. A large portion of Pinkie’s letters were just retelling episodes of the show, so I just skimmed them. The grammar is in dire need of help, to the point where backpedalling onto it being in diary format just won’t cut. I didn’t want to do a line-by-line on this because it would have ended up very, very long.

Now, on Inky changing her name: “Isabelle is good, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t have that Canterlot ring to it.” I’m surely not the first to say, “Um, what?” Isabelle is an extremely royal name. There’s no way this is going to fly past many readers who know much about English culture. And no, “but things werk diffrnt in equestrian” doesn’t cut it. Also, classical musicians wouldn’t call themselves a band. They’d call themselves an ensemble.

Overall, like Vimbert said: nice premise, poor execution. If you go through some thorough editing on this, you might end up with something great. But in its current state the letters just don’t read anything like letters, nor do they read like narration. The style is just sloppy.

Call Me, Call Me
>cheerful employee training program smile
If “employee training program” is a compound adjective, you should hyphenate it.

>All save for one, the one on top, which he placed on his bed.
Fragment.

>Pictures, postcards, bits of drawings and designs for toys. A black-and-white photograph of Doodle as a child in front of his house with his mother and father back when his father still knew the definition of altruism or the meaning of spending time with his son.
Both fragments. Introduce this list with an em dash, and turn into a comma the full-stop that’s splitting the list.

>More fragments that are a part of this enormous list.
Don’t do that, seriously. I’m reading these sentences thinking they’re complete, and then the sentence ends without a verb clause and I’m like “what?” Fragments should be short, and should only be there if they increase readability. That these “sentences” are just another item in this egregious list is painful to read. Since some of these items in the list have commas in them themselves, separate them with a semi-colon—you know, the way you’re supposed to do painfully long lists.

>He found himself loss
lost

>he said agreed.
Nope. Agreed should be in quotes; otherwise you need a dependent clause after said (e.g., “he said he didn’t”). “Agreed” is an odd answer to “Do you mind if I sit here?” anyway.

>of how many night
nights

>He laid down
lay
See above explanation. “Down” is an adverb, not an object. One argument, so your base verb is lie.

>But his joints had grown old and weary, and his bravado, likewise battered by time and disappointment, had atrophied down to a resigned resentment that was content to simply sneer at those that came too close, talked too loud, or smiled too much.
This is a great sentence. More of this.

>In Doodle’s worst bouts of anger, such as then as he stared at the mysterious spots on the ceiling, he would let his frustration fly about [...]
And less of this. That appositive is all kinds of confusing.

>He abruptly became aware of himself and the face before him faded [...]
Comma before “and”. You’ve got a lot of other cases where you didn’t have a comma before a coordinating conjunction, but this was the most jarring. It reads initially as “became aware of (himself and the face before him)”, but then I’m slapped with this extra verb, which throws me into all kinds of parser madness.

>He laid there
lay

Well, yeah, this story was disappointing, primarily because it’s obvious that you are capable of writing some very strong and descriptive prose. Because it’s more of a reflection than a story occurring, all the prose is in passive voice. Find how many of your sentences begin with “He had/was” or some variation, and you’ll see the problem. It’s a shame that you were being held back so heavily by this crutch, because I feel like you could write something very powerful otherwise. Great paragraphs popped out of nowhere amongst the maddening walls of info dump.

Benefits and Consequences
Cerulean Starlight already went through a large amount of copy-editing, so I’ll skip what he/she has pointed out.

>“Twi? You down there? I...” Spike coughed again, “... you got a reply from the Princess.”
Em dash. Learn to love it.
“Twi? You down there? I”—Spike coughed again—“you got a reply from the Princess.”

>The knock seemed to resonate through the the library and down into the basement, bouncing off the circular wall until it faded into nothingness.
“The” knock. What knock? Surely this should be “a” knock? And you’ve got two “the”s next to each other. And the sentence is passive. Try “A knock resonated throughout the library.” Cull fluff. Is the point that the sound of this knock didn’t echo for eternity—not unlike any other run-of-the-mill knock—something worth mentioning? Is the point that it went down into the basement important? Is Twilight in the basement? Why is she reading books in the basement and not the library? Why do I have a paragraph to this one sentence? Christ, I am going mad.

>Twilight was cut off by the stallion with a pestle cutie mark.
Get rid of this. Put it in the next sentence if you must:
>”We are aware of how rare dragon diseases are,” the stallion with a pestle cutie mark interrupted. “It’s no wonder that you would have to brew your own medicine.”

Okay so, there’s this big plot-hole right here: Why the flipping hell doesn’t Twilight just ask this apothecary to make the antidote? Why does she need super-secret Celestia-library books for something this hick chemist is so lax about?

Again, what? This potion is low-level poop that the apothecary talked about like as if he was sniffing that stuff back in grade school, and now all of a sudden Twilight is making God-tier potions?

So, yeah. This is a pretty boring story. Not much more to say. Weak premise and rushed prose. You could have added a bit of conflict with the apothecaries getting pissed off at Twilight or something, but this entire story is filled with lots of words and not much happenings. And get rid of the implication that the potion is beginner level stuff, because otherwise Twilight getting that super-special book from her connections is trivial.

A True Magician
>Fresh flowers from seemingly nowhere, cards appearing and disappearing, sudden bursts of confetti and smoke, the works.
Fragment. List should be introduced with a colon, and “the works” appended with an em dash.

Bleh. Rather typical Trixie story. The main problem with this story is it’s almost entirely monologue. There’s no interaction at all. Even between the crowd and Trixie all we hear is her mocking it. Inner-conflict like this is just cliche to be honest.

A Game of Twits
Skipped by request. I’ll read it later once you’ve touched it up.

A Case of You
There’s a lot of cases where you use semi-colons to separate dependent clauses from the main clause. You’re not supposed to do that.
>; her back rising up and down erratically.
>; uncomfortably close.
>; times when I felt desperately sad and lonely.
>; especially this way.
>; crying and speaking
All of these should be commas.

>; the humping in my head, the erratic beating of my heart, the stinging in my chest
The semi-colon should be a colon or an em dash.

Anyway, wow. This was a really nice story. The narration and prose flowed extremely well, even though it had quite a few errors (which I managed to overlook just because of how well it flowed). Berry’s feelings translated through the text so lucidly. I can really see how Berry would get the thought that Fluttershy could never love her, because she has to love everyone. I can even see how I’d get that same feeling from someone who was too nice to everyone. The subtle tie-in with the prompt here is wonderful. A great story to end them on, and a great story to start them on for those who read them in order.

Well, that’s all of them (except for Chess-man’s). Some were great, and some could use a bit of work, but overall I’m really impressed with what ya’ll came up with. Kinda makes me feel bad for my ending being so half-baked. Such is life.