[sral]

Razah: I thought the ending of your piece was dope, liked the angle of you searching for the beast who had killed your buddies/was the reason they were missing at least and gave your character some impetus to carry on the fight. It wa a cool concept at the bare bones of it all, and I thought this section was especially dopesauce:

The silence can be eerie but it's fascinating
Are those.. rain drops that I hear, or is the monster salivating

You did a great job here of tying in your descriptive imagery to the overarching theme you went with of this unseen or unfound animal/beast that had amused the disappearance of their colleagues. I think you surprised a lot of people with your run in this tourney so far, but I knew all too well the level you can write at so it's no surprise for me to see you here at the business end of the tourney.

Mr. J: It was fun to see you both actually go for a similar idea or concept of this missing research team, both you and the opponent. I know the picture topic almost lends to that idea but I just found it interesting how you both chose to do that...

You were obviously the more technically skilled as far as these two verses went, and I can't lie I tend to lean more towards the mechanically proficient verses - especially at this level of competition where really were nitpicking over the minutest details to decide a winner. I loved how you rhymed the spoken dialogue from the picture with that in your verse, it was a deft touch but stood out for me.

The two of you here were fairly evenly matched infact, Razah had that brilliant turn of phrase that comes with his experience in the battle side and he also had that imagery going for him which I thought was TIGHT in the section I quoted. Mr. J was the more technically proficient writer here and it's hard to look past that, especially as both verses were short in length so it highlighted that strongpoint all the more in the short amount of lines. Both different writers with different things that will appeal to different readers, a clash of styles perhaps, with Razah having a nod ahead in flow over some of the latter half of Mr. J's where the line lengths seemed to creep up... Tough call here, I've re-read a few times now and have to say I'm going with Mr. J, slightly, based on the overall stronger mechanics and execution and consistently solid verse.

Great battle!