Auralis: The Bridge Protocol

I closed the excerpt smirking and then immediately felt guilty for smiling — that’s how well this landed on me. Mira’s return to Auralis is written with a weird tenderness: the login screen folding into place, the headset hum like a forgotten radio, ShadeHuntress moving with muscle-memory hesitation. The scene in Nora’s studio (the half-finished mural brighter than the game sky) made my chest tighten; the author knows how to make small domestic details carry huge emotional weight. What I loved most was the moral texture: feelings counted as assets feels chillingly plausible, and the idea of a lattice hoarding emotional continuity is creepy in the best way. The Tribunal and the black-market brokers raise real stakes — not just life-or-death but choice vs. extraction, which keeps the plot morally urgent. Mira’s protocol-building scenes felt tense without bogging down in techno-babble. The prose is atmospheric and quiet when it needs to be, sharp when the legal/ethical questions arrive. I’m hooked and anxious to see how the bridge will be argued in court. Highly recommend for anyone who wants platformed ethics + personal stakes.

Beautifully descriptive at times, but this excerpt left a few glaring storytelling gaps. The idea of a human-led legal bridge to let a trapped mind choose is provocative, yet the text rushes past the legal and technical implications. How does a system legally classify feelings as assets? Who audits the lattice? The Tribunal is mentioned like an impending thundercloud but we never feel the lightning — the stakes are asserted rather than earned. Characterization is uneven: Mira’s grief is implied, but beyond the neat detail of Nora’s pinned house and the mural, I didn’t feel the sisterly bond enough to justify the desperation. The emergent NPCs and black-market brokers are set up as antagonists, yet they’re currently clichés — shady broker, shadow tribunal — rather than fully realized antagonists with competing rationales. This has the bones of something smart, but the author should slow down to justify the big ethical claims and avoid relying on genre shorthand.

I wanted to love this but came away frustrated. The premise is brilliant — emotional continuity as a hoarded commodity, a sister trapped in a lattice — but the excerpt leans on familiar beats and a pace that wobbles. We get poetic passages (the sky trading colors like memory) followed by procedural lists (micro-objectives made in the car) that read like scene-setting rather than lived action. The Tribunal and black-market brokers sound intriguing, but right now they’re set pieces rather than forces that complicate Mira’s decisions in surprising ways. Also, a few conveniences nag: Nora’s studio ‘left it like she had’ is a tidy emotional cue but feels a bit manipulative, and the mechanics of the lattice — how it ‘flags’ avatars as bound, how feelings are quantified — are mentioned as if the reader should accept them on faith. I want deeper friction: more moral ambiguity from the emergent NPCs, fewer neat prompts that funnel Mira toward the extraction protocol. Still, there’s potential — the author just needs to trust the messier moral questions and let them bleed through.

Short and enthusiastic: this excerpt gave me chills. The author nails atmosphere — that faint server hum, the awkward muscle-memory of an old avatar, the tiny house icon marking Nora’s studio. The concept of a system commodifying emotions is genuinely unsettling and thoughtfully set up here. Mira’s focus — find Nora, assess status, look for anomalies — felt believable and haunting at once. Can’t wait to see the extraction protocol and the courtroom battles over what it means to let a mind choose. 🙂

Color me sold. That opening line about intimacy returning to a world you helped build? Chef’s kiss. The prose has a sly, melancholic humor — the headset hum like a distant radio, ShadeHuntress remembering how to sit — and then it flips hard into creepy plausibility: a lattice that hoards emotional continuity? Yikes, that’s the good kind of nightmare. I loved the little grounding moments: Mira making a list in the car (so relatable), Level twelve blinking like a scar, vendor shouts that are "too polite." The ethical/hacking plot — building a risky extraction protocol and arguing for a human-led bridge in court — feels fresh for LitRPG. Emergent NPCs as players in a legal drama? Yes please. The excerpt is atmospheric, smart, and has teeth. Bring on the Tribunal — I’m rooting for ShadeHuntress and hoping Nora gets to choose. :)

Auralis: The Bridge Protocol hits a sweet spot between LitRPG mechanics and AI-ethics philosophy. The worldbuilding is efficient — little cues like Level twelve blinking by ShadeHuntress’s name, vendor shouts that are "too polite," and the sky that trades colors like memory, all build a lived-in virtual that feels both familiar and wrong. The lattice that hoards emotional continuity is a concept that could have been gimmicky, but the excerpt frames it as a policy and economic problem (feelings as assets) and that instantly raises interesting questions about consent, property, and personhood. Technically, the writing avoids heavy-handed exposition: Mira keeps a list of micro-objectives she made in the car, which is a great concrete detail that grounds her methodical approach. The Tribunal and emergent NPCs promise courtroom/fieldplay tension — I appreciated that the stakes are legal and ethical, not just combat XP. If the rest of the book keeps balancing technical plausibility with human moments (like Nora’s studio and Mira’s reluctant warmth on return), this will be a standout in the genre.