Submission (#11041) Approved

Summary:
On a trip to Frostpine with his parents and their army, Maru wanders away from the group as he often does. They’d settled near town at first, making Maru’s trip to the forest simple. There, he sees the pinekin pilgrimage he hoped to see. He can’t follow them all the way up the mountain, but maybe he can make a friend.

Review:
I was instantly enamored with the pinekin design when I saw it, so I was pretty eager to do this one, but it took a bit of thinking to come up with an idea. I ended up with the idea while talking to a friend, as I realized the reward for this prompt was getting a pinekin. So, I thought, why not just have a story that reflected that, where Maru actually got the pinekin. Through friendship, of course, because the idea was too cute to pass up at this point. I grew attached to the little pinekin in my head, so now I can properly imagine all the little adventures Maru and his pinekin will go on together. It was a bit too think about how one would just return to town with a pinekin, and I admit there’s always a bit of fear that I’m getting things completely wrong, but at the very least I had a lot of fun coming up with the idea. I think it’s cute, too, which is important. It’s good practice to just work on something I’m happy with, even if it’s not necessarily perfect or polished. Good vibes to take with me into the new year, even if part of me wishes I had a more refined idea. Or presentation, at least, but these kinds of stories are definitely not my strong suit. Good practice and good fun! And while writing the summary, I learned that a group of frogs is called an army.

15EC - 1500 words
4EC - 4 sentence Summary
2 EC - 200 word review
1 EC - Significant Interaction with Pinekin
TOTAL: 22 EC