Ooooh! This story is really getting lenghty, and interesting. I love the new twist of the setting taking place somewhere other than Earth. However it does seem like you overused the various phrases relating to projection within the first paragraph. I don’t know how you would have fixed that though.

Good job.

It kind of makes sense it would be somewhere other than Earth, if critters like that cucumber-thing are common enough that Dakotah considers them “normal”.

who are ‘they’ that have made contact, the scientists or special forces of which she is training/working with? Or are ‘they’ the villainous critters, or perhaps a rival alien race?
So many directions.. only one cucumber smelling monster.. oh and where did IT go?!

When I was writing it, I meant for “they” to be the people she’s supposed to be infiltrating. Pesky pronouns.

This is great!

You da man, Robo Master. I love your additions. The projector-spider, the warring factions, Brian (well technically you didn’t “add” him but you certainly built an interesting character of him.)

This series has suddenly exploded with depth. Sort of like the cucumber-eating alien thing did. []o)

Well that was fun! Great ending there to add some ‘larger picture’ stuff to what started on a very small scale. It’s neat to see things ballooning. The use of the nickname was spot-on as well, really showed some depth to their relationship in a quick way.

Me, I would have combined the description of him with the preceding sentence rather than leave it a fragment, but that’s me.