Hi @saun. Thanks for participating in #fiftywords. I'm sorry I haven't responded. I have to recover my @jayna account, and currently am posting as @jaynas-minime.

There's a lot going on in this story. Wow! If you do another one of these, please do aim for the 50 word count guideline. That is what this challenge is about. It forces you to cut out any extra words and fine-tune your story, so that every word counts. This story is 100 words, which is twice as long as the challenge guidelines.

Here are a few tips for you:

• "All of a sudden" can be changed to "Suddenly," which is one word instead of four.
• "Pasting a cunningly smile on his face" can be changed to "smiling cunningly," which is two works instead of seven.

Those are just a few examples of the edits you could make to reduce your word count to meet the challenge. Note: If you don't want to write a story in just 50 words, there are lots of other great writing challenges. Good luck!