Oh man, this one's difficult to judge. I'm still not sure if I enjoyed the piece or not, but I can say that there's a lot of issues. I think the ambiguity of the nomenclature combined with how long this piece is hurts a lot of the bits on the third offset; I would see, let's say, 8000(II)-C, and I would no idea which of the many moving pieces of this article that was, but now it's dead so I guess it was alive?
The characterization has some good moments and bad moments. There's neat bits, especially with Pepper, 3580, and Archine, but bits with Woodlock and -3 felt egregious and undercooked, and I'm sorry to say, but Roufhous comes off as a Gary Stu at best and just a bad character at worst. I feel like you could have made a better job at presenting their powers for people who don't know of them past 'appearing at random and solving whatever issue is going on, then being a jerk otherwise'. Pretty much every moment with them on failed to land for me.
Lastly, there's just a lot of moving parts that I feel work good if we consider this article three different articles, but fail if we see that this is just one piece. The bits where they go into flesh hell are interesting, but considering it's just one third of the whole thing, by the end of the article you do wonder if half to two thirds of the info that came from this part was even useful to begin with. I liked Krow's deal, for example, but if they didn't exist at all, the article wouldn't change much and it would be shorter, helping pacing. That's not good; there's clearly a good thing about being there, but removing them also helps solve issues, meaning there is issues with the pacing and the length and the moving parts here. Finally, and about this, the third part is the most obvious in which this happens. It's extremely long, and it really feels as though it didn't need to be, and could have been much shorter, because by the end of the reading experience, I didn't feel satisfied with the end product; I just felt tired that there was so much information for something that didn't feel all that engaging.
Feel like I've rambled too much, so I'll just say that, despite a lot of good ideas being here, their weight alone hurts your piece a lot, leading to a really neat thing that, at the start of each offset you capture me, but as it goes on and on, the spark you generate slowly snuffs out until it all ends up as a rather underwhelming experience. -1
