I recognise your name, and Zing seems to recognise you. I think that qualifies as community engagement.

I always start by reading the stories; it lets me form an image of the characters before you tell me what they should seem like. So:

Control prompt:

It's shocking to hear me say this, because I usually go the other way, but I think you might not have [i]enough[/i] narrative for the amount of dialogue. You're leaving a lot of questions unaddressed. Example: why does Ghost go on a hyper-specific tangent about curses, and what is up with Other Character's response to that - why does she think being scared of ghosts makes her 'that stupid', and what is Ghost reading into her tone? Why does he say 'you're not wrong' when, er, she's exactly right? And what was the familiar book?

Creative prompt:

This one hangs together much better (and is [i]hilarious[i]), but still has moments where I feel like you're hoping we can read your mind. If there's something you want to be sure your reader gets, you need to put it down on the page. As an example:

Ghost’s eyes widened as he took in the equipment in the wild-haired, wide-eyed agent’s hands.

A soft, ominous clanking made Ghost turn around. The very sight of it sent him screaming and running, leaving his instrument and heavy tome behind, as the murderous agent hurled a crossbow bolt after him.

What was the clanking behind him? What was the 'heavy tome'? Does 'hurled' imply that the agent didn't fire the crossbow? It's all just that little bit confusing.

Characters:

Honestly, they look fine. :) I don't see anything to cause concern: you've described them clearly enough to work with, but not so extensively that you lock yourself in. I feel like Hedda has the words 'daughter of...' looming in her future. :)

Overall: some stuff to work on, but nothing deal-breaking. Permission Granted - have fun!

hS

You have two very minor formatting errors that I spotted--an extra 'enter' between paragraphs (of dialogue, at the top of a page in...the first prompt, I believe) got lost, I expect due to a previous page division that later shifted, and the pale blue highlighting from copying in the RC number and continuing to type, which, man, I'm pretty sure we've all struggled with in some form or another before. IIRC, the way to get rid of it in GDocs, besides retyping the number immediately and continuing on from there/adding a new line after before pasting it in/pasting random text from somewhere else in the doc after it and then typing on from there (and erasing the copied text)...is to select everything with the blue highlight and click on 'normal text' (in the style options, next to the font options in the toolbar). This is going to get rid of any bold, italics, etc in your selected text, though, so make a copy/note down where they are first so you can put them back in after.

Overall, though, after a quick (and not too deep) reading, I see just about no technical errors, the pieces you've written are amusing, and I can certainly follow what's going on. There are other elements I'd expect the PG who takes a much closer look at this to weigh and comment on (mostly to do with the PPC elements and possibly character interactions/plot?), but at the very least, you're certainly on the right track, and I definitely enjoyed the read. Well done, and good luck!

~Z