Hi there. Not sure if I'm going to get my entry under 1000 words anyway (ended up being too long by a significant amount, should have kept a closer eye on the wordcount!) but I'm also not sure if I might have taken too many liberties with the theme as well. Is this meant to be an environmental type piece, or can it be something where the MC is interacting with a new environment around them? (I can be more specific if needed :) )

You’re welcome to interpret the topic as broadly as you like!

Certainly it could be an environmentalist approach–but it also could be someone put into a new environment. Or something happening in an IDE. Or … etcetera. :)

Here are the definitions of “environment” from Wiktionary, if that’s at all helpful:

1. The surroundings of, and influences on, a particular item of interest.
2. The natural world or ecosystem.
3. All the elements that affect a system or its inputs and outputs.
4. A particular political or social setting, arena or condition.
5. (computing) The software and/or hardware existing on any particular computer system.
6. (programming) The environment of a function at a point during the execution of a program is the set of identifiers in the function’s scope and their bindings at that point.
7. (computing) The set of variables and their values in a namespace that an operating system associates with a process.

Although for the computing definitions I’d prefer it if the environment is something in the foreground–and not in your actual coding–I’m not intending to police for theme unless something’s way off (and even then I’ll probably just ask how it’s related).

Hope that helps!

Cool, thanks!