Welp, after hours of painstaking work, I finally managed to finish up my entry for this month........ and almost immediately afterwards discovered that Alex's story has the exact same premise that mine does.
Huh.
Great minds think alike. We must be onto a winner.
It's really surreal just how much they match though. Like from the premise, to the setting, to the set-up, to the resolution, to even really small shit like 'being sent by a parental figure' or the talk about heroes and the like. It's almost eerie.
(Also, I hope you realise that this inevitably means we're going to need a mini-option in the voting thread to decide who did it best.)