Nice, I like it.
Some minor grammar errors, and general things I'd say is to vary your vocabulary (like you use "illuminated 3 or 4 times in this first page, maybe say 'light up' or something) and keep your tenses right, you sometimes switched from past to present, etc.
Anyways, it's great and suspenseful. The ending there was good, like a lose-win-lose-win thing o.o :thup:
I don't think I'm dealing with quite the same pressures though, at the very least its a significantly smaller system. For the time being I'm just going to put together a quick scrubby box though and hope it works good enough to not make my house toxic
I do know this - xenforo dropped the ball by not keeping the vbulletin reputation comments as a feature. The loss of the Reputation comments data when we switched to Xenforo really was the death knell for the site when it came to all the users that left. I know I missed it so much and I got way less interested in the site when that feature was gone and I run the site.