I also thought this was funny. There are a lot of good shots in here.

I would be wary of sentence length though. Sometimes the story was slightly hard to understand because there was just so much info in a given sentence. Starting off paragraphs with bite-sized sentences will make the writing flow better

The last of the congratulatory cheers died down. It was just me and him, standing before our loved ones. Me and him: finally engaged. But in the back of our private dining room, a dry cackle steadily increased in volume.

I ignored it. I preferred to get lost in Tristan’s handsome face. Hold his hands. But as the cackling grew, I watched the joy seep out of Tristan’s smile. His hands shrank away from mine and clung to each other instead.

We both looked to the source of the laughter.

I thought it strange that I hadn’t noticed this peculiar woman all night. The old lady wore a long emerald robe laced with gold sequins. An eyepatch obscured her right eye. And she openly laughed in our direction, clapping to herself. Her long golden nails tapped together with each clap.

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That's what I have so far! Happy to write more if people want it. Otherwise, thanks for reading :)

> it negatively affects my writing style

That might be a little harsh! It's definitely a case-by-case thing. And I'm not even close to an expert, so that's another thing

Focusing on the first several paragraphs.

I think this sounds like the beginning of a good story. It's well choreographed. You've got these obnoxious elites shouting over one another, and then you have this outsider who will slowly but surely take over the room. I think you've set it all up in the right order to maximize the impact of the moment. I like the flow of how the MC gets everyone's attention.

And your dialogue... I probably shouldn't say much here because I absolutely suck at writing British English* from any era lol. But it sounds authentic enough to me!

On the topic of "show vs tell" though, I have some thoughts.

I think your characterization could have been stronger with slightly more "showing" and less "telling." You have these three elites, each representing a different side of the argument. I think you can safely scrap the lines accompanying their dialogue (e.g., "pretending patriotism) while at the same time keeping the sentence of how our MC marks each one (i.e., "The jingoist; the racist; the coward").

The reason why I'd keep the ending bit is because it tells us more about the MC and what's going on inside his head. It gives us this sense that he's got an accurate read on the room, and therefore, he has control over the situation.

But I would scrap the previous bits just because it's less interesting to be straight-up told this stuff by the author. The resulting problem might be, "Well then how do we know that one person is feigning patriotism or that this other guy is just a coward?" And I say either the dialogue reflects it (e.g., "incompetent continental aliens") or their actions do (e.g., maybe the third guy squeaks out his comment). And then by the time we get to your MC's assessment, the reader gets this satisfactory "I knew it!" feeling and identifies closer with the MC.

Thanks for sharing!

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* I know!!

Yeah things like "he said" or "she screamed" around your dialogue. And then you can get fancy on top of that. Something like:

> "Why don't we just wait for the actual day of Halloween?" the monster pouted. He folded all eight of his arms.

Now you know who's talking and a little info about them

I'll focus on the intro here.

I think your dialogue stands out. I like how you use punctuation and capitalization to inject some personality into your characters. You keep it energetic

But I must admit, I was pretty confused at what was happening in the story. I think some dialogue tags here would be really useful. Then you can specify who exactly is talking and maybe introduce some fun characteristics about them.