I thought this was a cute story with some really compelling bits here and there. You put together the world with confidence, it was populated with adorable sprites (tho Nova had some expressions that gave me chills), and I felt that the scenes centering around Nova and how she observed people and dreamed were exceptionally good and moody.
If I had a real point of critique, it's that sometimes it felt more like ideas were being thrown at the wall rather than the world coming together fully as a place that I bought into. The stuff with LLMs in particular felt a little like writing about sort of popular issues with it without weaving together something more cohesive with that thread (as well as sorta confusing me somewhat in terms of Ashley inventing an AI as advanced as Nova capable of doing some of the crazy stuff she can do). On the note of said crazy stuff, the endings felt kind of like a wild escalation of what was really something that could happen in the story and it sort of lost me a little there.
Having said that though, you and your team put together and told this story with real enthusiasm and I think that is predominantly what shines through for me. Nova and Ashley are super compelling characters and I would have definitely read more about either of them. Great work!