I liked everything up until the black album. The black album was hit-or-miss for me; it had some parts i liked and some parts that weren’t really doing it for me. Load and Reload sounded (to me) kind of generic; it was metal but it wasn’t up to the standard I expected out of Metallica. The less said about everything after those albums, the better.
Honestly, both sound really cliche. I feel like you described them that way on purpose, so we the readers would be able to easily get an idea of what each story will entail (which is one of the benefits of cliches), but descriptions like that mean that my brain says “oh, we’ve been there and done that A LOT”.
My brain is kind of a dick but it is right sometimes. I would be interested to see what makes these stories yours, what interesting spin you put into these cliches, before I make a choice.
However, since we are talking about them, I will say that while your second story sounds like a fantasy story, your first story sounds like it could be an intriguing SF story. “If people today were transported to a circa-1800’s society, what advances would they make 70 years later” is something that captures my interest. What would people who are accustomed to putting electricity into sand and making it show them cat pictures be able to accomplish if they were sent back to the 1800’s?
I know my previous paragraph kind of negates the paragraph before it, but humans are a cornucopia of contrast, and I am definitely a human and not a robot typing at a keyboard, hahaha