Equestrian culture loves cutie marks. Filly Starlight Glimmer hates them and never wants one. So, she leaves Equestria.
The sound stone was silent for several minutes, until Dorable gave a long, unhappy sigh.
"Come on, buddy..." Valey nudged the stone a little. "I wanna know. You still owe me big-time."
"You don't want to know," Dorable replied flatly. "They won't make you feel better about anything."
Valey frowned. "Tough, because I'm not interested in feeling better. I'm interested because right now there's a bad guy running around with one of them, and I need to know what they're capable of. And I'd really rather not find out by having whatever it is used on me."
"...You won't thank me," Dorable warned. "You could steer clear of this person instead."
"Nope. Not happening." Valey shook her head. "Partly because I don't wanna, and partly because I can't. I need to know this, science guy. And you're not looking for my thanks in the first place."
"Nightmare Modules are extracted from obsidian," Dorable said. "Just like you. This is your last warning."
Valey glared at the sound stone. "Tough. Even more reason why I need to know this. Spill the beans, Dorable."
The gemstone paused for a moment, then finally relented. "They are patterns. Shapes and waves condensed to information, extracted from some property in the structure of obsidian that isn't entirely physical. Obsidian is a physically perfect substance without blemish, but upon exposure to certain higher orders of magic, it contains... traces. I'm not sure how to explain it to someone of your intellect. They're like shadows. If you examine them the right way, you can tell what made them. Aftereffects of the event and magic that created the obsidian before it was a meteor in the sky."
Valey shuddered. "Bananas. You crazy scientists were trying to recreate that? To make more of this stuff? Were you insane?"
"Don't interrupt now that I'm telling you what you wanted to hear."
"Right..." Valey shrank, licking her lips in frustration.
"We discovered a violent reaction between the chaotic essence of windigoes and obsidian. The explosion that ended our research in Icereach happened after we liquified a windigo heart using a procedure we had developed for other spells, injected it into a particularly large piece of obsidian, and had our shield spells fail when we failed to anticipate the strength of the blast as it reformed inside. You arrived shortly after, with the entire room covered in ice. You may have thought it was a failed experiment, but even as we were frozen, our sensors in the tower recorded the data we needed, and an automated process finished our work. The shape and structure of the ice crystals generated by the blast were the data we needed, and they were left in records, down in the basement of the tower, even when we were gone."
Valey stared into the sound stone in rapt attention.
"I went back to get them, of course. You didn't keep a close enough eye on me to stop it. So many of my colleagues had died for that information, I was duty-bound to retrieve it. I took the readouts back to Ironridge and analyzed them, hoping to use advanced mathematics to construct a model of the magic's original form. What I found instead was fascinating. You would find it disturbing."
Dorable cleared his throat. "Under analysis, the patterns broke themselves into precise blocks of uniform size, under a finite number of states and arranged into clearly-progressing chains that I was slowly able to assemble into one long stream. In layperson's terms, letters arranged into words in a language. Whatever magic created obsidian, its shadows were left behind in the form of thoughts or meaning. Scientifically, that is impossible as a coincidence, which means not only did something intelligent exist at the top of the mechanism that created obsidian, but it put that level of detail into its work."
Valey was gripping the sound stone hard enough to crush a lesser rock by now, but didn't dare interrupt. Dorable was telling her that moon glass had been deliberately created, with an exact purpose. If that same cause had made her...
"The next thing I learned was that the language's syntax was much simpler than a spoken language. In Ironridge, Sosa was working on theoretical improvements to the finite-state terminals used to control communication connections and data capture and playback. We didn't have the physical ability to make them, but there was a theoretical interest in... machines that could follow a set of instructions, moving from one instruction to the next. I read the papers written about these, and the patterns extracted from the obsidian... even without a way to interpret their meaning, they were similar in structure. Nightmare Modules are that: instructions designed to be executed on a machine."
Valey swallowed. "W-What kind of machine? Did you build one? And what do they do?"
"We found a way to use them. This module attacks a living creature's memory, corrupting and twisting it in on itself or erasing it altogether. After seeing it used, even my curiosity and constitution for the dark sciences was overwhelmed. Now, the research is locked away, and I only allow the spell to be used sparingly and under Arambai's direct orders. More importantly, we learned that there are more than one of them, but not how many or what the others do. Do you understand the significance of everything I've told you?"
"Uhhh..." Valey nearly dropped the stone, her hooves were shaking so hard. "That this stuff is bad news? Like, I like my memories, thanks."
"They are malevolent; when executed, they act cruelly on harmonic life. They are self-propagating; one thing that is almost certain is that another module has the effect of creating obsidian. They are incomplete; if there are multiples, they all come from a greater whole, and there were fragments of unused instructions in the data we obtained. They are from beyond this world; they fell in a meteor. And, they have an intelligent creator. Do you want to imagine what greater picture all of these things point to? Because I have, and wish I hadn't."
The swirling vortex of magic that powered the sound stone reflected in Valey's eyes as she stared darkly into nothing. "If there's more of them, so you put them all together and have them do whatever they do all at once... and they came through space, which no living thing could do... but... so..."
Her ears went flat. "Bananas. Are you saying whatever nasty made them could be trying to duplicate... itself...?" Her eyes turned straight upwards, though it was broad daylight and her target was nowhere to be seen. "The Mare in the Moon..."
"Yes," Dorable said. "Much of this is conjecture. The Icereach module's effects are not. And think... if these instructions were sent here with such insidious precision for foolhardy scientists like me to find, you came with them. You, and every other obsidian brand. Why do you think you are here?"
"I..." Valey swallowed, feeling her heart skip a beat.
"I don't know," Dorable told her. "I never found out, or even came up with a good guess. Maybe you will. I told you this wouldn't make you feel good about yourself, however. Here is your marefriend. Maybe she'll help you work it out."
"Valey!" Amber cried, sounding as if it had taken everything she had to remain silent during that discussion. "That's... Listen, maybe there's a scary or unpleasant effect from this spell, but that doesn't have to reflect on you!"
"Yeah. Yeah, cool, I know." Valey's voice was distant, her mind too busy processing implications to feel anything. "Stay here, Amber. I'm definitely gonna need someone to talk to once I... uh... start drawing conclusions..."
"I'm not going anywhere," Amber promised. "I'll be right-"
The sound stone ran out of power.
Valey blinked. She blinked again. "Bananaaaaas..."
Hugging herself and grimacing, she stopped beating her wings, descending into a loose glide spiraling slowly toward the ground. Dorable had been right. She didn't feel better knowing. But now she had to know what Puddles wanted with her Nightmare Module along with so many other things... and was even less sure she was a real pony.
If only keeping the world safe could wait...
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My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
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Alright I finally caught up all the way, making this the longest My Little Pony fanfic I've read. I slowed down quite a bit after Ironridge but I made it.
My thoughts on the story so far is that I've very much enjoyed it. However despite it all obviously being connected now I am kind of disappointed that Windigo's and Obsidian continue to be a plot point instead of something new. Even though with this chapter it essentially seems like Obsidian is basically the "main" story now.
And even though you just had an interlude talking about it I also have to comment on how I wish there was more Starlight. I like Starlight. I like Valey too but I'm more interested at this point in seeing Starlight's development and how she comes to be who she was when Twilight first met her. It just feels like Starlight has been too far in the background. Obviously this is going to be a very long story, fine by me since I've read a Pokemon fanfic more than three times the current length of this, and there's plenty of time for that to happen in the future I'd guess.
And another thing mentioned in the interlude, the cuddling and flirting and everything. I don't mind the romance but all of this that's been happening just feels so fanservicey.
There are certain other plot points that I don't really care much for like the multiple Trees of Harmony and the existence of Garsheeva and Sphinxes but that's nothing to really lower my enjoyment or anything. Just minor things.
Also I liked Howe a lot.
9213570 Hey, congrats on catching up!
I love Starlight too, and there's a whole lot of reasons she's the story's lone non-OC protagonist instead of anyone else. Unfortunately, her motivations and attitude don't make her the world's best main character: when she's in scenes where she cares about what's happening, she can do and say a lot, but there have been a lot of times in the story where she's there in the background of an important scene and does nothing because she just doesn't care about it. She's not a great driver of high-adventure plot development because she's rarely proactive enough to get herself into trouble. That said, I definitely feel that and will make an extra effort to give her more scenes.
Regarding the cuddling and flirting: yes, it's fanservicey. This story is written with a very particular audience in mind (the Noble Jury) and... yeah. But the last few chapters' worth of it aren't a rest-of-the-story thing, and I've mostly finished making the points I wanted to make with it.
Windigoes, obsidian/moon glass, trees of harmony, Garsheeva... TOW's world has a very large and (hopefully) cohesive underlying magic/science system, world history, and cosmology. I've been doing my best to put in varied world mechanics to work as plot drivers while still exploring those underlying systems like dusk statues, the Firefly Sisters' songs, and sphinxes, but since they're all facets of the same core things, there will always be parallels coming back to the last arc's plot twists. And some of those are going to be character-driven: Valey cares about moon glass, her sister and the Icereach research station, so any connections going back to those, she's going to follow. Ultimately, my goal for the story involves the protagonists and readers getting a clear picture of how everything relates so I can use that massive setup in the ending plot points, and with the story as long as it is, that makes it hard to justify committing large amounts of time to completely new ideas or mechanics that don't do anything to further the big picture. So aside from adding more major world events, I try to move the story along with character and political drama, of which the arc that's starting will have a whole pile of.
Howe will return...
yikes, riverfall mares dont seem to grasp what a healthy relationship needs. really buggin me, good work on building many different societies.
9373793 Coming up with the Riverfall/Sosa cultural dynamic about relationships was fun, indeed. Making two separate cities dominated by opposite genders, having them romanticize each other and then meet always in passing... I tried to show off the lack of relationship experience from Sosa's side as well, what with White Chocolate's dysfunctional past (and present) and Mobius being a terrible dad, along with minor details like how Elise's husband was mentioned as existing and being important but never appeared even once. And even after those cities are left behind, that history can keep working itself out in Maple, Amber, Valey and even Shinespark's character arcs. I'm glad you like it!
Just to make sure I’m understanding this correctly, Nightmare Modules are sort of like computer programs extracted from obsidian, where the “computer” they run on are harmonic creatures’ minds? And different obsidian chunks (may?) contain different parts of a greater program?
“The last few chapters of [cuddling] are not a rest of the story thing” Drat.
It’s funny how much of this story traces back to Nightmare Moon. And it makes it even funnier that, upon her return, she gets defeated in like six hours.
Also, other person in this comment section, Riverfall approaching relationships differently does not mean they’re unhealthy.