Chapter 15: Applejack's Regret
Applejack watched Rainbow Dash and Rarity not-really-fighting and smiled gently to herself.
She loved her friends. She especially loved Rainbow Dash, who had the spirit of a true competitor and a heart so courageous that Applejack's task was usually to more to save Dash from recklessness than it was to rally her to action. She supposed Dashie might have been killed several times over by now if she hadn't been looking out for her. AJ accepted watching out for Rainbow Dash to be one of the many jobs Fate had handed out to her, and she did so uncomplainingly. Friends should watch out for friends.
She could sense the outrageous lies in some of Dashie's boasts, and they amused her. Rainbow Dash was not lying basely, in the hope of using them to trick anypony into taking her at a false value. She was lying bald-faced and in fun; no way did she expect Rarity to believe her; not any more than Rarity was really outraged at those lies. Applejack could sense the byplay between them, and while she lacked Fluttershy's empathic talents, she didn't need empathy to sense the friendship underlying their banter.
Folk who knew she was Honesty often misunderstood the implications: Applejack had absolutely nothing against anypony else boasting in good jest, as Rainbow Dash was doing, though she avoided such statements herself. Nor was she especially horrified by the sort of puffery in which Rarity routinely engaged. Nor did she have anything against Ponies speaking well of themselves, especially if they believed it: after all, Applejack styled herself "the loyalest friend and most dependable of Ponies," and meant it.
Applejack was not at all stupid. She well understood the potential danger they were in: she'd gone up against Discord before and been bested by him at first, though thanks to Twilight Sparkle they'd won in the end. She'd also looked into the real Pool of Truth, deep below the Palace at Canterlot entirely too long for her own peace of mind. She knew just how bad things might become if Discord went mad again and won.
Nor -- though she was honorable and good -- was she at all innocent. She'd always had the talent for piercing lies with her perception, a talent that had been only amplified since she'd peered into the Pool, and when one can directly see the lies around oneself, one is no longer capable of much innocence regarding the world. She'd been shocked by what she'd seen in some Ponies, and pleasantly surprised by what she'd seen in others. The real surprise had come in how often truth and lies did not correspond with the surface presentations of good and evil. She'd always noticed this somewhat, but it was different when one could see it directly.
She tried to avoid looking too deeply into most Ponies without a good reason. She knew that in at least one reality she'd demanded constant and complete truth from everypony around her, and become Nightmare Mirror: this was a fate she feared. To fight white lies and petty prevarications was not the reason for which she had been born, or given these powers. She had another, more aggressive ability, which she very much feared to use without a very good reason. She hoped she wouldn't have to use it today. Especially not on him.
Applejack had no idea what would happen if she forced Discord to face the truth about himself. He might decide that he needed to be more the Pony for his own happiness; or he might decided that he needed to be more the Chaos God for his own integrity. Applejack was not sure what path she would choose in his position -- though she knew she'd rather choose to act as a Pony and know Friendship -- and she was acutely aware of what might happen if he decided to fully be the Chaos God.
She wondered what Princess Luna was telling Twilight in the other room. It must have been something pretty bad, and something involving Discord. Applejack had seen the lie-by-omission growing as they had discussed Discord's true nature with Luna, until Luna's own inherent Honesty could be restrained no more, not toward Twilight Sparkle, one whom Luna loved.
Twilight had of course entirely failed to keep the secret that Luna loved her: this was something that Rarity strongly suspected from purely mundane clues, and which Applejack saw almost screaming from Luna every time Luna looked at the younger Alicorn. Applejack could also tell that Twilight wasn't entirely sure how to respond to such affection. This was very obviously Twilight's first experience of being loved romantically by somepony she was capable of accepting as a mate, and Applejack could tell Twilight was both happy and a little scared regarding the situation.
Applejack was herself entirely heterosexual, but she saw nothing wrong with lesbian love, provided that it was meant honorably by both parties, which was the same moral criterion by which she would have judged any romantic love. Twilight herself was in all ways one of the most honorable Ponies Applejack had ever known -- one of the reasons Applejack had liked her so much from the start -- and Luna was similar. Once freed from the Nightmare, Luna had shown herself to be a very good Pony indeed, and Applejack thought her a fit mate for her friend. Or her brother, really, though Applejack knew Big Mac wasn't actually attracted much to Luna that way.
Some might have thought it more than a bit arrogant of Applejack to make such a judgement with regards to a Ruling Princess of Equestria. But Applejack, while reverential to authority, was neither intimidated by nor servile to it; she considered good and evil, honor and dishonor, to be qualities attaching to the choices of individuals regardless of their stations in life. The four Princesses were good because of who they were, not because of what they were. And she judged Luna as somepony she could trust with Twilight's heart.
Things would be going well for her friends -- if they could survive the next few days. Which was far from an automatic assumption, given who might be attacking them.
If he was attacking them. Applejack wasn't so sure about that. Discord was hard to read -- his mind was twisty and complicated, his motives mixed, as if he were more than one being, and that being more than a bit loco -- but as of late he hadn't seemed hostile toward them. He'd seemed more mischievous, as if he'd wanted to play with them -- and not even all that rough. Times he'd claimed to be their friend, AJ couldn't catch him lying.
That could switch fast, though, with thwarted love. Applejack didn't think that he'd hurt Fluttershy -- she was, after all, the object of his affections -- but she could definitely see him hurting Bulk. And anypony who got in his way when he was trying.
A lot depended, Applejack knew, on what Fluttershy said to Discord.
Applejack loved Fluttershy -- it was very hard not to love Fluttershy -- but she couldn't help but think of her as a bit immature, despite the fact that she was at 24 one of the oldest of her little circle of friends, with Applejack herself at 26 the only one older. In particular, Fluttershy seemed to have only the vaguest idea of how romantic love worked.
To Applejack love was simple. You picked the stallion you loved, you loved him, and you stuck by him unless he did something real bad to drive you off.
At least that was the theory. The theory had led to certain practical problems with Landscape Carrot, her fillyhood sweetheart who had six years ago gone into the Evergloom Swamps a thousand miles to the southeast to find treasure with which to win her as an equal, even though he'd already won her in every blamed way possible, and he'd never come out again and she didn't even know if he was alive or dead so she didn't know whether to keep on waiting for him to return or start mourning him -- but that didn't mean that the theory was bad. Just that its practice in life wasn't always neat and easy.
But there was no point making love more complex than it had to be. Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash had done that. First Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash loved one another. Then they quarreled because Fluttershy had never told Rainbow she was half Changeling -- admittedly that was a fairly big lie of omission, but from what Fluttershy had once told her she'd tried to let Rainbow know, but Rainbow just didn't believe her, and before a year and a half ago, nopony had really known that Changelings were anything but a legend.
Then Rainbow fell for Azure Sky. Who it turned out was a Changeling pure and simple, no "half" about it. Which would have been funny if it hadn't just about broken Rainbow's heart. And then the love lives of those three became something you'd need a score card to track, with Rainbow unsure who to love, and Sky and 'Shy accepting pretty much whatever love Dashie gave either one of them, which come to think of it sort of made sense given that they were 'Lings, though Applejack didn't like to think dismissively of a whole Kind that way. Which was about half Rainbow Dash's fault, of course, she shoulda made up her mind!
And then the last year, Fluttershy had become Discord's sort of Assigned Friend, with the assignment coming straight from Princess Celestia, and being Fluttershy once she actually decided to like somepony, or in this case some-whatever-you-called-a-Draconequus, she pulled out all the stops. Applejack could have told her she was just asking for trouble, cuddling up to Discord the way she was, which couldn't help but to give him the wrong idea. Poor ole Chaos God couldn't help it, whatever else he was he was male. Wouldn't have been entirely safe for a mare to act like that even around, say, a sweet stallion like Mackie -- though at least you knew that Big Mac wasn't going to start hurting Ponies over a misunderstanding.
Applejack could actually feel some sympathy for Discord, the way 'Shy had been teasing him. If she didn't mean it that way, she shouldn't have been leading him on so. AJ never would have been that affectionate to any stallion if she wasn't meaning to say "I love you" -- which of course had meant that she hadn't been that affectionate to any stallion for the last six years. Which bothered her some, especially late at night when she got lonesome -- but that was better than trifling with them, and what was happening now was proof of that. Though, admittedly, what was happening now was worse than what normally came of foolish trifling.
Then came poor Bulk Biceps, dancing happily onto the quicksand without realizing what he was letting himself in for. Applejack liked Bulkie -- he was a good guy, and he'd deserved better than that no-account wife who had left him the moment that she realized that the consequences of matrimony might include a little Featherweight cramping her style. AJ wished she had somepony sweet like Bulk to cuddle her and love her and give her a nice smart little'un like Feather to call her own. Mare was a fool, no two ways about that.
And Fluttershy fell for Bulk Biceps, not that surprisingly -- once she saw that despite his size he was a total sweetie, that his shouting was as much an expression of fundamental shyness as 'Shy's own soft little voice. AJ wasn't sure why 'Shy drifted away from Rainbow to do this -- they hadn't seemed to have a real fight, really. Mebbe it was that time that Rainbow tried to trade Shy for a book, or mebbe 'Shy was just tired of fillyfooling -- Applejack was far more brutally honest in her own private thoughts than even she would ever have been aloud to her friends.
And it's not like any single stallion was likely to resist Fluttershy, when she gave him one of those big sun-rising smiles -- AJ herself was neither stallion nor fillyfooler, but she could see why first Dashie and then Bulkie had been drawn to 'Shy. She was almost a force of Nature in that regard, when she wanted to be. The fact that Fluttershy seemed to herself be completely unaware of her own beauty only enhanced the appeal.
Only 'Shy had obviously never realized how Discord felt, obviously never sat down and had a talk with him about all this. So she'd left it for him to discover, and he'd discovered it, the worst possible way. Thus their current situation.
Not that this excused Discord's rudeness. AJ herself would have been plumb furious if any stallion had started spying on her in her own bedroom. But then, this was Discord -- merely spying on somepony was almost good behavior, by his standards.
She wondered if she could do some good by talking to Discord. He'd never hated her, not even when they'd been foes, though he'd never specially liked her either. Still, AJ knew she was good at keeping calm in a crisis, and sometimes at calming down others. She'd had plenty of practice with Dashie, to be sure. Though it was not as if she could simply grab Discord by the tail and hold him back, as she often did with Rainbow Dash. She chuckled to herself briefly at the imagined picture.
She looked to where Featherweight was ensconced in one corner, his little brown-maned head bent over a photography book, his creamy muzle buried in the contents. Featherweight was trying to distract himself, she knew, from his fear of Discord. That fear was not baseless. Featherweight had been among those to suffer the worst on the Day of Discord, over three years ago when the Chaos God had escaped his imprisonment and the world had become madness.
Applejack knew what had happened, of course, and that discovery had been one of the moments she had most felt her gift of seeing Truth to be a curse. Twilight had said, earlier today, that Discord wouldn't force Fluttershy, because the one evil he refrained from committing was rape. Applejack had wanted to say something, but she knew that speaking of it would have horrified Fluttershy, and possibly snapped the only even slightly-reliable restraint they had on his actions.
The lie -- even of omission -- still rankled within her. She would have to tell Fluttershy the truth, later, or it would tear her apart with the restraint. Any mendacity -- especially toward a friend -- was very hard for Applejack to maintain. If she kept it up for too long, it might actually destroy her attunement to her Element. Besides, it was just plain low-down.
What Discord claimed was narrowly true. He did not directly rape anypony. But he had no scruples against mind-controlling Ponies into behavior with each other which Applejack would have had no difficulty recognizing as rape-by-proxy. He had done this to Filthy Rich's whole household on the Day of Discord, and Featherweight had been unfortunate enough to be at their doorstep and thus swept up in his spell.
Featherweight -- like everypony else in that spell save for Filthy Rich himself, had been shifted into the semblance of Golden Tiara, Filthy Rich's insane wife. And Filthy Rich, his own mental resistance obviously overcome by a combination of Discord's raw power and his own overwhelming desire to have his wife back with him, had proceeded to mate with the whole lot of them, all of them rendered incapable by the spell of questioning the surreal horror of their situation.
They'd all remembered what happened afterward, though. Including Featherweight. Who had been around eleven years old at the time.
Applejack had done her best to help Featherweight, using the healing powers of Truth to help him realize that this hadn't been his fault, that what had happened didn't mean that he was dirty or bad, that still less did it mean that he wasn't really male. That had been one of the hardest healings she'd ever done; it had come close to breaking her as well, and she was normally pretty strong.
She'd mostly succeeded -- Featherweight had certainly stopped hiding -- but there seemed to be an extra fragility about him afterward, a hint of damage yet unhealed. Applejack had no clue how to heal him any further. She'd noticed that he'd since become good friends with Snails Carrot, and wondered if Featherweight was aware of Snails' hidden personality. But she couldn't go living other Ponies' lives for them -- that way lay madness, and Nightmare.
As far as she knew, Bulk Biceps did not know exactly what had happened to his son on the Day of Discord. The lie-by-omission bothered her, but she knew that now would be the worst time to tell Bulk about it, with the possible consequences including Bulk's death or madness, all the way up to a war between Discord and Equestria if this also shattered Fluttershy's friendship with the Draconequus. She also knew that Featherweight didn't want his father to know the truth about this.
Applejack hated situations like this. Evasion upon evasion, lie piled on lie, and if she just shoved the whole mess over, rotten as a termite-raddled tree, many innocent Ponies would suffer. Ghostly in the back of her mind, Mirror stirred, demanded release. She shoved the evil impulse back down where it belonged; far from conscious thought and action.
She wished for the lost days of her youth. Ten years ago she had recked not of balancing catastrophes with lies, of Chaos Gods and Nightmares, of polices and Princesses. She'd worked the farm and on her time off roamed the hills with Landscape Carrot, laughing and playing, having their mostly-harmless teenaged adventures, teasing him with her tail, and speculating, slyly and shyly, about the day they'd pledge their troth, and she'd do more than tease him. When had her life become so sad and complicated?
She missed her innocence.
On cue, something pink bounded across her field of view, grinning at her cheerfully.
"Hey, Applejack, you have such a sad frowny face right now and I want to make you smile so I was thinking that you'd like it if I gave you an apple pie we got from your farm but I strawberry-frosted it and made cute faces all over the top so now it's kind of like a Pinkie Apple Pie and it's all cheerful and tasty and I was saving it for the big party we'll have after we win when we're all happy and maybe do a song number but do you want it now?" Pinkie emitted without, as far as Applejack could tell, taking a breath anywhere during the sentence. She produced the cake from some unknown place of storage. It was indeed, strawberry-frosted, with caricatures of all seven of them surrounding a coiled-up Discord in vanilla icing.
Well, t'aint mah innocence, but it'll do for now, thought Applejack, smiling. It was very difficult not to smile when Pinkie Pie said and did something like that. She felt the gloom lifting.
"Naw, sugarcube, we should wait until after we see how things go," Applejack answered. "But thank you for the kind thought." She smiled even more warmly at Pinkie Pie, and Pinkie returned the smile.
"Oh well," she said. "More for us on the lines where we win and this doesn't get squished!" She returned the pie to whatever odd place she had gotten it from. "Which is future-us too!"
"Ah take it you have a good feeling about the way this'll all turns out?" inquired Applejack. Pinkie Pie had some sort of ability to see the future, and it was never a good idea to ignore her predictions.
"Yeppers!" said Pinkie brightly. "We'll all be safe and happy until the next time which will be very bad and I'll really miss this place but that won't be for lots of days! And we'll prolly all live through that, too!" she squeaked. "So it's okay!"
Applejack's Pinkie Pie to Equestrian decoder was not as elaborate as was Twilight Sparkle's But she got the gist of it. They'd survive Discord now, but something bad would happen in the future, but they'd all survive this. And the bad thing would destroy some place Pinkie liked. The Golden Oaks Library? Some other place in town? The whole town? AJ wasn't sure, but she also knew it was a bad idea to press Pinkie too much on the details.
"Okay," she said slowly, considering the implications, and on which detail was worth asking about. "Um, Pinkie -- is the very bad danger from Discord?"
"Nope!" replied Pinkie. "Not mostly. He's not really a meanie anymore. He's just sad. Don't know what it is that's coming but it's not mostly Discord. And not now."
Applejack had her doubts about Pinkie's opinion of Discord -- the flip side of innocence was being too trusting, which was a quality Pinkie had in spades. But if she said that Discord wasn't going to attack them, she was probably right; and in that case she wanted to make sure that they didn't change his plans by attacking Discord. She should probably bring this up with the Moon Princess when she emerged from the library -- the weapons Luna had been packing made it obvious she was loaded for bear.
"You'll see!" Pinkie laughed. "Everything will be okay and we'll come through and we'll have lots more adventures. And parties!"
Applejack devoutly hoped that Pinkie was right.
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Ooh, nanotechnology! Big infodump chapter I see. That's a Castle in the Sky reference with Laputa there. I would love to visit a library like that! First comment!
Rock farming uses nanotech? Whoa. Probably something I'd know if I read the Pony POV Series, but it's news to me. Rather astonishing news at that.
Ah, Manehattan, where not even a princess can get a cab. Yeah, there probably is something about the island...
Of course not. You don't let go of anything. You have infinite reach and want only to draw all things to your breast. Such is your nature.
In any case, the story continues. (Though at this point, part of me suspects that present circumstances might interrupt it before it ever gets finished. Luna's stalling again, and this time she's doing so with something Twilight won't want to interrupt.)
Still, looking forward to more.
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Indeed. The Crystal Empire is even more Schizo Tech than Equestria would later be, in that it was founded by the faculty and some of the students of an Age of Wonders university, and so it has a mixture of Classical to Medieval technology in a lot of its fundamental industry with some of the highest Information-Age technology of the Age of Wonders -- adapted to the paramagnetic field conditions of post-Cataclysmic Earth.
Most solid-state electronics fail under the constant interference and bleed from paramagnetics, which is why the Ponies couldn't recover by simply following the guidelines of old books. The artisans and scholars of the Old Republic and Empire diligently worked to try to regain the old Information Age technology. They had blind spots -- -- they were not always the most pragmatic thinkers, and in particular they didn't think in terms of steam engines in part because they knew what ecological damage they would cause -- to an ecosystem already devastated by the Cataclysm.
Have you ever read S. M. Stirling's "Change" series? It consists of the Nantucket Trilogy (Island in the Sea of Time and its two sequels) and the Emberverse series, starting with Dies the Fire. It's very much one of my models for the social effects of the Cataclysm on the Ponies of the Age of Wonders.
Actually, I'm getting it from the same source as did Hayao Miyazaki, namely Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. Laputa is a high-technology flying island in the story, dominated by learned but intolerant scholars. The island is levitated by a great "lodestone" (magnetic stone) against the Earth's field, which incidentally makes this story the source of paramagnetic levitation -- the same force which upholds and propels the Pegasi themselves.
Derecho, as my Notes mention, comes from Cold in Gardez's Lost Cities. I had originally thought that he modeled it on Laputa, but he once told me that he hadn't actually heard of Laputa. Anyway, Derecho has a "Laputa Stone" in honor of Jonathan Swift.
Gulliver's Travels is of course also the source of the Houyhnhnms, a civilization of sapient horses. The part about them is one of the most obvious examples of equinophilia in literature at least until Black Beauty (1877), and is almost certainly one of the inspirations for My Little Pony.
Heh ... when I wrote that part I commented to my wife that I'd written "library porn" -- not in the sense of characters having sex in a library, but in the sense of an almost erotically-loving description of a library.
When I write the "Luna's Tale" sections I try to keep in mind what is happening here -- which is to say that Princess Luna, who likes books and loves Twilight, is telling the tale to Twilight Sparkle, who likes Luna and loves books. So Luna is emphasizing the parts of the story that would most interest Twilight. If she were telling the story to Rainbow Dash, she would have talked more about fighting the Dragon and humiliating the warlocks.
I'm glad you liked my description of the Great Library.
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Nah, I made it up. I was thinking about it, and that I'd already decided that rock farming was first developed by the Crystal Empire (because of their obvious mastery of crystalline forms). And I realized that the Crystal Palace and the Great Library, even more so than the ordinary structures, must have been grown into at least the fundamental component shapes.
And then it occurred to me that I'd already decided that the Crystal Empire had unusual access to the lore of the Age of Wonders, because it was founded by university scholars. And that the simplest explanation for how you can "grow" rocks is that you're using nanotech to concentrate the ores within those rocks into segregated nuggets or more complex crystalline structures.
Why does it take time? Because nanotech isn't a zap-spell (even when it's semi-magical nanotech) -- each little machine is only getting so much energy and the whole swarm of them can only work so fast using the systems of micro-pores inside most rocks, tunneling new apertures if needed, and transporting the desired minerals to sites of concentration.
Not that practical rock farmers like the Pies know that what they're using is telepathically-controlled nanotech. They don't even know what is "nanotech." They know that they take seed cultures from previously farmed rocks and implant them in newly-mined rocks, then move the rocks around the fields to take advantage of the Earth currents while concentrating on what they want to achieve. The technology is so far beyond anything that modern Equestria has achieved -- a bit beyond what even the Age of Wonders had achieved -- that it's essentially pure "natural magic" from their point of view.
The joke of this is that I spent the first thirty-four years of my life mostly living in New York City. This is probably why I like to set stories in Manehattan, or refer to the existence of the island if there's any halfway-good reason to do so.
True in both the physical sense, as her Concept; and emotionally, as her Avatar. Luna is quite loving; she's just not very socially adept compared to Celestia.
And she's very loyal to her friends.
I'm glad you're liking this.
Ah, the Children's Section. The biggest nightmare of a child that wants to actually read something worth reading with more than three books. (I should know)
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Indeed -- though sometimes you can find the oddest bits of knowledge there!
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Yes. YES. YES!
You have no idea how much the casual use of nanotech as magic makes me angry, and seeing you approach it in a real life way makes me very happy! :-)
I didn't think nanotech existed by the time of the disaster.
Of course, in the pony pov verse:
The Crystal Empire was created thusly:
It was one of the castles for the wish spell, but the heart of Ponyland happened to be underneath it as well, having been moved there eons ago. And when the disaster happened, the shard was sent elsewhere. But instead of creating an atomic blast level wild magic release it mutated the ponies into the crystal ponies, along with the surrounding landscape. The crystal ponies from that point on being as much as part of the heart of Ponyville as it was a part of them.
I know Sombra has a VERY DIFFERENT origin in your verse compared to mine.
They were SCARED to travel far beyond it however, worried they'd turn into lifeless crystal statues if they strayed too far from the crystal heart. And no pony at the time was really interested in checking out the place where the spell castle once was sine the rest HAD been reduced to blast craters mostly.
everypony assumed that I was but an exceptionally-attractive little Unicorn.
Heh. At least she doesn't consider herself ugly.
Of course now . . . the crystal ponies whose ancestors were earth ponies are all thats left, at least in the pony pov verse. (Thank Sombra's ethnic cleansing.)
How was the Crystal Pony Kind created in THIS verse?
and the inhabitants went about clad in filmy silk garments,
Quite a change from a Equestria inhabited by nudists.
I imagine Luna giving the history lesson is due to Twilight being her audience.
Age of Industry.
Of course, nature minded ponies are likely gonna be resistant to it. A lot. They only embraced it before because they were imitating humans.
was that the[r speech was rushed
was that their speech was rushed
Manehatten was completely deserted after the disaster?
Reminds me of how after the fall of the Roman empire, it was either Scotland or Ireland (I can never remember) it wouldn't have a currency system again for centuries.
though of course long since deserted.
No longer holds any tactical meaning?
1500 years since the death of the world eh that Luna is chatting about?
et their culture still lives, and indeed two mares from that city run a beauty spa in this very town in which we sit
That's them alright.
They had the Lawstone, a great sphere upon which were microscopically engraved patterns which their priests said held the answers to all the questions in the Universe. They were right, though not in the manner they imagined.
Hmmmm?
but they had never forgotten the dream, they had set their hooves back on the road to the stars.
Did you see the poem of the dream Twilight had where the disaster never happened?
While Fluttercruel does bear an Element of Harmony herself, Temperance's blood still petrifies her. I wonder if the crystal heart would also leave her ill.
Discord destroyed the place and ponies that was the last time he was truly happy, and he has none to blame but himself.
What truly lurked behind Dissy, I would have fought for him.
Shady did.
The Imperator never knew that I had brought the doom of his nation to the heart of his power.
Interesting. In the reharmonized verse, Discord couldn't harm the crystal empire AT ALL, no matter what disaster he sent upon it. Thus why he recruited his cousin to bring their fears to life.
At least one Alicorn visited during the Age of Wonders.
http://mylittlewiki.org/wiki/Dazzleglow
For the record? I LIKE that you streamlined the spiritual side of things.
Luna mentioning how they were good ponies, reminds me of what Havoc thinks of D____, he was a good concept, but he thought he was the hero in a Megami Tensei style setting.
Right. If Luna is going to beat up herself for making a mistake that a child like her would have been BOUND to make in some shape or form . . .
And of course, the Alicorn Amulet wasn't a creation of Grogar or Sombra, but of Magic Star, and started out as an instrument for good in the pony pov verse.
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It didn't. It was one of the "dreams" of the Age of Wonders, it never got beyond laboratories and very limited mass-industrial applications (we in the Real World use some very basic nanotech today -- nothing yet like Drexler's dreams, just precisely tailored surfaces to facilitate chemical reactions). The engineer-mages of the Crystal Empire managed to make a more capable form of it practical when working with crystalline structures -- the resource extraction application was rock farming; the industrial application the growing of tailored macro-crystals, up to and including the skyscraper-sized macro-crystal of the Imperial Palace itself. They might have gotten farther -- they already had notions of growing a diamond-based space elevator -- when Discord put an end to everything but sheer survival. Luna is especially sad the abortion of these dreams, because they were also Moondreamer's.
Luna's quite aware that she's beautiful by normal Pony standards. And as a filly she was more arrogant and headstrong. She is quite aware that her Sister outshines her in the eyes of most Ponies, though.
She loathes herself for her (perceived) moral failures, and simple errors of judgment -- some of which indeed have cost much life and treasure. Luna does not, in Celestia's opinion, give herself enough credit for her virtues and successes, or take into account that the task she took upon herself -- to be the immortal Lady of War of a whole Realm -- is inherently a very difficult one, one in which she was bound to be the target of attempts to destroy her both direct and subtle (Sombra's was a subtle one), and in which any mistake was bound to be fatal to some Ponies on her own side.
Ironically, in my universe it's because the nobility were Crystal Unicorns -- and Sombros saw them as potential rivals. He was quite paranoid by then, so he killed some and the rest fled into exile. A good portion of Equestria's current Unicorn nobility is descended from them.
One of the last ones he drove out was the Lady Tourmaline, but in her case it was one of his last good deeds -- a part of him knew there was a good chance he was going to lose that final battle with the Sisters. He still loved Tourmaline, though in his last insane years he was cruel to her too --, and he wanted her to be safe. He knew that she would never have left him of her own free will, so he exiled her.
By being born within the direct radiations of the Crystal Heart. It produces a more permanent version of the changes that it can make to other Ponies when it flares.
It's actually a sign that the Crystal-Imperials of this age were more comfortable with public erotic display than are the (relatively prudish) modern Equestrians. By Pony standards, nudity is innocent; functional or decorative clothing can be innocent; clothing designed to half-reveal is intentionally seductive. In fact by Equestrian standards, those Crystal-Imperials are walking the streets in something close to lingerie. Luna mentions this right before stating that the Crystal-Imperials were a bit decadent, and it's neither accidental nor would that connection have been missed by a slightly-scandalized Twilight Sparkle.
Twilight has, of course, met plenty of Crystal-Imperials of the last decades of the Late Empire -- they're the ones who survived Sombra's tyranny and temporal stasis and are living there today under her sister-in-law Princess Cadance. But the Crystal Empire was poorer and less gaudy in that age -- these Crystal-Imperials are from the cultural height of their civilization, some fifteen hundred years earlier.
Oh yes. Luna is being extremely honest with Twilight (just how honest you'll see later on), but she is most definitely tailoring the story to her audience. She's focusing on the things Twilight would find fascinating, which is why she's describing the Crystal City and the Great Library in such loving detail.
One of the things Luna has figured out about Twilight is that Twilight loves history and historical details, and hence Luna can have her as a captive audience if she simply recounts to her some of the interesting details of earlier eras she's seen. A lot of the letters Luna's written her go into this, and this isn't the first time that Luna's personally told her of past centuries.
Having a long conversation with someone about things that person finds fascinating is a good way to make friends. Or more. In Equestria as in our world.
Luna's a Large Ham, so she likes to orate dramatically about it, but normally Twilight would be talking more as well. Twilight doesn't want to delay Luna's revelation of whatever secret she's about to tell, though.
Luna knows what she's doing. Twilight knows what she's doing. Twilight doesn't care, because the stories really are very enjoyable for her. And she likes Luna, anyway. Not as much as Luna likes her, at this point, but she does like her.
Maybe not completely, but we're talking about mega-tsunamis washing over the island with enough force to topple sizable skyscrapers. Then there was a period where minotaurs ruled the place, before the Pegasi captured the island. I'm guessing there's only very minor biological continuity between the lineages living there before the Cataclysm and the ones living there over a thousand years after it.
Roughly, yes. Luna and Dissy's Trip to the Library is taking place around 15 years before Discord's Awakening. Discord dominates the world for a thousand years, and the Crystal City disappears in YOH 489. So it's 1504 years before Sombra's fall, which is pretty close to "1500 years" on that timescale. Luna's not as much a stickler for complete mathematical accuracy as is Twilight on matters such as these -- she's not writing a textbook, after all.
I know I'm going to have to get specific about this. And I still haven't totally figured it out myself! In general, any of the cities in North America which was able to retain a high culture under Discord did so by being directly protected by one or more artifacts of Law which weakened Discord within their radius. Discord, being lazy, only operated against such enclaves indirectly, and usually only when reminded of such annoyances.
He got Lith in the end, though, or rather the priestess-queens made a serious mistake when they tried to overclock the Law-Stone against him in the belief that they could petrify him. And, technically, got themselves -- they failed to grasp that Life is sufficiently chaotic that a field of absolute Lawfulness would be a bad thing in which to exist.
The ruins of the city are now full of statues -- who once were the inhabitants. Those who did not heed the Sisters' warning and flee, that is. Discord himself saw what was about to happen and fled just before the Stone could discharge.
It did give the Sisters one very good idea -- that they could use a version of the same effect to petrify Discord. Not the Law-Stone, which they didn't have (it had become ultra-dense and sunk deep into the ground below Lith) and which in any case projected a spherical field effect which would have harmed them as well (though not as much as it would have harmed Discord). But if they could find some other artifacts of Law, amenable to generating a controlled and directional version of the same effect ... well, they did in the end, of course.
Note that Discord realizes this in "Dissy's Youth Remembered." Also, Dissy loved both the Sisters, even though his romantic love was for Celestia. He thought of Luna as one of his best friends, and was willing to go to great lengths to keep her safe and happy.
Discord was much more liimited in operating against the Crystal City directly, because he could not bear the direct radiance of the Crystal Heart. It was painful even to Dissy, and Dissy was actually much more lawful than Discord would be -- it would have actually harmed Discord.
I don't remember the poem -- was it in one of your stories?
During the Age of Discord, the Sisters took refuge in various places where something or other warded against Discord, and wandered between them -- in part because the rulers of these cities couldn't afford to have them stay there for too long, as they drew Discord's attention. Among these places were the Crystal City, Derecho, Lith and the Heartspire.
Celestia and Luna really liked the Crystal City -- it was cosmopolitan, civilized and intellectual at a time when the rest of the world was falling apart. They did not always like the other places as much, though they generally respected the inhabitants.
Luna found Lith dreary-dull, and without even the consolation of a glorious martial purpose as was the case in Derecho. The Lithians were all by normal Pony standards so ritualistic and formal in their behavior as to drive Ponies from most other cultures to distraction with the obsessiveness of it all. They would have totally understood Twilight Sparkle's checklists -- and she would have found out that too much of what she considers a good thing can be a bad thing.
Nevertheless, all this lawfulness meant that they tended to be very, very, very reliable. And ethical and moral, though usually in a totally by-the-book manner. They would not have understood Pinkie Pie, and compared to Lith the Pie Rock Farm is a happy wacky place with spontaneous song and dance every day of the year. And I'm talking about Igneous and Cloudy, not Pinkie Pie.
Yes, Lith was that boring. Good, but boring.
Well ... she was 19 going on 20 when she made the final fatal mistake, but given that Alicorns are often slow to mature, and that Luna was the less mature one of the two Sisters, she was psychologically more like a girl in her early teens at the time. And, what she did then was wrong, both morally and tactically -- but the evil she meant to do she didn't do, and the evil she did she did not mean to do. Which is all I can say without spoiling it.
5146405 Stuff you could find if you looked hard enough in an actual book.
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http://kendell2.deviantart.com/art/Commission-Dreaming-of-What-Could-Have-Been-482462468
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I followed the link and read the poem. I agree with the major premise. The G2 Pony civilization was by Equestrian standards (though not ours) amoral, brutal and callous, and might well have been unable to handle the responsibility that came with an interstellar level of technology. In SimEarth terms, Celestia cranked up the "Philosophy" settings on the culture she fostered, to ensure that they could deal with the social consequences of rapid techological progress. This will be part of what saves Ponykind in the Shadow Wars -- they leap forward 200 years technologically in 20 years, but their culture does not fly apart under the immense social strain.
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Actually, the war with the dragons, and the extinction of the minotaurs, buffaloo, and changelings happened BEFORE ponies achieved interstellar travel.
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Yes, I figured that. I mean that in the process of attaining interstellar technology, the Age of Wonders Ponies would probably have discovered and destroyed, subjugated or enslaved non-Pony sapients on Earth. In the Twelfth Equestriad Interview future, they are aware of the possibility of doing so, but so far have avoided the temptation.