That Maverick With The Dog

by Dan The Man

12. Epilogue: A New Record

12. Epilogue: A New Record

"Rainbow." Princess Celestia said softly.
"I know you wish for more than that. Believe me, so do I, but this is the most we can do now."

The little pegasus with the rainbow mane nodded slowly.
"But will it help?"

"Of course it will." she heard a voice behind her promise.
It was the voice of Twilight, who was busy putting a small box on the table of Celestia's study with the help of Applejack.
"At least it's safe." she continued.
"You simply tell him everything you want to say, and we put it in his house."

She was joined by a white pony with a carefully groomed purple mane.
"Twilight and I. It will be a mere cakewalk, darling. We go in, put the record on, and are back here again in no time."

“There is no way he’ll miss that.”
Carefully, Twilight magically lifted one of the records in her Princess' library over to the table. Unlocking the box, she opened the player with the microphone attached on top. She fit the record inside and put the grammophone needle on it.
"Now, Rainbow, be sure you talk into this thing only. Try not to breathe too much."

"If you say so." Dash replied and stepped forward nervously.
She spotted Fluttershy sitting in the far corner of the room, careful as to not disturb the recording. Even Pinkie Pie, loud and brash as she usually was, kept her company with a vigilant expression, and quiet as a mouse.
She sighed, and concentrated on the mic sticking out before her.
"This is for you, dad."

Twilight's horn flickered.
The grammophone's mechanism sprang into action, beginning to turn, carving the miniscule scratch into the wax plate.
"Ready when you are." Twilight whispered, bearing a warm smile.

“Okay…” Rainbow uttered in a trembling voice.
She harrumphed. Then she began.
“Dad… Dad. I don't know if you can... uh...”
The words became stuck in her throat.

She felt AJ’s comforting hoof on the back of her head.
“It’s alright, Sugarcube. Take a breath, and go right on.”

Rainbow’s head slumped. The she took a big, sating breath through her swollen nose, and resumed.
"I don't know if you can hear this, Dad... I was here. I missed you. And I still do.
Her mind skipped, jumping right to the core of her worries.
"I know what you're thinking... after all I have done... how could I... risk to come back..."

She saw Princess Celestia sitting nearby, softly shaking her head, telling her not to despair. But Rainbow could not comply just yet.

"I feel horrible. Dad. What will they do to you? If you can hear this, thank Celestia you do! If I had known... I wouldn't have done it. But I didn't know. Does that make it okay? The rainboom, it was such a great... grand moment for me before. Always when I looked back on it, it made me so happy. Does this make me a bad pony, dad? I don't know."
Her mouth scrounged up as another wave of pain overtook her.
“You didn’t tell me…about the destruction. Maybe you knew, maybe you didn't. I don’t know how… if I should thank you for that. Would it have been that much better if you did?"
Her head slumped a little towards the microphone.
"Oh dad, I really wish you could be here with me! Everyone's so happy and peaceful in Equestria... It's almost like I have been there my whole life... somehow...”

It was so obscure. She knew she was here for much longer than just two agonising days. She had family here. Parents. A home. She knew it, she knew it all to well… and yet, in some way, so was Brian and his home her home. She had spent a good portion of her life twice, and in wo completely opposite envrnoments. She felt confused. The forlorn feeling of stalessness was indescribable, almost too unbearable, like a vacuum of emotions, something foreign and unfamiliar lingering in the direct vicinity of her mind. Her memory was almost a curse, not a gift.

“It has been almost two days. For me. It has been two years for you, I still cannot believe it. You still have my pictures, the ones Celestia gave you, have you? I tried to explain everything in that letter I gave to you before I went. I hope it cleared everything up. Oh, I have so many questions I want to ask you! I want to know how you feel, how your life went. Two years is a long time. It’s not fair, why can’t I know? When I was here, only two hours ago, and came across your ‘friend’… at first, I was so happy. I thought that you had told someone. That someone else knew. That secrecy wasn’t such problem anymore. That’s some crazy wishful thinking, huh? I had a lot of such thoughts recently. I don’t know if it was the same with you… Every night, I was dreaming that somehow, every difference between this world and… and my world was simply lifted, and I could come and go as I liked. And you too. I feel so bad for leaving you behind there, especially after this… this...” She gulped.
“Dad, I came back because I simply couldn’t take it. The dreams came every night, every day, I could not close my eyes and sleep without… the experiencing whole torture from scratch. I begged Princess Celestia that I could finally come back and be done with it… just for a few minutes, to make sure you are alright and catch up on times… How would you have felt about it? If you had known? These trips inbetween the dimensions, as Twilight called it, they’re not easy to maintain, they are dangerous and complicated. I begged just for one more try. So I can leave my… past… in peace. Would you have approved?"

Rainbow fell silent for a few seconds, as if the was expecting her 'father's' reply.

"Dad, I am talking to you to tell you; I still love you. I miss you. And I am sorry. If I have done something wrong that I should feel about, there you go. I am sorry then. But I still cannot, despite everything, write off our time together as a disaster…”

She smiled weakly, much to the joy of her friends who were listening.

“It was the best time of my life for me, if only of our life together. Because there are two, two lives for me, which I always have to remind myself of. But still, I would not trade in those memories for anything. Not a single one of them. I couldn’t bear to do that. Princess Celestia, Dad, she proposed that, to make it... easier for myself. She said, that she could clear my mind, erase the memories... throw off some ballast, in a way. She said that I belong here, not on earth. She is right, dad, but I said no. Maybe it’s true than I can barely live with the knowledge that I have lived through my life twice… but I sure I could not live at all without it. I thanked Celestia that she would do something like that for me, but I also thanked her that she understood."
She paused for a moment.
"Dad, I was thinking. If we already lived through this life together halfway, what about the other half? Perhaps, I was just thinking, we can in fact meet again. Even though the time portal is occasionally unstable, it’s not impossible to maintain. I would like to see you again. Properly, this time. I'm afraid that otherwise, I won’t ever be at peace. At least one more meeting, nothing more. How about tomorrow morning? It’ll be about four months for you, dad. Twilight said, that she can tell me the time even more precisely.”

Rainbow shifter her glance over to her lavender friend.
Twilight whispered something.

“She said, it would be any day from the first of of October to the 15th… half a month. I could come, be inside the house at any hour, really. Can you wait, dad? Can you afford to stay at home for fifteen days? We may have to watch out for each other. Who knows, dad, maybe you can even invite someone? Someone who knows about…"
She bit her lip.
"I’m sorry, I’m citing my own hopes again. Scratch that. Also, dad, I understand if you do not want me to come, at least not on those days. If you can listen to this before October, this record probably passed through the portal, just like I could in four months. As you can see, it’s no problem, and not even that dangerous. With that said, dad…”

She became a bit more silent, her brightened, hopeful countenance, freezing a little bit in fear and nervousness.
“If you don’t hear this in time, because you chose not to, or…” she closed her eyes at the thought.
“… you aren’t even there to here it… then you can just tell me… by… not being there when I’m there. I told you, I'd understand. As you know, I never was that good at planning things…”

She looked around herself, at the expectant faces of her friends from Ponyville, and that of Princess Celestia. Then she turned back to the microphone.

“I guess that’s all I have to say, dad. All I had to say for now. I know there is so much more I would want to talk about. But let us do it another time. You know, properly.”

Again, she smiled a little.

“Dad, I send you the best wishes from Twilight, from Applejack, Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy and Rarity, and Princess Celestia. I thank them for being so understanding. They were all well aware of the dangers of these trips, and yet they’ve been doing everything in their power to support me. They also want to support you, dad. We are not alone in this. We can make it.”

Solemnly, she placed on of her hooved on top of the microphone, giving her absent father a hoofbump.

“Soon, dad. I love you. Bye.”

That was it.
Under Twilight’s power, the needle slowly lifted from the disc with a thwack sound.
The record floated through the air, and carefully lowered itself into Twilight’s saddlebag.

“We're ready.”

(You may want to play this)

Author's Note:

A postface.

Hello, dear Readers.
Finally, after a long time, we have found our way to the end of this story. It's been more than a year. More like one and a half years, ever since I came up wth the idea to write a follow-up to My Little Dashie, a hybrid of drama and thriller, treating a subject what I have always seen as bit of a plot hole in the original - the sonic rainboom.

In those 1.5 years of writing this story, I must say I have lived a more or less turbulent life - school, graduation, moving to another place, university, a part-time job... I can recall periodically writing on this story in a high school classroom during exam prep, on a beach in southern France, in a hotel room in Sweden, on a park bench in front of a fencing club, in a seafood restaurant in western Turkey, in an Austrian auditorium during a lecture, on a historical town square in central Czechia, in a coffeehouse on the Dutch coast, in a shared apartment with overly loud classical music - it's been a small adventure.

But enough about me.
You may ask yourself, could I have concluded this story any faster? 40 thousand words in 18 months aren't exactly a record-breaking pace. The first story I ever wrote (the one before this one, Nation Shall Speak Peace Upon Nation), was finished in a grand total of less than two months, even before publishing.
So what gives?

Well, the thing is, this story has been the one of dozens of concepts and ideas that I kept juggling in my mind at that time (not that it has gotten any better) - and it was the one I ultimately chose to write down. And I must admit, there have been times where I lost control of the story in a way.
At the very beginning, I was motivated, hyped, and I felt like I could write a hundred thousand words of this... but then, the impact of the story and the characters gradually began to dawn on me. I began to feel that I may have been a bit too reckless and naive with what I planned to write. I began to realise that I hadn’t gone quite the right path – that certain characters required more intrusive characterisation, that certain plot points needed more, or rather less focus. I was afraid that the story would end up featuring too little pony for its own good. I quickly became jumbled in the mess of thinking of what steps to take to further the plot. I completely lost track of my priorities – even the easiest of steps became seemingly insuperable obstacles. He process of me continuing the story ground to a halt with every new chapter.

And at one point, I lost faith in the story completely. I didn’t know what I could still do to save it, to bend it just right.
So, for a time, I began to pay attention to other concepts that I deemed more promising. I currently have six stories in varying levels of completion resting in my archive – and only two of those have been published.

But thankfully, it didn’t stay this way. After a few months, I gradually found my way back. Even though my expectation was less high than when I began, I was determined and positive that I could continue where I had left off. I wanted to finish it in a good way, with a mindset as close to the one I began with as possible.
And lo and behold - in the end, I felt that it was still absolutely worth it.

Now, you may ask yourselves just as much as I do:
Could I have done the story any better?
Could I have created more immersive characters? Could I have concentrated more on Dashie and Equestria's side of the story? Could I have tried an a bit less obscure approach to the plot?
Probably. But in the end, it wasn’t so. Why?
I know that to claim that a story was just a ‘grand experiment’, a test of the author’s writing abilities rather than a fully fledged, genuine, serious story, is perhaps the most overused and shameless excuse of all times.
So I won’t claim that this is what it was. But it is still only the second notable story I ever finished. I am not completely pleased with it, of course. I don’t know whether anyone else isn’t, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all. I may have done mistakes and encountered some shortcomings, but I am glad I did so now instead of later.

And while I am happy that I could finally move on and devote my attention to do other stories with a clear conscience, I must say that I still enjoyed writing the ending to this. It has always been quite an emotionally-laden story, and some chapters were written completely on an emotional high time.
Completing this story has been more than just ‘completing another story' for me. Regardless of what level of literature it may be, and what it was to you, its readers, it symbolises the end of a certain turbulent time for myself. Completing this story meant starting a new chapter in life.

Anyhow, dear reader:
What did you think of the story? Was it to your liking? Which parts, do you think, really stood out, and which ones did not quite do the rest justice? Was there anything that didn’t make total sense to you? I’ll be happy to clear up any confusion.
And of course, the ever-dreadful grammar.

What’s more, I am already deep into yet another story what I managed to start in the meantime.
That’s all that will be said about that for now.

I bid you a nice evening, everypony.

Comments

[Diokno44]

If only you could make a follow-up...

[Dan The Man]

3220031 If only...

[Diokno44]

3223161 You should show the meeting, or maybe Dashie can visit from time to time

[McPoodle]

First of all, I'd like to thank you for seeing this story through. Of all of the incomplete stories I was following, this was the one I was most afraid was going to be abandoned, because of the huge scope of the ideas you were pursuing.

Now as for a critique? Overall, I am satisfied with the work, and I think you more or less succeeded at what you set out to do: explore the philosophical consequences of these two worlds meeting in this way. Despite that, I was more impressed with the scenes before the big confrontation than those following. The tension of the scenes, the way that the investigation unfolded, and the way the agents danced around Brian as they drew their net ever tighter around him--these were my favorite parts of the story. The discussion in Chapter 7 was obviously the core of the story for you, but for whatever reason it didn't impress me that much--I wish I could give you a more useful explanation than that.

As for Brian, the scene with Ingrid was the best. Otherwise, he seemed a bit too mopey, like his life had stopped after Dashie's departure. Which of course it had. I think that subtracts a bit from the ending, that all he has left is hope of reuniting with his daughter. That he still has no life other than her--even if she does come to visit for a day, what's going to happen to him the day after that? If he couldn't get closure from her letter, what exactly is it going to take? Plenty of authors think he needs to move to Equestria, but I think that it's possible for him to move on despite them permanently living on different worlds--I was hoping that you could have at least hinted that such an ending was possible for him. I think at least one more scene with Ingrid would have helped.

This isn't the sort of story that I would ever write, but if I did, I might have gone in a few different directions than you. I probably wouldn't have done any of it in first person, and if I had, then I would have stuck with just one character, preferably Fitzgerald. Switching back and forth as you did got rather confusing after awhile.

I think you had a few wasted opportunities that you could have pursued. For instance: what about those eight people who died? Who were they? How did their friends and family move on from that day? That would have come up in the trial, which I was rather disappointed that you skipped over. Not the prosecution's arguments (those would have been redundant), but the stories of those victims. Fort Pleasance was a dead-end town--were any of the victims deadbeats themselves? Were any of them poets or artists? Was it possible that the death of at least one of them led to a positive good, motivating the survivors to bring meaning to their lives and the lives of others?

On the Equestrian side of things, I had hoped that the focus would not entirely be on Rainbow Dash and Princess Celestia. After all, the accident that caused this mess was Twilight's fault, and surely you know how obsessed she gets with responsibility. I can imagine her seeing Rainbow Dash getting more and more introspective, and blaming herself for bringing unhappiness into her life. (Typical of Twilight Sparkle, she fails to notice that RD had an introspective side even before the accident.) She tries and fails to find a way to use time travel to prevent the accident. And then when that fails, she turns her frustrations against Earth. She uses research to try and resolve her emotional issues, and this would be how Princess Celestia would learn of the current state of affairs on Earth. Plus of course this would bring up the issues of surveillance and control that are at the core of this story.

At least, that's the way I would have done it.

Let me reiterate, though: I do like this story. I clicked the "thumbs up" button when I read the first chapter, and that thumb (and favorite) are not going away. I'm just haunted by the specter of what could have been. As, it appears, you are as well.

I wish you the best of luck with your future endeavors, whatever they may be.

P.S. Even if you decide that you do not wish to write a sequel to this story, you haven't really finished it, at least in my opinion. What you need is a proper open ending, with Dashie flying around Brian's house, landing at the front porch, and knocking. Leave it up to the reader to imagine what happens after that. "We're ready" is sequel bait, pure and simple.