What Went Wrong, and What Went Right
Attn: Unauthorized presence detected near storage cache in grid 1457.34η.
The message flashes red, disrupting vision in my left eye. For the fifth time today, I revisit my decision to go with the ocular implant. The constant wash of messages often seems more trouble than it's worth—and ductive saccading does odd things to your appearance. Then again, given the alternative... For the fifth time today, I decide the ocular implant is just fine, thank you very much.
Attn: Unauthorized presence detected near storage cache in grid 1457.34η.
The pony at the flower cart is giving me a worried look. My eye must have slipped out of alignment again. I give her a practiced smile and shrug my shoulders. "I guess I must have forgotten my bits at home. I just don't know what went wrong." I laugh and turn to go. The flower vendor says nothing. One advantage, I suppose, of having a reputation for instability—no one looks twice if you occasionally act a little... well...
Attn: Unauthorized presence detected near storage cache in grid 1457.34η.
Of course, the downside to the ocular implant is that you've got no way of shutting it off until Leshe-Marbian decides to do so itself.
The message continues to blink incessantly as I wing my way south into the woods outside of town. Not the place the locals call the Everfree, mind. We thought about leaving the cache out there, but for all its reputation, you'd never believe how often these ponies seem to find themselves stumbling around this Everfree Forest. No, the southern woods have been a much better choice.
Tense correction: had been.
I take a moment to circle overhead, looking for movement beneath the canopy. The afternoon sun is low on the horizon, a blazing orange that interferes with my vision. After four passes, I finally spot a flash of pink. As I begin to dive, I also catch a hint of mint green. Good. My partner probably has the situation under control already. I ease off the dive and glide down the last twenty meters, settling quietly into a nearby clearing. Then I backtrack to where I thought I saw the two figures. Before long, I can hear voices.
"—kie Pie! Fancy meeting you here!" A nervous laugh.
"Ooh, are you looking for skellenic hadropods too, Lyra? I always like to have some on hand for my Vargeban Day parties!"
Processing. Please wait for translation.
I ignore the readout. Experience has taught me that Leshe-Marbian understands Pinkie Pie no better than anyone else. My theory is that she just invents new words to suit her needs. Leshe-Marbian doesn't buy it, but among us three, the drone has the least field experience with uncontacted sapients.
Lyra thinks Pinkie's on to us, and that she's just trying to mess with the drone's language processors. But Lyra's judgment can be questionable at times.
Anyway, if anybody’s on to us, it’s Twilight Sparkle. Now there’s a pony worth worrying about.
"Skellenic... hadropods?" Lyra doesn't wait for the drone's translation; we both know it's not coming. She swallows. "Yeah! I don't think there are any left around here, but Bon-Bon told me there might be some over by Sweet Apple Acres. Do you want to help me look for 'em?"
Pinkie pronks in a circle, clearly pleased by the idea. "That sounds superriffic! And you've got to tell me all about what you and Bon-Bon have planned for Vargeban Day!"
Lyra shoots me a nervous look—Leshe-Marbian has relayed my location into her cortex by now—and waits for my nod before following Pinkie Pie. Neither of us like dealing with Pinkie, but it's hard to avoid her. This is the third time she's set off the proximity alarm this month. We've already moved the cache once, but it doesn't seem to help. Pinkie is everywhere.
Warning: Unauthorized access to storage cache in grid 1457.34η.
Repeat: Unauthorized access to storage cache in grid 1457.34η.
I stare at the flashing red letters in horror. My eyes slip out of focus, and I feel the full weight of this planet's gravity crushing the air from my lungs. My brain churns sluggishly, like some enormous cetacean trapped in a shrinking tidepool.
But Lyra dealt with Pinkie!
Doesn't change facts.
We solved the problem!
No, you didn't.
But how can anyone else have—
And then it hits. Pinkie didn't set off the alarm. Someone else did. My breath catches, and an image of Twilight scouring the cache flashes through my mind. I look around quickly, for once paying attention to the constant stream of metadata my implant provides.
grid 1457.33α
"Love is going to kill me for this," I mutter. Me, or the whole goddamned planet. It takes seven tenths of a second for me to orient myself to the grid, and then I'm galloping like I've got Special Circumstances riding on my tail.
Which, come to think of it, I may.
We call it the storage cache, but it's more of a storage multichambered metal vault.
Okay, it's a ship. But we did a pretty good job hiding it. Lyra... appropriated it, during our last assignment. I have no idea why Love let her keep it, but Love seems to have a soft spot for Lyra.
I'm out of breath when I arrive. The drone, Leshe-Marbian, is waiting for me in the entryway. It's only about half a meter tall, but it hovers off the ground at eye height for my present body. If a machine can be said to look upset, it's throwing a tantrum.
Where were you!? I told you there was trouble!
The words blink across my visual cortex in painful variegations of color. I don't regret the ocular implant—but the decision to remove Leshe-Marbian's vocal effector before we left Love? That, I regret. Even Love agreed that it was a reasonable precaution, but Love doesn't have to put up with the drone and its wounded pride every damn day of the year.
"You know where we were. You've got an uplink to Lyra's cortex. Speaking of which, where is she?"
Still with Pinkie Pie. The drone gyrates in a way I've come to associate with the idea of sighing. The last thing we need is her snooping around, however big a mess we've got on our hands.
"Hooves," I correct instinctively. "Okay, how bad is it? Did they get inside?"
Yes. The word blinks once. Twice. Fades. No text appears to replace it.
I frown. "Drone, I can't fix this unless you tell me what happened."
I scared them away. They were only inside for a minute. Maybe less.
It's worried. There's something it doesn't want to tell me. "Okay, who was it? Did you identify the intruder at least?" I hold my breath.
Leshe-Marbian hangs in the air, hardly moving. Three. Apple Bloom. Sweetie Belle. Scootaloo.
Not Twilight. For the first time in fifteen minutes, a smile flashes across my face. It’s those three. Even if they talk about the cache, nobody's likely to believe them. The whole town knows what their imaginations are like. Then I look back to the drone, and notice that it's still hanging deathly still in the grip of its gravity effector.
"Drone..."
Cybernetic Unit AFX-7 is missing.
"They took the goddamn dog!?"
Cybernetic Unit AFX-7 feels its processor click on. It checks the date, makes the necessary adjustments to its software, and engages its sensory input systems. Because the unit has been inactive for more than three years, it reserves a large amount of processing power for fast execution of its pattern detection algorithms.
It takes 0.28s for AFX-7 to recognize that it is inside a room of some sort. An additional 4.90s allows it to identify that room—by size, contents, and position—as a treehouse. It has never been in a treehouse before. By this time, AFX-7 has begun to resolve three independent organics sharing its space. Two are stationary, one is moving. They share basic similarities, but do not conform to any archetype in AFX-7's memory. The closest match it can find is 'horse, miniature', but the pattern compatibility doesn't even reach 70%.
The three not-miniature-horses exhibit transient repetitive sound formation. This is not uncommon in organics, but certain features of the sound formation (modulation, degree of repetition, speed of production) trip a series of programming contingencies that have been hardwired into the unit. It continues to gather data.
At 14.41s, AFX-7 decides that pattern recognition will require additional processor power and shuts down all non-essential systems. Then it begins to record the three not-miniature-horses for linguistic analysis.
"You just had to bring the dog along, didn't you?"
"Will you let it go, already? What's done is done. We just need to make sure we get it back before... y'know... it decides to do something."
The moon hangs low over the orchard at Sweet Apple Acres, leaving everything in shadow but the Cutie Mark Crusaders' clubhouse. Golden lantern light pours out of its windows, and I can hear high-pitched voices arguing inside. Leshe-Marbian is forwarding the dog's positioning data to my implant, and the implant says AFX-7 is up in that clubhouse with them.
Meanwhile, Lyra and I are about thirty meters away, hiding in the trees. We need a plan.
"We could just blow it up," Lyra suggests, fumbling in her saddlebags for a small device that looks like a double-ended hammer.
I glare at her. "Because in the three years we've been here, we've seen so many explosions. Shit, Lyra, hardly anybody even dies on this damned planet, and you want to blow up three little girls? Yeah, that's not going to attract any attention."
"Can't we..." She twiddles the hammer thing. "Maybe just a little?"
"No! No effing explosions! I don't want Twilight bloody Sparkle deciding she wants to know more about whatever the hell we do tonight."
"I wish you wouldn't talk like that," she mutters. "Why do you have to be so angry? That last assignment changed you, Ditzy."
My jaw drops. That last assignment changed me? From Lyra "I want hands again", "how do ponies sit", "can we blow up that treehouse like they do in the movies" Heartstrings?
It's a good thing I don't have hands right now. I don't know if I could stop myself from strangling her, if I did.
Ms. Sma, your partner's idea may have some merit, if adapted. You need to isolate AFX-7 from its captors. A suitable distraction might remove them from the area.
Love,
LCU Love and Tolerate, Scree class
Great. Now Love wants a piece of the action, too.
At 1953.48s, AFX-7 estimates its language processing algorithm is 87.5% complete.
The not-miniature-horse called Scootaloo says: "This is *****."
The not-miniature-horse called Apple Bloom answers: "*****! I think it's doin' something!"
In fact, AFX-7 is doing many things. It is finalizing formal rules for grammar, adding the 443rd word to its initial working dictionary, and beginning to program a subroutine for re-processing its recorded data, now that it has determined that the not-miniature-horse called Apple Bloom is speaking a dialect and not an entirely different language.
The not-miniature-horse called Scootaloo says: "No it's not. It's just ***** those *****. It's been doing that for, like, thirty ***** now."
The not-miniature-horse called Sweetie Belle says: "I think we should tell somepony about this. Rarity and I were supposed to ***** ***** together tonight, for Pinkie's big party tomorrow. She's gonna be ***** about me."
AFX-7 recognizes many of the words and structures used by the not-miniature-horse called Sweetie Belle, but seems to lack context for understanding any of it. Is Rarity some sort of deity for the denizens of this planet?
The not-miniature-horse called Apple Bloom says: "Will you ***** stop ***** so much? This is some ***** of crazy ***** *****. This could be the ***** to gettin' our cutiemarks!"
The not-miniature-horse called Scootaloo says: "I don't know, Apple Bloom. Don't you think it would have done something by now? Anyway, do we really want a cutiemark for... what, metal dog *****?"
All three not-miniature-horses have used the word 'cutiemark' many times. It is a noun, and it seems to hold much importance for them. AFX-7 does not understand the word from context yet, but perhaps this noun will provide an avenue for inquiry and communication once AFX-7's language processing algorithm is complete.
The not-miniature-horse called Sweetie Belle says: "I'm gonna go talk to Rarity."
The not-miniature-horses called Apple Bloom and Scootaloo say: "No!"
The Limited Contact Unit Love and Tolerate, in geosynchronous orbit above Ponyville, decides that this is the most fun it's had in at least a year. It has carefully arranged its crew of five to observe the various cultures of this world, but three of them make for unforgivably dull watching. Only Diziet Sma and Liera Kwandon, the two Contact agents tasked with observing pony culture, ever seem to get up to anything exciting. Then again, given their performance with the stage-three civilization discovered by the GCU Arbitrary four years ago, Love and Tolerate does not find this fact surprising.
Both of them believe their current assignment is disciplinary. The ship finds this particularly amusing.
On the planet, Diziet and Liera resume talking as they prepare their distraction. Love and Tolerate has its limited sensor package focused in a narrow beam on Sweet Apple Acres, both to oversee its agents and to obtain a detailed recording for its superiors.
"Do you think they're going to send in Special Circumstances if we screw this up?" Liera asks.
"Who the hell knows," Diziet replies. "Equestria's a stage two-three. Maybe they'll let it slide. Or maybe they'll find an asteroid to drop on us and call it another 'experiment'."
Love and Tolerate finds Diziet Sma's dislike for Special Circumstances pleasantly ironic. She views them with a mix of terror and veneration. She claims to be disgusted by their methods—even while she demonstrates, time and again, an exceptional talent for exactly the sort of problem-solving they value.
"Let's just get the damn dog back," Diziet says. "Love probably won't tell SC about this, unless we eff this up even more than we already have."
Of course, all information on Diziet and Liera's performace is already being relayed to Special Circumstances. This is, after all, a job interview.
Applejack is going to hate this.
"You ready, Ditzy?"
I like Applejack. If I were prone to going native the way Lyra always does—finding somebody like Bon Bon and shacking up—well, let's just say Applejack would be very high on my list of people to go native with. And she's really, really going to hate this.
"Diziet! C'mon!"
I sigh and hop down into the ditch where Lyra's already taking shelter. She’s got that two-ended hammer thing half-buried in the ground now. I don’t actually know what it is—some other device from the cache, I guess.
"Okay, let's do this." I hunker down and plug my ears with my hooves.
A no-longer-explosion-free Equestria in three. Two. One.
I can still hear the roar, and a shower of dirt and pebbles cascades over the lip of the ditch, covering my coat. Trying to shake it off, I stand and look at the damage we've caused. At least thirty trees are bent, broken, or uprooted, and a number of small fires are beginning to kindle. Thankfully, the pegasi should be able to deal with that before it gets out of control. But all those dead trees...
Thankfully, the storage cache contained a couple meteorites we'd picked up from the Las Pegasus area. I can't see Leshe-Marbian, but the drone will be planting one of them at the center of the blast and heating it to the appropriate temperature before anyone has time to arrive on the scene. That should, hopefully, deal with Twilight's curiosity.
There's still work for Lyra and I to do, though.
We gallop toward the clubhouse, careful to stay hidden. We hear three high-pitched voices screaming in excitement, heading the other direction.
The clubhouse is dark when we arrive; the Cutie Mark Crusaders must have taken their lantern when they ran off. We hurry up the ramp, just in time to see the dog switch on its primary systems, fire up its gravity effector, and levitate into the air.
"HELLO NOT-MINIATURE-HORSES. MY NAME IS AFX-7. PLEASE TEACH ME ABOUT TALKING TO RARITY AND HOW I CAN GET CUTIEMARKS."
Repositioning the cache is a pain, as always, and takes most of the night. We have to be particularly careful not to attract attention after the fiasco at Sweet Apple Acres. Fortunately, Love can monitor surface activity and help us avoid discovery. Of course it’s idiotic for us to have the cache down here on the planet anyway, but every time I suggest sending it back up to the ship, Love starts claiming it doesn’t have the hangar space. Like hell it doesn’t. The ship’s lying—I just wish I knew why.
“Do we really have to wipe its memory banks?” Lyra sits in the back of the cache with the dog on a workbench in front of her. “It’s gonna forget about me and I’m gonna have to train it all over again.”
“Well, maybe you should have thought of that before you let a bunch of schoolfillies kidnap the damned thing and teach it their language.”
“It’s not my fault! I thought the alarm meant Pinkie! How was I supposed to know those three were sneaking around in the woods?”
“You could have asked Leshe-Marbian. You do have a mindlink with the thing, you know.”
“I—” Lyra pauses, frowning. “Oh, yeah. I guess I… Why didn’t I think of that?”
I roll my eyes and sing-song back at her. “I just don’t know what went wrong!”
The cache is silent for half a minute. When Lyra responds, her voice is quiet. “That’s not very nice, Diziet. I did my best. I’m sorry I screwed up.”
And she’s right. I’m just in a bad mood, and blowing up all those trees didn’t help. I sigh. “No, I’m sorry. It’s not like I knew any better, either. It would have been nice if Leshe-Marbian were a little clearer with those warning messages. Anyway, we got it fixed, right?”
“Right.” Lyra smiles.
“But you still have to wipe the dog’s memory.”
Another morning in Ponyville. I sit beside the window in Sugarcube Corner, watching the sun crest the treetops of the southern woods. Half of a buttered blueberry muffin lays on my plate, surrounded by crumbs.
Twilight Sparkle steps through the door to the shop, and a shock of cold dread crackles down my spine. She glances around, sees me, trots over.
“Hi, um, Ditzy.”
I bury my anxiety and give her my most welcoming smile. “Hi, Princess!”
She sits down across the table from me. “Say… I was talking to Pinkie last night. She said she and Lyra went hunting for… well, that doesn’t matter… anyway, she thought she saw you flying around south of Sweet Apple Acres yesterday afternoon. And what with the fire last night and everything, I was wondering if you might have seen—”
“Oh my gosh! There was a fire at Sweet Apple Acres!? Is everypony okay?”
“Ah. Yeah.” She gives me a small smile. “It just brought down a few trees. Nothing really important.”
Inside, I wince. Nothing important? Applejack loves those trees.
Tense correction: loved.
“Well, that’s good.” I sigh. “How’d it happen, though? I mean, a fire in Applejack’s orchard?”
“More of an explosion, really. It looked like a meteorite impact, but Luna and I keep very good track of near-Epona objects, and there shouldn’t have been any such event last night.”
I shrug my shoulders, doing my best to look confused.
“I was hoping you might be able to tell me some more about what happened, since Pinkie said you were in the vicinity.” She pauses, staring at me with too-knowing eyes. “Maybe you... saw something?”
This calls for my best wide-eyed-and-innocent look. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I was in such a rush; I forgot all my bits at home, but the flower cart lady was really nice. I flew home to get them, but I must have gotten turned around after I delivered that big, heavy box to the mayor’s office, so I went south instead of left, and then I got lost, and then I thought I saw Rainbow Dash, so I went to say hi, only it turned out it was Cloudchaser, so I turned back around and I came home and I forgot all about the flowers. But there was a meteorite? That’s so cool!”
She’s not buying it. I can tell from the expression on her face. “No, I’m pretty sure there was no meteorite. Somepony just wanted it to look like there was one. We found a lump of metal, but the temperature and the angle of impact were all wrong.”
Damn it.
Then she drops the bombshell. “We also found… something… half-buried in a ditch a quarter-mile from the site of the explosion. Something I’ve never seen before, like a little hammer. It was smouldering hot last night, but it should have cooled off by now. I was just about to head back over to Sweet Apple Acres and fetch it.” A slow smile spreads across her face. “Maybe you’d like to come with me?”
Before I have time to panic, elegant golden letters scroll across my vision.
Ms. Sma, I believe I can handle this one. Have a pleasant morning.
Love,
LCU Love and Tolerate, Scree class
I give Twilight three good blinks, like I’ve got no idea what she’s talking about. “Are you worried you won’t be able to get it alone? Is it heavy? I mean, I thought you could just…” I wave a hoof in the air. “Unicorn it out. Can’t you do that?”
She stares at me. Clearly not the answer she was expecting. “No, I think I can manage just fine, Ditzy. I just thought—”
“Oh, good!” I smile. “‘Cause I’m not very comfortable around hammers. Or any kind of tools, really. Rainbow Dash says they shouldn’t even let me look at them.”
“It’s not that kind of hammer, Ditzy. It’s a—”
“Well, you know what my mother always said. ‘Better safe than sorry.’ Or maybe it was, ‘You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.’ That’s true, you know. I tried it once. Colgate got really mad at me. She said it wasn’t something you’re supposed to actually try to do, and that I had to clean up the mess myself. And then Time Turner came in and said he could do it, but Colgate didn’t believe him either, but then I had to go.”
Twilight opens her mouth to respond, but she can’t seem to find any words. She frowns at me a little, narrowing her eyes. I smile back and shrug my shoulders.
Twilight Sparkle: 0. Diziet Sma: 14.
Finally, she leaves, disappointment plain on her face. I relax a little, take another bite of my blueberry muffin, and turn back to the window. I sit there for a minute, just enjoying the view. Two ponies walk along the road in front of the shop, talking quietly.
Ms. Sma, my sensors register a surge in your oxytocin levels. Is everything alright?
Love,
LCU Love and Tolerate, Scree class
The message flashes through my optic nerve, and my left eye slides out of alignment again. I don’t care. Love is intrusive enough with just the ocular implant. I can’t imagine what it’s like for Lyra—a machine sharing her brain, peeking into every corner of her thoughts. I could never do that. Sometimes, I like to keep my thoughts to myself.
Applejack and Rarity pass the window, heading toward the Ponyville market.
A de-natured drone screams upward through the atmosphere, carrying the localized grid trigger away from Sweet Apple Acres and the prying eyes of Equestria’s nobility. Love and Tolerate directs the drone to its hangar bay.
Below, Twilight Sparkle arrives at the site of the explosion and begins to search for her hammer-like object. Love and Tolerate continues recording. This is always the best part—watching mystified organics poke around their habitat, like they know what ought to be there and will continue looking until the universe reorders itself to give them back their toys.
For the next fifteen minutes, Twilight becomes increasingly agitated. Eventually, she sits herself down in the middle of the blast cavity, plucks a pair of apples from one of the fallen trees with that wonderful built-in field effector these unicorns have, and performs a passable impression of a linear particle accelerator. She does this six times in total, and by the end her coat is liberally splashed with bits of half-ripe apple. Then she stands, some of her calm restored, and marches back toward Ponyville.
Satisfied that its recording is complete, Love and Tolerate dispatches the signal package antispinward to the GCU Friendship Is Skillful Misdirection and begins to plan out its next test for Diziet and Liera.
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Author's Note
Just a quick thing I kicked out over the last couple days—though I have to admit, I like it rather a lot. Many thanks go to Horizon and GhostOfHeraclitus for the pre-reading on this one. One of them is a big Culture addict and the other knows of the stories but hasn't read any of them. Both seemed to enjoy this a great deal, so I'm feeling pretty good about its accessibility to readers who don't know the secondary source material.
Man, we really do need a Sci-Fi tag on fimfic.
My only exposure to the Culture novels is through another story here on FiMFiction, but this was fantastic. I do love portrayals of Ditzy Doo that are more than meets the misaligned eye, and the addition of Lyra was icing on the muffin. Or something.
In any case, great one-shot featuring best pony. Thank you for it.
(That said, I can never remember which tracks you're supposed to follow to find skellenic hadropods. Is it snarks or Crumple-Horned Snorkacks?)
Is this actually a takeoff on Curious Incident in any way?
3959775
In absolutely no way. But all the other title ideas (Ghost and) I could come up with kind of sucked for describing it...
Also, I've got a bit of a tradition of using literary-sounding titles for things.
ETA: Actually, I shouldn't say in no way. Holmes's explanation is somewhat relevant, in the end.
3959784
Darn. :B To the to-read nevertheless.
First I stumble across a eclipse phase crossover,
And now a culture one,I mean, I just , wha is this I don't even
Seriously though, good job, hope to read about their adventures
(Unrelated-ish, you get my first ever comment, because Culture)
3959709
Yes, yes we do. Even EQD has one, for their submissions, but not us.
3959769
Very happy to hear this is continuing to be accessible to people who don't know the Culture stories! I was definitely worried about that while I was writing, but the idea was just too fun to resist.
3959813
You'd probably be surprised how many people here love Iain M. Banks. I know I always am. I still think it's probably a pretty small number overall, but this is far from the only Culture crossover on the site, I'm pretty sure.
3959833
).
Also, a Normal tag, because sometimes you can't choose anything and the tags Random or Slice of Life are your only options (truthfully I think the Random tag isn't even needed most of the time, but that's just me
3959833
I absolutely adore Iain M. Banks, and Iain Banks as well! Very much looking forward to reading this tonight.
Ah, this was a lot of fun! I've read quite a few Culture novels but I don't think I could write one
I love the Love. I wonder what it's planning. I'd love it if you wrote more! 
It's good, certainly worth an up thumb. I kept getting a distracted feeling when reading it as though I really would be enjoying this more if I knew the core material, but you've painted the alien culture well enough that I'm interested in knowing more about the Culture books, so good job there. (From the brief glimpse we see here I get sort of a And Having Writ vibe from the aliens, dunno how close to the mark I am with that.)
Title was a bit distracting, as I have in fact read The Curious Incident... and this fic had little if anything to do with that book besides the presence of a dog. But given some of the titles the show's writers riff on with no clear referent in the plot, I can hardly say that this isn't true to the universe at least.
Ahhhh, Ditzy = Diziet, how did I not see that COMING.
Excellent story.
3960360
I keep forgetting that there's even a book with that title. The reference (for what little it's worth) actually comes from where the book got its title, Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes story "Silver Blaze". I don't actually know anything about the book except for a tiny bit of what it's about.
Well, I suppose it's a little unfair to say the title comes from "Silver Blaze". It comes from Ghost, who I'm assuming got it from "Silver Blaze", and that's where I recognize the reference to be from. All I could come up with were "Observers" and "Of Trees and (Robo)Terriers", neither of which felt all that great to me.
I didn't have that hard a time writing this story, but I had a heck of a time trying to find a title for it.
Hah. This was fun. I don't think I have that much to say on the matter -- the Diz revelation got a big smile, and some more CMC would have been nice to see, but that's about it.
3959910
He really was a fantastic author. I think I've only read about eight of his books (seven with the 'M' in them), but I enjoyed them all a great deal. Well, I suppose I must have, or I wouldn't be writing Pony–Culture crossovers.
3960115
I don't have any immediate plans to come back to this, but I have to admit I enjoyed the premise (and Leshe-Marbian really didn't get much chance for screen time here). It's a bit like "Three Nights"—I don't know what I'd do if I came back, but I enjoyed the scenarios and character-building that I definitely might be interested to do so.
3960360
Oh, I should mention... From what I could glean from the wikipedia page, no, I don't think there's a whole lot of similarity (aside from the overarching tropes). It sounds like the folks there were a bit more actively interested in pursuing an agenda. Contact, the Culture diplomatic service, seems to be a bit more of a middle ground between open intervention and Star Trek style hands-off observation, at least in most cases.
Then again, since I'm working off of a wikipedia brief, maybe I totally don't understand the similarities and differences. That... wouldn't surprise me.
3960381
Actually, I have to admit it snuck up on me, too. I picked Ditzy and Lyra straight off, because Lyra's an obvious choice and because I kind of loved the idea that there was a good reason for Ditzy's eyes being out of alignment. But since I was writing Ditzy in first person, I didn't have much reason to use her name until about halfway through the story. And then, as soon as I wrote it out, it was kind of plain as day. She even gets called Dizzy as a nickname in "State of the Art".
3960483
More CMC is almost always nice, though I have to admit, writing in cybernetic dog perspective is kind of hard to do. Especially when you're explicitly trying to make your cybernetic dog not sit up and play fetch. Or discourse on the appropriate ways to worship Rarity. Whatever.
3960381
oh crikey... diziet. I've just gone back to check. Yep, I DO know that name. Hah!
What's this, surprise Bradel story? I actually liked this more than I thought I would, given I'm not usually in to sci-fi, especially hard sci-fi. I did feel a little like things were flying over my head, but that's to be expected given it's a crossover and it wasn't so bad. I got the main sci-fi tropes.
3961237
Ah! You aren't actually familiar with the source material!?
Wow, my bad. I was so confident I'd heard you mention it at some point too...
Oh well.
Anyway, I'm glad you liked it! It's fun to surprise you guys every once in a while.
3959813
Ooh, if you're interested in sci-fi, you might want to go check out the blog post Horizon just tossed up. It's ostensibly about this story, but it's got a very nice list of other good sci-fi on the site (including Eclipse Phase). Also, Horizon's just an all-around good guy to know about.
ETA: I suck. Link fixed.
Oh great. Now, I'm never going to be able to see Ditzy/Derpy again without thinking of this story! (Which was a heck of a lot of fun, BTW!
)
3961302
You're thinking of Ghost. He's the one with epic level knowledge of all things cultured and cultural. I'm hopeless.
Well, that was a delight! I certainly wouldn't mind reading more.
3959769 What was the other Culture crossover you read? I'm mildly surprised there's more than one!
My only complaint is that there is not more.
You know, eventually Luna's going to find that funny-looking 'star' up there and stick it where it belongs, regardless of if it wants to go there.
"Captain, we're slipping out of orbit again."
"Well, apply more power."
"We're at max already, and still moving."
-Meanwhile, below-
"Celly! Stop messing around with my stars! You've got this one all out of place, and it's a royal pain to stick it back where it's supposed to go!"
I absolutely adore that you went ahead and did this, Bradel. It makes me happy to see my two favorite utopias bouncing off each other.
3961627
Outside Context Problems. I like it, but it's probably even more enjoyable when the reader is familiar with both halves of the crossover.
3961322 well got bookmark that link, thanks!
3960360
3960382
Yup. I got it from the Silver Blaze story, not from the book. I'm a bit of a recovering Holmes addict[1], and it came to mind quite quickly. And, besides, it was an incident, it was at the night-time, it was curious, and it involved a dog which did nothing. That's truth in advertising that is.
3961404
Oh, you
3962315
Funnier still, Culture ships don't have captains being controlled by fully independent hyperintelligent Minds. So it's more like:
"I need to get us into orrr—oh meat that's an odd sensation. Right on my outside field envelope. Right back into orbit we g—mmm. That's... that's a very strange feeling. Mmmm. I think I sort of like it."
[1] Worse yet, I'm the sort of curmudgeon who thinks Sherlock is rather nice, but is still inferior compared to the Granada series.
A near little, and pretty original fic. I goota say I could go for more chapters filled with a frustrated, suspicious twilight
Ooh, this was a very fun piece, and it's got me interested in Culture now too, if the books are anything like this in terms of tone. I hope you decide to do more with this at some point, I think it'd make for a very entertaining universe.
Heh. Diziet.
Do I understand correctly that the mission on Arbitrary was the one from "The State of the Art"?
I gotta say, it's hilarious how much Love and Tolerate sounds like the name of a Culture ship.
Oh my god, I laughed so hard at that line that my eyes are watering.
That was everything I was hoping for when you mentioned this story in a blog post and then some.
Oho. Here we go. I'm once again put in the uncomfortable position of having a really good author put out a story with a tag I generally avoid at all costs* only to discover that either my aversion is unwarranted or they're just that damn good.
I like how you make the reader feel clever for realizing the narrator is Derpy almost immediately, and yet in retrospect it's really frickin' obvious. Gosh, we've had changeling Derpy, changeling Bon Bon, and now limited contact field agent Derpy. Sorry, Ditzy. Bah. There's something about this group of background characters that makes them really work for writers of this kind of fic. They're depicted as just out there enough in the show that there's plenty of ways to write them as completely unexpected yet very interesting characters in a way that perfectly explains their eccentricities.
I haven't read the Culture series, - indeed, I hadn't even heard of it until your recent blog post teasing this story - so I have to say you did a darn good job of writing something where I really didn't need any side knowledge to get a pretty good picture of what that series must be like. I was left with a few interesting questions though. The most pertinent I think being exactly what field agents are. Evidently they are given fairly accurate replica bodies, given that they seem to have the complete organic experience, including, apparently, attraction to the natives.
When they decided to camouflage the "like they do in the movies" explosion as a meteor strike, I immediately knew it would not pass examination by Twilight "Monitor Everything" Sparkle. I have to say though, I was a little confused as to why she would quiz Ditzy "I Just Don't Know What Went Wrong" Doo outside Sugarcube Corner about last night's alleged meteor strike until I realized you intended this universe's Twilight to be suspicious of her, specifically, not being what she appears.
*Slight exaggeration. The only tag I really avoid at all costs is [Anthro], because there is literally no good reason for that, ever. Interestingly enough, I didn't even consciously realize it existed until recently when I was coding up a new table view and needed to scrape all the tag types. The only other crossover I've ever given a chance is that one by Paper_mate_pony, because best thing is allowed to be crossed over with ponies, but it seems to be kinda dead. On that topic though, since Ghost brought it up, I have been enjoying Sherlock, but as far as visual adaptations are concerned, Jeremy Brett is absolutely the One True Holmes.
Wow, well done, Bradel! I love Banks' writing in general and the Culture novels in particular, and as far as I'm concerned, you really nailed the feeling of a Culture story. The character naming was brilliant and hilarious, and the interactions and quirkiness of all of the Culture characters was familiar and fun.
I really didn't try to read this from the perspective of someone who hasn't read anything Culture - because I'm lazy that way, and it was my lunch time, dammit! ;) But it strikes me as written in a way that others can connect with, and hopefully get interested in reading Banks. I would love to see you write more in this vein.
My favorite bit? Twilight Sparkle: 0. Diziet Sma: 14. I laughed pretty hard at that section. Just lovely.
Rating: High oxytocin levels all around!
I love Bank's Culture, and this was an excellent crossover. Some things were a tad predictable, but I was smiling the whole time. It was a bit like seeing old friends again after a long absence. A heckuva fun short!
Okay, that was fun. I can see I'm going to have to read the Culture books now. But one thing still bothers me.
Why is it called the Love and Tolerate? Besides the obvious out-of-universe joke, I mean.
*Grins and slowclaps* Bravo.
Wow, it's been too long since I was replying to comments here!
3961627, 3962239
Glad you folks enjoyed it! Like I think I might have said elsewhere, I'm in no way opposed to doing more of this. I haven't gone and done sequels to anything yet, but both this and "Three Nights" lend themselves very well to sequels, I think—this because it's really just a fun pacing exercise and idea introduction, and "Three Nights" because it introduces a couple OC's and a setting I quite like.
We'll just have to see what happens. And, if the show's going to be running another five years, well, there's plenty of time for a lot of things to happen.
3962315
That made me laugh. I like the idea of Luna doing that to a spaceship rather a lot. (And we'll just ignore Ghost, shall we, because it's still cute!)
3962663
I honestly can't even remember where the idea came from... Though 3962767 and I have been making up jokes about the Love and Tolerate for a while now. Along with a number of other ships whose names I couldn't actually remember when it came time to write the story...
3962943
If I were to come back to this, I think you're right on the money—suspicious Twilight is one of the more fun things going on here, and I suspect it wouldn't be too hard to spin a story around her. She's so far in the background of this story and I never get much farther than giving hints about what she thinks that I know there's a lot of fertile ground left unplowed with her.
3964187
Unfortunately, I think the tone here is pretty different from the tone of the Culture novels (though if someone cares enough to disagree with me, please feel free). I always think of the Culture as a sort of halfway point between fantastic (i.e. like fantasy) sci-fi like Star Wars and hard sci-fi like Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars book. It's usually very serious stuff, but it's really well written (if dense, like KSR). Giving it a zany madcap humor spin is, I suspect, pretty much all me.
3964256
You would be absolutely correct. The strong implication I'm going for here is that this follows directly on the heels of "State of the Art". I kind of wanted to write the story without actually referencing humans or Earth, though, because I felt that to people unfamiliar with State of the Art, it might feel a bit too strongly like Earth thrown in for the sake of cheap pandering, rather than Earth thrown in because it's a legitimate part of the crossover material.
3987666
LCU "Sufficiently Advanced Friendship", GSV "Anticipation of a New Alicorn's Arrival", GOU "Friendship Problems"
3965050
That line actually took a bit of massaging, and I'm still not super happy with it myself—so I'm glad to hear that it's firing pretty well. One of the reasons I struggled over it so much was because I was trying to keep continuity with the second AFX-7 section, where I was eliminating all words beyond the 400 most common English words for scriptwriting (which you can find on Wikipedia), with a couple carefully selected additions like proper names and cutie marks, which I figured the Crusaders would probably say so often that they'd have to be part of any language-learning algorithm. Doing robot speak without being able to use more traditionally robot-y words like "require" and "information" is kind of hard.
3974669
That makes me happy to hear! Smiling the whole time is pretty much what I was shooting for. It might have been good for me to shoot for a bit less predictability in this, but I was mostly trying to focus on the pacing and getting this to cover as much ground in 4300 words as I could, without making it feel like I was skimping on details.
Anyway, thank you for the comment. I'll try to look out for this more, moving forward, and see if I can strike a better balance on predictability when I'm trying to keep the pacing up. It's a good thing to shoot for, I think.
3976854
All of the ships in Banks's Culture novels have sort of amusingly sarcastic names. Here's a list of a few favorites:
– GCU Of Course I Still Love You
– GSV What Are the Civilian Applications?
– GCU Funny, It Worked Last Time...
– GCU Ultimate Ship, the Second
– GCU Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality
– VFP Resistance Is Character-Forming
3986365
Glad you enjoyed it!
3965547
Thank you for making me feel good about this story and my writing ability in general. I had a bad week or two on the, "Why do my stories suck so much" front.
I have a tendency to avoid crossovers, too.
Actually, that's an understatement. I'm still kind of worked up over the fact that I've written a story with Ghost's Spinning Top ("A Filly's Guide to Not Making Headlines", for the kids following along at home), and 3960360 has written Dotted Line into his Cadance of Cloudsdale series, and in "Three Nights" I've written a Cadance story that draws on G.M. Berrow canon rather than Skywriter fanon for Cadance (which I put on pretty much equal footing, because Skywriter). In my mind, that means that either "Filly's Guide" and "Three Nights" are incompatible and one of them, properly, should have an AU tag, or I've got to toss a multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics at pony so Ghost's OCs can be allowed to exist in two conflicting storylines.
This legitimately makes me upset. Not like, angry at Skywriter. Upset like should I curl up in the corner and cry over the fact that I've single-handedly broken the universe?
Yes, obviously, I'm a crazy person.
3962767 frankly has a much better handle on the Culture stuff than I do, but yes, I think the certainly have the technology for Dizzy and Liera to go switching bodies. Worst case scenario, they're in sleeper chambers in the hangar Love refuses to let them use, and they're wearing neural laces. But I suspect the Culture can just move 'em on over to other bodies, when necessary—though I suspect that's not a whole lot of fun. As for falling for the natives, well, yeah, I think that's pretty typical Culture behavior. They're... open-minded.
The bit with the meteorite actually was supposed to fool Twilight in the first draft, and the only reason it didn't was because my pre-readers thought the ending felt rushed and needed a more gradual let-down. That led to expanding the Sugar Cube Corner scene and then adding the final Love scene, which was entirely absent in the first draft. I was going for a bittersweet ending with Dizzy looking out the window at Applejack, and... basically it worked about as well as the Octavia ending on "Three Nights", from the feedback I was getting. I have to admit, I do like the expanded ending better, even though it meant slowing things down from the pace I tried to use through most of the piece, but that's probably good for the reader anyway. But I'm dodging around the point. Twilight figuring it out was actually kind of an accident (though Twilight's role overall was smaller, i.e. she wasn't mentioned much early on, in the first draft, so the issue of whether she'd figure it out might not have been so pronounced). So... um... I'm glad I somehow made it work in the end!
3967227
I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Actually, I've been thinking all this time that I may not be giving people a very good idea of what the Culture stories feel like, because my memory of them always paints them as so hard-core and hard-hitting, and this... well... is a comedy. Though I guess maybe the pacing here does help bring it more in line with Banks's stuff. Hmm. It's an interesting question. But it does seem like this has peaked a lot of folks' interest in the Culture stuff, which is kind of wonderful in my mind, given how awesome it is. I'm really happy that this has been so well received.
Also, yes, I really liked the score line, too. I wasn't sure if it'd be confusing for people if I did something other than 0:1, because you'd have a hard time justifying Dizzy racking up that many points right here. I was hoping it would read like she was constantly keeping score—and it sounds like that panned out! I thought it was a nice bit of characterization, and funny, but... yeah, again, I was just worried it might wind up being confusing.
I saved up a whole dedicated comment for replying to you, but now I'm out of things to say!
3987928
Eh, I know what it's like to sweat it, but no need to sweat it. I think there's a hundred thousand shadows of Equestria, we're each seeing either one or a handful, and anything that looks like a contradiction is obviously just happening in a slightly different parallel version. I like to get Dotty as close as I can, but the Sun-Nag as she appears in the Cadance stories is different than the one that appears in the Civil Service tales, so I have no illusions (or aspirations) toward a formal unification of our writing universes. Where would I put all the footnotes, for one thing?
Incidentally, I view the "Alternate Universe" tag not as "something in this story is incompatible with canon as presented" but as "four of the Mane 6 were raised as sky pirates and they are currently being hunted by Captain Twilight and her faithful assistant Rarity."
3988019 Now you have me thinking of Dottie being told that there are a multitude of timelines in which Dotted Line exists, therefore in at least one of those lines, there is always a Dotted Line who has tea, which would be an immense comfort to him.
3988325
Pfft. More likely, he will conclude that between the lot of them, there can never, ever be enough tea.
3988019
(Spike, you see.)
What about "one of the Mane 6 dies during what would have been Season 1"? Or how about "Spike never existed" (or "... hatched", if you prefer)?
Ooh, ooh! What about "Twilight is a Pokemon trainer"?
Since I'm punching with this, what about "dragons are ancient vintage AIs"?
3988435
I think the key for me is "at some point in its chronology, does this story universe basically resemble the one we see in the show." So "never existed" would be AU but "(x) died early" would not.
(x) is incidentally best pony. I love (x).
3988325
Not as much comfort as actually having the tea, mind.
3988435
I'm pretty much on the same page as Skywriter for what counts as proper use of the AU tag... I think. (I just don't necessarily think of AU in terms of the tag, I usually think of it as compatibility between stories.)
That said, I kind of wanted to weigh in because I think the first two are probably things that ought to be tagged [AU], the third one ought to be tagged [Crossover], and the fourth one...
...is just a clever Idea Story concept, cf. my recent blog.
Oh, I guess 3988906 responded while I was typing this. What'd he say?
Yeah, I think I'm a little more permissive on what deserves [AU], but just a little. As for (x), at the risk of getting all political, let me just point you in the direction of something from my Facebook feed: somebody from Arizona who doesn't like (x) very much.
3988906
But but but season 1!
Or, to express that without the affected histrionics, how much resemblance and how recently is needed? For example, would Twilight staying in Canterlot at the end of Season 1 instead of returning to Ponyville count? What about 'Season 1' happening completely differently, so that Season 2 happens the exact same way but for completely different reasons, if the fic is set post- Season 2? What about if Spike hatched a couple months/years later? (Or earlier?) What about swapping out one or more ponies within the Elements, without otherwise changing anything? (Well, except of course the resulting divergent character interactions.)
3987928
Wait a minute there, mate. What if Skywriter's stuff is the AU there?
3988933 Two things:
(1) No it's not, not by itself at least. There's not enough to it to hang a story on all by itself. It would make a good Major Background Detail, the way the Grand Galloping Gala was a Major Background Detail to its trilogy in S1, but it needs something else to pull it into being relevant. It could be one 'Thing' of a two- or three- 'Thing' story.
(2) I read that article you linked, and... that's horrible. I mean wat.