Sonata Dusk wasn’t quite sure what she was feeling. She was so proud of Aria for finally saying yes to a hug, and she was relieved that her sisters had agreed to stop fighting. But she had lost her gem. All three of them had. And that sadness wasn’t going away, and it dragged the happy bits down. Maybe that was how it felt to be Aria, all the time, only with angry instead of sad? Like, whenever something good happened, like when Sonata had cooked them a big-meat battle breakfast that morning, it should have made Aria happy, but instead it just made her a bit less grumpy for five minutes. Sometimes when Aria was talking, Sonata liked to close her eyes and imagine Aria as a talking grey cloud with a frowny face. It made her happy thinking that Aria would never know about that, and that whatever mean things she said, Sonata could always go away and giggle about Aria just being a cloud who’s angry because it’s all full of rain. But she loved her sister anyway, because a rain cloud couldn’t help being a rain cloud, and if it could then nocloud would water the plants.
Right then, Aria reminded her of a streaky cloud high in the sky on a cold, clear day. The kind of cloud that looked like thin strands of white hair. A cirrus cloud, she remembered. Sonata liked clouds, and she’d read about them on the internet after hearing that singer singing so prettily about them, even if it didn’t make much sense to her how a human could see a cloud from both sides, when they couldn’t even fly!
Anyway, where was she? Oh yeah: Aria was looking happier, and that was because they’d all agreed to work together to find the best thing to do next. But without their jewels, none of them would keep their happiness for long, and so Sonata thought the best thing to do would be to find a way to fix their jewels before they all got sad again. She knew that they might not be able to fix them, but she wanted to try really hard first, just in case there was a way. Hadn’t Adagio said something about fixing them earlier?
“You said we might be able to fix our jewels if we could get to Equestria?” Sonata asked.
Adagio pulled a face like she had trodden on something sharp. Sonata wasn’t worried, though, nobody was better at planning than her big sister, and if there was any way they could sing again, she knew Adagio would find it. There wasn’t much they could do for now, as Adagio had said she hadn’t got a plan, but Sonata knew that if she and Aria asked the right questions, and helped choose the best ideas, then Adagio would find a way to turn them into a plan, and then the three of them would know what to do.
“I said we’d have more of a chance there than here, but there are so many problems that I hardly know where to begin.”
“Ok,” Aria answered while Sonata was still thinking of what to suggest, “so what’s the biggest problem, aside from the obvious?”
Once she would have said that I was the biggest problem. In fact Aria had said that, in the kitchen the day before. Sonata had answered at the time by grabbing fruit from the bowl and throwing it at Aria, but inside she’d wished that she wasn’t the biggest problem the three of them had. She didn’t think she always was, but the other two got so shouty with her that she knew that was what they thought sometimes. And when she’d been wishing, she’d meant for her to be less of a problem, not for a bigger one to come trundling along so that she didn’t look so bad when she stood next to it.
“That once we reached Equestria, we’d revert to our 20-foot siren forms,” Adagio said, “which would lose us the ability to infiltrate and deceive.”
Sometimes Sonata missed being a siren. Well, she knew she was still a siren, but she hadn’t looked like one since they’d arrived in that world. It had felt so good earlier in the evening when they had gathered enough Equestrian magic to be able to make their siren bodies in the air. And they’d grown wings on their real bodies, too; she wasn’t sure what that was all about. Being shot at with butterflies hadn’t been so nice, but just feeling the wind on her scales again had been the best thing. And she’d mostly forgotten about the butterflies until thinking of it that moment, as their siren bodies smashing into pieces – and then their necklaces too – had been way worse than anything.
“Combat advantage, though,” Aria said, licking her lips like they were shopping for ice cream. “Size, strength, scales and teeth.”
“True,” Adagio agreed, and Sonata noticed that doing so made Aria smile in a way that really showed how much that hug had helped, “but any skills we’d gain for physical intimidation would be countered by the magic users there, who we no longer have a weapon against.”
So if they went back to Equestria without their jewels, even normal unicorns would be able to push them around? That just wasn’t right! They were sirens; ponies weren’t meant to be able to do anything to them. Even that stupidbeard pony wizard only managed to send them far away, he hadn’t actually managed to hurt them. Did that mean they weren’t really sirens anymore?
No, sirens were what they were deep down, that wouldn’t change just because they couldn’t sing, would it? And Adagio would find a way for them to sing again; so they couldn’t be sirens, then not be sirens, and then be sirens again, could they? That would be silly. So of course they would always be sirens, even if they couldn’t sing at that moment.
Adagio carried on, “We need to pass unseen more than ever before. We’ve got used to looking like those we’re living among, but that’s useless since there are no other sirens in Equestria. Thanks to Sonata, we know that there were once three sirens in this world, but they died thousands of years ago.”
Sonata giggled quietly to herself at the funny feeling in her cheeks as Adagio said something nice about her, and then thought back to the afternoon they’d learned about the other sirens. She could see the scene perfectly in her head, just as clearly as when it had happened.
She was lying on her tummy on her bed, painting her nails silver and sparkly. The door was open, and she could hear the music Aria was listening to loudly in the next room. It was something fast and messy, with noisy guitars and raspy singing, and Sonata hummed along with the chorus. But some of the words in the verse made no sense, and so once the song was done she got up and went to see Aria about it. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the next track starting up.
“Hey, Aria? What was that last song about?”
Aria looked up from sitting at her desk in front of her computer, and pulled a nasty face as she saw Sonata standing in the doorway between their bedrooms.
“The three-word repeating chorus didn’t give it away?” she crossed her arms, reaching her leg out to kick her door closed in Sonata’s face. A second later, Sonata heard the music get louder from behind the door as Aria turned it up.
Knowing Aria would just start shouting if Sonata opened the door and tried talking to her again, she instead headed downstairs, feeling her feet sinking into the fluffy white carpet. Adagio was in the lounge, sitting sideways on the bigger of the two sofas, leaning back against the armrest with her legs stretched out in front of her over the next seat. She had her laptop on her lap (which was probably a good place for something called a laptop), and a glass of red wine stood on the coffee table, perched on one of the coasters covered in pictures of tropical fish that Sonata had picked out.
That had been a fun few days choosing furniture stuff, when Adagio had given her some catalogues and a credit card, and told her to order things online for the house. The coasters were one of her favourite bits, and although Aria had said they were pointless and stupid, Sonata had seen her sister staring at them sometimes, looking like she was thinking of home.
Adagio looked up as Sonata came down the stairs, giving a smile and then going back to her laptop. The white fluffy bathrobe Adagio wore matched the carpet, which made the expensive black cordovan of the sofa look even darker, although the blue jeans that peeked out from under the robe didn’t really match anything.
“Adagio?” Sonata asked, moving to stand in front of the table with her knees together and smoothing her skirt, “Can I ask you something please?”
Without looking away from the screen, Adagio reached for her wine. She often did that when Sonata came to speak to her; maybe it was so her mouth didn’t get dry when answering Sonata’s questions? Sonata didn’t like wine, as it made her tongue go funny. White wine was worse, though. It wasn’t even white, like milk was; white wine was a silly greenish clear colour, and it tasted like bottom feeders.
“What is it, Sonata?” Adagio said, setting her laptop down, turning her head in Sonata’s direction and rolling over so she was lying on her side, but leaning an elbow on the armrest. She didn’t look bored, but not interested either.
“Aria’s listening to a song, but I don’t understand what the words mean.” It kind of sounded silly when Sonata said it out loud, like it wasn’t something she should be bothering Adagio with. Realising that, Sonata added a slightly guilty, embarrassed smile.
There was a long pause as Adagio raised the wine glass to her lips and drank, keeping her eyes locked on Sonata’s own while doing so. Held there by that look, Sonata felt more and more like she was wasting Adagio’s time, especially when she knew Adagio was busy planning their move on the school where the rainbow magic was hiding. When Adagio at last did answer, she didn’t frown or smile, just kept her voice flat like she was trying to say the words without any feelings along with them.
“Mammals are the group of animals that humans belong to, but so do cats, cows, elephants, and many others. Ponies, too. The Discovery Channel is–”
“Not that song,” Sonata interrupted, looking guilty again, “I mean the one about free running, or whatever it is.” How come Adagio didn’t know the song I meant, when Aria was playing it so loudly? And that was when Sonata noticed just how quiet it was where she stood, even though Aria was probably still playing her music just as loudly as before.
Ohhhhhh.... The soundproofing! All that special stuff Adagio had insisted they had put into the walls and ceilings before they first moved in, and cost so much they’d had to add a couple of extra days to the week they’d spent sorting out money things. Adagio had said it would be good so that they could practise their singing day or night without disturbing each other, but now Sonata wondered if Adagio had actually wanted it so badly so that she’d be able to relax quietly in the lounge however loudly Aria was playing her music upstairs.
“Ok?” Adagio said, in that voice that said she was waiting, but not for long, and Sonata panicked and made sure she was concentrating fully and not getting distracted. What was it she needed to say? Oh, right, the song thing. Yep, that was it.
“It said about spending the night in jail, but then it said listening to the sirens’ whale. But,” Sonata scrunched up her face, trying to puzzle it out, “we don’t have a whale.”
She wouldn’t mind if they did have one (she could speak whale). She remembered swimming among the whale pods from time to time in Equestria, joining in with their songs when they were in the shallows, but staying away when they went out into the deep, where the terrorsquid might have been waiting.
When Adagio answered, it sounded like she was trying talk the way people with dummies did, with their teeth stuck together. She was still moving her lips though, so Sonata wasn’t too impressed, and would have easily been able to tell it was her talking and not the dummy.
“They mean ‘wail,’ as in crying, screaming or moaning.”
Why would the whale be crying? Was it ok? No, wait a minute, that’s not what Adagio meant. If the song said wail when talking about making sad noises, then there was no whale. There never had been, even. Sonata felt a bit sad about that. She kind of preferred it her way. And now she’d thought of it, she did rather want a whale.
Just forget about the whale! That was the part of her brain that was trying to concentrate on the conversation, and it wasn’t often happy about how easily she got distracted.
Ok, so if there had never been a whale...
What did I just say?
It’s ok, I’m concentrating, I’m handling it!
...Then what had been doing the wailing? She played the song back in her mind, following the words. Listen to the...
Sirens! It was them that had been wailing! Suddenly it all made sense! ...Didn’t it?
“Oh right,” she nodded, and noticed that although Adagio still held her wine glass, there was quite a bit less liquid in it than before, so Sonata might have been standing there thinking for a while, and in the meantime Adagio must have drunk more without Sonata noticing. “But why would we be doing that?”
The moment she said it, Sonata could tell she shouldn’t have done. Adagio was looking up at her, with annoyed eyebrows, like she had much more important things to be doing than talking to Sonata about some song Aria had on. Which, Sonata, then realised, was kind of true. With her cheeks tingling, Sonata was just about to back slowly away from Angry Adagio and go back up to her room when–
Everything changed.
Eyebrows on Adagio dragged down even further, and she looked off to the floor at one side. She didn’t look angry anymore, though, she looked... puzzled? Like she was trying to figure out where the whole bowl of chocolate trifle had gone even though she’d just sat down with a spoon in front of the TV.
“...Yes,” Adagio said, looking back up at Sonata, with her head leaned to one side like a puppy. “Why would we?”
Sonata wasn’t quite sure what was happening, and it was made doubly scary by the way Adagio was looking at her while searching for an answer, when Sonata knew she didn’t have one to give. She hoped it was just that Adagio was after an answer generally, and just happened to be looking towards her at the time.
Before Sonata could even think about thinking of something to say in reply, Adagio’s hands shot out and grabbed her laptop, pulling it onto her lap again and hammering away at the keys without pausing.
“‘Siren,’” Adagio said out loud as she typed, and then looked closer at the screen to read out whatever the machine had come up with. “A device that makes a loud prolonged signal or warning sound.”
Huh? I don’t even...
“That doesn’t sound like us,” Sonata said, rocking on her feet and watching Adagio’s face for clues about what was going on.
The only warning sound or signal she could think of a siren making was the cross ‘urgh!’ noise Aria would make just before hitting something or someone, which Sonata had learned to listen out for and sometimes even managed to pick up on in time to get out of the way.
“No, indeed,” Adagio said, her eyes still on the screen and zipping side to side. Even though she often managed it when answering Sonata’s questions, it was amazing how Adagio could read and talk at the same time. Sometimes Sonata found it hard enough just to concentrate on doing one of those things, never mind both at once. “It must get the name from somewhere though,” Adagio added, looking up at Sonata quickly before diving at her laptop’s keyboard again, frowning down at the screen as she did.
“Ah, here we are,” Adagio said a moment later, “‘Siren (mythology).’” Then she went quiet, reading the screen to herself.
It was always a bit of a scary thing if Adagio went quiet when she and Sonata were having a conversation; it usually meant she was about to explode. If Adagio was just reading, and not doing anything at the same time like talking, then whatever she was reading must have been very important.
So, the sirens talked about in the song were the loud warning noise kind? And they were wailing because they were... sad... about warning people? Maybe Aria wouldn’t tell me what the words were about because she didn’t know either! She always acts like she knows so much more than me, but maybe–
Sonata jumped, nearly knocked over backwards by the impact. Looking up, she saw Adagio sitting up, singing a pure note of sound energy towards the ceiling.
Sonata knew she couldn’t see sounds, because they didn’t work like that and that was what ears were for anyway, but it felt like she could almost spot the waves of Adagio’s voice bursting out of her mouth in a tight cone pointed upwards. If it was that loud where she was standing, it must be much louder where Adagio’s voice was pointing: Aria’s room, straight above them.
Adagio stopped, but Sonata was still thinking about it when she heard the door click open at the top of the stairs, and then Aria stomp down to join them.
“Even with the soundproofing, that’s still painfully loud, Adagio. What’s so urgent you’d summon me down like that?”
“Sonata’s found something,” Adagio said without looking up from the screen. Found something? Her?! She felt something swelling up in her chest like a balloon. Was that pride? She grinned at Aria standing beside her, chiming with laughter as her grumpy sister folder her arms and took on Aria Grump Pose number three.
“Her self-respect? Her mythical second brain cell? Might need a little more to go on here.”
“Ooh, is it Nemo?” Sonata exclaimed as the idea hit her. “Did I find Nemo? I’m a blue fish,” she told Aria, closing her eyes, lifting her chin and puffing her chest out like a proud cat, “it’s what we do.”
Sonata was happily wondering if that meant she’d get to meet the cool sea turtle as well, but snapped her eyes open again the moment she heard Adagio’s ‘this is important’ voice, which hadn’t been used since the first night after they were banished. Not the ‘pay attention, you two, this is important’ one that was frowny and hard to disagree with, but the scary important one, because Adagio didn’t sound like she was acting, and was just as shaken as they were about to be.
“We are not alone,” Adagio said. Before any questions could be asked or other reactions reacted, Adagio span her laptop around and held it up in their direction so they could see.
A picture took up the whole screen, one that looked like it had been painted by hand by a painter who really knew what they were doing. Sonata could see the water drops on the rocks as if they were right in front of her (instead of right in front of her in a painting on a screen); and the waves crashing against them, sending walls of water high into the dark sky on either side of the rocks, were painted to look so real she felt she could hear the roar of the sea in her ears, and feel the spray swirling around her in the air.
The most important bit of the painting, though, was the three figures lying on the rocks in the middle: one blue, one purple, and one gold.
“How is this possible?” Aria asked, while Sonata tried tilting her head to see if the picture would make more sense to her from other angles. It didn’t.
“When were we singing on the rocks since we got here?” she wondered out loud. She certainly couldn’t remember doing that since Equestria, and her memory was usually as good for that sort of thing as any siren’s (which Adagio had said was way better than most humans’), even if she did forget what she was doing sometimes when she was in the middle of doing it.
“We weren’t,” Adagio said, in the same voice as before, “this was painted nearly three thousand years ago, on the Magna Graecian coast, near Messana.”
Three thousand years? But the three of them were only eighteen years old! Sonata knew she wasn’t very good at maths, but...
She ‘hmmmed’ to herself as she turned the problem over in her mind, which got her an annoyed look from Aria. She thought it was probably better than what Aria had been doing until that point, though: standing there biting the inside of her cheek as she thought. That was silly; thinking was painful enough as it was – chewing your own face wouldn’t help!
“Could the spell have sent us to the future?” Sonata asked. Silly unicorn wizards weren’t really strong enough to do that, were they? There must have been some other answer for the eighteen years vs three thousand thing, right?
Sonata was a bit surprised when Adagio didn’t laugh at the suggestion or look disgusted by it, so maybe it wasn’t as dumb an idea as she’d thought. What Adagio did do was move the laptop back to her lap again, quickly bashing some keys and clicking stuff with the touch pad thing. She then read whatever page she’d found, telling them what it said as she did so.
“Three millennia ago in that part of the world, King Pyrrhus drove back the Romans from Magna Graecia, never again to secure a foothold there.” Sonata saw Adagio’s eyes drop lower down the screen as she skipped to the next bit worth saying. “...Time went on, Greece and Rome became allies... They remained so until Rome fell, about fifteen hundred years ago...” None of this made much difference to Sonata, and she didn’t really understand why Adagio was saying it in the first place, but there was probably some important reason that would be obvious by the time Adagio was done. There normally was.
“Their pantheons of gods were combined over the centuries and spread throughout the world...” Adagio carried on, then skipping even further down the page, “...and were ultimately abandoned around seven hundred years ago, when science came to prominence.”
Standing there trying to think stuff through (and probably looking just as confused as she felt), no new answers came to Sonata as Adagio finished reading and put the laptop to one side on the coffee table, turned so that all three of them could see the picture of the painting on the screen. Sonata almost sighed happily when Adagio’s next line sounded more like her old self.
“But there’s nothing here about having evolved from magical talking ponies during that timeframe, so no, we’re not just in future Equestria.”
She could have just said that... But then Aria often got annoyed if Adagio didn’t explain what was going on and how she knew stuff, so maybe Adagio was being nice and hoping Aria would help think of answers with them.
On Sonata’s right, Aria now bent over forwards to look closely at the picture on the laptop, holding herself up with her hands on her knees, her nose only a few nose-lengths away from the screen.
“It’s unmistakeably us,” she said without looking around, “but we’ve never looked like that.” Sonata leaned in beside her, trying to see more closely but taking care not to get in Aria’s way. She also looked back to make sure she wasn’t blocking Adagio’s view, but saw Adagio sitting upright on the sofa looking straight ahead, doing her thinking face.
“Gossamer wings,” Aria pointed, “pony ears, glowing red eyes.”
“Longer hair, too,” Sonata added, glad to be able to contribute something helpful when they were all a bit stuck.
“Oh that’s good, I really thought we were lacking in the hair department.”
No, we’ve got, like, loads more of it than all the other humans we’ve seen, so that’s not– oooh! Was Aria doing that thing where she said something but meant the opposite of it, which definitely wasn’t confusing? Yeah, like that, ‘definitely not confusing!’ I have so got this! Sarcasm, that was the one.
All the same, Sonata thought maybe it would be best not to mention that Aria sort of only half had longer hair, with her bunches the same length as they always were, only now with a long straight bit of hair hanging down between them, which looked kinda weird. Yeah, no, she wasn’t gonna say that out loud to Aria.
“So that’s us,” Sonata said, pointing at the painting on the screen, “but not us?”
It sounded stupid and probably impossible, but it was the only way she could think of to explain it that fit with everything they knew. She wasn’t sure if it made it all more or less confusing though.
Adagio whispered something from her spot on the sofa, and Sonata straightened back up to look at her again and concentrate on what she was saying, because it sounded a lot like she’d whispered ‘a world without shrimp.’ Sonata hadn’t seen anything else helpful about the painting anyway, and a moment later Aria stopped leaning down too, standing beside her and giving Adagio the ‘wat’ look normally saved for when Sonata tried new ways of mixing foods together at dinner. Even though sometimes it worked really well!
Sonata felt her mouth go a bit dry looking at Adagio, who still hadn’t moved from how she’d been staring at the wall in front of her, and must have spoken without looking round either. Sonata didn’t get a good feeling from that, as Adagio was usually really good at thinking of stuff while the three of them were in the middle of things, and then just lead them through it as they went, instead of needing time to work on it on her own beforehand.
Once Adagio realised Sonata and Aria were standing there watching her again, she shook her head and blinked a few times, like a fluffy bunny rabbit waking up. And then she smiled! A nice little smile as she looked up at them that said she thought she had an answer. Sonata pressed her hand against her heart in relief, and knew that everything would be ok.
“It came up in one of those shows we watched a few weeks ago to learn about life in high school,” Adagio said. “A different version of a familiar character appeared, from a world where different choices had been made. A parallel universe, they called it.”
Once Adagio had said it, Sonata remembered some of the details: the nerdy girl had shown up wearing black leather, and that meant she was bad now (and that was when Adagio had forbidden any of them from wearing anything black or leathery when made their move on the school, once they were done preparing). But soon the show had then had the girl in leather standing next to her normal self, so they’d been two different people even though they were the same person.
Again, Adagio picked up her laptop and set it down on her lap. “Ok, ‘parallel universe,’” she said as she hit a few keys, and then sat reading the screen for a couple of seconds. “A hypothetical self-contained reality co-existing with one’s own.”
I think I understood most of that... maybe? Most of the words on their own, at least, but together they sort of just made word soup. Adagio moved the laptop back to where it had been before, so all three of them could see it. The screen showed a white page covered in small black writing, with a bigger heading in the top left saying ‘Parallel Universe.’ Sonata again leaned in closer to read more clearly, noticing her sisters doing the same.
The few minutes that followed for Sonata had her standing there reading the screen and trying to turn the words and ideas over in her head, building them into a picture she could use and understand. It felt like doing a jigsaw puzzle, like the one Adagio had bought her of the world map to help learn the names of the different countries, only this was less like the pieces were neatly cut and meant to fit together in a particular way, and more like blobs of scrambled eggs she was mushing together in a frying pan like she was trying to rebuild the original unbroken egg.
She giggled to herself on the inside at the thought of trying to mend an egg.
She knew Adagio and Aria probably got a lot more of the writing on the page than she did, and that was fine ‘cause they were good at that kind of stuff and she could always ask one of them if she needed to know for anything she was doing, but she at least followed that there would be different copies of the same world, which all started out the same, but where different things happening back in the past had led to the present being a bit different for each copy. Like maybe in one world men wore skirts and women wore trousers, that sort of thing?
Eventually Aria spoke, straightening up slowly as she did so.
“So the unicorn exiled us to an alternate reality,” she said, then nodded towards the screen as Adagio flicked it back to the painting again, “and they’re the ones originally from here.”
Sonata stood back up too, from where she’d been crouching on the floor to read the screen without getting in the others’ way, and felt her knees complaining about being kept folded for that long. She watched Adagio sinking back into her seat and stretching her back, saying nothing but clearly agreeing.
That’s the answer, then? There are copies of us already in this world?
It was good to have an answer to the problem and to have solved the mystery and stuff, but also, there were three more sirens out there! And one of them was another Sonata Dusk! She could go find them and introduce herself – well, they’d recognise her, of course, but, oh, that would mean she’d have to explain where she came from and how she got there, and that meant studying stuff to make sure she got it right. But then she might have a siren sister she never fought with, like a twin but even better! And they could do all kinds of fun things together that Aria and Adagio never wanted to do like take loads of selfies of them in different outfi–
No, hang on, there’s a problem here.
If the other sirens could take selfies, why hadn’t they done that instead of being painted? ...Why? Umm, think, Sonata, think! Why would anyone want a painting instead of a photo? Because they were old-fashioned and stuff? Or, no, not old-fashioned, old! They had a painting done because it was too long ago for selfies to be a thing. In fact it was aaaages ago, the other sirens would be, like, ancient by now.
Oh, no, wait. They’d be dead by now.
Huh. No twin for me then. Sonata stared down at her hands, wondering how she’d lost a sister she never had. Three sisters, really, that she wouldn’t ever get to meet, since the other Aria and Adagio would have been just as old. But why? Why were they so old when she, and her proper sisters, were still so young?
“But why are we here now,” she asked out loud, finding no answer on her own, “when they were so long ago?” Seeing her sisters both look in her direction as she spoke, she continued, “If they’re us, shouldn’t we have the same birthdays or something?”
And then she spotted the look Adagio was giving her. Adagio had never looked at her like that before! That was the look Adagio did when she was impressed. Like, really impressed, the kind of thing that only happened when someone thought of something before she did. Sonata had seen the look directed at Aria once or twice, but had never been on the receiving end of it herself. It almost felt like a mistake for it to be heading her way.
Aria, looking more relaxed as she stood with her hands in her pockets, said, “We suggested time travel; it could have been both.”
One unicorn could send them across parallel universes and through time? That made being defeated by him feel a little less bad, if he had really been that powerful. But Sonata had found it hard to believe that a pony could have that much power when time travel had first been mentioned, so the idea of him doing that and different universes too...? Could all unicorns do that? She didn’t think so, or she and her sisters might have been stopped sooner. So what made that one pony so special?
“In fact,” Adagio said, sounding cunning, as she always did when discussing plans, “if you were trying to banish something to as far away as possible, so it could never return and” – her voice dropped to more of a growl – “wreak the vengeance it promised on you,” she paused for a moment to smile at them, showing all her teeth, “wouldn’t you throw it through distance and time, if you could?”
If she could? Sonata knew Adagio could be pretty scary when angry with her, like all her hair made her seem big and dangerous. Although she’d been just as scary at times like that when they lived in Equestria and none of them had hair, so it couldn’t just be her looking like a lion. Sonata looked at Adagio’s smile, one of the nastiest she’d ever seen from her sister (and much nastier than she’d ever received), and tried to imagine how she’d react if she were a pony wizard receiving that look.
Yeah. Yeah, I’d banish her as far away as I possibly could, and I still wouldn’t feel safe afterwards.
“So,” Aria shrugged, “we’re in a parallel world, three thousand years in the future.” Until she said that, she’d been staring at the carpet off to one side for a while, but as she spoke, she looked up, and seemed ok with it all. Maybe the carpet held hidden answers for how to deal with stuff? Or maybe it was just relaxing to fill everything you could see with fluffy white carpet, like a nice warm blanket for thinking that made the bad stuff seem not quite as bad, and also got rid of all the distractions so you could just work on how to make the bad stuff go away completely?
Maybe that was why Sonata liked clouds, which were also white and fluffy? Apart from clouds being pretty, anyway. Although the white carpet did look very nice too, so maybe they both did both things. Didn’t pegasus ponies use actual clouds for carpets? And if they really were good for thinking, did that make pegasi super-smart? ...Was that why Adagio suggested the white carpet to begin with, when Sonata had been picking furniture stuff?
“Looks like,” Adagio nodded. Neither she nor Aria looked upset about it, but not hugely happy either, apart from perhaps it being good to have an answer. Sonata wasn’t sure what to feel, it was all a bit too strange and far away from her actual life.
“What does that mean?” she asked. Obviously she knew what it meant, they’d just spent ages going on about it, but what did it mean for them? And what would they do now they knew it?
Aria shrugged again, still not taking her hands out of her pockets. “The home we knew is gone, even if we could get back to Equestria now.”
What would have happened to their cove, and Sonata’s little corner of it filled with all the pretty shells and shiny things she’d collected when the three of them were small? Aria said their home was gone, so maybe they wouldn’t even recognise which cove was theirs if they went back.
But they’d left the cove long before they were banished from Equestria, since they’d grown too big for it, so it wasn’t like they could have gone back there anyway. It was still sad, though, knowing the waves would have washed everything away as if she’d never been there at all.
“Everypony we encountered during our Equestrian campaign is dead,” Adagio said, reaching for her glass of wine on the table, which had been left forgotten while they’d all been talking. She sounded serious, like, not sad about it, but like it meant something important to her.
Not so much to Aria, who said, “Meh,” and made her nope-don’t-care face. Sonata kind of agreed; it wasn’t like they had been planning to ever go back there anyway, or knew any of the ponies’ names.
“Including the wizard,” Adagio said back quickly, over the top of her glass before taking a sip.
Oooh, except that one! We knew his name!
Sonata reacted without even thinking about it, taking a step closer to Aria, lifting her hand up and shouting.
“High five!”
A couple of months later, a little way across Canterlot, Sonata Dusk sat in a dirty backstage room on a smelly old sofa covered in food stains, and smiled to herself. That had been such a great day!
I like this Sonata; dim and very, very easily distracted (interjecting her lengthy, but slightly silly thoughts pretty often), but not obnoxious or... well, we all know the worst of the cliches by now.
She seems almost dependent on Adagio at this point, too, and while I don't know if it was intentional, their interactions (particularly Adagio's possibly proud look) engraved a firm Mamadagio image next to the bickering sister dynamic she has with Aria, all without going to canon-stretching extremes!
Never seen them work out their situation on their own like this either, but I think access to Google, some time watching TV, and Adagio's consistent use of genre savviness fit. That day in mind, looking forward to seeing how they address the question of going back 'home' for any length of time.
8230461 Thanks! Given how often I mention a certain well-known Sonata-centric story, you can probably guess where I drew inspiration from She was quite fun to write, as long as you're in no hurry to stick to the plot And stripping down the vocabulary used for her wasn't nearly as stifling as it was for writing Rainbow Dash, as she can be quite creative in her descriptions. 'Looked' comes up an awful lot in this chapter (53 times ), rather than more varied and precise terms. I still smile each time I read the bit near the beginning of the chapter about a problem trundling along, though
The long, silly thoughts are kind of how she balances into the problem-solving discussion. This chapter (and its second part) are particularly heavy on long-winded explanations and extrapolations from small details, and Sonata can only have so many so-dumb-she's-accidentally-clever moments, so the discussion is mostly the domain of Adagio and Aria (even in Sonata's chapter, Adagio still gets over twice as many words of dialogue as her), so Sonata's rambling internal monologue (sometimes on-topic, sometimes very much not) is kind of her counterpoint to that.
I'm really glad you mention Adagio having more of a mothering vibe here - it definitely wasn't intentional, and it's something I'm sometimes not too keen on, but even though I think I wrote Adagio just the same as in the last two chapters, I was worried she came across as a bit horrible when seen through Sonata's eyes.
It was very frustrating realising at this point in the story how little information they have to work with (canonically, assuming they didn't have further interactions with the Rainbooms we didn't see, or hear much from elsewhere). They certainly don't know about the portal, but they also don't know about harmony magic, or the Rainbooms being the counterparts of the Element bearers, or Princess Twilight being from Equestria, and probably not Sunset either. And then there's the whole time jump thing
Thank you for taking the time to go through the timeline stuff with me back in February, I was going to mention it in the author's notes but ultimately thought it would be more relevant to the next half of the chapter, so could go there instead.
I’m seconding the notion of this being a very good Sonata. There were times when I felt like you were skirting just on the edge of having her get too distracted, but I think you did a good job of reigning her in before she got completely out of hand
However, while her ditziness and attention span made her quite entertaining, I’m even more appreciative of how relentlessly hopeful she is, if in the childlike way of being utterly faithful in Adagio’s scheming capabilities.
This line of hers might be my favorite, though:
since it leads to a perfectly legitimate insight despite the very childish rationalization
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I find that writing Sonata doesn't necessarily require less dialogue to be less sophisticated, just different. Like fine wine served in a sippy cup.
I guess it's kind of hard to have that at a formal dinner (other characters having an intelligent discussion), though, so it kind of has to find its own place somewhere, and the kids' table in Sonata's head is probably as good as it's going to get in terms of including her.
Don't give wine to children, in sippy cups or otherwise.
And, I don't think there was a Mamadagio vibe in the last two chapters, but Sonata's vaguely childish (though not exactly innocent, high-fiving over someone having died and not apparently caring all that much about the rest, even her shiny shell cove) nature brought forward with her internal monologue and the patient parent kind of role Adagio takes at the start of their talk here are what brought it to mind. I could sort of see why she might seem bad at first, but anyone with sanity left to lose would get kind of tired of Sonata and her sippy cup ramblings sooner or later, and in most depictions, Aria and Adagio are long past later.
I don't know how much difference the timeline stuff will make to them now, but am looking forward to finding out!
8230615
Thank you! I completely agree about those bits almost going too far, I did at one point look over the document and realise I'd just accidentally written a whole page about whales Hopefully I will manage a similar balance with the second half of the chapter, when it one day gets written I'm pleasantly surprised you liked her, given that I know you lean towards her being more ditzy than stupid
...I did really enjoy just now putting a spoiler tag on that one particular word
That one happened almost by accident, it was just going to cut straight to her realising they were gone, but I was very glad when I thought of the selfie thing as it does link it together much better.
It's a bit of a funny one, that - that point in the story is an unspecified time before Rainbow Rocks, but they've already set up housing stuff and are busy researching, so it's probably not more than four months before the movie. So at that point, the sirens have been in the EG world for between four and eight months. And while Adagio and Aria have doubtless realised it from research, Sonata may not quite instinctively have grasped that technology here is transient, with cameraphones being a relatively modern invention (or indeed the selfie as a cultural meme). Given the absence of technology in Equestria (and how cut off the sirens were from that anyway), mankind's history being one of slow technological progress is legitimately a lot less obvious for her than it would be for anyone else. So I think it's a nice childish moment, but it's also a bit more justified than some of her other (whale-related) stuff
Thanks! I hadn't thought about it while writing it, but I do like how she's scared by quite a few things about her sisters, but never their intelligence; it's nice having her accept that they're both a lot smarter than her, but not feel threatened by it.
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It's an area I was surprised to learn was lacking, since the general fimfic trend is to have Sonata as the most chatty of the three, but I definitely have her talking the least in everything I've written for her (in fact this is the only chapter I've had in any story where she speaks more words than Aria). It's a lot more noticeable here since it's her POV, but it's something I'd like to improve on. I ran the numbers on Metasirens, there's one chapter where Adagio and Aria each get four times as many dialogue words as Sonata. And across everything I've published, Aria has double Sonata's dialogue word count, and Adagio double again.
So I think it's mostly just how I've been writing them, with Adagio and Aria sparring back and forth as the focus, and Sonata piping up from time to time to interject something. I would be interested in breaking that pattern, though, but I agree here the balance is probably this way for a good reason, and might be the best option for the chapter.
Quite right, make them buy their own!
The mammadagio vibe is an interesting one... I think the difference between it in this chapter and the previous ones is that Adagio's perspective makes it more clear that she (at least in those previous cases, though not necessarily here) doesn't really behave that way out of love (in the traditional sense, at least), but a rational calculation of the best way to keep her unit together. The stretched patience thing I think completely understandable from Adagio and Aria's side, though I did still worry about it coming across as mean. There's a casual disregard, too: my favourite moment of the chapter is Sonata noting that whenever she approaches Adagio to ask her something, the latter's first response is usually to reach for her wine. There's also an unhealthy amount of fear, I think, that might get in the way of a mother/daughter-type bond to come across in a nice way, as Sonata seems very wary of upsetting Adagio. Again, that all seemed a reasonable response to canon Adagio snapping at Sonata about it not being the fruit punch, but reading it back does give it a slightly oppressive atmosphere. Thankfully, Sonata probably isn't bright enough to take it to heart I'm now trying to remember in the film if she ever snaps back at Adagio, as she does with Aria.
The main thing was going to be how familiar they would have been with Princesses Celestia and Luna, and therefore if they'd be able to come up with the parallel universe explanation upon encountering the principal and vice-principal. I had scrapped that entire section of the chapter before I thought of using the human siren angle to bring out that side of the discussion
8230912
Well, it might just’ve been this containing chapter that did this for me, but I didn’t really get the impression that she was stupid, at least not in the way so many other people inexplicably seem to enjoy. Maybe she was more stupid-seeming in the first two chapters, but in this one I think the highlights for me were her short attention span and lack of focus more than anything else; her thoughts are coherent and sometimes even fairly thoughtful, just not always relevant and not always particularly complex, so she’s more out-there, I guess, than stupid. With the whales, for example. Furthermore, as you noted, she’s capable of, when she’s actually thinking about on-topic things, deducing the time difference through cues that wouldn’t be intuitively obvious, such as selfies being modern while paintings tend to be old. Admittedly, there was a bit of a leap of logic she made in that not all paintings are ancient, but her reasoning still required her to make sense of things that she had very little familiarity with, which I think would require at least a certain degree of intellectual sophistication.
In a way, it might be a testament to her naivety; you mentioned in another comment that Adagio’s attempts to hold the three together seem more rational than loving, whereas it seems clear to a certain extent that Sonata adores her older sisters. If she overestimated the extent to which they reciprocate that feeling, it’s only natural that she’d be pretty accepting of them being much smarter. In a more callous environment, the intelligence gap would make for the most immediately obvious reason to cut her loose if Aria and Adagio decided they were fed up with her, but Sonata’s probably innocent enough to assume that’s never going to be the case (Similar to how she doesn’t quite make the connection between Adagio’s exasperation and tendency to drink), hence her lack of worry.
That might have been a little more cynical than where you were going with it If nothing else, I do like how Sonata is afraid of the consequences of stepping out of line, but her reaction to said fear, as shown by this line:
suggests to me that she’s more concerned about Adagio being mad at her than at any kind of serious threat, which is a dynamic I’m much more comfortable with than some others out there.
8231175
Sonata's whole reason for existing in canon, I think, was to help with exposition by asking questions and needing things spelled out as plainly as possible, for which a scatter-brained ditz was pretty much ideal. Given that she's exactly that and the ensuing conversation helps show the reader a few things here, I'd say you hit it on the head.
They definitely aren't a touchy-feely family or anything, so not being too affectionate fits. There may be something to be said for Mamadagio not necessarily equating to the bake-cookies-and-sing-to-sleep kind of mother, and I can see where that might make some people uncomfortable.
If it's any consolation, I'm not sure Sonata feeling totally free to say/do whatever she wants at all times is much better, because while she's apparently not wary at all of ticking anyone off in the movie, I've seen quite a few depictions in which her unchecked antics just make the other two miserable, with them never actually doing anything about it for unaddressed (and possibly nonexistent) reasons. I'd rather see a reasonable response from someone that doesn't find Pinkie Pie endearing than have them just resign themselves to being her chew-toy for no reason, if that makes sense.
Only in the sense that her some of her responses cause them both some amount of psychological pain, I think. Aria complains about their situation and Adagio's plans and belittles Sonata on a regular basis, Sonata only ever getting angry/annoyed about Aria insulting her. Adagio gets annoyed about either of them acting stupid, which falls to one much more than the other, but Sonata never challenges/snaps at her in any way, giggling when Aria is shut down with the "My. Lead." moment.
From what we could see in the fiendship comics, they aren't much bigger than ponies. Siren and pony height comparison.
There is also a posibility, that the Equestria, Sunset and Twilight came from, isn't the same, the sirens were banished from. Time doesn't have to have the same speed in every universe. There could be three paralel universes in play.
Wasn't stated that the painting is three thousand years old? So how did she deduce they are thousand years in future? Yeah we know from the film that they are thousand years in future from the Equestria Sunset came from. But Aria couldn't know that.
8231555 I think if she escaped seeming overly stupid in this chapter, then I suspect she's probably ok in the other two as well, she's not nearly as prominent there and doesn't get as many silly or distracted moments? I remember when we were discussing her in the second chapter of Resplendence Revoked; I realised that past a certain point I'm not sure of the difference between stupid and ditzy, so it may well be that I aimed for one and ended up with the other
The logic leaps in the painting thing unfortunately I think are failures more on my part than hers I perhaps should have included more description of the painting itself, a dark oil canvas masterpiece with an ornate gold frame, which, even if it had been done in modern times, would have been fair for her to stylistically describe as old-fashioned. I wasn't quite sure how to describe that in Sonata terms, but I definitely should have mentioned the frame She's certainly baffled by the idea that anyone would want a painting when they could have a photograph, so she's doing an Applejack and letting her own prejudices get in the way of her objective reasoning, but that was intentional
I'm happy with the balance of her intellect here, so if it reads as ditzy more than dim, that's great with me Might also make some of the future moments a bit more convincing, if she has to act a bit smarter at any point (I wrote out some dialogue ages ago about Sonata's assessment of Aria's personality that goes quite a bit further than 'frowny cloud,' so if it helps that seem more in-character when it comes up then that can only be a good thing ).
That's true, I hadn't thought of that One of the problems of spending this long on a story is that I sometimes forget where I'm going with certain things, so I may have overstated the Adagio not loving them angle. Rereading it, I think it's about right, but the phrasing is very important: she's not acting out of love, but that doesn't mean she doesn't love them (perhaps in her own way, very, very deep down). Someone asked the question yesterday 'What would Adagio do if Darth Vader kidnapped Aria and Sonata?' and my answer was 'Send him flowers with a note saying 'They're your problem now :-)',' and I do like that level of detachment, but I also like the warring sibling angle of them loving each other but not liking each other (or maybe I have that the wrong way around, I'm not even sure).
I agree I certainly hadn't imagined any greater conflicts happening between them than a lot of shouting. On the one hand I can't see Adagio making empty threats, on the other I don't think any of them would physically hurt each other. And Sonata would happily shout back at Aria, but I'm not sure either way if she would with Adagio. Either way, I'm fine with shouting, and I'm kind of surprised I wrote Sonata as being so afraid of it
8231849
True, I'd much rather go this way than the opposite. I'll see how it pans out in the next chapter. And it may well be necessary for Adagio and Aria to try to restrain her like that, if even after that kind of conditioning she still blabs to Sunset about singing to get what they want, so one can assume that if they have been training her not to do that as in this story then she'd have been even worse without it. But if the main impression the chapter leaves isn't that her sisters are fairly horrible to her, that's a good thing Neither overly horrible or overly caring was intentional, but it's probably better if the latter happens accidentally rather than the former
Hmmm. I'm genuinely not sure if Sonata would shout back at Adagio - this version of her or the canon-only one. I suspect so, she's probably a bit too act/speak-before-thinking to show that much restraint when she feels strongly about something, as we only see her holding herself back here when she's mildly interested. I'd prefer it if she felt she could shout back, it seems more fair. But then one probably doesn't want to get into threat escalation with Adagio
8231877 Hi Jaroslav, how are you?
It's probably best if I just say flat out that I'm completely ignoring the comics; I can't say I've been impressed by the bits of them I've seen or heard about, so I'll take the handy not-official-canon justification to say they don't exist as far as this story is concerned
I know the projection forms they have during the final battle could be larger than their real life siren forms, but they're pretty huge in the fairytale sequence too.
vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/d/d4/Storybook_page_about_the_sirens_EG2.png/revision/latest?cb=20141029010852
It could be metaphor, having them looming over Equestria like that, but with so little to go on it could also just as well be an accurate depiction. So, given that both times we see them in the film as sirens, they're huge, I'm going to take Twilight's book illustrations at face value and say the sirens were the size of buses, and that the projections are actual size (they're still completely dwarfed by the sky alicorn though).
My main size reference picture is this one below, which shows their shadows on the ground in comparison to Vinyl's car, which I think puts them at about twenty feet (although I can't remember what measurements either the EG films or the FIM series use, so 'feet' may be an anachronism).
vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/4/43/Siren_Aria_and_Sonata_flying_above_the_Rainbooms_EG2.png/revision/latest?cb=20141029082231
...Incidentally, as I've stuffed two images into this reply already, I never liked the appearance of their siren projections - they looked too rounded and cartoony, and considerably less malevolent than their human forms, their hybrid ponied-up forms, and their storybook forms. I adored how they looked in Twilight's fairytale, so beautiful and alien but also so ominous and threatening.
This is the only time I've seen them done in MLP's usual style and still look scary (source - by couchcrusader):
derpicdn.net/img/2016/9/29/1261017/full.png
Hmmmm. That is entirely possible. I think it depends how many different universes use the term 'Equestria.' We in the fandom usually talk about 'the EG/EQG world' or 'Equestria,' and Adagio definitely says in the opening scene that they used to be in Equestria. And we know from Twilight's book that Star Swirl once banished three sirens from Equestria. I don't think it could be absolutely ruled out they're not the same sirens in the book that we see in the film, but I think it would take quite a lot to rule it in, and I'm not sure what difference it would really make if storybook Equestria is so similar to FIM Equestria?
For ease of assigning names to different universes, I'd rather just say there's only one Equestria seen in the franchise and one EG world, with the sirens having crossed from one to the other
Thank you for catching this! I wrote that line ages ago, when it was just a dialogue skeleton without prose, and must have just typed it out into the proper chapter without thinking about it I have gone back and changed it in the chapter text 'three thousand years' doesn't quite have the same casual ring to it as 'a thousand years' (I did consider 'a few thousand years' instead, but since they have an accurate figure at three thousand that even Sonata uses, I thought Aria would too).
Ah, but are they only a thousand years forwards from when they left Equestria, canonically? How do we actually know that? Everyone assumes, but I did quite a bit of digging into it in February, and unless there's a line in Rainbow Rocks I've missed, it's never properly confirmed. I think - and, again, unless there's a line I've missed, in which case I'll feel like an idiot - we only assume a thousand years because it was Star Swirl who banished them, and he knew Princess Luna (since she mentions having known him in Luna Eclipsed).
The only concrete number we really know in Equestrian history (going just on the show - not the comics, the journal, or what anyone has said on Twitter) is that Luna was banished for a thousand years. But before that, she reigned alongside Celestia until she grew jealous, and we're never given a figure for how long that lasted (as we see in the first episode). Before that, there was the reign of Discord (shown in Princess Twilight Sparkle), and again, we have no evidence to suggest anything about how long he ruled for.
We do know, however, that he ruled Equestria, so the trouble with the windigoes must have been before that, since that's what led to Equestria's founding. Again, we have no idea how long Princess Platinum, Commander Hurricane and Chancellor Puddinghead and their descendants ruled Equestria for before Discord showed up. The only thing we do know is that Princess Platinum's assistant, Clover The Clever, was a protege of Star Swirl, so he was at least around from Equestria being founded to Luna being banished. But he was also a wizard with access to time travel, so a normal pony's natural lifespan doesn't seem like much of a limiting factor there.
I think it most likely that the sirens came to Equestria after the windigos (since Adagio refers to it as Equestria, rather than whatever the previous pony land had been called) but before Discord, since it's Star Swirl and his unicorn magic that deals with them rather than Celestia and Luna wielding the Elements of Harmony. It could be that they were at the same time as Discord and before Celestia and Luna arrived on the scene, but it seems funny that Star Swirl would take the time to banish the sirens when he couldn't deal with Discord, who was kind of a bigger problem, or would even notice the strife they were spreading in a kingdom ruled by Discord.
So! Sorting all this out in this story would involve the sirens sitting down with Princess Twilight in her library with a lot of books (which would have had to survive - unaltered - through Discord's reign), and even then they'd be at the mercy of inaccurate historically recorded detail and so on. I have no idea how the story will end, but that's not something I'm planning to happen, and if it did happen it wouldn't be for a while. So all the sirens know is that they're in the EG world in the year we'd call 2014 (all dates in the rest of this post will use that calendar, though it is not used in this story), and the sirens native to that world were there by at the latest the 8th century BC, since that's when Homer's Odyssey was written. Adagio's history lesson starts in 282 BC, but that means the human sirens and the Equestrian ones are a good 2,800 years apart.
That leaves us with a pre-Nightmare Moon gap of 1,800 years in Equestria, so if you think it's feasible that the post-siren-banishing reign of the descendants of Platinum, Hurricane and Puddinghead, then the reign of Discord, and then the peaceful reign of Celestia and Luna together could have added up to 1,800 years, then that's the easy answer.
If not (and it's a much longer figure than I'd like - I'm inclined to suggest that Luna was banished for longer than she and Celestia had already ruled together, for example), then it could be that time flows differently in each dimension, but I don't really like that take on it as it means all sorts of timeline hassle for Twilight and Sunset going back and forth (not to mention writing to each other). My preferred alternative solution would be that something about Star Swirl's spell depositing the Equestrian sirens in the EG world in the future also displaced the human sirens back in time, sending them further back into the past. So the human sirens might naturally have been around in, say, 600 AD, and were then magically zapped back to 800 BC when the Equestrian ones arrived.
But that would be very difficult for the characters here to discuss and confirm, since no one would be likely to know for sure. I hadn't before really thought about how long the Equestrian founders' descendants ruled before Discord showed up; that could conceivably be a long time, so I think I prefer that explanation, with the sirens banished from Equestria 2,800 years previously and without time displacement for the human sirens.
Sorry for the massive post; the discussion in the chapter was my attempt to explain as much as was necessary for the story without needing this huge discussion, but it probably would have helped if I'd had Aria say the right thing Thanks again for catching that!
8232715
Sonata is a bit more the fly-off-the-handle type than the others, isn't she? When arguing over fruit punch, Sonata is the one to resort to slapping (to which Aria retaliates by adorably messing up her hair), from which it's not hard to picture that she might go off if provoked about something. I'm not sure calling her stupid would do it, however, because right after "You'll have to excuse them, they're idiots.", she just smiles brightly, almost as if to say "Heh, yea, what can ya do?"
And now I'm picturing a slightly masochistic Sonata actively trying to get yelled at. .-.
If that's part of the reason Sonata never snaps back, she might actually be smarter than Aria, in her own way.
8232881 Yeah, I think so. Impulsiveness cuts both ways
Ooh, that's a very good (and alarming) thought! I'm now wondering what Aria would make of that if Adagio pointed it out
So before I read this I have one very important question ask-Do they sing and if so, are they original songs or songs someone else made? I'll still read it regardless but I like to know.
8277553 Hey, only give it a read if you want to, if it doesn't sound like your thing then don't feel bad for giving it a miss.
When you ask if they sing, do you mean generally, like 'Aria sung a few notes to herself on her way to work,' or a big scene of them singing an actual song with words and all?
To answer: Adagio blasts a single note in a flashback, but that's it so far. I'm not at all keen on songs written out in print, so there's none of that.
8277578 Even better. I'll check input when I can
8277689 Sure, whenever's good with you.
8232881
I see you Eyeswirl. If you write that, I'm reading it.
So, this was a good freaking chapter. I love the breakdown of how everything went down. From Aria suggesting they burn down houses, to Adagio slowly talking them out of it, to finding out about other sirens with Sonata's accidental insight... this all felt really well done for me. Is it long? Yeah, but I enjoyed the explanations and how they continually worked themselves through things. I always love the fics where the Sirens are smarter than just "We're going to get you back for that [exact plan, still fails because of lack of foresight]" or more determined than just "We got nuthin' so I guess we're hangin' with you" (which I am, regrettably, also responsible for doing to them on occasion). Adagio is the ultimate genre savvy. She planned everything down to a T, so I find it borderline impossible to believe that she would come up with a plan without thinking ahead first. And, I just find it difficult to believe the Sirens would hang around the Rainbooms without motivation of some kind (possibly involving personality displacement, like some fics do). So, seeing them in this light was very refreshing.
Adagio's slow, methodical, and, if I may be so bold, calming way of talking her sisters down from setting fire to things reminds me almost of a person calming a frightened cat and it's, honestly, really nice to see from her. The thought processes of the Sirens are all very believable as well. This was freaking good.
Also... that last line has me confused and slightly frightened. I don't know why, but the fact that the day was apparently a flashback makes me very worried for what happened to the other two Sirens. Just saying.
8290024 Thanks for the kind words and the sizeable comment
Ok, to address your last concern first, about the flashback, because it's the simplest:
1,100 words into this latest chapter, Sonata 'thought back to the afternoon they’d learned about the other sirens. She could see the scene perfectly in her head, just as clearly as when it had happened.'
Everything from there until the final paragraph of the chapter is the flashback, and everything else in the story has been happening 'now,' being the evening of the Battle of the Bands final near the end of Rainbow Rocks. So the other two sirens are alive and well, as we see them in the first two chapters and at the start of this one (or at least as alive and well as they can be right after losing their jewels).
The irony does not escape me that I once left a comment on one of your stories saying the boundary between flashback and present could be more distinct I didn't really want to put 5,000 words of chapter in italics to show that the rest of it was a flashback, and a scene break with a horizontal rule seemed rather interrupting for just Sonata's wandering thoughts, so I left it as it is. I did wonder if people would get confused, because it is easily overlooked especially when skimming, so thanks for saying.
As to the rest of your comment - again, thanks!
We know that there's a balance to be struck between writing what you want to write and writing what others want to read. My general trend is to write exactly what I want to write, and then panic at the last minute over how it will be received (and I was wonderfully reaffirmed by fimfiction when not one new downvote appeared on the story when I had the sirens considering whether or not to go on an arson spree, murdering our beloved heroes, which I was very concerned about publishing but still wrote the chapter exactly how I wanted it, as if it were for me alone).
That said, audience feedback definitely does have some advantages, and not just for the technical execution of writing, or conveying a story. I find story ideas can come from all over the place on this site, sometimes in response to comments, sometimes stories by other writers. And those ideas can be positively inspired to try those same angles yourself (with enough differences for it to be your own story) or negatively, to push back against what someone else has done. That Chrysalis story I wrote, for example, was just an escapist fantasy I took to writing because I'd felt trapped in Rainbow Dash's head for two weeks writing the previous story, and desperately threw myself into something as far from that as possible to cleanse my palate, which happened to be about two characters I'd been enjoying reading recently. Other stories in different stages of completion (or at least conceptualisation) I'm working on are inspired by reacting to/against what others have written/commented.
In the case of this story, it was two comments I'd seen on similar post-Rainbow Rocks siren stories, though I now couldn't tell you which ones. The first said that all siren stories start with them either running down the street away from CHS, having fled the stage and never looked back, or with them showing up at CHS again as pupils some time later. My plan had been the former, so I changed it to the backstage thing seen here. But probably the most important comment was someone saying that the course of action the sirens were taking in a story was unrealistic; that there was no way they'd do that and the commenter couldn't understand what would lead them to make those decisions. So I thought the best way to avoid that problem would be to have them talk through their options, and if particular paths are rejected, we'll at least understand why (and hopefully agree with their reasoning).
So of the three options you raised that you prefer it when stories avoid, well, I don't think we can completely rule any of them out at this point ('we're going to get you back for that' seems unlikely, given how smart they are and how self-destructive they know revenge to be - at least, the 'I'll get you back if it's the last thing I do' kind that happily throws everything else away to achieve that getting even - but it does mention that they swore revenge on Starswirl, which they show no signs of having cooled off about), hopefully if any of those courses of action are decided on, we'll understand why, and (if Adagio's made a convincing case) agree with at the time.
This line of yours:
This is an interesting one. Firstly, it's possible that she isn't/didn't, and just coasted on very good luck. It's bloody unlikely, but hey, it works out for the heroes that way pretty much always, so... Secondly, it's possible that it's less conscious planning and analysis and more just very, very good instincts for going with things she'll later be able to twist. In much the same way as some people are just 'good with people,' Adagio could be very tuned instinctively to manipulation. I am vaguely considering writing one story somewhere down the line taking that view of her, with her being a lot more impulsive and less tied down to plans, because she's a lot more magnificent bitch than chessmaster, and I do worry that that's sometimes lost in fanfiction (since chessmaster villains are way easier to write).
However, I could believe that of Midnight Sparkle, Gloriosa Daisy etc, if they'd displayed Adagio's behaviour, because they were at least born and raised human. Adagio has had no contact with humans before arriving in the EG world, so she shouldn't really have natural instincts for manipulating them, except for where that would cross over with ponies (or unless she's been here for a millennium and had plenty of time to develop them), so I think at least part of her skills are conscious rather than instinctive. That said, she manages them very fast, and often while doing several things at once, so I think there's some degree of instinct at work there too, perhaps.
That's why here everything she does is calculated towards keeping Aria and Sonata on-side, and steering them wherever's best for the three of them. She probably wouldn't have bothered sparing them anything like as much thought while they had their gems, but we've all read stories of the sirens splitting up after the battle, and I think Adagio realises it's a legitimate concern and does what she can to head it off.
However, none of that really matters from a plot standpoint, just a character one. What matters from a plot standpoint is that I think the interesting thing with Adagio is watching her use her intellect to find ways to claw her way up from nothing. So I think it's quite likely that she would have thought to put contingency plans in place and had numerous safety nets, effectively able to carry on almost as comfortably without their gems as they were before.
But that's not much fun as a story.
I thought 'and here's how to conquer homelessness in five simple steps' might be a bit patronising and idealised, so I left them the house, and I didn't really want to deal with them having to get jobs, so I mentioned their money week in this chapter. But they're a very long way from world-conquering territory here, and the only way they could get there is by squeezing every advantage they can out of the things they do have, and twisting the situation to their advantage however possible.
In a way, that's why the arson discussion is there in the second chapter - I'd seen one too many comments on other stories involving Twilight's phrase 'they're just harmless teenage girls now.' I always felt the threat from the sirens came not from their power, but how willing they were to use it, and if you're a bit creative then wreaking pinpoint destruction on unsuspecting targets is easy; you just have to be willing to. So after establishing that Adagio would at least try to keep the three of them together (and therefore no blame would be thrown at any one of them, deserved or not), and that fleeing the country would be difficult without passports, the next order of business for me was establishing that the sirens were still very much a threat... if they wanted to be. There's a big difference between 'lacking magic' and 'harmless' - Sunset's three year reign, after all, was magicless, and only magic brought in from another world could stop it. And Adagio here in the second chapter, with no forethought, puts together a solid plan to kill each of their enemies, without them even needing to go home to get stuff first.
I think I've probably given them more of a safety net, especially financially, than I'd originally planned with the story, making their house a bit more opulent perhaps, and I hit a technological development problem with something I'd (annoyingly) already seeded a chapter before, which caused some issues and needed a change of tack there (not many details are given in this chapter, but more might come out later), so I'll see how that levels out, but in my head they're still clinging on with intelligence and force of will alone, because that's where I think they're at their most interesting.
I can't say the imagery of calming down a frightened cat was intentional, but wouldn't be at all surprised to learn it's naturally ingrained in me and came out subconsciously - the question I've been asking recently, though, is what Adagio's feelings are in that situation (see the below comment discussions on the third chapter with Eyeswirl and Naiad), because I wanted Adagio's reasons to be pragmatic ones of them standing a better chance as three rather than one, rather than actual concern for her sisters' well-being. But her stance of them having lost enough that night, and therefore her sisters being all the more precious in a loving context rather than one of simply keeping hold of assets available to her, kind of happened accidentally. Looking back at the opening of both the first and second chapters, neither angle is explicitly stated, so there could be any balance there between the two. The balance might well shift, in fact, depending on Adagio's mood. When she's feeling more fond or protective of them, perhaps it feels more loving, but when they're a lodestone for her, she dwells more on how she needs them. Perhaps, that is. It's nice being able to read into it with as much from either column as the reader would like, but again I should mention that that was unintentional as far as I remember, and often it's easy to see things that way in hindsight, but keeping them open to two interpretations going forwards can turn out to be a pain (having to keep things intentionally vague, when discussing character motivations, can be crippling in stories intending to take a detailed look at the characters). So sooner or later the story might be more explicit about the balance there.
The other thing I should perhaps say with regard to Adagio calmly talking her sisters down is that unless Adagio's manipulative skills really are some siren instinct, and aimed purely at prey, then I really like the idea that if she has free access to her talent for reading people and situations, she'd turn those observation and analytical skills towards her fellow sirens when necessary. So she's very finely calculating exactly how far she needs to push Aria to break the hold of certain notions, then tiptoeing up to that point and holding onto her by a lifeline while pushing her over the edge, and pulling her away from it again afterwards. I used to have a blog post on here (since deleted, since its main argument, of the sirens being metavillains, was then adapted and published as part of my metasiren story) which mentioned that the sirens are very good at pushing things absolutely to the limit, but no further. When they're circling Sunset in the corridor, they make some as-harsh-as-reasonably-possible claims, like that Sunset isn't in the Rainbooms because her friends worry she's too unpopular, but never so outlandish that Sunset's actually able to debunk the arguments. I think that's the same skill Adagio is using on Aria, of knowing just how far to go.
I have to say, as a final thought - I worry for the world if Sonata's thought process was 'believable'
Thanks again, comments on this story always brighten my day considerably
Sonata is best blue fish.
8335440 I'm not sure... I mean if she's competing with Dory, then