[HICHE] ADKoPD: Episode 4, The Power of Flutter Valley

So I know how it looks. I had the Wraith wipe out G3 Ponyville sans one right at the beginning and then immediately after I had the G3 Breezies wipe themselves out sans one. I don’t hate G3, I swear! The idea to include past Gen world chunks in this story came early on but after the full setup was otherwise established, and admittedly these were the first two worlds I planned stories for. I can’t remember if I meant for them to both be this early, but they were needed to more firmly establish the stakes without endangering the characters I still wanted to write parts for, and are part of a ‘progression’ I’ll touch upon later. As for why it was those world chunks in particular, maybe I was unimpressed with parts of the G3 episodes I’d recently watched, but I promise it’s a show of love for me to include them as the sacrificial lambs (everyone wants to be a body on CSI), and besides, imagining the G4 ponies losing fights against dinosaurs is what let me warm up to the idea of watching FiM in the first…I should just stop talking now, right? Welcome, friends, to Episode 4 of “A Different Kind of Pegasus Device”.

[G-Docs Chapter Link – The Power of Flutter Valley]

Many parts of this episode are rather underwritten making it the shortest word count thus far, so bear with me as I list the basic details. Our new mission team consists of Twilight and Rainbow Dash. Also on the team are Golden Harvest (the fandom’s “Carrot Top”) and the crystal pony Ivory, but they haven’t really been written into any major scenes or roles at this point. You’ll find this a bit often as episodes go by, it’s a hazard of the rotating cast challenge I gave myself. We start events as Jumper 2 (because Jumpers are numbered for convenience now) arrives over a planet via Spacegate and follows a sudden energy surge on the surface to find a primitive settlement. Welcome to Flutter Valley, a Gen 1 location featured in the original MLP movie and ripped from the rest of the world to be given its own planet in this story, inhabited by the Flutter Ponies, ponies with thinner legs and clear butterfly wings – basically full-sized Breezies. The timid residents of the grassy crater live in small treetop gazebos, an image that could only come from the 80s. The layout of Flutter Valley onscreen changes almost between shots because of the animation budget, so I can arrange the location only so precisely.

Our explorers are greeted by Queen Rosedust, who oddly specifically wonders why only one of them is a crystal pony. Through an unwritten conversation, we hear about the Sun Stone of Flutter Valley (from G1), a large orange crystal they revere and which Rosedust says protects them, perched in a mini Stonehenge setup. In G1, the Sun Stone is a magical artifact that Flutter Valley needs to stay bright, pure, and happy, and without it will fall into a physically corrupted mess; in this story, however, when our heroes arrive at the stone ruins, it turns out to be a ZPM. Obviously, Rainbow is already thinking of how to swap it for one of Atlantis’ dead ZPMs because they’ll never notice, being so primitive they haven’t yet invented the front door much less anything a ZPM will power (this is similar to an SGA episode, “Childhood’s End”). Other Flutter Ponies are slowly coaxed out by Rosedust with personalities taken from their G1 appearances if any were presented, but of particular note is Honeysuckle, who’s not timid at all.

Skipping the unwritten boring part of everyone talking about things, the story continues when a Wraith Dart flies overhead, coming in for a quick fly-by attack. Twilight shoots it down with a magic beam, but when the pilot attacks Rosedust, she displays a power of Flutter Ponies she’d tried to keep hidden: the Utter Flutter, a stream of sparkling wing dust that does whatever the story needs it to, in this case petrifying the Wraith. She also uses her crown to briefly give Twilight the ability to see the life forces glowing within all living things: them, the other ponies…and the crashed Dart. As in SGA, the Wraith use organic, borderline living ships (pushed a bit past borderline for this story), and Rosedust isn’t happy that Twilight hurt this life that couldn’t control its actions. For this reason, Rosedust is strictly against fighting the Wraith, but Honeysuckle seems itching for action, so the team tries to get her to help them convince the other Flutter Ponies to in some way assist their efforts.

They don’t manage to get very far, unfortunately, before a trio of new Darts arrives to check on the first one. As the team tries jumping into action, shockingly the Flutter Ponies use Utter Flutter to deactivate their Jumper and even Twilight’s magic. As Twilight pleads to let them help protect the Flutter Ponies’ paradise like they didn’t manage to in Breezie Blossom, Rosedust reveals that they don’t need outside help. It turns out that the stone ruins the ZPM is sitting on are actually a hidden machine and the Flutter Ponies aren’t as dirt-primitive as they’d first appeared. “What a twist!” Powered by the ZPM, the mechanism puts an invisible shield over Flutter Valley that effortlessly protects it from the Darts. Then, Rosedust has it do something else: briefly give the living Darts the ability to think and act for themselves. The Darts use this opportunity to turn on and kill their pilots, two being destroyed in the process, but the third ejecting its Wraith before flying down and landing calmly next to everyone. So, Atlantis has control of a Dart now. Sweet.

In the aftermath, Rosedust explains that their mechanism keeps Flutter Valley out of danger by sliding it into a parallel dimension, they only slid back because they hadn’t seen a Crystal Pony ship in millennia and were curious, and that the energy surge from coming back had drawn the Wraith’s attention. Also, Honeysuckle was only impatient that Rosedust waited so long before fighting back, not that Flutter Ponies are paralyzed pacifists. They don’t fight the Wraith because they don’t believe in catching their living ships in the crossfire, but as seen, the Wraith themselves are dead meat if they’re caught one-on-one. Flutter Valley will have to hide again before a bigger Wraith search party arrives, but this draws their ZPM into question again. In SGA, ZPMs at maximum output 24/7 last around 3,500 years and can’t be recharged at any point, but in this story, magic gives us a solution. Stripping away all the technobabble, the Flutter Ponies use harmony magic to exploit a ZPM’s canon functionality and recharge it to use the same one indefinitely; there’s a more lore-intensive explanation in the draft’s dialogue for those interested, it’ll resurface again later. Anyway, as Flutter Valley shifts out of phase again, the team flies the Jumper and newly captured Dart back to Atlantis, and Pinkie has a brief scene washing it with the only confirmed song in the story (I’m bad at music, so I stole the tune from “Psych: The Musical”), where it seems to somehow appear happy. We end things off back with the captured pegasi, where Spitfire tries volunteering to be taken next to protect the others, but the Wraith Commander suddenly senses something elsewhere and leaves. As in SGA, the Wraith are telepathic on a certain level, so what could he have sensed? We’ll find out later…

If you hadn’t already guessed or didn’t know them beforehand, the Flutter Ponies in this story are meant to be a rather direct parallel to the Nox, aliens from SG-1 that have basically the same story in their own episode…“The Nox”. Very clever name. Staying hidden out of phase is also in reference to one usage of Merlin’s ancient laptop, also from SG-1. The Flutter Ponies are certainly a force to be reckoned with, but like the Nox, their philosophy prevents them from interfering with the big bad of their story on a large scale, at least by traditional means. Now regarding the underused side cast, if I were going to fully flesh out the story, I’d make sure to give them better roles, starting by perhaps reattributing existing dialogue to them to glean a personality from and then expanding on that, likely to take some of the big words away from Rainbow who probably wouldn’t be using them anyway.

With “The Power of Flutter Valley”, we’ve reached the first and by no means the last episode where this summary will probably be a clearer or more complete read than the draft itself, which will add little beyond specific dialogue. There’s a reason I decided to release the story in this manner, when I said it wasn’t finished I meant it. It’s still no less of an important episode, though, and serves as a turning point for the attitudes of our characters, showing that power which can score reliable victories against the Wraith does exist, as well as giving them something else to think about when facing them. Speaking of facing them, prepare for the Expedition to get a bit too up close and personal with the Wraith for the first time in the next episode, “Enemy in the Sky”.