One morning, a soft clopping came from the door. Pinkie bounced over and pulled it open to reveal a little pony wearing priestly robes. She smiled brightly at Pinkie. "Hello. Is Silver Spoon in?" The blue pony sat up on her haunches. "It's very important, miss."
Pinkie tilted her head. "Oh sure, she's right over there. I'm Pinkie, what's your name?"
The short one smiled at the introduction. "I'm Blue. It's nice to meet you. Luminace bids us to make friends whenever possible." She held out a small hoof, and Pinkie met it with a soft clop. They were friends, and that was settled.
Silver looked up from her book. "Who are you talking to?" She saw the pony wearing a clear Luminace holy symbol and her interest spiked. She set her book aside and trotted up beside Pinkie. "Hi there!"
Blue smiled back. "You're looking well today, Silver Spoon. I've been bid to journey with you on a very important task." She pointed at Silver Spoon, then herself. "We are both servants of Luminace, so we should help each other out. The kingdom needs our help, or it will fall completely to darkness."
Pinkie frowned a little. "That sounds super bad. How can we stop that?"
Blue clopped her forehooves together. "We are defiances of destiny! We can change what was meant to be. The short legs should be dead. Equestrians should not be here, and Equestrians should not be worshipping Everglow gods, and yet, all of these things have happened." She placed a hoof at her belly. "There will even be one more generation of short leg. I'm not sure of it beyond that, but at least one more."
Pinkie gasped loudly. "We have to throw a foal shower! Wait, how young are you? You look way too small to be doing that..."
Blue giggled softly at Pinkie's concern. "I'm about as large as I'll ever be, miss Pie. I'm old enough to have a coltfriend, but that's beside the point. If we are to succeed, I will need the help of as many destiny defiers as possible, preferably those that side with friendship and goodness."
Silver pointed at herself. "I like both of those things. Luminace has been, like, really good to me. What do we need to do?"
Diamond Tiara was drawn to all the conversation. "What are you all talking about?"
Pinkie pointed at Blue. "We're gonna save the day, I think?" She tilted her head at Blue. "What do we need to do exactly?"
Blue was looking all the more excited as people rallied behind her cause so willingly. "The pony empire is facing dark times ahead, but we can help. We're not... We're not supposed to exist, but we do. We can change what should not be changed, to make everyone better." She glanced away. "Luminace is being a little naughty... But it's for a really really good reason."
Gneech joined the crowd, drawn by the ever growing nature of it. "Huh? Is big treasure?"
Diamond pointed at him. "That's my dragon. What's in it for us?"
Silver Spoon frowned a little. "It's for a good reason, Diamond Tiara. Everglow has given us so much already... Can't we give something back without asking for, like, money?"
Diamond Tiara grew an expression of distaste, but she could see Silver Spoon was adamant about it. As much as she liked her comfort and wealth, sending Silver Spoon off on her own... "Fine. I don't want my partner getting hurt the moment she's out of my sight."
Gneech raised a hand. "Where alpha horse goes, Gneech goes."
Blue clopped her hooves excitedly. "Good! We're all together! I'm very excited." She looked to DT and Gneech. "I'm Blue. Like Silver Spoon, I worship Princess Luminace. She's a very kind goddess that wants us to be good friends to everyone around us, so I'm looking forward to being your friends too."
Diamond Tiara pulled free the handaxe she never surrendered. "Someone has to keep this group moving in the right direction. So what's your plan, small pint?"
"Blue," Blue corrected without realizing the insult intended. "She talks to me through scraps of books I find, which isn't perfect, but it works. We have to find the Queen first. She is hiding, somewhere. Without finding her, we lose."
Pinkie frowned a little. "She helped us out last time. Why can't we get her to come to the big castle over there?" She pointed towards castle that resided in Viljatown.
Blue shook her head quickly. "She feels the... She's dying. She waited too long, hoped too hard. She will die with no suitable heir."
Diamond raised a brow. "She never got a king?"
Blue let out a little sigh. "Every stallion she met only wanted her attention because of what she could offer them." Blue dug out a book from a saddlebag and set it down. "Here, the collected thoughts on a historian that made it his life's ambition to follow the Queen at every opportunity. She tried dating a few times, and every time she ended up with a broken heart. She wanted love, but that's hard to get when you're the queen of the largest empire in the world."
Pinkie Pie frowned a little. "Gosh. If I was there before, I would have helped her out. She's a super nice mare. She deserves a good stallion."
Silver Spoon played with her glasses nervously. "It's totally too late for that. Our job isn't to get her a date now."
Gneech held up a finger. "So we find new queen?"
Blue pointed at Gneech. "Yes! You are a very clever person, Gneech." Gneech looked quite pleased at the compliment. "We must find out her plans for a successor, and help her as best we can, but first, we have to find her."
Diamond Tiara tucked her axe away. "Why don't we start by hiring the best wizards bits can buy and getting them to find her?"
Blue tilted her head. "She is also a spellcaster, and has become very talented at not being found."
Diamond waved a hoof idly. "That's why we pay big. I know you're not in this for the money, but she's a Queen. If we help her out, she'll compensate me the money." Or else, thought Diamond Tiara with a little frown.
Blue shook her head. "We have another idea before that... Princess Luminace has bade us to recover the book of my god."
Silver blinked at Blue. "I thought your god was Princess Luminace."
Blue put a hoof over her heart. "I have dedicated myself to her, yes, but this other goddess... She gave birth to the short legs. She is our god, of our entire race. I... can't argue that, but I know almost nothing about her. We have to rescue her book from her enemies. Kara has it, and she won't let go of it lightly. If we have it, we will further fracture destiny itself, and we may yet change the way things will flow."
Diamond leaned forward. "I'm liking the sound of this." She clopped her hooves together. "We're going to do something ponies say can't be done. I'm getting used to that. So where do all these 'Kara' folk live?"
Blue pointed off to the east. "Our first destination, the city of lies, Blevik. It is infested with doppelgangers, but not all of them, and not all of them are evil, but enough that we will... We should be very careful."
Pinkie looked to the other ponies with her. "Dopplegangers are kinda like changelings, but not really. They're a lot smarter, and not a..." she put her hooves close together. "What do you call it when they're all together? Like bees? Hive mind! They don't have any of that."
Silver Spoon shook her head a little. "I remember when they took over Ponyville, yuck, it was the worst. Do they make those icky pods?"
Blue shook her head. "They don't have any pods that I'm aware of?"
Diamond shook her head. "Look, let's just assume they aren't anything like what we know. It's confusing things more than it's helping." She pointed at Blue. "What do you know for sure?"
Blue smiled in agreement. "Yes. They're shapeshifting ponies. A lot of them live in Blevik. Many of them are just, you know, ponies, but you can't tell which is which. I don't know too much more, except their goddess is Kara, and she doesn't like my goddess, which is why her people stole the book away. The book was supposed to stay lost, another fracture of destiny."
Pinkie tapped at her chin a moment before she reached out and pulled Blue into the room and slapped the door shut behind her. "Well it sounds like we're going to have a big full day ahead of us! Join us for breakfast?" She didn't really wait to head a reply as she started guiding Blue towards the dining area and busied herself cooking for everyone.
Diamond slipped closer to Silver. "Good, let them worry about breakfast. Personally? I'm not going out without supplies. Come on, Silver Spoon, we're going to adventure like the rich ponies we are."
Gneech looked hopeful as he moved to follow. "Maybe Gneech get something good too? Gneech use it for alpha horse."
Diamond Tiara threw one leg around Silver Spoon and the other foreleg around Gneech as she walked along. "Yeah yeah. We can't have anypony in this group looking like a slob." She knew the value of a well-equipped minion, and she had no intention of being as underprepared as they were the first time they ran into danger.
Back in the room, Pinkie looked up to find herself alone with Blue. "Huh... They must not have been hungry. It's just you and me." She plucked up Blue and tossed her into the air. The little pony squealed in fright and excitement, but Pinkie caught her and set her back down. "I'll fill that little belly of yours up and we'll get ready to go, alright?"
Blue smiled brightly. "Yes ma'am, Miss Pinkie Pie. I think Luminace would favor you, miss. You're so full of friendship. Do you like to read?"
Pinkie tilted her head. "Not my favorite thing in the whole world, but I like a good mystery novel, and cook books let you make tasty yummy new things!"
Blue brought her forehooves together gently. "Good enough. It will be a pleasure working with you."
Mechanic is not actually a pathfinder class, is it? Because that's totally what DT is setting out to be.
...I'm not sure if that's actually a well-known term. It's what one of my old GMs called a character that bought dozens of magic items that did stuff for them so that they never had to use their own skills. It was pretty obscene in GURPS, since wealth gives you an exponential amount of money for your points and everything else you can spend points on costs an exponential amount of points instead. After a few dozen, it's cheaper to have a self-powering magic item of each spell in the book than it is to learn the spells yourself. They try to limit that by having a one-magic-item-recharging-at-a-time rule, but there are ways around it.
6244353
I see her more as a Barbarian.
I see the set up looks like this:
Silver Spoon : War Priest
Diamond Tiara : Barbarian
Pinkie Pie: Bard
It is almost a balanced party and would be a fun group!
That would be a good name for a rock band.
Ooh, boy. This is going to be AWESOME! Blevik, the book of Lashtada, Iliana's hiding place. Lore, adventure, character development and tie-ins to all the old plot threads. Yes, yes, YES!
Blue has matured quite a bit from the clueless, dependent filly they rescued in ADS. She's showing quite a bit of leadership.
(You know...they don't have a tank in the party, they should grab Fast Shadow. Just sayin' )
Luminace must be guiding your fingers, I didn't find any typos.
interesting a quest this is going to get good.
Oh yay, they are going after the book after all! Guess if the party lacks motivation to do something, give them some.
6244353
6244411
Personally, I see Diamond Tiara right now as an Aristocrat, which is admittedly an NPC class(barring some settings where it's been beefed up to a full PC class), but all her abilities so far are skill based. She knows economics, can run a business, has high bluff and diplomacy checks, etc. Rogue is another possibility, since it's a skill heavy class, but she hasn't demonstrated any rogue like abilities like stealth or lockpicking and such. Plus, unlike Spoon, she hasn't really been taking any time to learn a PC class, and has been mostly relying on her Equestrian learned skills.
6244907 Pinkie was shown holding a mighty impressive stack of cider with no ill effects afterwards. She is a party animal. Mind you, she felt the booze after this competition, and had a nice vomit and drunken cheering with all her new friends. She was a mess.
Diamond is far from the ideal of a best friend, but she is Silver's friend despite that. Diamond knows it, and Silver knows it, and to Tartarus with anyone who disagrees with them. Diamond and Silver would fight to keep what they have.
I can't say I have any huge regrets for shying away from the huge red button topic that is foal related romance though.
Capitalize the first letter of the first word of this sentence.
Since they're not talking about a specific individual (e.g. it's "a king" rather than "the King"), the word "king" doesn't need to be capitalized.
There should be a space between "that," and "but."
There should be a closing quotation mark here.
So...is it dinner or breakfast? The chapter began with "one morning," so I'm guessing the latter, but still, this is odd.
Don't capitalize the second "yeah."
Huh. That's quite a few plot threads coming home to roost. This should be one heck of a quest.
6244766
And aristocrats are proficient with all martial weapons, which would explain her skill with that axe.
6247249 Typos sent to Tartarus, and oh em gee, you're on the latest chapter. Kinda scary.
6247441 Don't worry, it won't last long.
6247441 To say that I didn't like this chapter is an understatement. I really, really think that this chapter was poor, not so much for the ideas that it presented, but for how it presented them.
I'll start by critiquing the ideas first. While I am pleased to see that old plot threads are being revisited at last, I think that they're being taken too far. I didn't bring this point up when the author was asking for new input, and I should have, because what's being laid out here now isn't a direction that I'm particularly happy about. Why? Because I like that this fic was showing us Everglow without feeling the need to change it due to its new-found contact with Equestria, for two reasons.
The first reason is that I appreciate the more mature, even dark, nature of Everglow as compared to Equestria. Everglow has always struck me as being the adult version of Equestria's child-like nature, where friendship can solve everything in a half-hour (a full hour for really bad things). I enjoyed that Everglow's default setting was of a darker, less hopeful time, set a generation after the Pony Empire fell due to Iliana's inability to find an heir and her nobles' inability to look beyond their own selfishness. That was a world that needed heroes, that was ripe for adventure...and it's apparently going to be undercut now.
That gets into the second critique I had about this fic changing the "default" presentation of Everglow: I liked that this fic could be interpreted as something that, unto itself, didn't contradict anything in the Ponyfinder source materials. That sort of made it the "secret history" of recent events; that is, this fic was how things "really" happened that isn't recorded in the setting book. Going and making out-and-out changes undercuts that, and makes it, well...just a fanfic, rather than the author's sly way of saying "but here's what really happened."
So yeah, I don't like the idea that Pinkie, Diamond and Silver, Blue, Gneech, et al are going to out-and-out change how Everglow's history unfolds. To that end, my hope at this point is that the story becomes one of their noble, but ultimately futile, struggle.
But all of this is beside the point, said point being the how all of these ideas were presented in this chapter. I'm trying to cushion this as much as I can, but this entire idea - the goals to be sought and their reasons for seeking them - were awful in how they were introduced to us...and not just in one way either.
Let's start with how much of a break this was from the last chapter. Last we heard, a letter was slipped under their door. Did the maid just clean it up with no one noticing? What happened to that? For that matter, this chapter begins with "one day." Okay...so they've been there a while? How long has it been? Days? Weeks? Months? How long have they just been hanging around, and what have they been doing in the meantime? To summarize, this arc has been introduced poorly.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The way this quest was introduced - with Blue showing up and announcing that she'd apparently had a vision (for all intents and purposes) from her god - was so hackneyed, so artlessly presented, so clumsy in how it's delivered, that it was painful to read. This is a deus ex machina at the beginning of the story, rather than the end, and it costs the story dearly in terms of narrative build-up. Setting the stakes would have worked so, so much better if these goals had been revealed organically over time, as their next quest had continually fed into larger and larger adventures that - eventually! - got to these world-changing issues.
It's the same way a given adventure path starts off small and then has the heroes gradually following plot threads to bigger and bigger things. Fighting some local thugs leads to their base, which has a letter saying that they're allied with an assassins' guild in a nearby city. Defeating the guild shows that they're receiving funding from a cult, which is hinting that it's amassing power in the region. Fighting off the cult shows that their god is preparing to instigate some sort of war, founded on a gateway contained within a nearby demi-plane. Sneaking into the demi-plane to shut down the gate leaves the PCs trapped on the other side in the evil god's realm. Now the PCs have to fight the evil god on his home turf, hopefully defeating him and ending the threat for all time. That's how you do build-up in a story. You don't immediately say to your level 1 heroes, "I've had a vision that this evil god is going to attack. We're going to have to kill him."
I also have some problems with how heavy-handed Luminace's warning was from an in-character standpoint too, but these are minor in comparison. For example, why is she suddenly the only deity that's doing anything about this, when the Sun Queen is the patron goddess of the Empire? Why aren't the other gods trying to do something about this impending disaster (or, alternately, trying to help make sure it comes to pass)? It's like all of the other gods have suddenly become dumber in comparison.
Even the idea that these ponies are "destiny defiers" seems childish, like they've just had it declared that their special even to the gods, and for no real reason besides "this wasn't 'supposed' to happen." How do they know that? Only Sheila knows what's "supposed" to happen, so this entire concept seems borked from the very beginning. I prefer heroes that are ordinary individuals who forcibly raise themselves up to become something great, rather than having "special" written on their forehead from the very beginning.
Yeah, so far I'm not a fan of how this new arc is starting.
Whaaaaaaat cancelled!?
Cancelled?!?!?! Well dammitalltotheassfuckingpitsofhell, that sucks. Le Sigh. You could have at least done something cheesy like having the world explode for no apparent reason or something. Because then there would be closure. "Well, it's not like he left everybody hanging, the world just up and exploded, so that's the end of that."
... well that happened?
If you're sure man. Hate to see this not finish but if that's what you think would be good for you, I support your decision.
I was wondering why there weren't any updates. Doesn't seem too hard to go back and maybe change up a scene or two. Would have been nice if Pinkie came in a bit later. Possibly showing up once Dark rejoined Diamond and Silver, and 'taking them out'. Providing her employer with a tiara and pearl necklace.
Diamond and Silver being told by Dark that she'd help them escape the city, Diamond instead stubbornly plots out a way to avenge their 'deaths'. Finding out the Griffon had more control over the city beyond just his dyes. Maybe he's part of some Guild that has relations to some black market underground.
Pinkie hearing rumors of some nasty griffon having killed off her two charges? Would be interesting to see how she'd a played out in that.
Possibly find a clue after the adventure of exposing the villain, possibly having lost Gneech? Maybe not lose. Up to you. Silver could find a clues, Luminance guiding her to find some letter that has Luminance suggest Silver go find some Mage to offer them help, to follow these clues into searching for the whereabouts of some supposed Queen? Something else? A more vague and harsher journey that leads Pinkie to find the two fillies are still alive and continues her search for the fillies?
I journey that, while they may not succeed in preventing a death, can lead to at least pushing ponies towards learning more about how to help Everglow or better themselves as ponies? They can make it to the Church of Luminance later?
Eh, I've no idea. If anything at all, you could end this story with Pinkie reuniting with the fillies and let a future story try to tie these characters back together again? It would open up doors for future possibilities. I guess it was only inevitable with how on-the-fly this story has been. Maybe convert this into a Comment Driven story? Let people vote or suggest possible routes after each chapter like that one Mass Effect pony story?
Well, thanks for writing an enjoyable story with these two for what it was worth.
P.S. If somehow DT goes down a path where Silver and her split ways, Diamond who seeks revenge against Applehack after whatever could give her a chance to do so, and Silver going on a path where she has to choose to stay with Pinkie or leave with Diamond?
Maybe Silver finds a way to redeem Diamond in some last ditch gamble to try and bring her back from whatever dark path she was going down?
derpicdn.net/img/2015/4/16/875384/tall.png
Possibly piss off some big bad that finds Silver's action was some unforeseen action that loosens his control over Diamond just enough to bring her to her senses?
Cancelled. Another unfinished story. Goodbuy daily dose of happyness.
Well, thanks for the read though. I enjoyed it greatly.
6260607 It's been quite a few days :p I have other daily stories being updated daily, but none of them have Diamond Tiara.
6259655 I'm not feeling like I'm penned in. That would imply I had a plan to begin with.
6260832 NOOOOOOOO!!
WHY WOULD YOU CANCEL THIS GEM?!!!
~Crystalline Electrostatic~
20:39_7/29/2015
6261366 Why are folks suddenly noticing four days later? :D
6261374 Because we don't pay attention and you didn't make a blog post about it. The site doesn't notify us when a fic's status is changed... And I demand you uncancel this and finish it right.
~Crystal Static~
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Apple family cider is not alcoholic. They made it and sold it on the same day, leaving no time for fermentation. It was just plain apple juice. There is evidence that Pinkie Pie is resistant to chemical influence, but this isn't it.
6271243 Apple juice doesn't foam, and I'm not really here to argue the fine points of pony alcohol.
6271259 Behold: foamy apple juice.
The Apples' cider-making method involved a lot more churning and spinning than most, so it would have to be frothy.
6271410 You are correct.