It appears that the next completed chapter will belong to Midnight Rising... brief teaser included · 9:12pm June 27th
I’ve made good progress on the Lemon Zest chapters this week thanks to a quiet spell at work, which is especially welcome after vacation. In fact, part one is only a day or two away from draft completion, at which point it will be off to prereaders.
The Lemon Zest chapters are indeed going to be in two parts, with the nearly finished part one likely coming in at somewhere around 12,000 words. It’ll basically be Zesty’s intro to show both how bad and utterly incorrigible she is, to say nothing of how fearlessly confident, even in the face of Midnight’s enormous power. Be ready to hate her almost instantly.
There isn’t a hell of a lot I can clip out of part one to use in a teaser for obvious reasons, but I’ll give you the start of the chapter including a single exchange of our humane 6 peanut gallery:
Hey, folks, including all potential future readers. For the record, I’m resuming writing this not one but two days after the previous chapter—it’s now Thursday evening. Why the delay? Well, since none of us slept well the other night other than me and Fluttershy, we figured it would be best to take at least a one-day break and concentrate more on our homework instead. It’s getting towards the end of the school year, after all, meaning that final exams and class projects are coming due.
It worked, as we all passed today’s Physics exam in Professor Event Horizon’s class. Yep, even Rainbow got a B-minus thanks to no little tutelage from the rest of us. For once, there’s not much new to report on the futa front, except to say that Princess Twilight did indeed come through with two new additional magic absorption crystals. But instead of using them for ourselves, it only seemed right that we gave them to Ms. Zecora and Ms. Cheerilee, who have been staying away from school for the same reasons Principal Celestia and Vice-Principal Luna did earlier.
This time, I picked them up from Equestria myself, finding Twilight’s scribe Spike alone waiting for me on the other side of the portal. He was there since the Princess was unavailable, leaving me—and Flash—an apologetic note saying she’d been called to an ‘urgent alicorn-only conference’ in Canterlot so she couldn’t meet us. I missed Starlight Glimmer again, too, as she wasn’t back from whatever mission the Friendship Map had sent her on yet.
Hyperdash: You know, it’s really weird and crazy that they’ve actually got a magic map over there that dispatches ponies to fix friendship problems, whatever the heck those are. But then again, it’s not like we don’t have weird and crazy concepts on this side of the portal, too!
Daydream: Yeah, well, human technology like smartphones that allow for instant communication and knowledge would be seen as weird and crazy magic from the pony side of the portal, too. They’d view it as some new form of sorcery. As the trope goes, any science sufficiently advanced appears to be magic, after all.
Fertile Fields: Heh. Reckon you got us there, Sunset. Once the Princess figured the internet out, she loved it! I remember finding like four hundred internet tabs open when I let her use my desktop browser that one time!
Hyperdash: Ha! Figures! So did she have any tabs open containing pics of humans screwing?
Crystal Queen: RAINBOW DASH! That is NONE of your business and you know it!
Fertile Fields: Sorry, girlfriend, but this is one time I’m with Rarity. Whether she did or not, I ain’t sayin!
Sugar High: Oooo, so the answer is yes? I’ll bet she was trying to figure out how to be with Flash as a human! Aw, she should have just come to me! I could have had Triton train her!
Fluttershine: Um… I really don’t think the Princess would have liked that suggestion, Pinkie.
Sugar High: Well, maybe not at first, but once she got a taste of Triton? Then she’d be addicted and insatiable! So on second thought, yeah, maybe not. She might get addicted to Triton instead of Flash!
Daydream. Wow. Pinkie showing restraint? I’ll have to mark the date! But before I get too lost in this discussion, it’s time to start working on the story again. We’re finally at the point Lemon Zest appears and I know everyone’s anxious to hear what happens to her!
Fertile Fields: You better believe it! Been waiting on this for weeks! And you promised that Middie punished her properly? I’m gonna hold you to that, Sunny-D!
Daydream: Sure thing, Piggly-Wiggly. Did I lie about her being punished properly, Pinkie Pie? You said you remembered what happened to Zesty, right?
Sugar High: Sure do! And nope, she didn’t lie, AJ! Or should I call you P-W now?
Fertile Fields: Dagnabbit! Don’t you DARE!
Daydream: Don’t start none, and there won’t be none, AJ. Continuing…
While on the other side of the portal, I did take the opportunity take a picture of baby dragon Spike for Rarity, who was only too happy to pose once I told him who it was for. Unfortunately, when I crossed back into our world, I found that the picture of him had changed into his dog form! I swear, Princess Twilight is going to be giddy when she learns that the portal’s magic is so thorough that it even alters the digital memory of our smartphones.
I’ll tell her later, though. Walking inside, I headed directly for Vice-Principal Luna’s office, intending to give her the siphon gems directly. It actually wasn’t easy for me to go in there again. For the record, I was fighting off flashbacks to both seeing our VP helplessly horny on her house’s front stoop and myself later taking Ms. Cheerilee at her desk the whole time. But to Luna’s credit, she showed no signs of arousal herself, thanking me and accepting the crystals before hastily dismissing me as she rushed out the door.
She then took off in her midnight blue sportcar to deliver them personally—one wonders how she afforded that on a public-school V-P’s salary--squealing her tires as she left the parking lot and peeled out onto the main road.
I wasn’t going to deliver them myself this time, for obvious reasons—first, there was too big a chance something untoward might happen between me and Ms. Cheerilee again, and second, I didn’t want to be in the presence of crystals myself for too long in case they started sopping up my magic as well, and then didn’t have enough storage space leftover for our two teachers. Yeah, I was disappointed that I wouldn’t get to see either instructor again, but that’s fine, given I think we’ve all had enough complications of late!
So that was yesterday morning. By the secondhand reports we’ve received via email from the Vice-Principal, the gemstones are once again working, but by Twilight’s instructions, our two teachers need another full day in their presence to fully remove the foreign magic.
All’s well that ends well, I guess. I gotta say, though, girls, that for as taken as I was with Ms. Cheerilee and for as much as I enjoyed my time with her, part of me really does hope that removing the excess magic doesn’t preclude more of it.
So yeah, that’s the chapter intro, and that’s pretty much the only part of this that isn’t adult. It’ll be off to be prereaders likely by tomorrow, and then it’ll launch once prereads are in and I’ve given the chapter the customary two editing passes. I’ll give one final update on the planned launch date once the prereads start coming in. Until then, take care, and don’t worry, Applejack. Zesty will indeed get hers.
On the one hand, I am rather sad that my favorite member of the Shadowbolts is this awful in this setting, but I won't say no to more Midnight Rising. Looking forward to the full chapter!
Looking forward to more Humane Seven commentary!
Good tease, and I'm looking forward to prereading!
I'm looking forward to reading the next chapter.