Days of Wasp and Spider
by Luna-tic Scientist
=== Chapter 30 (remastered): A precautionary measure (2) ===
Fusion was a comfortable presence at the back of Gravity's head, watching through her eyes and making suggestions as the blue mare placed the first bomb in the engineering spaces above the armoured roof of the beamline chamber. The second went halfway up the tunnel she'd excavated down to the lower levels, more pulses of violet magic used to push the razor edged fragments deep into the surrounding floors, opening out a cavity that made the tunnel look like a snake swallowing an egg. The last sat not two lengths from where Fusion and Lilac lay, an innocuous box glued to the floor with something she'd pulled from the equipment pile.
Gravity worked quickly, using more magic to cut and weaken the primary support pillars that rose from the bedrock beneath the lowest levels. As she did so, she watched the progress of the defeated Security team, seeing them finally meet up with the blockade at the upper level transit tunnel junction. She couldn't really see what was happening there -- only the gryphons and ponies were readily visible, everything else was shadows and silhouettes. In this she had a better view than her sister; their diverging magical specialities also manifested in their shadow sight.
Where Fusion was sensitive to stored concentrations of energy -- especially things like reactors with their loops of energetic plasma -- Gravity could get a sense of mass. In her shadow sight this appeared as a feeling for three dimensions, an enhanced ability to separate things by density and distance. It was this that let her notice the take-off of the Security vehicle from the surface shaft, an event which had prompted a few nervous moments until they'd realised it wasn't going to attack the facility with heavy weapons.
The Security team had started moving again, splitting up to leave the ponies in one place while the gryphons moved through the blockade, to be whisked away down the transit tunnel inside the angular shape of an airtruck. There were plenty of other vehicles there, along with more gryphons; any Masters were invisible at this distance. Distinct from the airtrucks were a pair of things like flattened spheres, each with a streamlined lump on the top. Obviously built for speed, these were larger and much heavier than the airtrucks, standing out because of their thick, high density hulls.
She'd seen those before, too. A whole field of them after they'd been released from the attack carrier, able to move with frightening speed for things so big and heavy.
The sight of them brought back her unease; what they'd seen so far was a small fraction of the Master's power. If they'd had any real understanding of what they'd faced, she very much doubted they'd have led with such a small force. And why didn't they just use their magic suppressor? she thought.
Although she hadn't articulated it, Fusion picked up on the question. I think that Security and the Military don't like each other. We were Security's prisoners, so their responsibility. Perhaps they don't have the suppressors?
Gravity grunted something in response, busy laying lines of shock tubes to the thermobarics. The bombs had any number of sophisticated remote control options, none of which were of any use to the ponies, but some thoughtful designer had incorporated a basic timer and an external trigger. All three had their timers running, synchronised by the simple expedient of Gravity simultaneously pressing 'start' on each before setting them in place. They now had four kiloseconds left.
"Makes sense," she said absently, "the Security vehicles had crystal levitation drives as well as their jets; the attack carrier didn't. Either way, they're bound to use it eventually, although I get the feeling we really surprised them, so I think it will be some time yet," she said. The manual trigger had already been glued to a wall inside the radiation lock, and Gravity carefully inserted the shock tube into the port at the bottom, making sure the thin plastic pipe wouldn't pull free. A few quick brushes of magic and the tube was hidden under dirt and debris.
Think it will work? My pathfinding never went as far as demolitions.
"The scans look good, but we'll probably never know. I think so... it should be a nasty surprise if it does."
Gravity had been dipping into her shadow sight every few seconds, making sure nothing nasty was trying to creep up on them. During one of these forays the wing and horn light of the Security ponies disappeared. One moment they were there, all clustered together in a tight huddle, then they were gone. A half second later there was a faint crackling roar from that direction, distorted and attenuated by its passage through the intervening mess of walls and rooms.
They killed them all, Fusion said faintly from the back of her head. Why? Why would they do that?
"Contamination," Gravity said thickly, stepping outside the beam chamber to get a better view, "they're afraid I did something to those poor ponies. After all I went through to keep them alive... I should have freed them, at least they would have had a chance." Fury was bubbling up inside her, her power building like an unbearable pressure inside her chest. "And rather than take the chance to check--" Gravity broke off, calling up another pattern, one she'd only ever used as part of the fifty strong launch team during training, ten days and a lifetime ago.
The thing was brutal in its simplicity, but required a horrible amount of power to use. With it, a team of ponies could launch a satellite into orbit, creating the gravitational gradients needed to fling tonnes of material at the kilolengths a second required without exposing the cargo to high acceleration forces. The full complexity of the spell was beyond her -- there were simply too many parts to the pattern for a single pony to hold in her head -- but the drive section...
What are you doing? Fusion said nervously, I don't recognise--
"I will not let them get away with that unpunished," Gravity spat, igniting the spell's locus a hundred lengths away, somewhere inside the surface shaft. She let her anger funnel into the pattern, priming the enchantment with energy before she brought it into the real world. "The sooner they understand that actions have consequences, the better it will be."
She compartmentalised the sharing spell, protecting it from her new magic. With Fusion still sitting at the back of her mind, Gravity opened herself to the power that was ultimately derived from the motion of everything in orbit about the planet. She'd had a little taste before, but during the fight the main limit had been her own mind, her ability to hold multiple, complex spell patterns in her head. This spell was a simple thing, just requiring an enormous amount of energy to cast. The mare pulled in the power -- cool and fast, like a mountain river in flood -- then fed it straight back out and into the pattern she was crafting. The locus coalesced at the centre of the Institute's entrance shaft, energy transferring from the arcane to the real.
All at once it seemed like her body was strung with a hundred little balloons, like she was slightly buoyant. At that instant she knew that the spell was working; she'd created a gravitational point source, a virtual mass that she could manipulate at will. To be felt out this far, the spell was simulating millions of tonnes of mass, more than enough to distort local space-time and pull the Security aircraft out the sky.
Made reckless by success and anger, Gravity let the power rise like a tide and channelled it straight into the pattern and the rapidly swelling arcane locus. The spell was working far better than she had imagined; as the power surged through her she actually thought about reining it in, to make sure it didn't break free of her control and hurt those close to her, but in the heady rush of being able to do so much the thought was discarded like it belonged to somepony else.
There was no finesse here, no intricate spellwork; it was all brute strength. She was dimly aware of the demands of her body; a bone deep weariness spreading from her head and along her chest, sweat streaming down her flanks from the effort required to keep the spell active. Somewhere deep inside she knew this was a problem, knew that it wasn't right that she couldn't really feel what the magic was doing to her. Her conscious mind disregarded the nagging worry, completely focused on revenge and the sheer joy of the power.
Her manipulations caused the carrier to brush with the edge of the shaft and spin wildly; another adjustment and the green crystal glow of its drive vanished, the aircraft falling with unnatural speed. Gravity moved the locus to keep the distance constant and maintain the acceleration. She could feel her body getting lighter as the spell came closer, heard the terrible groans from the already weakened structure being exposed to forces from directions it was never designed to experience, but none of that really registered.
Grav, stop!
Gravity felt a flash of pity at the worry in her sister's cry, and it was easy to ignore the tiny voice, nearly drowned out by the power flooding through her body. Fear has made you weak, sister. If you had acted rather than tried to remain hidden, we wouldn't be in this mess. I'll do what you cannot, she thought.
You'll kill us all! Please!
These words were inconsequential and barely registered; it was the emotional feedback that came with them that made her pause. The roaring in her head faded enough that she could think about what she was doing. The spell flicked out and weight returned, bringing with it a crushing burden of guilt. How could I think that, I-I- she thought, mind nearly paralysed. Awareness of her body returned with a rush, flooding her with an enervating weakness that almost made her legs give out.
The shockwave arrived an instant later, completing the task of knocking her to the floor.
She'd put little thought into where the carrier was going to hit; in the end it was only luck and the strength of the shielded beamline chamber that saved them. Accompanied by an explosion that seemed to go on forever, the floor rattled and shook, more cracks racing over the already damaged walls and ceiling. Large beams and slabs shifted above Gravity; she stared at them by the pale and flickering glow of her horn, too weak to do anything to protect herself should they fall.
===
Dropship Pilot Namak looked again at the long range radar plot; he was supposed to be keeping all his attention on the ground sensors, alert to any attempt at a break-out by the rogue servitor and any ponies it might have with it, but his weapons officer and her suite of antipersonnel sensors and weapons could do that. The three squadrons of aircraft were rapidly approaching, the third group he suspected of being a heavy weapons response package having caught up with the other two and was heading straight for him.
The other two had separated and appeared to be diverting around the Institute, getting no closer than a couple of hundred kilolengths, something that confirmed his suspicions that they were Arclight units. For something to do he set the computer to crunching the data from the radar, integrating the return signals taken at various points of his own little circuits of the exit shaft. The resultant synthetic image was distorted, but perfectly recognizable.
A swarm of flying things, too small to resolve beyond fuzzy points, orbiting a much larger vehicle that looked like a bird that had swallowed an egg. Stubby wings on a body distorted by a central sphere, the aircraft looked ridiculous, doubly so if you knew how much it cost to make. Namak checked the tracking plot, extrapolating the route and making an estimate of the time before Arclight came in firing range. The flight paths were already starting to curve into a wide circle; each vehicle would take up station on opposite sides of the target, giving them the most accurate control over the suppressor's volume of effect.
A warning light flashed on his HUD, the threat detection system throwing up a steeply climbing graph in his peripheral vision. By reflex he reached out and slapped the thaumic defences into full active mode, glancing at the graph to check the readings had dropped. They hadn't, and seemed to be climbing still faster. The fur started to rise on the back of his neck as he realised the impossibility of it; the levels had already surpassed those from a ground mounted thaumokinetic array, and were still rising.
Thaumic spike, somewhere inside the Institute, he thought, one paw coming off the controls to bring up the real-time mapping data from the intelligence systems distributed through the facility. An exploded model of the site, spanning from the depths of the lower tunnels all the way to the surface, started to rotate in the lower part of his HUD. Another quick claw tap and the map was filled with shifting blobs of colour, a measure of the thaumic activity as determined by the relatively crude 'arcane early warning' sensors in the airtanks.
"AEW's tagged it as having a high gravitational component," he muttered, trying to understand the display, "ah, Maker, that's not good." Right next to the beam chamber was a patch of intense colour, rapidly shifting up through the spectrum, shading to white at the centre. The computer rescaled the thaumic plot, then rescaled again as the magic kept building.
He'd seen something like this before, no more than ten kiloseconds ago as part of his briefing package. Another servitor, another beam chamber, another Institute facility. A similar plot, one taken with instruments actually designed to measure such things, but showing the same readings: a near exponential rise in thaumic power density. That event had resulted in the blackout of a large chunk of the surrounding tunnel network. If this was the same...
Yet there's no sign of any arcane effect, just the readings, he thought. And where is it coming from? At these levels the forces should be enough to knock the dropship about the sky, even if the antimagic field would stop them from punching holes in the hull. The readings jumped and the thaumic alarm shrieked, just as a shudder ran through his aircraft.
A second zone of arcane potential had appeared on the plot. It bloomed into an even stronger signal than the first, rapidly forming something that looked like a miniature sun, somewhere inside the Institute's entrance shaft. A high gravitational component, he thought, a slight shiver of fear running down his spine. Namak’s eyes flicked to the arrival times of the Arclight units -- still hundreds of seconds from firing range. "Under for magical attack, possible TK effects," he snapped out, the broadcast routed back to the command post and thence on to Security control at the Pit.
Everything grew suddenly heavy, just like he was pulling out of a shallow dive. Compared to the forces felt by a fast jet pilot it was nothing, maybe three or four times normal gravity, but the effect on the hovering dropship was devastating. More alarms blared: sink rate, ground proximity, structural failure in the lowest parts of the carrier, a sudden fire in one of the auxiliary power units. Namak struggled to regain control; something was pulling the dropship off course. How is it affecting this one through the field? he thought fleetingly, then all his attention went on trying to keep the dropship in the air.
He was dropping like the engines were off, even though all four were running at maximum emergency power. Despite orders he activated the crystal levitation drive, cursing as the downward motion didn't quite stop, changing into a relatively slow drift. He bared his teeth, fighting the magic for control and trying to ground the dropship on the surface, rather than have it fall down the Institute's entrance shaft. There just wasn't enough power to spare; the belly of the dropship floated down past the edge, clipping the lip as he descended.
The port side number two engine was sheared off by that seemingly minor contact, the ducted fan exploding into a thousand fragments as the blades hit the inside of the housing. Bits of high velocity single crystal blade, each one enormously strong and designed to withstand the centrifugal forces inside the engine, were flung out at speeds high enough to drive them deep into the concrete walls of the shaft. The dropship, already unbalanced by the unnatural forces being applied to it, started to spin wildly.
Namak's training had been the best the Hive could manage; he had megaseconds of actual flight time logged, with more megaseconds in the simulator, being run through whatever disasters his Security trainers could devise. He'd even been through this kind of drill -- colliding with tunnel walls was a constant threat when reaching the deeper parts of the Hive in a hurry -- but the time was too short and the distances too small. The view out the cockpit windows was useless and an instant recipe for disorientation, so he kept his head down and fought the chaos by instruments alone.
The hard spin was making his vision blur, but he'd trained for that and it was no worse than one of the high G centrifuge runs. The HUD systems compensated for his half closed eyes, painting their laser patterns onto his retinas and allowing for his drifting focus. A three dimensional model of his ship in wireframe spun against the unforgiving walls of the entrance shaft, all non important details removed to present him with a clean picture of his environment.
The wireframe marked out the damage with a spectrum of colours starting at green and descending into crimson. Aside from the number two engine pod, the hull looked like a rainbow, pure green at the top and shading to orange and red near the landing gear. As Namak fought the controls, that band of orange crept ever higher, tendrils of red threading through the lower hull. A nasty groan of stressed metal echoed through the cabin and the thrust indicators for the crystal drive suddenly went dead.
The sensation of extra weight vanished and, just for a moment, Namak thought the magic had released his ship. Reality came crashing back in with the sight of the shaft walls rushing past, and he realised what had happened. Free fall, he thought, still calm, and still trying to restart the crystal drive, when the carrier struck the bottom of the shaft.
The floor of the shaft was a set of big doors. They had been unopened for almost half a gigasecond and were only installed to allow large machinery to be passed into the accelerator tunnel at the lowest level of the Institute facility. The outer surface of the doors was used as a landing pad for the occasional guest well connected enough to warrant their own air vehicle and needing to travel with the speed that only a suborbital hop could provide. They were strong enough to support a half kiloton bulk cargo vessel, should one ever be needed.
The carrier hit the doors at almost a third the speed of sound, slamming into the tough metal and concrete with enough force to shear off the main locks -- each the size of a tall Person -- and collapse the supports. Battered and trailing smoke, missing all its external engine pods, but still mostly intact, it fell through empty volume reserved for heavy lifting gear and punched into the cluttered equipment shaft below. Fragments and debris filled the cavity with a dusty cloud of lethal shrapnel. Lightning flashed deep inside the haze, illuminating the dust with blue-white flickers.
===
Olvir stared at the patch of concrete, still able to feel the radiant heat on the few exposed surfaces he had. His mind ran circles, forever replaying the moment when that hot green light had filled the corridor with fire. It all just seemed so wrong. Those ponies probably saved most of the injured soldiers, and would have ensured that all of them made it back to the medical centres alive.
He was used to the idea that he might be sent on a suicide mission, to die for some abstract gain during a fight he didn't understand, but this seemed to be such a waste. What did they do wrong to deserve that? he thought, trying to come to terms with what he'd just seen. No matter how he approached the idea, he couldn't come up with a satisfactory answer. He'd had the standard training courses in how to interact with the creatures; every single one had emphasised their total loyalty and how that was magically enforced.
Yet this 'blue pony' has managed to kill four of the Masters and at least six Rippers, he thought. What must have been done to it to make it act like that? Olvir had heard rumours about what went on in places like this, the experiments carried out by the Eugenics Board on gryphon and pony alike.
For a moment he wondered what the world would be like without any Masters, where a gryphon could fight for what he wanted, or -- and here was the really mind blowing idea, something that was very nearly blasphemy -- not have to fight at all. Then the floor seemed to tilt under Olvir's paws, an odd and unsettling sensation that made it feel like the whole complex was somehow teetering on the edge of a cliff.
Alarms sounded, the shrill warble of a thaumic attack, and he looked about uncertainly, running a talon over the control pad for his antimagic defences. His HUD reported that the arcane locus was several hundred lengths away, so whatever he was feeling was a minor side effect, not the actual attack itself.
The effect vanished and the alarms stopped. Olvir let out the breath he hadn't known he was holding, relief washing over him as he realised it was over. What was that? Was it the blue pony or something stranger? he thought. There had been large scale uses of offensive enchantments in the past, and these were what his antimagic systems were supposed to defend against -- spells able to aggressively affect organic matter had been common, now out of favour with the advent of modern field technology. The only real use these days were the big thaumokinetics used to defend surface facilities.
The arrival of the shockwave startled Olvir out of his musings, surprised him so badly that he forgot discipline and jumped off the ground and into a hover before his conscious mind caught up with his actions. His wide eyes took in the scene in an instant; cracks darting across the ceiling with the speed of lightning, the whole surface rippling like it was water. Instinct reasserted itself; with a single desperate down stroke of his wings Olvir turned over in mid air, arrowing away from the zone of destruction.
Rocks rained down around him, and he split his attention between watching the ceiling and navigating a path through the chaos to the tunnel leading back to the main transit route, out beyond the clustered Security airtrucks and mercifully clear of any roof damage. A flicker of motion triggered the part of his raptor brain normally on the look-out for attack by another bird, and he twisted his wings for a hard turn.
A concrete block the size of a small aircar caught Olvir a glancing blow on his right hip, sending him tumbling through the air. At this altitude there was no chance of recovery, and Olvir ploughed head first into the concrete, taking all the impact on his shoulder and head.
He awoke in darkness, a great weight pressing down on his back. With a groan, Olvir lifted his head, feeling gravel and small rocks tumble away. A quick look over his shoulder showed the problem -- a large beam, almost the width of his torso, balanced on a nearby boulder, leaving him trapped in the gap. Breathing out, Olvir twisted and worked his body closer to the rock, finally getting enough freedom to wriggle out of the small space.
Trembling all over from the shock and adrenalin rush, Olvir inhaled deeply and tried to suppress the feeling of shame that washed over him. I left my squad, he thought, feeling sick, left my post. They'll never forgive me for that. A charge of cowardice would follow him for the rest of his life; no chance of promotion or extra responsibility, no opportunity to breed, never trusted by another gryphon.
Nearly in tears, Olvir turned to head back to his place in the line, stopping dead when he saw what had happened. Where his squad had been was buried under enough rock to half fill the high ceilinged tunnel; the vehicles were barely visible mounds, but there was no sign of any of his squadmates.
===
The shrill warble of the AEW swallowed Hakon's anger at his Gunner; silencing the alarm, he brought the airtank's defences to full active, then watched open mouthed as the tactical repeater showed the fate of the dropship. As the aircraft fell towards the bottom of the shaft, the Pilot increased power to the engines and lifted the hull off the ground. It's not just falling, that's far too fast! he thought, taking a firmer grip on the controls. The dropship was accelerating downwards like it was in a power dive, taking less than three seconds to drop the hundred or so lengths. "Brace for impact!" he called out, eyes darting nervously to the ceiling.
The shockwave arrived and he didn't feel a thing, but the ground outside jumped in response, throwing many of the bipedal powered troops to their knees. The gryphons fared better, wings popping out from under their barding panels and dancing to keep their balance. The rumbling growl transmitted from the external microphones didn't die away, instead it built and built, dust and rock starting to rain down from the ceiling. The facility is collapsing! Hakon thought, heart thundering. He gunned the engines, intending to retreat back to the main tunnel. The first impact put paid to that idea.
One of the ceiling blocks came crashing down on the front of the airtank, unbalancing the drive and causing it to grind glacis plate first into the concrete floor. The noise was horrific, the immensely strong hull ringing like a badly tuned bell. Half deafened, Hakon struggled with the controls, but more blocks and rubble followed the first, slamming the airtank into the floor and blocking the intakes. Lazgo was shouting something, but the Pilot neither knew nor cared what he said.
The safety system killed the air breathing turbine, closing the foreign object shutters before anything could penetrate the screens and wreck the ducted fan. The airtank's limited reaction mass kept the drive working, but it would only last for seconds in this mode. This close to the ground and friendlies, Hakon didn't dare route the feed through the plasma drive, so he dropped the airtank to the ground and hunched down in his seat, tensing against the final blow that was sure to follow.
The roar of falling rocks subsided and Hakon dared to open his eyes. The imaging system showed a fuzzy, out of focus jumble of large and small shapes, bright in some areas and dark in others. It flickered as he stared at it in confusion, the display cycling to a false colour image as the tactical awareness system tried to make sense of its surroundings. Taking a deep breath, Hakon reached out a trembling paw, resetting the mad colours back to a comfortable greyscale.
Buried, he thought, but not crushed. The airtank's hull was built to withstand energetic plasma, high density long rod penetrators and radiation at power densities only found close to Celestia, but a thousand tonne primary ceiling beam would be more than capable of smashing it, especially if it fell from the high roof of the transit tunnel.
"Mantlet, how deep--" Hakon paused, feeling stupid. This was the sort of thing the servitor would do, custom magic to augment the airtank's sensors. Grumbling, he fiddled with the wall penetrating ultrasound, trying to persuade it to work with the sensor clusters packed with gravel and dust. The readings were crazy, fluctuating wildly as the system tried to adjust to material within the resonating cavity, slowly settling as Hakon eliminated the most ridiculous solutions the computer came up with.
He kept one ear open to the local battlenet channel; the high bandwidth link was still up so the command vehicle hadn't been flattened, but the only response to his situation report had been a terse 'sit tight'. The procedure under these circumstances was clear; if you are safe for now and the unit isn't under attack, don't dig yourself out until ordered. The last thing he wanted was to cause a further collapse if it turned out that the airtank was now a vital part of the roof support structure...
To take his mind off the situation, Hakon started flicking through all the surviving local cameras to get an idea of the situation. One side of the tunnel had collapsed, burying a pair of airtrucks and his Firebug; underneath the tonnes of rubble were also a quarter of the powered troops and at least a squad of gryphons, those who chose to shelter next to the vehicles rather than fly for the exit.
The People had probably survived; their armour was self contained and would recycle air and water until the deuterium-helium three fuel ran out, which could be megaseconds. The gryphons... He could see at least one golden brown wing sticking out of the rubble, its owner somewhere under one of the half length wide interlocking tetrahedral blocks that made up the ceiling.
The protocols for this sort of thing were well established, and someone on the command team was organizing the recovery operation. Heavy lifting gear was always on call when Security performed this kind of operation; ceiling supports were a favourite terrorist target. Servitors would normally be providing the grunt work, but all of theirs had been ordered away after the true nature of the threat was suspected. Or burned, Hakon though grimly. How many more will die because of that stupid order, killed by the clumsy crystal thaumic systems used to dig them out?
Lazgo had nothing to occupy his time and wasn't taking the waiting well. "How could one servitor do all that?" he said, voice sounding loud now the thrum of the airtank's engines had been silenced.
Hakon's lips pulled back in a mirthless smile at the nervousness in his Gunner's voice. Lazgo was on his first tour and it showed. First taste of an opponent actually fighting back, eh? he thought. "Lazgo will see all sorts as he gets older. This one cut his teeth fighting Baur sleeper cells during the run up to the Three Day War. He also remembers when the King sent assault teams into arcology four. They collapsed the primary entrances and the deep tunnels; it took our servitors almost a day to get a big enough opening."
"What happened?"
Hakon's voice went dreamy, lost in the memory. "By the time we got in, the gryphons had slaughtered the Security forces and the police, and had been hunting civilians for almost fifty kiloseconds. This one must have spent half a megasecond buttoned up, trying to get all of them... They'd done something to the birds, some kind of conditioning. None of them surrendered... and every single one had a bomb vest. After the first few blew themselves up while faking a surrender we didn't bother asking again."
Lazgo said nothing, but the air in the vehicle held a kind of expectant hush, and Hakon knew he had the Gunner.
"The last of them were cornered in the power core, it was only a matter of time before we had them, and they knew it. You see, that was the plan all along. Some Baur scientist had figured out a flaw with our power plant designs, and they'd rigged the reactor for when the war went hot. Eighty percent casualties; Hakon's airtank got caught in the arcology collapse when it blew.
"How did Hakon survive?" Lazgo asked, still too loud for the small space.
"The airtank was ruined, but still had emergency power; Hakon knew it was only a matter of time until the rescue teams dug then out. What he didn't know was that the airtank had fallen to the bottom of an equipment shaft... and that no one was looking at all."
"Why not?" Lazgo sounded outraged, and well he might. That rescue would come was something drummed into all aircrew.
"There was a war on," Hakon said dryly, "they were busy."
"Then what happened?"
Hakon's voice dropped to a whisper. "After the first megasecond this one's Gunner had to be restrained by the crew servitor. He'd given up; couldn't stand the thought of being trapped. He waited three days, until the pony fell asleep from exhaustion, then opened his wrists with his own claws."
"Did- did Hakon manage to save his Gunner?"
The faint tremor in Lazgo's voice maked Hakon grin, even while the memory made him shiver. "By the time Hakon awoke, the crew bay was awash with blood and the Gunner was cold. It was another two megaseconds before Hakon and the servitor were found."
"Hakon is a bastard, he had this one going for a moment."
The Pilot gave a cold smile. Lazgo won't get away that easily, he thought. "It's a matter of public record; why do you think this one was transferred to Security from the regular Military?" Hakon let the silence hang there, ears twitching at Lazgo's rapid breathing. He smiled again, genuinely this time, when the order to shake free of the rubble popped up on his screen. "One more thing," he said, reaching forward to start the crystal drive, "the rogue servitor pulled a whole dropship out of the sky moments after Lazgo pulled the trigger on the Security ponies; that sounds like revenge to Hakon. What does the Gunner think it will do to us?"
The airtank vibrated suddenly as Hakon fed a quick pulse of power into the plasma drive, blasting the lift vents clear of debris. A quick shake and he could drop back to turbine mode, making rocks cascade from the top of the airtank and exposing the sensors to give him a look down the half collapsed tunnel. His orders updated, and he floated the airtank down the corridor to the upper level nexus point, in the middle of a formation of gryphon and powered infantry.
The routine of the work occupied Hakon’s body, leaving his mind to ponder the other information that had come along with the movement order. Arclight was still nearly a kilosecond from deployment; the faster heavy weapons units had been ordered to stand off until it could be activated. If the servitor makes a move, we’re all that stands between it and the main transit lines, he thought, if it gets into those, there’ll be no stopping it before it reaches the arcology proper. The big twenty lane transit lines were always very busy, and for a moment Hakon imagined the creature flying down the centre of the main tunnel, pulling the roof down as it went.
===
The shocks and vibrations became irregular, slowed, and finally stopped altogether. Gravity took a deep breath and climbed shakily to her hooves, never taking her eyes off the ceiling. The slab directly above her head had cracked clean in two and was drooping drunkenly, only held up by a few unbroken reinforcing bars.
She staggered back into the beam chamber, dropping to her belly next to her sister and enfolding the other mare in a hug that she couldn't return. "I'm sorry, I don't blame you, none of this is your fault, if I'd just believed you..." she said, voice muffled where her muzzle was pressed against Fusion's dust and blood stained fur. "I don't know what came over me."
Don't worry, Fusion said, it will take time to adjust to your new strength. Do... Fusion tailed off, the pause extending out for several seconds. ...do you think it was the Maker-thing again? Did it feel like it was you?
Gravity thought back to the flash of anger that had overwhelmed her despair, back when she'd seen the surgical robot move over Fusion's paralysed body. There was an odd taste to the remembered emotion; it was too clean, too perfect in her mind, and not at all like the fury she'd felt when the Security ponies had been killed. Was that all me? she thought, doing her best to shield that terrible idea from Fusion. You enjoyed that, didn't you? The traitorous thought wouldn't go away; the more she tried to suppress it, the more obvious it became. The rush of power, the ability to hurt those who'd mistreated her sister and had made the world so very unfair.
"I think so," she said, burying the shame of the lie within the guilt she already felt.
Are you ready to go? Fusion said after a few moments, sounding troubled. We should leave while we can. They must have sent for the suppressor vehicles by now, and I've no idea if the shielding will work after all that structural damage.
"Easy way to find out," Gravity muttered, standing up again and walking slowly around the chamber to get the blood flowing in her still shaky legs. She looked into the shadow world, examining the walls of the room. Only a few sections of the walls and ceiling were dark, the carefully designed panels split by fine cracks that disrupted the precise patterns of crystals.
This place is very well built, Fusion said, I thought it would be far worse.
Gravity hummed in agreement, her attention on something else. "I think the force near where they killed those ponies is on the move," she said, anger stirring once more. She looked down toward the lower transit tunnel access, a wide chamber at the very bottom of the Institute; where the second group of Security vehicles had been was now a chaotic mass of metal and stone, only really identifiable by the few remaining crystal systems around it.
There is only one way in now, she thought, turning her gaze in that direction, through the upper tunnels. The access through the shaft itself had been thoroughly smashed; even though the high level access points were still open, the connecting ramps and lifts had all collected near where the carrier had crashed.
"I'm going to have to stop them," Gravity said, fanning her wings and jumping up through the control room windows.
Why? Fusion's mental voice sounded angry and more than a little scared. We can just leave; reset the bomb timers and teleport away.
"It's going to be hard for me to do the long jump," Gravity said, "I want to make sure we're not interrupted while I'm building the pattern." That was the truth; carrying two other ponies to a half remembered location would be difficult -- not so much for the amount of magical effort required, but for the preparation that would go into the pattern. And because... because I want to hurt them some more, get the Masters who killed those ponies. She kept that to herself, ruthlessly suppressing the thought. The mare trotted through the control room door and out into the corridor, telekinesis clearing a path through the passageway made by the Master, once again a mass of sharp edged rubble.
Please don't leave me, I- I don't think I can stand being alone again. You- you promised...
Gravity flinched at the fear in Fusion's voice, a faint and tremulous whisper in her head, so different from the determined pony who'd taken the chance to confront her about the Masters, then felt a flash of irritation, followed by another burst of guilt. Doesn't she realise I'm doing this for her? she thought, again keeping that from the sharing. "Be brave, Fusion," she said soothingly, then her tone turned to iron, brooking no arguments. "I'll be quick and won't take any chances, but I will not leave an enemy at our back again, not after what happened last time. There's no way they'll get past me."
But what about--
"No," Gravity said sharply. There was desperation in Fusion's mental voice, the tone of a mare grasping for any excuse to prevent the inevitable. Gravity felt more irritation, but this time without any guilt. "Sister, you are not thinking clearly. If they were going to use their suppressor, where is it? I think they have badly underestimated what we can do, and that the thing will be far too late to stop me. I am going to take this opportunity to be certain they don't take us by surprise."
There was a long pause, so long that Gravity started to check the sharing spell, worried that the link had been lost. Keeping it open wasn't too much of a problem, but she'd have to go back inside the beamline chamber to reconnect.
Okay... I-I trust you.
Fusion sounded so small and lost that Gravity paused, half turning back towards her sister. Then she lowered her head and hardened her heart, heading at a brisk trot towards the still deploying Security force.
....and here's the next bit.
Welcome all!
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Your timing is impeccable; have two more chapters
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I'll admit that's one of the bits I'm very pleased with, glad it came through.
Argh! Why oh why must it end on such a cliffhanger!
Not the kind of thing I'd read on a regular basis, given how strongly I respond to the continuous high tension of Fusion's situation, but definitely amazing in every respect. The world-building, the presentation, the pacing... I've read many professional sci-fi novels worse than this.
It's a great story... it's just the first story in a very long time where it communicates the tension effectively enough for me to feel it in the pit of my stomach (and have trouble dismissing it when I take a break) yet, unlike Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, doesn't hit my empathy so hard that my ability to stay immersed in the story shuts down in self-defense. (I tried to read that in high school and couldn't make it past the first chapter.)
...and that's really saying something. Ever since high school brought me within a hair's breadth of nervous breakdown, it's rare for me to achieve and maintain feels other than mirth or annoyance and, at the same time, become consciously aware of them. I read a lot and the only things I can remember giving me significant feels (in this case, putting a hitch in my voice or a glint in my eyes) within the last few years are especially moving things like:
- This music-enhanced reading from Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot.
- A Universe Not Made For Us (another Sagan clip)
- Science Saved My Soul by philhellenes
- We Stopped Dreaming (A Neil deGrasse Tyson speech enhanced with music and visuals)
- The Story of Human Rights (specifically, being hit by the Eleanor Roosevelt quote at the end after what came before primed me for it.)
- Listening to '39 by Queen after realizing that it's about space travel and time-dilation. (Listen to the lyrics closely and you may not need to read the spoiler to figure it out.)
Normally, I'd also try to give some detailed constructive criticism for this as thanks for the free entertainment, but I'm self-aware enough to know that, beyond what I've already said, my cognitive and emotional biases would, at best, prompt me to unknowingly give flawed advice for a fic like this. (A deep revulsion at the denial of personal freedoms, especially within the sanctity of one's own mind, is part of the bedrock of my worldview and that impairs my ability to objectively analyze and critique a fic like this when it also evokes emotion so effectively.)
Oh, a bit of advice for other readers. You may want to watch A Universe Not Made For Us and Science Saved My Soul if you haven't already. They're deeply insightful, poetically moving, and relevant to this story since, while talking about the nature of our existence, they both indirectly touch on the "wise master - incurious servant" ideal deeply embedded in major organized religions.
Daaaamn, Luna. Maybe they can handle more than I was thinking if she can pull aircraft out of the sky. Even if she can't do it again immediately, that should teach the Masters some caution.
The best defense is an overwhelming offense, eh Luna?
A pretty inefficient way to inflict damage though. Sure, she pulled a carrier out of the sky, and the resultant explosion and gravitic rebound damaged the facility, but it was an insane amount of power for just that. I'm wondering if she's going to end up biting off more than she can chew, though I do wholeheartedly support her desire for revenge, seeing what they did to the Security ponies.
hi hi
I find myself shaking my head and sighing. It looks like Gravity Resonance is going off the deep end... She's just forgetting her own lessons over and over again. If Fusion Pulse doesn't end up pulling her flank out of the fire this time, I can only cringe to think of what her condition will be like when Gravity finally returns. (Even if those sensor bugs don't have any weapons on them, I imagine you could still suffocate a pony with one, and this time there is no one to stand guard.)
In hindsight, Fusion being incapacitated and leaving Gravity to do all of this herself is probably what exacerbated those early steps into insanity. Take a slave and give her god powers and primal fear for herself and her family, and you've got something worse than Carrie. Out of the frying pan and into the core of a star, sheesh. It's a wonder she hasn't buckled under the stress already. And Fusion's even closer, she's been through even worse.
It's a wonder they aren't broken, gibbering messes by the time of the show. Well, Celestia at least. And as far as we know.
Will there ever be light in this world again?
Months of pan and anguish and suffering and death and now... two doses of MORE pain and suffering and anguish and death at once!
Can't gravity just, like, cast a 'Kill All Da Masters' spell now? (Genocide Is Magic!)
3123763 Well, Luna DID get a 1000 year time-out, and Celestia did have 1000 years of all pony-kind re-affirming her role and existence. That's not even counting what kind of effect the
elements of harmonycreation stones might have on their bearers.Luna's already had two major freakouts (disassembling the autodoc chamber and bringing down the carrier), and Celestia learned fear and respect of her own power after the beam chamber incident. I'm sure things will finally come to a head once they have to confront Discord.
Speaking of Discord, I kind of wonder how he's going to get a physical body, given that he's some sort of thaumatergical entity. Anyone want to bet that a whole bunch of the villain characters that he's be brain-poking get fuzed into one entity?
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I think he'll simply gain so much control of the system that he'll just... manifest. He's obviously growing more and more powerful by the second.
Oh, Gravity. Irrationally lashing out at authority, seeking short-term pleasure over long-term gain, abandoning everything she once held dear...
Don't worry, Fusion. You haven't created a monster. You've just empowered a teenager.
In any case, I almost look forward to seeing this bite Gravity in the flank. Maybe this will teach her a little humility or restraint.
Also, Olvir's section was very interesting. It's not just magical cross-contamination the People have to worry about. There's also memetic...
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Another song fitting this story - Deify:
Welp, looks like Gravity's finally cracked.
The Masters' scorched-earth policy with regard to their subjects is a highly untenable one even including the abilities of the Creation Stones. I can see why modern Equestria places so much emphasis on Harmony - such rampant and blatant disregard for others can only result in widespread suffering and resistance.
That said, Gravity is being incredibly stupid.
1 - She was already fighting exhaustion during the firefight, it nearly floored (killed) her when she brought down the carrier, and now she's going to try and engage the surrounding forces again?! I know what you've said Luna-tic, but I'm dreading the next chapter because I can't imagine it ending well at all for Gravity, and that will also kill both Fusion and Lilac. She hasn't bothered to consider whether she'll be able to teleport at all after using more magic.
2 - Never let the enemy see what your capabilities are until you are ready to use them effectively. Gravity is going to slap around some relatively unimportant forces just to show off what she has. The Masters are watching and would love to gauge her capabilities so that next time they can counter her more effectively. In fact, she and Fusion talked about the relative unpreparedness of the Masters' forces, and she's still going to show off. I know the two aren't militarily-minded, but still... she's throwing reasonable caution out the window just to make a point.
3 - Gravity has already seen many examples of how the Masters react to disruptions. Currently they aren't overly-concerned with slaughtering Servitors just to deny the sisters' potential allies so she knows that they are more than willing to inflict horrible collateral damage just to contain the situation. What does she expect will happen if she proves herself monumentally dangerous? She doesn't have to know about the moon-based accelerator to know that they will probably unleash something truly horrifying.
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Good choice. That's by far my favorite song by Disturbed. It also vies for very few others for my choice of favorite overall.
Wow!
Weird off topic question. But I've always wondered what types of music the People have.
I like to think the mostly listen to some type of electronica.
I'm loving the glimpses of other personalities: Hakon contrasted with Lothgar, the honest flunky Olvir. It makes the world bigger and more relatable.
Poor Gravity. She's falling far and fast, isn't she? I have the idea that one of our most fatal flaws is the refusal to recognize our own dark side, and/or let others know it exists.
I think it was in the last chapter, but I ran across the word "orientate." This is just a pet peeve of mine, so you can ignore it if you want, but the word should be "orient." It has a long history as a verb.
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TL;DR: Read the boldface parts.
I've never really been a big Disturbed fan. I think it's because their style of metal relies less on impressing the listener with the artistry of their melodies or lyrics and more on forming a raw emotional connection with the audience... which, as I mentioned, doesn't come readily to me.
To be honest, I was surprised when I first read that Disturbed was considered Metal rather than Punk Rock. I like metal and I know it can get really heavy, but their style sounded more like punk to me. (Shows how little I know about music.)
(By comparison, I'm not a big fan of Pearl Jam either, but Do The Evolution is great when viewed as a music video.)
Anyway, since I've got some time and I'm in the mood to ramble, here's an infodump of songs I'd recommend. (Just skip it if you don't care.)
First, here's what comes to mind when I think of good Metal:
- Iron Maiden (2 Minutes to Midnight, Blood Brothers, Brave New World, Dance of Death, Face in the Sand, Fear of the Dark, Ghost of the Navigator, Montségur, Mother Russia, Run To The Hills, The Clairvoyant, The Trooper, Virus)
- Savatage (Commissar)
- Ozzy Osbourne (Crazy Train)
- DragonForce (Through the Fire and the Flames)
- Metallica (Nothing Else Matters, The Memory Remains, Fade to Black)
- Blind Guardian (Mirror Mirror, And Then There Was Silence, Harvest of Sorrow, The Soulforged, Age of False Innocence, The Maiden and the Minstrel Knight, When Sorrow Sang, Time Stands Still, Nightfall, Sadly Sings Destiny)
- Rhapsody (Sacred Power of Raging Winds, Holy Thunderforce, Echoes of Tragedy, Rain of a Thousand Flames, Power of the Dragonflame, Land of Immortals, The Bloody Rage of the Titans)
- Luca Turilli (Kings of the Nordic Twilight, The Ancient Forest of Elves, Black Dragon)
- Týr (Regin Smiður, Hold the Heathen Hammer High, Sinklars Visa)
...though I prefer the Gregorian cover of Nothing Else Matters and Apocalyptica's Cello covers of songs like Fade to Black . (I also have a certain fondness for Malekith's "Children of the Rising Sun" (From the album of the same name. Requires something capable of playing MO3 files like XMPlay) and the non-album version of Holy Forest (also MO3) despite his strong accent.
If you haven't heard anything by Rhapsody, DragonForce, Blind Guardian, or Luca Turilli's independant efforts, give them a listen. (Especially from 3:20 to 4:00 in Kings of the Nordic Twilight. The lyrical twist is very clever.) Many of their songs fall into a delightful sub-genre known as symphonic metal which mixes in instruments like flutes and classical guitars with the more typical electric guitar riffs and, because of their fondness for fantasy-inspired lyrics that often tell stories, they're also often referred to as epic metal. (Blind Guardian did an entire album based on The Silmarillion)
Týr is also definitely worth a listen (though you'll need to look up translations for the lyrics of many of their songs). They do "viking metal". (Folk metal focused around viking history and norse mythology... and I mention those separately because "to go viking" literally meant "to go raiding/pirating" and not everyone did it.)
As I mentioned, For the style used in Deify, I tend to think of punk bands. I know there are some songs I'm forgetting that are closer in sentiment, but the ones in my collection that are closest to the style tend to be the bands and songs which focus on social rather than personal ills:
- Bad Religion (American Jesus, Drunk Sincerity, Punk Rock Song, Cease, Sorrow, I Want to Conquer the World, Slumber, Supersonic, Modern Man, Pity the Dead)
- The Offspring (The Kids Aren't Alright)
- Gob (Give Up The Grudge)
Of course, as far as being relevant to this story goes, that's a more difficult one since themes like slavery/dystopia, brainwashing/self-delusion, having your worldview shattered, rebellion in sci-fi compatible context, the kind of self-doubt that comes from the necessary evils of being a hero, and idolization/deification don't feature very strongly in the parts of my collection that are either well-organized or strongly remembered.
(Most of the stuff I have that deals with some kind of unpleasant social reality is firmly tied to a contemporary context and, if I just ask my mind point-blank, the only results I get are things which, while beautiful, only loosely fit some of the elements of this story like "origin story", "divinity", and "Celestia is benevolent" while completely missing the point.) ...or only show up because of the combined emotional effect of an AMV they were used in.
It's only really suited to an epilogue where Celestia and Luna are putting on strong faces for their newly-free subjects while trying to make peace with all of the deaths on their consciences, but I could imagine Kate Covington's lyrics-enhanced version (mp3) of Rose of May from Final Fantasy 9 being suited. After all, it may be about a human soldier, but it's still a song about making peace with the blood on her hands and the necessary sacrifice of innocence.
There's probably some stuff by E.S. Posthumus or Two Steps From Hell that'd work as mood music but I'm terrible at remembering tracks without lyrics by name (The most relevant ones I can think of off hand are Mosane Pi and Am I Not Human?) and, given how I generally collect music to listen to in isolation from what it was composed for, anything which accurately represents the mood of most of the scenes in the story probably wouldn't stand out enough to stick in my memory. (There's a reason it's called background music. Only the triumphant stuff is allowed to steal the show )
(Though Am I Not Human? might work for some aspect of the recent scenes with Gravity trying to protect Fusion until they can escape. Most of the mood music I can think of tends to be intended for impressive situations such as impressive camera pans, planned missions, or chase scenes, rather than just going about life without getting caught or being worn away defending a position while doing something to secure an escape thats unimpressive to "look at".)
Anyway, enjoy.
How far into the prehistory is this going to go? A good stopping place to my mind is the schism of the diarchy, but it could very easily end with the founding of the first pony nation.
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I asked around and managed to find a friend who knew an even more fitting song. Pet by A Perfect Circle (lyrics).
I think it'll be very hard to find something better matched to the intended master-slave dynamic.
I also figured out the fundamental problem with finding suitable songs. Most songs that touch on the right themes either mention specific real-world events or focus on the romanticized view of rebellion and freedom. (The version that ignores unpleasant side-effects like fear, harming innocents, guilt, betrayal, etc. The "male stereotype that sells" version.)
For example, most of the stories relating to the concepts of slavery and freedom assume a population that knows it's opressed and just need that spark to push them over the edge, ignoring that, to a mind used to slavery, freedom is more terrifying than being thrown into the wilderness with no tools.
(A more subtle version of the same "learned helplessness" is actually a big part of the problem with societies around the world including our own. It works well for keeping populations subservient and in check without them realizing it. If believe that "I can rebel whenever I want. I just don't want to." or you turn to others to teach you everything and assume the world is a scarier, more dangerous place than it really is, you won't risk rocking the boat even as "the band plays on".)
The concept of rebellion is pretty far removed from the female stereotypes and traditional social ideals but, if anything stereotype-like can be made by cobbling together a mish-mash of traditional feminine stereotypes, freedom, and some of the associated antitheses of the male stereotypes, this story definitely goes in that direction:
- The lead hero's personality starts out passive, not independent and rebellious.
- It's clear that even the choice to start down the hero's path by becoming aware of the injustice was out of her control.
- While she may have been given the odd physical or knowledge advantage, she is, personality wise, an ordinary nobody with no charisma or allies.
- The outrage and rebellion that drives her is rooted in compassion for those around her, not idealistic visions for some abstract "everyone".
- Her resolve is tempered by the comparatively small, personal horrors of watching specific individuals suffer.
- Her peers have no fires of rebellion to stoke and would turn her in at the least suspicion.
- Until she makes an agonizing snap decision to save her life, the lead's sister cannot be convinced to join her and it's not unbelievable for her to turn the hero in to the authorities, honestly believing it's for her own good.
- Most significantly, the fight for freedom is not in any way glorious. It's not even neutral. It's constantly made clear that our heroes are troubled by all of the innocents who are suffering as a result of their selfish decision to pursue their own freedom and it's very likely that, not long after they finally feel free and safe, they'll have the mother of all emotional breakdowns.
Thanks for your comments, folks! I'll be pretty tied up with NaPoWriMo until october, so please forgive any tardiness on my part (I do read everything).
====
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And there I was going out of my way to avoid them! Seriously, though, that's not a cliffhanger, that's an 'I want to know what happens next'. Adventure stories being what they are, if you aren't twitching with the need to read the next chapter, then the story needs more excitement (my opinion!).
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Walk softly and carry a high yield mass conversion bomb...
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This really makes me shudder, a sulky teenager with the powers of a god. You wouldn't be able to move for impact craters and lakes of glass.
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I always figured she'd be the type to want her revenge as hot as possible, none of this 'best served cold' rubbish. Unfortunately, she didn't have the benefit of a few days to get used to the idea and to actually think about the future. She'll learn, it's just a shame such lessons tend to be hard ones.
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Of everything I've planned, I'll admit that's one thing I've not even considered. With their dog-like hearing it would probably span a much greater frequency range than a human could hear (and sound pretty odd to us).
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Complexity in everything; there's no way I can write a whole world, but I can at least try and present the illusion (thanks!). I looked into the orient/orientate thing, apparently this is a US/UK difference (to me 'orient' is China!).
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The original plan was to end essentially at S1E1, with a conversation between the Nightmare and Celestia, but that's not on the cards now (way to much to write; I did actually write that end chapter, it will get recycled into a short story at some point). Current plan is to end on or about the founding of the pony nation, but probably not the one you are thinking of (ie significantly before the Hearthswarming Myth; I've already written the epilogue).
3132664 True words, but it has an ending clear and concise with how this is.
As to why I say this is more towards a cliffhanger, is perception, or at least how I see it as such. You end the chapter here with established parts done, and a direction of tension unresolved. You have suspense, danger, and a very clear new, if old foe in this. But, I do not disagree, you have in this view being quite right, I just see it in a little different light.
But have a great time with NaPoWriMo! I wish your muse and you the best of luck, may you find music and the right spirits to aid you if you are that inclined.
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High praise indeed! Glad it's working for you, and thank you for taking the chance to read it (also: that's a great avatar you have). There's no way I can do your comments justice, so all I'll say is thanks for the observations and subsequent music suggestions (more to listen to!). I'd like to say it was all planned to come out that way, but the truth is I just try to write in shades of grey and get across the complexity of the situation (there's very little planning, mostly I just set the starting conditions and let the scenario evolve). I'm a firm believer in consequences, and that nothing happens in a vacuum.
...and the lyrics for 'Pet' give me the shivers; I can see why you picked it.
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Just don't lose interest in finishing this. That'll be enough to do them justice. I put effort into my reviews and recommend stories as a way of thanking authors for free entertainment. (Speaking of which, I've added you to my recommendations group. After Arrow 18, Days is only the second story I've found on FiMFiction which truly feels like science fiction.)
If there are any other genres of music you're interested in, let me know. My tastes span quite a few.
As for planning, you're obviously good at what you do regardless of how you do it. While your story arc seems to be moving along more quickly than some of the people I've seen, I get the impression you're the kind of person who's sees their story at ground level (as opposed to from 10,000 feet) and, as such, you're naturally talented at writing good characters but you run the risk of letting them push you into neglecting plot advancement in favour of character detail. Am I correct?
If so, your biggest risk is letting your focus wander enough that fleshing out your world results in the old "amazing story dies without resolution when the author's muse runs dry around the 500,000 word mark" problem. (Professional editors generally require submissions from unknown authors to be in the range of 80,000 to 120,000 words and that's one of the reasons.)
If you're interested, I can offer some simple tips for getting a general feel of where your story needs to go next so you can keep your current writing style with less risk of wandering too far off. (Basically, various kinds of "planning without planning" questions where, if you take the time to ask and answer them, then it makes your intuition more aware of what you're aiming for later on... and may help to catch a problem or two beforehand.)
I definitely agree in "consequences and nothing happens in a vacuum". Of course, I refer to most of what that encompasses as "character-driven, character-focused writing" and point to David Weber as someone who knows how to do it well. (Every little thing happens because someone causes it and the story is about the characters, not the plot... which allows some really convoluted plots in his other books which would otherwise be unbelievably contrived.)
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I'll be interested in seeing your take on the bizarre species trimorphism especially. I have my own ideas of where you're going but I don't want to spoil the fun by saying them out loud.
p.s. I'm really loving the character development on Gravity.
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Yes, I noticed the extra group pop up (thanks).
I think you are probably correct, that does sound like the way I approach my writing. Obviously there is a certain (minimal) amount of planning; I know a few points I want to hit, as well as the ending. I liken it to driving towards a mountain at night; I can see the peak where it blocks out the stars, but the actual road is only revealed as I drive it.
I'm a firm believer that there is a special place in Hell for writers who start a story but don't finish it... I welcome any suggestions/tips, so yes please.
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The accuracy rate of guesses in the comments have been amusingly low (well, I find it funny!). I'd be interested to know your thoughts via PM, if you don't want it exposed to the world, although I won't confirm or deny anything (up to you; such things have been useful in the past). The problem of creating the three races was part of the original universe design; hopefully my solution works for folks!
3132401>>3128101
Thanks for the song suggestions. I'll check those out.
Regarding "Pet": It does provides certainly some aspects, "Deify" doesn't cover. (And it's creepy as hell.) As you correctly summarized, Days covers several (more or less related) themes, a song containing all is probably impossibly to find. A shame that you don't like Disturbed, but I still consider "Deify" part of the theme song list, unless there is even a more more fitting one (aside from the Bush intro it doesn't refer to actual events, so you could safely play it to Gravity and Fusion and get them agree easily).
Love it! Although I cringe every time Gravity increases her destruction I enjoy watching her turn into Nightmare Moon. Can't wait! The suspense is killing me. Good job on the great chapters.
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Of course I'll stay with it, this story is amazing, and sorry if I bugged you about it. I just am really used to shorter chapters, I guess.
Edit: God smetimes I hate autocorrect. It tried to make me hug you about it.
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Ok, since this is publicly visible, I'll be fairly thorough so others can benefit as much as possible. I don't expect you to need all of this but skim through the parts you already know in case I say something you hadn't considered before.
The first questions I always ask about a story (my own idea or that of a friend I'm helping) are related to the nature and scale of the driving conflict, because they're so central to the pacing. They're not strictly something that can be properly changed once a story has already begun, but Days is already well beyond the recommended length for a single volume in a series, so that sort of "properly" is sort of out the window anyway.
#0: "What is your story seed?"
Just as every complete sentence has, at its core, a subject, verb, and object, every complete story idea has, at it's core, an agent (character or group), a context (the setting), and a driving conflict (the plot). Some authors really trip over this and get confused at why some of the ideas in their collection become stories readily and some stubbornly remain just ideas.
(In fact, this is the #1 problem that tends to prevent "Wouldn't it be cool if...?" ideas from becoming stories. Even if they're not scenes in search of a story, they tend to be missing one or more of these details.)
I'm not going to put too much effort into fine-tuning all of the connotations of the words I use, but I'd reverse-engineer the seed for Days as something along the lines of "In a high-tech world without humans, one of the slaves has the shackles on her mind removed and starts down the path that will eventually lead her to become Princess Celestia."
Actor: A slave who will eventually become Princess Celestia
Context: A high-tech world without humans
Conflict: The shackles on her mind are removed (and she becomes able to see the injustice around her)
Changing any one of those little details will cause a massive shift in the kind of story that grows from them.
#1: "In general terms, what is your driving conflict?" "In general terms, what is your chosen resolution?"
Here's an example on the verbose end of what I mean by "general terms"
- Conflict: "<main character> and father get separated when he's 7 years old. Son spends 10 years building resentment for the mistaken conclusion that he was abandoned while building a new life. Father spends 10 years slowly losing hope until events finally bring them back into contact. Son wants nothing to do with father and father makes things worse in his sloppy attempts to reconnect."
- Resolution: "Father and son finally manage to understand each others points of view. While they both have new lives, they decide to give some kind of reconciliation a chance."
These two questions are important for reasons beyond the obvious "they tell you where you should start and end." Specifically, if they don't match, you've got a simple way to know, for certain, that you have a series with at least two volumes on your hands.
Second, they form the basis of the second question:
#2: "Is this a story-level conflict or a series-level conflict?"
Story-level conflicts are concrete, immediate, personal in scope, and hold the reader in an iron grip when done properly. As such, they cannot last for more than one volume because, when done well, the reader will have trouble putting the book down. (I own an omnibus version of Lord of the Rings and, when I read it back in high school, I was metaphorically begging my instincts to let me put the book down by the end.)
Series-level conflicts are more abstract, long-term, generally national/global in scope, and hold the reader firmly but softly so they can take a rest between volumes while still being raring to go when the next one becomes available.
The more epic a problem is (by the literary "ordinary nobody changes the world" definition) the more likely that it must be a series-level conflict because of how much time and effort it will take to overcome.
This is important to think about for the same reason professional editors limit first-time authors to 120,000 words. The longer your story, the more likely you are to burn out both your own muse and your readers' interest. (If the J.K. Rowling had mistaken "Voldemort is still out there" for the story-level conflict, then she'd have written a single book so long that it could only be released online as a million-word fanfic-like monstrosity.)
It's also an especially significant concern with a story that relies as heavily on tension as yours does. You run a very real risk of burning your readers out if you don't give them a rest.
I'd say that "Ponies are enslaved" is your series-level conflict and your story-level conflict is "Fusion and Gravity need to escape" so, if you aren't already planning to, I'd advise that you wind down the immediate-scope conflicts with something like "Fusion and Gravity manage to escape in a manner that ensures readers won't worry about the recently-blessed foals" and then start a new story so readers have a clear point where they can take a break from your already-massive story to avoid burn-out.
Also, if it was the series-level conflict, identify your story-level conflict and repeat the process for it.
The next questions I always ask are about tone/atmosphere/mood/feel because, contrary to popular belief, they're just as important as everything else combined. (Reading is an experience. The four facets of the narrative (plot, characterization, setting, humour) form only half the picture and speak to your rational mind. If you aren't consciously aware of what you're trying to accomplish on the emotional side, then the outcome will be a mish-mash of blind talent and luck.)
I like to start with the questions with more concrete answers and then work toward the more abstract to help bridge things.
#3: What kind of conflict drives your story?
(Or, for something as big and nuanced as Days, "which facet of the conflict is key to the narrative?")
This is important because, very often, a description of an idea falls under multiple classifications but each interpretation will have a distinctly different character to it and explore a different facet of the problem.
Some people go for as few as three categories (man against man, nature, and self) or as many as eight but I've found that using 5 is most useful as an authoring aid. To limit cognitive bias, I describe them as follows:
1. person vs. person (or groups thereof)
2. person vs. self
3. person vs. society
4. person vs. nature
5. person vs. fate
Drawing a distinction between person vs. person and person vs. society helps to draw attention to the difference in tone and style that comes about when your antagonists are being treated less as individual opponents and more as an amorphous socio-political force of nature.
Likewise, drawing a distinction between person vs. nature and person vs. fate accents the significance of whether nature/fate is a passive obstacle (eg. wilderness survival stories) or an active force (eg. "events" forcing two characters to confront their past together.)
I exclude things like "person vs. machine" and "person vs. god" because I haven't seen enough evidence that they're fundamental types. (eg. Brave New World is person vs. society and people try to use it as an example of person vs. machine. Gods are either characters (vs. person) or faceless forces (vs. fate).)
The series-level conflict for Days is definitely person vs. society but the story-level conflict is less clear-cut. I'm not sure what you're trying for, but the current form feels like a person vs. society which expresses society's force in a very character-oriented manner.
Naturally, there's a large (and excellent) person vs. self component in the moral dilemmas Fusion and Gravity are struggling with but, unless you plan to mark the story as completed when they stop feeling guilt, become rampaging, murdering monsters, and are thus empowered to crush their enemies, it's not even remotely in a position to be the driving conflict.
#4: What is your "focal balance"?
Because of the perceptual relativity of prose (the denser you make your writing, the slower time seems to pass in your story), it's impossible to focus on every thing equally, just like how, because you get more massive as you approach the speed of light, it would take an infinite amount of fuel to reach light speed.
That means that a story has to allocate its limited resources between the four fundamental components of the narrative. (plot, character, setting, and humor) Focusing on all four equally dilutes all of them to the point of making your story forgettable and focusing on one to the exclusion of the others is extremely difficult to maintain in a novel-length work but there are many mixes that are possible.
This is why some stories (like the anime/manga Monster) keep you riveted for the twists and turns (plot), some have amazing characters, some keep you coming back for the world-building, some make you laugh your ass off, and most fall somewhere in the middle. (eg. David Weber tends to do great character focus while Eric Flint tends to do great setting focus with varying amounts of character mixed in)
For more specific examples:
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series divides its focus fairly evenly between setting and humor and uses its characters merely to provide a frame of reference and its plot to provide coherence.
The Sherlock Holmes series divides its focus between plot (the mysteries) and character (Holmes himself) with no humor and minimal setting. (Remember, they were written to be contemporary novels and outlived that context.)
House M.D. is some mixture of Character, Humor, and Plot but it's been too long and I can't be sure what the split is, exactly.
I'm not entirely sure what you were going for, but I get the impression that Days is primarily character with plot and setting divvying up second place, since they're primarily used to manage the mood, maintain tension, and provide a context for events.
(Speaking of Holmes, he provides an interesting example of a story with a character who is developed, not by growing and changing, but by remaining relatively static and endlessly revealing new facets to the reader. The series also demonstrates the proper way to use the "wiggly line" series-level tension graph that things like sitcoms are always trying to use.)
#5: What adjectives best describe the feel you're going for?
I'm not an expert on feel yet, so my third point is basically an instruction to do things like free-associating, picking words out of a hat, brainstorming, or whatever else leaves you with a pile of adjectives that summarize the feel of your story.
The important thing is to force yourself to consciously think about what you're aiming for, rather than trusing the (instinctually lazy) human brain's more intuitive side to figure it out as you go.
#6: How dense is your story and, if applicable, your series?
Density refers to how quickly time passes for a given volume of narrative. Story-level density refers to how much time-skipping goes on between scenes while series-level density refers to how much time-skipping goes on between story arcs. You can have any mix of series-level and story-level density but some combinations are more esoteric than others.
You don't need to think as long and hard on this as your other questions, but it's important to be aware of the potential and effects.
For example, Sherlock Holmes has high-density stories (they do very little time-skipping and resolve themselves in a matter of hours or days) and the series is of a fairly low- to medium-density. (It's obvious that time is passing between individual stories but we get the impression that it's not very much.) This, combined with the many short stories, lends Holmes an immortal quality which helps to explain why fans were so upset when Conan Doyle tried to kill off Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls.
Low series densities allow you to explore the history of something "centuries/millennia" in the making where each novel can be the entire tale of some historical figure or event by turning entire novels into vignettes.
Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question" is an example of the rare, esoteric, low-density story. Each scene passes normally, but the story is composed of widely-separated vignettes which, in total, span billions of years. (If not trillions. I forget.)
Given that the perspective Days takes is that, in a very real sense, Celestia is the origin of Equestria, I'd say that the series density will be fairly high throughout (since, as soon as Fusion and Gravity experience enough person vs. society calm to allow a timeskip, they'll almost certainly be forced to confront their built-up person vs. self issues.) and we already can see the density on the story.
All of these tips also help you to see more of the big picture earlier, which limits the chance for dead-ends and writer's block.
Speaking of writer's block, the best way to think of it is "encountering a problem which doesn't yield to your usual approaches"... which is why sharing it with a friend is a good idea (they inherently don't think the way you do) and applying my techniques helps ground-level thinkers catch problems they may not otherwise notice. (You're stepping your mind through an alternative perspective on the problem.)
Before I go further, I'd like to get a response from you so I can get some feedback on where I should focus my attention (so I don't end up rambling off an entire book's worth of advice and missing the bits you're most likely to benefit from) but I will give a few more general tips:
Tip 1: keep an eye out for themes, subplots, and the like
Watch for subordinate conflicts (like when Fusion forced a person vs. self conflict on Gravity by lifting the blessing or the person vs. self conflicts forced on Fusion and Gravity when they harmed innocents either accidentally or as a result of defending themselves.), themes (Unfortunately, I'm not as good at identifying detailed, concrete themes in a way that'd be useful to guide writing, but I did mention some abstract ones when talking about songs.), symbolism, and any of that other stuff you slept through in high school English.
Just because you don't make a conscious decision to insert them, knowing what they are in a technical sense, doesn't mean that you should blindly trust your intuition. Taking the time to be consciously aware of them allows you to think about how they influcence your overall vision so you can nurture or suppress them to improve the whole.
This also works as a form of being aware of the tools at your disposal rather than delegating the task and that is huge. Not only does being consciously aware give your intuition more chance of using them, it informs your decisions in other areas, allowing you to write a more nuanced story with less effort and making it easier to switch to a mechanistic approach to getting unstuck if you find yourself blocked. (In other words, using techniques like summarizing the situation you're in and then questioning the definition of each and every word used to force yourself to explore less obvious avenues and interpretations.)
Tip 2: Know how to apply these techniques fractally in case you need it
These same techniques and questions apply at just about every level of the story. You can ask yourself similar questions about a series, a story, a subplot, a scene, or just about any other element and get useful answers.
For example, If you're writing a tricky scene and you want to be explicit about everything, the questions you'd quickly run through for each character on your mental tally go along these lines:
1. What is their long-term goal (takes a whole story arc to change it)?
2. What is their personality like (since it's essentially their "long-term mood")?
3. What do they want right now (in other words, their short-term goal)?
4. What is their current mood?
6. Is there anything about the setting which might affect them beyond what we already know? (eg. Is it threatening to rain? Is it hot and muggy?)
7. Is there anything plot-wise (long-term or immediate) that could affected by otherwise inconsequential details of how they act?
8. Would some humor to release tension be appropriate and, if so, could this character contribute to that in addition to whatever else this scene accomplishes?
How deep you normally go is something you'll have to experiment with, but try it at least once so you can get a feel for how to do it.
I tend to apply a variant of Pixar's "throw out your first five ideas. They're too obvious." rule in a fractal manner. When I'm helping a friend plot out a fanfic, I question everything and discard the first answer or two, which can be difficult at times, but makes things much more novel and interesting.
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Thank you, that obviously took some time to put together. I'll need time to think on that, and to understand the questions posed; unfortunately time isn't something I have much of, here at the start of NaPoWriMo (if you are not familiar with that, it's the pony fanfic version of NaNoWriMo, and is essentially the same except in a different month).
===
One question: the idea of drawing a definite 'line in the sand' and splitting the 'story' into a 'series' is an interesting one; I take it the suggestion is to literally close the file on DOWAS, then start the next part of the 'series' under a new title?
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Not a problem. I saw your commentary to that effect and I'll be fairly busy over the course of the next month too, so that works out well.
As for splitting Days into separate story entries, yes. I've seen stories which break themselves into a series of arcs but are then posted in a single story entry on the site and it just doesn't give enough of a cognitive boundary. The reader tends to impulsively click "next" and get hooked on the new arc before they fully realize what's happened.
The level of engagement a series-level conflict generates needs something at the volume boundary to make the reader stop and think so they can properly notice if they're in that "I can read more, but not a whole arc more" state.
(Not a big one though. Providing a "next story in the series" hyperlink at the bottom of the last chapter is fine. In fact, Twisting the Hellmouth has built-in series support and they just have a slightly larger "The End" followed by a "next story in the series" link.)
(Twisting the Hellmouth is a Buffy the Vampire Slayer crossover site which is less beautiful than FiMFiction but has a few features FiMFiction could take inspiration from like explicit series support, fine-grained watch controls, a nifty approach to streamlining the advanced search/browse interface using AJAX, site-level support for marking a story as in need of a beta reader, and the ability to grant multiple authors ownership of a single story for collaborations like Widening the Lens)
It also makes people more likely to start reading the story since a huge word count on a single story is often seen as intimidating.
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Oh, one other question pair and tip I almost forgot:
#2.5: "What is your divergence event?" "When does the narrative start?"
(On the face of it, this is only for fanfics but it may also be more generally useful if you interpret the questions as asking about the difference between when "it all began" and when the reader came on the scene.)
For any story, the reader must feel that they can form coherent mental models of the various elements from the details given.
The character version of this is the reason that the kind of mind-control stories often used in fetish writing are incredibly difficult to pull off. The reader feels that understanding the character is impossible because the story renders invalid our intuitive model of how much a human mind can change in a given amount of time and what kinds of sensory inputs would be required to do so.
(Put differently, the reader evaluates the quality of a character based on how well they manage to be "too complex to anticipate but fully consistent in retrospect". For that to work, the reader needs to feel a certain level of confidence in "new mindstate = old mindstate + inputs". Mind-control fics change that equation to "new mindstate = old mindstate + inputs + hidden inputs".)
(Days is an interesting case there. While the blessing is mind control of a sort, it's simultaneously internal to the character but external to their personality, so it doesn't fit this definition of "mind control" because it doesn't violate our intuitive model of how a human-like mind works and also doesn't react to invisible external inputs.)
However, it's the plot side of things that I'm talking about here.
To preserve suspension of disbelief, readers must also be given the illusion that the story is a closed system. (That, even if some of the events occur off-screen, their cause is internal to the story, rather than The Hand of Author reaching in and meddling. The difference between an OK plot and a great plot is how natural it feels to give the story the benefit fo the doubt here.)
For a fanfic, this manifests itself in the principle that all divergence from canon which needs to be justified should trace back to a single causal event and various believable "maybe this was always waiting off-screen in canon" moments which follow.
For crossover fanfiction, the causal event will be the same one that establishes the crossover and, in the process, justifies it happening now when it didn't happen in canon. (In anime/manga fanfiction, usually a "should've taken a left turn at Albuquerque" moment, since there's already a predisposition to believing that all of the different light/comedic anime and manga take place in different parts of the same "anime Japan" setting and simply never happen to cross paths.)
As for "needing justification", here's an example on FiMFiction:
In An Affliction of the Heart, that divergence is Kuno being discovered by Warden. The existence of Kuno and Warden as characters needs no justification because it's plausible that they existed in canon but, without meeting each other, never amounted to anything significant. Everything that occurs in all three stories from that point on feels believable as a natural consequence of that divergence event and the cascade of changes that follow.
This isn't really a big deal in Days, since your story is presenting itself as a prequel to canon (so there's technically no divergence point), but it's good to know for other types of stories. (For a sequel to canon, the divergence point is the end of canon, regardless of how much you timeskip.)
As with conflict and resolution, there's a good reason these two questions are paired.
By clearly identifying and separating the concept of "when it diverges from canon" from the concept of "when the narrative starts", you gain three benefits:
1. It's easier to apply the principle of "jump right into the action" (or, as I like to say it, "Chapter 1 must give an accurate first impression") when you clearly understand what is backstory and what is narrative.
2. In some stories, the divergence point may be decades, centuries, or millennia in the past and consciously recognizing that helps you to notice events which don't quite fit with the causal flow. (It also draws attention to spots where you might need extra justification for something that hasn't changed from canon. The perspective associated with this part may be relevant to Days.)
3. If your divergence event lies after the start of your narrative, you know you're wasting time and boring the reader by restating canon events.
---
Tip 3: Use these questions when you want to mothball or share an idea
The questions I've already shared actually have their roots in my need to accurately summarize ideas I lack the skill to develop so I can either shelve them or share them without important details being lost in the process. In fact, they're about 90% of the task.
The other main things you'll want to make notes on in such a situation are:
- A summary of the timeline or story outline so far.
- A loose record of unsorted ideas you want to fit into the story but haven't yet found a clear place for.
- A list of any problems you need to solve, decisions you need to make, and questions you need to answer.
(It's been my experience that splitting them up this way makes it easier to collaborate, either with a friend or with your much-changed future self)
(This is also useful as a step in breaking through writer's block since writing this stuff down in a form that's meant to be read by others tends to bypass the brain's tendency to save energy by replaying old opinions rather than forming new ones.)
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You're welcome. Let me know if there are any other genres you'd like suggestions from. As I mentioned, my tastes are pretty broad.
I've listened to Down With The Sickness on occasion so it's not that I never listen to Disturbed. It's just that, when I listen to music, it's hard for me to fully enjoy the lyrics if the musical side doesn't hold my interest too.
If the music isn't carrying half the load, then the lyrics devolve into overly-simplified poetry... and I'd much rather read poetry which gets its impact without music (and possibly in a more compact way) in such a case. For example, The Chimney Sweeper from William Blake's "Songs of Experience" (especially the second stanza):
...or the second stanza of London, again from William Blake's Songs of Experience:
(Which reminds me. One of these days, I really need to make time to sit down and savour reading The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in one go.)
As for Deify, no worries. I wasn't excluding it... I just said that it wasn't really to my tastes.
3145854 Pfft... I read Fallout: Equestria in two weeks, while working. Wordcount don't scare me!
Hay, I plan to power through Project Horizons only once it's finished!
I can understand splitting a story if it truly has independent story segments with their own buildup, climax, and proper epilogues, but guidelindes be bucked! If a story flows... Let it FLOOOOW! If it ain't broke, don't split it!
Well, I can honestly say I can't wait for the next chapter, and that EqD is a darn tease, what with their days, even week+ late story posts... Gettin' my hopes up Sethisto, bout stuff I already read...
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Well, considering how the next few chapters have been written, the break would be barely noticeable to folks like you who are already in this deep. The only reason I'm considering this is that it fits really quite well with the the stuff I have in draft. About all you get extra would be a transitional epilogue that would put some stuff in that I probably should have included anyway.
As to EqD's updates... you can blame Seth for a lot of things (including the destruction of the last two years of my personal life), but not how the updates pop up. I think they lost #27, and I'm still a bit annoyed they never did a April 1 story update post, but the rest is my fault (sometime I forget; this month has been especially bad for that).
Read this entire thing in about 8 hours. Up to chapter 30 anyway. Couldn't put it down although i did get a bit confused in places. Want more now :(
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Welcome!
...and it's going to hurt dropping back to reading it at the rate I'm writing it.
Anything in particular get you stumped, or did you figure it all out in the end?
3196499 Welcome!
That's because of my (possibly flawed) memory of the DD's speech patterns in Dog and Pony Show. It should just be the Masters, so if you have an example of when the ponies are doing it...?
Making them 'alien' was part of it, so at least that worked (even if you don't like it!).
Oh, DANG.
this is glorious, I LOVE the worldbuilding here, MMM. so good. the concept of the blessing is chilling and ingenious and the way you've developed the masters' society and social structure is fantastic. the alternate ending was fabulous and the shocking incident with Fusion and Salrath in chapter twelve floored me, I was totally invested and really shocked.
My only slight complaint is that in the later chapters, the narrative keeps leaping from side-character to side character, introducing lots of random elements who I really don't care about that much, but that might just be me being impatient to find out what will become of Fusion and Gravity.
One little question. Are the servitors regular FiM pony sized and shaped, or are they Celestia/Luna sized and shaped? I need to know because you wouldn't believe how badly I wanna fanart this fic.
Also Korn's compassion for the ponies is adorable, these are my favourite kind of friendships, ugu. I really hope we see more of him.
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Welcome!
Glad you are enjoying the show -- your comment about side characters is noted, and it is something I'm conscious of. I probably went a little over the top for the last few chapters (there were actually more POVs, but I terminated one during editing). Things should be more constrained after this arc is complete (the problem is that I like the other viewpoints and it's really hard to resist the urge to tell all the stories!).
The servitors are 'full size', Celestia/Nightmare Moon is the closest; Gravity is only a little younger than Fusion (my headcanon says that the show's Luna is still growing/recovering from having the Nightmare stripped away, so my pair are closer in size than they are in the 'modern times', if that makes sense).
If you do decide to draw something, be sure to send me a link
I'm sure Korn's story isn't over yet...
This is currently my favourite story on the site, no other is griping me like this one. You have built such a convincing world, with all the small details which lend a glimmer of life to the whole story.
It is so well crafted that even though it is an origin story, I am still afraid for Fusion and Gravity.
My brain tells me they will get out of this alive, but I can't shake a feeling of dread from my guts, I was actually terrified when reading the part about the live dissection, or following Gravity through the gun fight. She was so powerfull and yet so fragile, a small moment of inattention, a straw bullet away from losing everything .
And the fate of the security ponies, tragic and yet to be expected. The people are acting quite rationally in this matter, they don't know the range of the "de-blessing" ability neither the time required to do it, so they are not taking any chance. Ruthless and efficient, a few servitor's lifes are an acceptable sacrifice for their peace of mind.
I wanted to convey that you are doing a wonderfull job, and you need to continue for a very long time.
PS: I want to see Gravity blow up a lot of expansive military hardware, with plenty of people's bit still inside
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Thank you! Glad there is a real 'sense of peril' coming through -- making the threat real yet survivable is a fun challenge.
There's plenty more story to be told, so I can't see myself stopping anytime soon.
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Saved and going to be used when I'll be writing something, thanks! Since I didn't read it yet, I'm not sure, but I think that you didn't mention plots without conflict - an abstract thing, compared to most literature, but still doable and nice.
And now the usual stuff:
After the first megasecond this one's Gunner had to restrained by the crew servitor. --- had to be restrained?
Nice chapter, is this going to be the seed of Nightmare Moon?
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I didn't feel it was necessary to mention plots without conflict in this context but I have discussed them a bit with a friend of mine.
As he pointed out, all you really need is for the story to grab the reader's interest and change enough to retain that interest through to the end.
The problem is that, even if you don't need the "the driving conflict helps the author more than the reader" benefits, it's still counter-productive to write a story without a conflict because, given how the reader's mind works and what it takes to make a story engaging, the reader will probably mis-identify something you didn't intend as a significant conflict and then they'll be disappointed when it's not as significant as they expected.
(To put it another way, a story without a driving conflict is much more trouble than it's worth. It's better to just use a very subtle one instead so you get all the benefits and none of the drawbacks.)
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Fixed, thanks.
(what with all the editing and other writing, it's been about two months since I did anything for Wasp -- it's good to be back in this particular saddle!)
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Just to let you know that I haven't forgotten; I'll have a reply for you when I've had a chance to properly think about your post.
So many lose ends!
It is already over 200.000 words with already one alternade ending and there is still so much left to explore. I see no end of Gravitys and Fusions travel, only the wisp like feeling that it may end when they manage to collect and use the Creation Stones.
And the Chaos influence. It is just to much for me to even try predicting in wich way the story may be going. Do you still know?
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Ah, how much fun would it be if you could predict what was going to happen next?
Assuming the question was directed at me, yes I do know where things are going. The exact path may be shrouded in fog, but the destination is clear.
The story has lasted longer than I thought it would, back when I started writing it (two years ago last month!), and it's still got a way to go yet.
Also: welcome!