Sister forum[GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by Somber Sat Jun 21, 2014 8:07 pm
Goldenblood answers.
Music: "...it sounds nice."
Fashion: "...do I look decently non-descript? Good. Not to neat. Not too shabby. That's all I care about."
Sports: "Right... next please."
Wonderbolt Derby: "... it involves going around in a circle. Fast."
Edit: And yes, Pendergast gets even WORSE later in the series. He's soon surrounded by other ultra competent, ultra intelligent people who are just a shade less than he is.
Music: "...it sounds nice."
Fashion: "...do I look decently non-descript? Good. Not to neat. Not too shabby. That's all I care about."
Sports: "Right... next please."
Wonderbolt Derby: "... it involves going around in a circle. Fast."
Edit: And yes, Pendergast gets even WORSE later in the series. He's soon surrounded by other ultra competent, ultra intelligent people who are just a shade less than he is.
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by Icy Shake Sat Jun 21, 2014 8:14 pm
I think that the last chapter actually contained an excellent example of this in the Littlehorn orb. It showed an example of where he had many things stacked in his favor—special knowledge of the people he was dealing with, a diplomatic problem as the first step, operating on his home turf, at least one person willing to help—but despite all this, he failed miserably in stopping the Starkatteri, and indirectly the escalation of the war, etc. He couldn't sway the dean or get her to get more support once he knew a Starkatteri was involved, I'm not even sure he tried; he couldn't physically or magically disrupt the bomb, which would at least have bought time; he couldn't get a warning out before it was too late; he couldn't impress the distinction between the appearance of the situation and the finer details.SilentCarto wrote:Well, this is where I don't quite follow. BJ is highly competent in her particular skill set, but that's not a crime. She's useless at sneaking, hacking, and medicine. She's okay at convincing people with her sincerity, but a political animal like Lighthooves will talk rings around her. The kind of ultra-competence you're referring to implies that she's an expert at so many skills that one of her talents always applies, and that's not really the case.Somber wrote:Uggggghhhhh...
I just realized where Goldenblood and Blackjack came from...
I read a lot of different stories. Lord of the Rings, of course. Wheel of Time (To a point). Dresden files. RA Salvadore's dark elf line. But I also read a lot of non-fantasy fiction and am a big fan of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child team ups. I'm also a fan of Clive Cussler's work.
Mix this together and what do you get?
Ultra competence.
Goldenblood is similar in that he's highly competent in his sphere. He's an ambush predator of politics -- tricky, stealthy, and deadly when he decides to strike. In most flashbacks, we see him in his native environment, so of course he's extremely competent there. But my response comes in two parts.
First, he's not universally competent. He's good at this one thing, which is fine. If you challenged him to single combat or a trivia contest, he'd be sunk. But he uses his political acumen to see to it that A) you never got the chance to challenge him, and B) you never knew who to challenge anyway. A lot of what he got away with was thanks to his relative obscurity. He uses his skills to make sure his opponents stay in the arena where his skills apply.
Second, if he was the hero of the story, you're right that his level of manipulation might be unacceptable. But this kind of behavior is perfectly fine in a villain. Xanatos, Palpatine, Light Yagami... well, just see the "Magnificent Bastard" entry on TVTropes, really. (And yet, even Goldie isn't perfect -- he was being played the whole time.)
On a larger level, even ignoring that he was being manipulated by the Eater and/or Luna, the game he was playing ended up with him losing, and in a predictable way consistent with how he played it. He was always dependent on having something to offer or something to threaten with. He used both, and the way he did both tended to make enemies of the people he needed to work for him, and with so many dirty, dangerous secrets held from everybody, it was only a matter of time before something, somewhere broke badly enough that he'd be taken down as a result. Basically, he was operating in a manner that can seem to work great on the surface, but underneath is fragile and unstable, and has some pretty nasty failure modes.
The key thing here is that he had sown the seeds of his destruction, and in the end they grew bore fruit; from a writer's perspective, the dangerous, dishonest thing to do is to disconnect the consequences from the actions. It would be bad if all of this never led to a breakdown in the system, or ever-increasing efforts to keep it running. But that's not what happened, is it?
Going a little bit beyond that, it's worth remembering that, like everything else, hypercompetence is only a bad thing depending on the context. The main thing is to ensure that there remain obstacles that are meaningful to the character. The best example here is probably Superman: take most versions of him and put him on real Earth, and about the only story you have left to tell is related to the fact he can't be everywhere at once. Given the right author, it could probably still work, but it might not support a bunch of ongoing series. But put him in the DCU and you have no problem, and can even tell ensemble stories where he needs the support of others.
It sounded to me like the major problem with Pendergast in Relic was that he was leagues above all the rest, and became more so over time. I'm not sure that that was ever a problem with Blackjack, even on the narrow dimension of combat; while it's true she's generally come out on top, she's often gotten in over her head and needed to be bailed out or paid a price either from how she was directly impacted by the battle or in how it harmed those around her.
Largely agreed, but there's one particular aspect that sometimes shows I'd like to expand on: unearned reactions from other characters, a special case of facing no obstacles. The canonical way that plays out is in the Sue being adored by everyone for no reason (maybe not antagonists, true, though I think that in their case it's sometimes set up such that they're the flip side, hating the Sue for no reason that follows from the action of the story, or out of mere envy of the Sue's Sue-ness). I think there may have been some hints of this in the early chapters of Project Horizons, but even then mostly not too strong.SilentCarto wrote:You can use the term "Marty Stu" or "Gary Stu" for males if you prefer. But "ultra competent" is not what "Mary Sue" means. A Mary Sue waltzes through the story without having to expend effort to overcome challenges. That is absolutely not the case for BJ, of course, but that's not what you're worried about, so I'll set it aside. Just be aware that "Mary Sue" implies traits you didn't actually mean.Somber wrote:AKA, Mary Sue characters. I generally don't like that term, as it is horribly sexist, but it's the one most people can relate too. Ultra Competence.
Glory could be chalked up to circumstances, desperate for anyone to not only help her but give her emotional security after facing raiders unprepared and hiding in a hole for a week, but she did still seem to latch on to Blackjack and P-21 very easily and rapidly, especially considering how Blackjack immediately pushed far against her comfort zone with the Pony Joe's job.
In the early chapters, P-21 may have been this even worse, in that after a certain point he no longer had the necessity reason to stick with her, and both before and after that it's not the easiest to see why he'd be as supportive of her (grouchy, angry though he was), or especially why he'd not only act like Blackjack was their leader, but acknowledge it as well. Again, these are relatively minor and there are ways to rationalize them, but I feel like it kind of comes down to because they are the main cast, and Blackjack is the protagonist.
I can't really think of any other cases off the top of my head, good or bad, that aren't accounted for by the Wasteland media, so in this segment of the definition, you're again largely, if not perfectly, in the clear.
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by O. Hinds Sat Jun 21, 2014 8:19 pm
As I see (and remember) it, Goldenblood does look ultra competent when we first see him. As the story progresses, though, we learn more and more that that was an image, a front, that he was often unsure and was in many ways well out of his depth ever since Littlehorn. He was a talented individual, certainly, but he wouldn't have been in the position he was in if he wasn't. He's definitely not a mary sue; one of his greatest skills was hiding his many, many, many mistakes, and even that eventually failed him. And this is before it's taken into account that he was really being played for so much of the time.
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by SilentCarto Sun Jun 22, 2014 2:13 am
I don't think it ever quite came to that. I had the impression that it was generally some combination of knowing BJ is doing good work, inertia and lack of other options, and the feeling that BJ would get herself and P-21/Glory killed without Glory/P-21.Icy Shake wrote:Again, these are relatively minor and there are ways to rationalize them, but I feel like it kind of comes down to because they are the main cast, and Blackjack is the protagonist.
I kind of loved that sense, in the early days, that the team was hanging together by a thread. It made me cheer every time one of them chose to stay in spite of all the reasons they should leave.
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by SilentCarto Sun Jun 22, 2014 2:17 am
For some reason, I just got the mental image of Goldenblood doing this:Somber wrote:Goldenblood answers.
Music: "...it sounds nice."
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by Vinylshadow Sun Jun 22, 2014 1:43 pm
Well, now there's some interesting blackmail material...
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by Icy Shake Mon Jun 23, 2014 11:46 pm
That's all true—and I feel the same way—but though it feels great when they pull through even that feeling is built on the fact that there wasn't that much holding them together, and both Glory and P-21 did have good reasons to leave, and that's a point I don't think I can deny when I hear it as a criticism of the early chapters.SilentCarto wrote:I don't think it ever quite came to that. I had the impression that it was generally some combination of knowing BJ is doing good work, inertia and lack of other options, and the feeling that BJ would get herself and P-21/Glory killed without Glory/P-21.Icy Shake wrote:Again, these are relatively minor and there are ways to rationalize them, but I feel like it kind of comes down to because they are the main cast, and Blackjack is the protagonist.
I kind of loved that sense, in the early days, that the team was hanging together by a thread. It made me cheer every time one of them chose to stay in spite of all the reasons they should leave.
On a more positive note, the Hightower arc ended on a chapter I found much more enjoyable and fulfilling than the two that started it off.
- Chapter Forty Eight Running Thoughts:
- I swatted her flank with my singed tail. “I need a number. Minutes? Hours? What?” We were backing away from the heat and smoke that began to swirl in through the smashed out window.
“Half an hour? An hour at most,” Xanthe whimpered. “If we had more time and Cerberus were intact, we might have severed the warhead and removed it, but…”
“Yeah. That plan is out the window,” I said. Between the smooze and those flaming ghouls, I really wasn’t bothered by the idea of Hightower being gone soon. Particularly since, if we could get in, the smooze could get out. Still, “Meatlocker needs to be warned that their neighbor is about to go boom. Can you get Cerberus flying again and out through that hole? Without getting blasted?” I asked, pointing at the gaping breach two stories above us with my stump. Of all our fliers, Cerberus was the only one we could really spare to warn Meatlocker.
“I… don’t know? His levitation system should already be functional enough, but depending on the targeting talismans in the turrets they might let him go, or they could disintegrate him,” she said, and bit her lip again. Then she jerked her head up with a smile. “I’ll examine one of the sentries and see if they have an intact IFF unit!” She turned and raced away from the window and down the hall.
“You have five minutes!” I yelled after her, then coughed at the acrid smoke that was filling the air. I suspected that death by balefire blast could be preempted by the far more mundane peril of smoke inhalation. I turned and looked up at Stygius, Psychoshy, and Silver Spoon. “Go back to Rampage. Get the RadAway bottled up however you can, and make sure those supplies you scavenged are passed around.” I closed my eyes asked Lacunae, “Any ideas on dealing with all this smoke?”
I suppose it's been happening for a while, if less so with people outside of her core group, but Blackjack really is getting better at not just taking charge but forming specific plans in response to situations and dividing them up based on the resources available to her. This is pretty distant from the old "Let's show up, shoot at it, and improvise," is what I'm saying.
“We don’t have any respirators, so tie wet cloths over your muzzles!” I shouted at the pair of fliers as they flew back towards the radiology storage, then coughed again myself.
Interesting. Didn't notice or think about it before, but I guess the synthetics can still be irritated by particulates, chemicals, or heat.
I could feel the chewing feeling halfway along my ribs and up my throat. Everything hurt. The ebb and surge of pain grew heavier with every breath. I had to fight it. He hadn’t been able to end his curse, so now my only hope was that there was something Snips’s partner could do to help me.
Stuff like this I guess gives a little taste of the difference between serial and bulk publishing: it's sort of extraneous or redundant if the reader can be counted on to remember the details of the last chapter (not knocking it or anything—there've been numerous occasions when I at least started out a new chapter, of this or other stories I was reading as they updated, where I at least went back and read the last few pages of the previous chapter just to have my bearings at all), but it sure beats a "Last time, on Dragonball Z" or "Previously, on Stargate SG-1." And it's not like it's absent in single-shot publication long form fiction, but probably less common that it happens with such a short in-story gap.
“Good job. We’ll get out of this yet.” He just stared at me, and I felt new sweat popping to my brow. “What?”
“Oh, if only you were a griffin,” he muttered as he looked skyward. “I would have given my left paw for a commander like you.”
I blinked in shock. “Um… thanks?” I replied, then peered up at where the smoke was being blown out the hole in the prison wall, then back at him. “Were you a soldier before…?” I balked, not sure how rude it was to point out he’d died. The question seemed to annoy him a little, but not for the reasons I thought.
I know there's the five minutes they're giving Xanthe to figure out what they can do with Cerberus, but is this really the time?
“I am a soldier. All griffins are soldiers. From the youngest chick to the oldest harpy, we’re all soldiers. We strive for assertiveness, certainty, and martial skill and hold ourselves to our honor and our Contracts,” he said coolly as he looked in the direction of the bomb, though now there was so much smoke that all that could be seen was a murky blue glow.
"Except the pastry chefs. But we don't like to talk about them. They can be pretty nasty with a rolling pin or dough cutter, at least."
Also, "harpy"? Rude much?
“We fought for both sides. We fought to protect neutral parties. Fought for whoever owned our Contracts. The only people we never fought were our own kind.”
Yeah, I have trouble seeing it work out that way in practice.
“I pledged my Contract to the holder for as long as I lived, first to a family of scavengers who hid my young during the war with the Enclave. The father was an honorable earth pony, but when he died, my Contract passed to his son. He drove off my family and used me as a weapon, forcing me to kill any who attacked him due to his unreasonable and obnoxious demands. I would have happily killed him, or allowed them to… if it would not violate my contract.
Yeah, a limited transferability clause would have been a really great idea there. I'm surprised that wasn't a standard feature for long-term open contracts.
“Did Ahuizotl have dealings with zebras?” I demanded.
“I protect the holder of my Contract. That includes his secrets,” he said with sullen resignation.
I wanted to demand that he tell me the truth, but guessed it was futile. He’d died of radiation poisoning saving the life of a pony he hated to avoid breaking his Contract. Then I blinked as an idea came to me. If this worked… “Tell me he didn’t have dealings with zebras.” The griffin blinked and scowled sharply. Then he knit his brows as if processing my response. I hoped that ‘killing me to protect his secrets’ wasn’t in the Contract. Then Carrion looked right at me and simply smiled.
This has a very Laws of Robotics vibe to it.
Yes! Maybe brain tumors had made me smarter.
Come to think of it, since the mid-sixty chapters this has been a testable hypothesis. And I think I'm justified in saying it can pretty readily be dismissed.
“The Maiden is born of heartache and sorrow, and I know you suffer. She butchers all who oppose her. I saw what you did in Yellow River. She sows destruction for the entire world. That monster you slew was indestructible, and yet you destroyed it.”
I slumped. “Xanthe, I got lucky.” Something in me was drawing tight, a single raw nerve growing sharper and sharper. “That’s all it is. That’s all it’s ever been.”
On the one hand, Xanthe kind of has a point: it kind of stops looking like luck if the streak continues indefinitely against consistently high odds. On the other, I'd really like for there to be more to it than just a "victory" special talent, or at least with a strong twist, which based on some of what Somber's said the last week may be the most I can realistically hope for.
“Luck? Luck that you die but return to life? Luck that you overcome all adversity?” The zebra scoffed. “Luck that you stumble across the secrets of ages past?”
Yeah, that. Granted, it's also that there's a hoof on the scale, but I also think it's pretty clear that that wasn't the deciding factor all or even most of the time.
I am not Nightmare Moon! I am not the Maiden of the Stars! I am not special and I am not going to put up with it any longer!” I screamed down at her.
Well, I think there's a pretty big gap between the first two sentences and the third, but then it depends on the specific meaning of "special."
“You sure about that?” Psychoshy asked behind me, and I turned and saw all of the others staring in shock. “‘Cause I saw what you did in Hippocratic, and Rampage has been trying to convince me you really are some fucking paragon and not the scariest fucking mare I could ever imagine.”
"Why can't she be both?"
Why the fuck shouldn’t she think of you as Nightmare Moon? Why the fuck shouldn’t everyone?”
“Because I’m trying to do good!” I countered, twisting around to face her. “I’m trying to make the world better.”
“Glad to hear it. That still doesn’t make you any less damn scary. Because all it would take is you changing your mind, and the rest of us are dead! Maybe you think the world would be better without Psychoshy. What are my chances of stopping you if you really wanted to kill me? She thinks you’re the devil. I’d say you’re two steps away. And anypony who’s seen you fight would agree with me.”
Quite a difference from the Psychoshy who fought Blackjack in the Arena. A lot's happened, of course, and she has seen enough to know that just because she won—and it was a near thing at that—then, that doesn't say much about next time. It's kind of nice that she's managed something of a reversion to the more (outwardly) confident, self-assured (and more) mare following the gap, but I do wonder if that will still stick when things start to heat up—there's a big difference between hanging out in a protected place surrounded by friends and the heat of a battle that isn't going your way, but there is at least the help that Blackjack isn't as overbearingly deadly, or so it would seem, as she used to be.
“One of the ghouls is our agent,” Xanthe murmured, so softly that for a second I thought I’d imagined it. “He feeds us intelligence and passes messages on for a steep price. He has for years.” The zebra glanced up and sniffed, begging in a whimper, “Please don’t kill my people, Maiden.”
I sighed and reached out, paused, and patted her head. “I don’t want to kill anyone, Xanthe. Not if I can help it.”
I like the delivery here, clearly a rhetorical plea, a prayer, rather than really asking Blackjack not to kill her people. Because it does seem like even Xanthe already knew Blackjack doesn't intend to kill her people, but believes that it's an inevitability nevertheless.
Then I looked at my stump. “And right now, I’m not looking like I’m going to kill much of anypony.
Ah, good to see that is still an issue.
“Buck up, Soldier. There’ll be other ghouls to disintegrate,” I said, earning a surprised and slightly troubled look from Silver Spoon. “Remember, straight there.”
"Blackjack, the accidental racist!"
But yeah, that phrasing wasn't great—I'd say not well thought out, but I don't think thought was put into it at all.
Lacunae and Snips walked over, the blue unicorn holding my sword in his magic as far away from himself as possible as if the blade was diseased and reeking.
Wouldn't be much of a surprise if Lacunae were averse to it as well.
“How do we know this IFF is going to work?” I yelled over the howling air. Rain was pouring down outside; it looked like late afternoon. Had we really only been in Hightower a few hours? Felt like weeks.
Heh.
Then I stopped wondering why as I saw blue flames slowly approaching. “Flamer!” I warned as the swirling smoke parted to reveal a flaming pony squeezing out of a breached cell. Vigilance came up as I stood in the gap and sighted along the barrel, planting shots as precisely as I could. The flaming ghoul let out a scream and charged, my bullets half-vaporizing before striking its skull. The 12.7mm rounds were substantial enough to slow it down, but beyond that...
Then Carrion flew up the hole behind me, and a line of green lanced out and began to chew through the ghoul. Xanthe was placed beside me, firing her sidearm wildly into its torso as I kept my shots on its head. Finally, silver arrows streaked through the smoke and sank into the flaming monster’s head. It collapsed in on itself, disappearing in a heap of green dust.
Kind of a downgrade compared to the last one. But you can't have every one of them take as long as that, and I guess there was at least some benefit from a learning curve, even if to an extent it wouldn't really apply that much since each of them pretty much specialized in one thing anyway.
“Right!” I shouted, not able to see more than ten feet in the smoke. “Move quick! Call out if you see a flaming one. Move!”
Reminds me of Left 4 Dead 2.
Worse than the flames and blasts were the screams for help, though. In more than one cell I saw glowing ghouls among their feral brethren and begging to be let out. I just couldn’t think of a way we could open the fused steel doors and extract them safely. I wanted to give them a chance. I needed to…
But sometimes we don’t get what we want or need…
Luckily, she didn't know any of them. More seriously, that's an unusually mature, practical reaction for her, as much as it hurts. Don't think she ever counted them in her list of failures or murders or anything, though.
Even the smooze seemed to find the three a little too spicy for its taste, the blue sludge disappearing back into the corroded toilet. The smoking mess left behind was so destructive that it was eating into the concrete floor.
Wait… if it was strong enough to do that…
Oh! I misunderstood what was going on earlier. I thought the plan was to get the (first flaming ones, then) smooze to take down the door from the beginning. Now that makes more sense. I think I got a little mixed up because I elided in my mind the three flaming ones in the hall and the glowing ones in the cell, and from the context of Blackjack smacking her hand against the wall (which I suppose I should have distinguished from the door) right before Lacunae brought the flamers to her attention.
The smooze flooded over them, boiling and blackening and letting out a noxious reek that made me gag. The ghouls struggled, raising melting heads as the entire concoction cooked into a blackened tarlike mud. . . . The smoking mess left behind was so destructive that it was eating into the concrete floor.
Short, though hardly sweet, but some nice, vivid description there.
Too bad it was too hazardous to take with us; the infernal mix ate through everything, even Sparkle-Cola bottles.
Unfortunate you didn't have any clipboards with you.
A minute later there was a loud thunk, then another, and the door opened a crack. It took all our magic and Carrion’s power armor to get the door open enough to squeeze through, and even so, Carrion had to remove his armor, wiggle his way through the gap, pull the armor through piece by piece, and put it back on.
I feel like this and the smooze strategy probably ate up quite a bit of their time, maybe 5-7 minutes between them, maybe even more depending on how fast the tar corroded the door.
There was simply no way for the alicorn to pass through the gap. She could fit her head and neck in, but no matter how much we shoved the heavy, armored door, the gap simply wasn’t wide enough for her body.
It's too bad that unlike Boo, she isn't a cat. I bet she'd be able to get through then.
She met my eyes and gave a sad smile. “Shall we just skip the argument about you not leaving me behind?”
“I’m not leaving you down here to die,” I said immediately, and she chuckled and shook her head.
"That's not what I said."
But yeah, unlike (at least some) Fallout and Fallout 2, party members, it's not like she'd just stay there.
“Blackjack,” Rampage said as she nudged me, but I closed my eyes, trying to maintain the connection with Lacunae. The Enervation interference was horrible; she kept coming in and out of focus like a badly tuned radio. The exertion made my head throb.
“One second. I want to make sure she gets out okay…” I said through grit teeth as I concentrated.
"Hey, remember that conversation you had with Psychoshy earlier? This is one of those things she was talking about."
“One second. I want to make sure she gets out okay…” I said through grit teeth as I concentrated. Images came in bursts. I saw her winging her way down to the largest puddle of blue flame, nearly standing inside it as she soaked up as much radiation as she could. Then of her standing on the cusp of the hole. Then the alicorn took flight, swooping her way higher and higher along the face of the prison. Red beams sprayed from the turrets at her, and her shield flickered and flashed as she pumped her wings, the Hoofington rain around her glinting crimson and white. Then she soared up and landed on the edge. She’d made it! She was safe! I let out a held breath…
Then there was a flash of red, then darkness and the scream of Enervation. I suddenly found myself incapable of breathing as I stood there.
In hindsight, it's kind of reminiscent of Flash Industries. But I sure didn't see the return coming.
“You have to be strong, Blackjack. Please…”
It’s not all about you, Blackjack. I forced a smile and patted her shoulder. “Hey. Don’t worry. I just went a little crazy too.” That enervating scream was getting annoying, like a hoof scraping a chalkboard. “We’ll get through this, Rampage. We’ll get through it.”
“Rampage. There is no Rampage. No Arloste. I’m just a half dozen ponies squished together in one jar.”
I was kind of expecting during this whole thing for there to be an expression of "Yes, she did die following you, but right now you should focus on making sure she's the only one," but I guess it all got kind of sidetracked.
Softheart. “But the talisman drove her insane, didn’t it?” I pressed.
“Maybe…” Snips said softly, looking away from me. “The haunting effect of soul jars wasn’t understood then… still isn’t, really. A soul jar is more than just an indestructible object. They want things. Feel things. Hate. Love. The detective was already under a lot of stress, and if we hadn’t gotten the haunting fully blended out by then… it could have been the haunting effect that pushed her over the edge.”
It kind of sounds like a more pronounced version of the impression I'd been getting from the starmetal sword and chunks of the stuff.
“It may be that the megaspell magic, combined with the souls trapped within, had an unanticipated side effect that created the pony called Rampage. A combination of good and bad in a single gestalt individual. A pony with no soul of her own but containing the souls of almost a dozen different ponies.” Snips shook his head. “There’s really no way to tell.”
“And Rarity wanted this?” I hissed.
“Rarity wanted her friends safe,” Snips countered. “She’d have done anything for them. The project she had us working on after she stopped the development of the phoenix talisman was still for them.”
That, and it's not exactly like you could predict what would happen when a bunch of souls and a megaspell blast came together without testing it.
Aside from a light in the ceiling and a bucket in the corner, there wasn’t much in here, but every inch was covered in crude sketches. One whole wall had been devoted to Macintosh’s Marauders. I tried to guess who each pony was, but his talent clearly hadn’t been art. I thought that one of the small ones was Echo, but I could only scratch my head and wonder about who the other little one was. Only they had a little sad face drawn on them. Sadder still, there was only one large pony in the picture.
If she can't tell which is which, how can she tell that they are the Marauders at all? It's not like it would be that hard: there were only two unicorns, one white one black (but I guess if he didn't do any shading at all . . . ); the two pegasi could probably be distinguished by size; only the earth ponies would be hard even going by just the grossest of features, and Doof would be larger than the others, Echo smaller, Applesnack in between, and Twist probably close to Applesnack. I guess what I'm saying is that if he's drawn them so poorly you can't make good guesses about which Marauder is which, he probably didn't draw well enough that you could tell they were Marauders at all.
Then I was going to sit in Star House and cry for a week for Lacunae. And I wasn’t going to move an inch till Rampage and I were better, no matter how I climbed the walls.
Yeah, let's add that to the list of things that would never happen.
It was just like with Silver Spoon. It seemed that ghouls had a tendency to get stuck on certain things from when they were alive. I’d better keep her in the fantasy, unless I wanted her to go feral. “What’s the situation here?”
“Well, the alarms went off, and immediately we went into lockdown. Prisoners were rioting. There was no communication from the outside. Then that missile hit! Then captain Sourcup said we were sticking tight, but others said we should evacuate. Then the captain pulled out his gun, and there were alarms going off and screaming and some ponies went crazy. Shots were fired, and then it was batons and hooves and fighting for our lives…” She trailed off, frowning with that look of something amiss she couldn’t quite put her hoof on. “Who’s doing all that screaming?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said as I saw my friends run up. “Looks like the rest of my team is here. We’re going to… arrest the Warden and evacuate as many ponies as we can.” My ass was starting to get toasty sitting on the metal floor. “Don’t worry about anything below us. It’s… taken care of.”
Silver Spoon sighed and said in a low murmur, “Blackjack, have you been lying to delusional ghouls again?” I smiled awkwardly and shrugged, and the gray ghoul sighed and covered her face with her hoof.
I agree to an extent, and understand where Silver Spoon is coming from here, but I do think that this situation is pretty different from her own.
Oh yeah. More ‘Hoofington sucks dock’ reminders.
Hey, I remember this! It was because of this line that I ended up learning what "dock" meant in the context of horses.
Snips was investigating a large panel in the corner with the label ‘Airshaft #4 Access’. “Is that our way up?”
“Of course,” he said as he put his shears in the corner of the panel. “We still have two fliers. One goes up, finds the security station upstairs, turns the key there, we turn the key down here, everypony but the other flier goes through the door. Then the other flier pops up the shaft and we all get out of here. Easy peasy.”
Yep. Sure. I'll buy that. It's not going to be some complicated mess that ends up (nearly?) killing someone at all. Nope.
“Come on… get…off!” And with one last heave the panel came off and popped free. I heard the sudden intake of air, like the largest flaming pony ever taking a breath, and then a plume of fire exploded out the gap. I tried to lunge, but misstepped and failed to knock him aside. The flame poured over his features like a flamer as he fell back, clutching his blackened face as he screamed. The ball of fire rolled over the ceiling like a hunting, living thing and spread out as it dissipated.
I rushed to his side beside Silver Spoon, the squat blue pony’s face a blackened ruin.
[s]Kind of another Steelhooves moment, if it had stuck.[/s] Never mind, looks like I misinterpreted that a bit. At least I got cleared up later in the page.
“Well, think you’re hot enough to make it up that?” Rampage asked the stunned Psychoshy.
[s]Don't ever say that Rampage doesn't take (some) deaths in stride.[/s]
I was using my pitiful medical skills to apply a bandage to cover Snips’s blackened eyes. “If Blackjack has to face the Warden, she’s going to need you,” he croaked, his cooked face splitting and bleeding. “You can’t stay… but I can.”
Er, okay, I guess it wasn't.
“I’m not planning on dying here, anyway. Once you get into the warden’s office, you should be able to shut down the teleportation inhibitor talisman at the Warden’s security station. Not hard, just smash it. Then I’ll teleport up to you. Easy as pie.”
Ahem. What happened the last time you said something like that. You know, maybe two minutes ago?
“Did you know a pony named Doof?”
“Oh, you mean Fork ‘n’ Knives himself. Yeah. I did. Strange case,” the pegasus said as she fluttered her crumpled wings. “I mean, I know he was a convicted rapist, but for a few years I just didn’t believe it.”
“How so?” I asked, keeping my voice low.
“He fought like hell in here. I mean, sure… yeah… he was a criminal, but he stood up for other ponies. He wasn’t in a gang, though Celestia knows everypony wanted him on their side. He was just here. We threw him in solitary just to give him a chance to heal before putting him back out again. Every week he’d get beat to shit, and every other week we’d lock him up,” Blossomforth said with a shake of her head. “Said he deserved it.”
“Yeah…” I muttered, thinking about the waste of a potentially good pony.
“Then he went bad,” Twitchy muttered as he kept eying the smoke. “Really bad…”
“How?”
“Doof wrote letters every day he could see straight. He wanted to see this one mare. Just once. Said he’d happily be locked up the rest of his life if he could talk to her for five minutes and tell her how sorry he was,” Blossomforth said with a small frown. “Never found out who, but I guess that one of her friends told him she’d never ever ever ever ever speak to him again. Pushed him over the edge…” The ghoul shivered. “After that we weren’t locking him up to protect him, but to protect everypony else from him. Kept provoking us to put a bullet in him… send him to Hell where he belonged. Finally he got transferred out of here. Don’t know where… don’t want to know.”
More good work with Deus. Not the easiest to sympathize with, but it works.
And then they took an angry, nigh-suicidal monster and made him into a cyberpony of death. I really had to wonder about Silver Stripe’s judgment on that one. I looked into the next cell we passed and then frowned. “Huh…”
Agreed. Also "nigh"? If he was just "nigh-suicidal, " then so was Blackjack at various points. As someone said at some point, just because she thought suicide was wrong didn't mean she wasn't trying to die. Same here.
Blossomforth followed my look, and her dessicated and battered wings popped out as she ran to the cell. “Cell 712! Shady Legs is supposed to be in there!” She looked at Twitchy. “Supermax confirmed full roll call this morning, right? No absences?”
The nervous unicorn nodded. “Yeah! I heard Merriweather… oh sparklefarts…” he murmured as we passed another. Cell 722. “Another one!”
That is some quality pony swearing right there.
“A breakout just before the missile hits? But nopony escapes from Hightower!” Blossomforth flew down the hallway, calling out, “731! 740! 755! 780! They’re empty!” The ghoul swooped back. “Not just a breakout! A mass breakout!”
“Really?” I found myself smiling. “And nopony ever escapes from Hightower?” Warden was gonna be pissed…
I'd think he'd already know, given his surveillance options.
“Okay. Everypony take a different spot, strip it, and dump it in my saddlebags! Stuff it in!”
"Phrasing!"
. . . I'm such a child.
For a heart-pounding moment, I was absolutely positive that I’d screwed up again; shouldn’t we have been at the door by now? I wondered if my mane was on fire; I glanced back at where Rampage was biting my tail, but she wasn’t burning yet. There wasn’t anything to do but keep going, crawling along the supermax cells as my head spun. Too much smoke. Too much damned smoke! Was I going around in circles? I was… wasn’t I?
I really like the writing here. It conveys very well a sense of confusion and lostness and desperation and too little time to sort any of it out.
“What kind of… this is… I would have been notified…” the Warden spluttered as he looked to the side and back at me. I saw his eyes widen. “Nopony escapes from Hightower. Nopony!” the Warden shouted, slamming his hooves down repeatedly.
Huh. Guess he didn't have the resources I'd expected, or never bothered to use them.
Most of us, ghouls and ponies alike, collapsed and concentrated on not cooking.
Wow. Kind of insensitive there, huh? Ghouls aren't ponies anymore? Why not "ghouls and living," Blackjack? Especially since you have a living zebra with you, too.
“Snips! Don’t be dead! Tell me where the talisman is!”
He moved and lifted his bandaged face. Sweet Celestia, it was so hot in there he was smoking, cooking before my eyes. His hoof reached out, found the microphone on its little wand, and pulled it to his lips. “On the roof,” he rasped, barely audible even with the microphone against his mouth. I felt the world lurch around me; what did he mean, ‘on the roof’? “Doesn’t matter, anyway. I was never smart enough to figure out how to teleport.”
“You lied…” I murmured.
“I lied,” he said with a little nod. “Somepony needed to stay here to buzz you through. If I hadn’t, somepony else would have had to. I didn’t want your friends to do it. I didn’t want you to try and be noble and sacrifice yourself for us. And while you might have been able to talk one of the guards into doing it, I didn’t want to take the chance of them going feral and everypony dying because of me.” He shook as his hair smoked. “I deserve this, Blackjack.”
Not like it makes up for the curse, but . . . brave move. You have to respect that. And he did know how to get Blackjack to do what she needed to.
“Nopony deserves this!” I contradicted at once. The pain of the curse had spread out almost over my entire body, and my shock seemed to make it surge once more. I struggled to keep focused on the screen. My pain could wait till later.
I'm pretty sure she doesn't actually believe that, at least not all the time.
“I do. Your zebra was right. I’ve tried not to think about it for two centuries, but Snails and I meddled in things we had no right to. Ponies were killed for us… or by what we did.” He said as he bowed his head. “I wasn’t honest with all of you at the outset, but that’s the Wasteland, isn’t it? If I’d trusted you, we could have done this better. Graves. Lacunae. They died because I forced us to go through here. And trust me, in two centuries, I’ve done plenty in the Wasteland to deserve burning.” He hung his head as the glowing smoke and licking flames swirled behind him.
I really like him a lot better when he has his soul.
“You don’t. Please… there has to be some way!” I begged, trying to will all of this to not be true.
You know, for as much as people talk about her angsting and whining, nobody ever seems to bring up Blackjack's related, and also fairly frequent, begging and pleading.
“Tell him I cast the swirly curse from the black book. The swirly one. Swirly. Remember.
You're just filling me to the brim with confidence, you know that, Snips?
Tell him… tell him I tried to get him out as soon as I could. And tell him that I’m sorry I forgot the donuts.” His bandages were smoking now as well. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…”
“I forgive you,” I said as he curled up in his seat.
No, Blackjack, you don't get to do that. The only one who can forgive him for forgetting the donuts is Snails. And I just don't see how he could find it in his heart to do that.
Then I heard something that made me freeze reflexively. Though it had been weeks since I’d last heard it, the voice pierced my panicked denial and pinned me in place. “Damn it, Vanity, I don’t care what that cunt says. I want to see her!”
Doof, that's not how you ask a favor. Especially a big, emotionally laden one like this.
My eyes focused on the muscled mass with the anguished face. Even though he wasn’t a Marauder anymore, Doof still had the powerful physique of a pony who worked out regularly. His gray hide was marred by tracks of scars; I’d never thought that those scars on Deus might have come from before he was turned into a cyberpony.
That's an interesting detail.
Vanity sat on the other side of the table, his hooves folded before him. “Use that word again, and this meeting is done,” he said in cold finality. Doof shook with the effort to keep himself restrained. “I am here for her, not you. She says no, Doof. Respect that.”
. . . There's some irony in saying that to a rapist.
“You think I’m a scumbag?! I’ll show you who I am. I’m a fucking god of pain and misery, you rich fuck, and when I get out of here, nopony is going to stop me! Nopony!”
It's amazing how much the depictions of Doof slam from one end of the scale to the other, and so fast. Earlier in the chapter you had some sense of nobility in him, some sympathy plays, then you run into the other end with how he changed after this meeting, or even parts of the meeting before this where he's abusive and hateful, to this where he goes full-blown narcissistic megalomaniac.
“Hey...” came Rampage’s voice from the door. I moved slowly, like a zombie ghoul, and used her to pull myself slowly back together. “Snips didn’t make it, did he?” I couldn’t answer, so I grit my teeth and nodded, tears cutting dirty lines in the soot that covered me. She sighed and shook her head. “So... want to go through all the hating on yourself and beating yourself up, or would you rather have more bad news first?”
I looked at her standing there. She looked... tired. “More bad news.”
“Why am I not surprised?” she muttered. “Psychoshy and Stygius are really bad off. She won’t wake up and he can barely stand. I think that it was smoke inhalation.”
“Is she going to die?” I asked as I turned and left the monitors behind. Left Snips behind. I’d punish myself appropriately when I had the whole butcher’s bill for this fiasco.
“Maybe. If you want to keep that answer from being yes, we need to get the lockdown lifted and get the hell out of here.”
Well, better this chiding come late than never.
“I need to find the attic first. I need to find Snails... I owe Snips that,” I said in a daze. “Which way is the attic?”
“Owe Snips?!” Rampage shouted. “You don’t owe him anything! He should be glad I didn’t buck his head clean off his shoulders when he couldn’t remove the curse!”
“He wanted to help his friend...” I muttered.
She kicked me upside the head, knocking me sprawling.
Sometimes I wonder if at times like this Rampage and occationally P-21 are meant to stand in for the frustrations of the segments of the audience (sometimes but not always including me) over the fact that the very things that make them (and us) love and admire Blackjack can also be infuriatingly . . . what? . . . potentially shortsighted and surely morally and emotionally (short-run) unsatisfying since nobody else is as forgiving and generous as she is. I suppose it's that there are times when doing better is both the moral high ground and gratifying, but then, in the cases that really make the difference, where doing better really is doing better, because the merely not-bad aren't doing it, it doesn't naturally feel as good because you need to do it for people who don't deserve it or you wouldn't want to do well by.
Also Blackjack is Jesus and blah blah blah reaction to not being all about kicking out the Romans et cetera and so forth also loving enemies and turning cheeks and whatever.
Oh, and as part 3928423 in my unnecessary and unending quest of justifying Blackjack as a potential Element of Generosity, I'd like to note that right here it looks to me like she's so desperately insistent on giving Snips what he most desired that she's losing sight of the fact that some things aren't hers to give—in this case, risking the lives of Psychoshy and Stygius by spending more time there. I think this is an interesting potential failure mode of Generosity, and would actually like to see a Rarity episode or comic based on it someday.
[Update: Okay, I was forgetting about how they needed Snails to lift the curse on Blackjack. I think, though, that even in the absence of that, she would have at least tried the same, although without the specific, pressing need it may have resulted in everyone else pushing back, possibly making Blackjack abandon the attempted rescue and at least forcing her to see what she would be doing by going through with it (depending on layout, etc.). This whole line of thought didn't really appy in this case, but I think still does in the larger picture.]
She swallowed, then nodded to the little white rabbit. He grinned, his ears twiching this way and that. Like a fuzzy missile, he launched himself at her terminal, dove under the desk, emerged with a black plastic box trailing wires, and snapped it over his knee. Another swivel of his ear and he leapt into a potted plant. A tiny spritebot came buzzing out, but the rabbit flew through the air and exploded it in a single furious kick. Then he looked right at me and leapt up at me in two bounds.
Hey, I remember this scene (well, setup, anyway) from FoE! The one with the Sparkle-Cola bottle. Played up a bit more here, though. And I guess a good time to use Angel that doesn't seem too ridiculous.
“Fluttershy, please! You can’t tell me that death isn’t the most horrible thing you can imagine,” Rarity said, sounding stunned. “Think about Big Macintosh... and Pinkie Pie and Applejack... are you saying that us dying isn’t the worst possible thing?
The last sentence is a little stilted, but I have to admit . . . you found a context where that reference isn't over the top melodrama.
I... I think about it every night, and... I can’t face what will happen if I have to go to a funeral for you or Twilight or even Applejack.
At first I thought this was relatively dismissive of Applejack, but then I realized that the same words with different delivery could actually be the opposite. Still, given the context that she's always been closer to Fluttershy, probably the former. Can't ever forget that especially at the line and scene level, there's a lot more than just the words on the page.
“But... but I’ve been working on a way to keep you safe! To keep all of us safe! Once I get it working right, none of us ever need to worry about that ever again!”
Maybe there's just something about unicorns, but isn't it every bit as easy to see the same obsessive breakdown coming from Twilight, and for the same reason?
Rarity then turned and gave a near-manic grin. “But don’t you see, Fluttershy? Don’t you understand... once we have these, the war is effectively over. They won’t be able to kill us! We’ll all be safe. Forever!”
Ooh, yeah. Probably constricted pupils too.
“Do you... do you have any idea what I’ve gone through to create this... for you? For all of you?” She looked on the verge of snapping completely, and for a moment I was certain she was about to cast some horrible spell on her best friend.
“I know how many patients Happyhorn received from Hightower, so I have an idea. But I still do not want it, Rarity. I’d never want something like this if even one pony died to make it,” she said as she reached out, took the talisman in her hooves, and set it aside. Rarity looked like she was going to explode. “What I really want is my wonderful friend back... not some magic trinket...” She pulled Rarity into a brief embrace, then turned and trotted out once more.
Ah, the joy of missing the point . . .
Also, just realized something, but I'll wait until the money line drops to go into it.
“I thought she’d understand... I thought she could appreciate it more than any other pony... how dare she? How...” She lifted the black book and screamed at the top of her lungs, “I made it for you!”
And suddenly the white unicorn was in a frenzy, her magic tossing and ripping the pages out of books, splitting the sheets, tearing down the crates, and tossing the grotesque wooden zebra sculptures out the window as she moved like a purple-maned tornado of destruction. The sharp edges cut her fetlocks and smeared her forelegs with blood, but she ignored the injuries in her frenzy. “You said it would make them happy!” she roared as she swept the desktop clear with the black book. “You said it would keep them safe!” Then her magic surged, and she flipped the entire desk over in a crash of her art supplies. “Everything I did... was for... nothing!” she shrieked and threw the black book with all of her might, sending it flying against the large standing mirror in the corner. It struck dead center and sent dozens of cracks radiating out from the impact.
Rarity panted and gasped for air from the exertion. “I just wanted to keep her safe... I just wanted... Oh Fluttershy... what have I done?” She stared at the blood on her hooves. Then the white unicorn sat in the middle of the devastation she’d wrought, head bowed as she wept.
I think I can chalk this up as more great description porn. Also I think a wonderful depiction of Rarity desperate, at the end of her rope and finding that all she did, all she gave (yeah, I know), was rebuffed.
Oh, and put to the screen, this might go with
(at 29:39; that part is fine, but the video as a whole isn't SFW)
and
(at least the room trashing part) as a good (or "good") room trashing scene.
Rarity then looked up at the broken mirror and wiped at her tears, smearing her cheeks in red before rising. Step by step she approached, looking at the broken reflection. She looked at the different shards of herself reflected back, counting softly. “Forty-two... Of course...” she murmured, then smiled faintly. “Silly Rarity... a present doesn’t count if you take it from somepony else. It only counts... if it comes from yourself...”
And there it is. And . . . I can't believe I didn't see the juxtaposition with what Blackjack was doing the first time I read this.
And of course the inspiration would come from a shattered mirror. I mean, that's just science, right?
She led me down a hall and around the corner, and I told her about Rarity’s quest to become immortal, how she wanted to protect her friends, and just what it had cost. When the story was finished and the holes were filled in, Rampage wore a stunned and worried look. “Whoa... learning does suck.”
“Told you,” I said as I limped along. “Blissful ignorance. That’s the ticket. I was so blissful before I knew any of this crap.”
Well, "blissful" might be a little strong, but sure, I can give you the direction at least.
“Really?” Rampage replied. “I thought life in 99 sucked?”
“Compared to Hightower right now, that sucking was bliss,” I replied with a smirk.
It's happening again!
It was the tiny purple figurine lying on its side beside a metal door next to the pair. Slowly I approached, step by step, till I reached out with my magic and picked up the teeny tiny figurine of Twilight Sparkle. I slowly turned it over in shock, five breathless ponies in the back of my mind squealing in glee.
I stared at the inscription on the base. ‘Be a brainiac!’
Huh?
Then Twilight Sparkle’s head fell clean off!
Good fakeout.
Oh, but what's with going for Snails, or Rampage going along with it, right after her blowing up right before? Oh! It's because they were right next to each other anyway, isn't it? And the still needed him to fix Blackjack. Never mind, just me getting caught up on the wrong details again. Carry on.
for the first time since starting my climb up Hightower, the air felt chill against my hide.
Nothing to do with the story, but this reminded me of one of my English teachers in middle- or high school trying to say that "chill" isn't an adjective.
In the middle of the room was a gray pony I’d seen before. Octavia stood in the center apprehensively, hugging her contrabass and bow like they were a comforting blanket. “M-M-Ministry Mare,” she stammered.
Nooo . . . Why?
Painful. But I guess at least it's a volunteer this time?
“Please. Call me Rarity,” the white unicorn said as she smiled gently. “I understand you’ve fallen on some hard times, and I’d like to help you out. But first, I need you to help me, Octavia. You see, I need to try a spell. It’s something that’s never been done before.” She put her hoof around Octavia’s shoulders and gave her a hug. “But I want you to be okay with helping me. If you don’t want to help, you can leave. With the bits I offered.”
Still uncomfortable, but better at least than with the prisoners.
“Is it for the war, Ma’am?” Octavia asked with a little frown. “Are you going to use it to make weapons?”
Rarity looked at her a moment, then smiled and shook her head. “No. No, this is for me and my friends. I’ll never use what we learn here for the war effort. In fact, when this is finished, I hope to seal it all away forever.” She locked eyes with Octavia. “I swear, on my life and soul, that I won’t use it for the war.”
Given what you're planning to do with your soul, I'm not sure how much that's worth.
"I swear on my mother's grave, which you are helping me in my plans to desecrate . . . "
Snips lifted the black zebrahide book and began to intone words that didn’t sound like they could come out of a pony’s mouth. Even more disturbing, though, was the flat monotone he spoke them in; it was far too similar to the humming I’d heard in the Harbinger camp outside of Flank. Too similar to the Enervation scream...
And connecting the being of unimaginable power from beyond the stars to the necromancy . . .
"You got alien eldritch abomination in my dark magic!"
"You got dark magic in my alien eldritch abomination!"
"You both stole it from Lovecraft (and I guess maybe FF VII?)!"
"Can it! Everyone knows and nobody cares!"
Octavia began to lift off the ground along with her instrument, her eyes clenched tight, limbs shaking as they clutched the contrabass. Yet there was no glow of unicorn magic; she rose aloft as if lifted by the shadows themselves. A flickering vortex of magic seemed to rise up from the center of the sigil and coil around her, as if wrapping her in a dark cocoon. Then the screams began. They sounded from Octavia, but I’d been in Hoofington for too long; those screams were from the shadows as well.
Then a dark orb of energy gathered at each of the two unicorn stallions’ horns and flew up into the air. They struck the cocoon of shadows in unison, and that arcane envelope exploded in two immense fans of prismatic light. Outwards they arched, and then plunged back down. One funnelled into the mare’s body, the other into the wooden bow and panelling of the contrabass. Octavia slumped as the vortex dissipated and she dropped towards the floor.
Nice writing, also another example (if SC didn't get this one) of a case where Enervation came through a recorded medium.
“We’ll find out,” Rarity replied tersely as she looked over Octavia and then back at Snips. “Check the book again.”
Snips flipped it open and leafed through a few pages. “Oh... will you look at that! Looks like the big black book’s got a few ideas on splitting souls all of a sudden.” He peered at the yellowed material. “Mostly involving torture... but it’s got some other things here too!”
“I thought it might. Horrid thing. Well, I have some ideas of my own.” She knelt and nudged Octavia. “Come on, dear. Please wake. Please...”
Was the book learning borrowed, or new?
Snails blinked, looked at the floating sledgehammer, and quickly tossed it aside with a bashful look. “Don’t you worry, I’ll get her home, eh?” He looked at her and smiled slowly. “You live in Ponyville, right?”
“F-Flankfurt,” Octavia stammered.
“Oh. Well, same diff, don’tcha know. Come on,” he said as he trotted languidly out with Octavia at his side, contrabass resting across her back.
Eh, I don't know that Snails ever came across as having a Minnesotan accent to me.
Snips stared up at her. “You’re gonna put a piece of your friends in each statue? Wow... will they let you?”
“No to both,” she said as she pulled out a mirror and gazed into it with a frown. “But I have an idea that ought to be every bit as good as using my friends.” She put the mirror away with a clear shudder. “It should be possible to take a fragment of soul and copy the unique magical properties of another.”
Snips scratched his head, looked at the book, and then said skeptically, “Well... yeah! But only if you like pieces of your soul going poof...” Then his eyes popped wide. “Ooooh! I get it. You’re gonna snip off some felon’s souls and make them like your friends! Clever!” He trotted out of the room, the black book hovering in front of him. “I’m gonna see if I can find anything else new in here!”
Rarity stood alone for several minutes, standing where Octavia had minutes before. I was beginning to wonder why I was still being shown this, and then she said quietly to herself, “No, Snips. No more sacrificing other ponies. I’m going to use my own. Because... it’s not a gift if you take it from somepony else.”
There, at the end, is still one of the best, most Rarity (sad, determined mode) line's I've read. And ties back into the thing from above.
Icy Shake- Alicorn
- Posts : 1209
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Join date : 2012-06-05
Age : 35
Location : Boston, MA
Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by Icy Shake Mon Jun 23, 2014 11:49 pm
- Chapter Forty Eight Running Thoughts, Cont'd:
- It was pretty sad that I was getting so used to visions, flashbacks, and other things messing with my perception that I didn’t faceplant into the middle of the ritual circle.
And on only three legs, too.
Octavia. Rarity had split Octavia’s soul, right in two. And part of that soul was inside her contrabass. No wonder I could play it so well, or that Vanity had been able to beat off a mob with it without the instrument getting scratched. It was so obvious; why hadn’t I thought of it before?
And here we have Somber risking literally insulting (some segments of) his audience's intelligence, or counting on the being smarter and more perceptive than his protagonist.
The rags sniffed and shifted and Snails sat up. The pony beneath them was much like the pony I’d seen in the vision, a middle-aged unicorn stallion with an orangey coat. And like Snips, his eyes glowed with a soft luminescence. He had a pair of figurines in his hooves; ones of Snips and himself as young stallions, maybe even from before the war. ‘Bestest Friend’ read the inscription on the former, and ‘Besterest Friend’ on the latter. Around his neck, on a frayed ribbon, was a tacky little medallion of three shooting stars. The gilt had rubbed off on some of the corners, but it was still inscribed with “Best Magic Act.”
“You’re his friend?” Snails asked slowly as he sat up.
Oh god, the schmaltz, the saccharine schmaltz!
. . . Very well, this blatant appeal to emotion got me. I hope you're happy.
“You’re his friend?” Snails asked slowly as he sat up.
“I’m... I guess you could call me that. I was trying to help him and he was trying to help you. So now I’m trying to help you.” I guessed that was friendship, sort of. Technically? “He... um... accidentally put a curse on me. The swirly curse.” Snails’s glowing eyes scowled in thought, and I gave a hopeful smile. “He said you’d know how to remove it?”
“The swirly one? I dunno... I don’t think you can remove that one. ‘Cause it’s all swirly and spreads till it pops you right out of your body.” The orange pony scratched his matted mane. “I can... well... nope... but maybe? Um... no... that probably wouldn’t work. But maybe... huh...”
Of course, Rampage could have butted in here with some kind of "No, Blackjack, friends don't put death curses on friends" thing, but I'm glad she didn't.
I was struck by the horrible revelation that my life and soul were in the hooves of Equestria’s slowest necromancer.
Come on, out of all of two that you know of, and one of them's dead, as far as you know!
“Right. Okay. Does the Warden have anything else in there? Robots? Turrets?” I asked Snails as I looked at the figurines. What was Rarity doing with these little statuettes? They were nothing compared to the five I’d collected in the Wasteland. They all looked so... dead...
“Oh yeah. He’s got it all,” Snails said with a little nod. “And he’s big, too,” he reiterated earnestly, as if hoping it’d help.
“Right. Big. Scary. Turrets and robots. Well we’ve dealt with all of those,” I said as I sighed. “Does the Warden have a terminal or something?”
“Oh yeah! Right by his desk. A big, fancy one. Controls everything in the prison,” Snails said, nodding as an idea began to form in my head.
“So we don’t need to beat the Warden. We just need to occupy him long enough for a certain zebra to get to that terminal and lift the lockdown. Then we blast the terminal, run for our lives, and let the balefire bomb finish him off!”
Is this the Horrigan fight from Fallout 2? If so, I missed it the first time since I hadn't played the game.
Snails blinked slowly at Rampage. “Do I know you?”
“Eh...” She rolled her eyes. “Part of me... don’t worry about it. Welcome to the Blackjack and Co. Travelling Freak Show. Remember to shoot Blackjack. It’s good luck.”
“Do not shoot Blackjack!” I contradicted at once as we started out.
Hey, Snips absolutely "shot" Blackjack, and look where it got him.
“What was Rarity doing here, though?” Rampage asked as we trotted out of the ritual chamber, looking at all the figurines.
“Nothin’. She just split her soul into forty-three pieces. She put forty-two of ‘em into the figurines. The last one she kept; I know because I made sure it got back to her and that it was the brightest and shiniest part of all,” he said with clear pride but otherwise as if he was mentioning that it was raining. It halted me in my horseshoes, though.
I like this Snails.
“You’re telling me there’s a piece of Rarity’s soul in here?”
He took it in his magic, then calmly smashed it down against the ground. If I had a heart it would have stopped. The figurine, though, was completely unharmed save for a little bit of dust on her pink mane. “Yup. Well, it was a piece of her soul, but then she copied some of Miss Fluttershy over it. She was such a nice pony.” He looked at the inscription and blinked, then flushed. “Oh... heh... supposed to say ‘Be Pleasant...’ whoopsie...”
And explaining the difference. Nice touch, of course, and a more interesting solution than just making what would have been a very easy retcon.
Forty-three pieces. “But... why?” I stammered.
“Um, Blackjack? Balefire bomb going to go off? Swirly curse killing you? Imminent mortal doom?” The striped mare gave an apologetic smile at Snails. “You’ve got to excuse her. She gets distracted easily by the motivations of ponies who died two centuries ago. Makes her overlook the little things.”
Right . . . the ADD protagonist interacting with the slow side character. Makes sense.
“Did he really come all this way to save me?” Snails asked slowly.
“Yeah. He actually cursed Tiara to keep her from leaving. Totally crazy,” she replied.
“Tiara’s here?” he asked, looking around nervously.
Silver Spoon dropped her eyes. “Well... no. I mean... Blackjack. I get them confused. But... I mean... if I’m still here, and you’re still here... maybe Diamond Tiara is somewhere out in the Wasteland?”
And Silvy has a very specific form of dementia.
“Right... lift the lockdown... warden’s terminal... sure...easy peasey faciley...” I wasn’t sure she was quite with it, but she was our best chance.
I very specifically remember liking "easy peasey faciley" the first time around, and I still do.
Stygius flew back to her, held her by her shoulders, and shook his head. She coughed and looked him in the eye. “I’m good to fight! Just... give me a second!” He shook his head again, and she glared at him. “Don’t you... tell me no! I’m capable... of kicking as much... flank as-”
Good character and shipping moment, with Psycho's insecurity and jealousy showing through as determination beyond her ability to deliver.
Two centuries of direct exposure to the warhead had caused the ghoul to swell to Goliathian proportions.
I love that this is actually a reference to PH itself, and to David & only second-order.
It slowly rose up, looming higher and higher as it twisted around to face us. There was a reason the screens had only shown Warden Hobble’s face: it was all that could fit. Two centuries of direct exposure to the warhead had caused the ghoul to swell to Goliathian proportions. His hips were trapped within the warped center of the glass floor, his rear legs dangling twenty feet below, draped in glass stalactites. The blackened undead flesh erupted prominences and coronas of blue flame in magmatic floes that healed mere instants later. The desks and furniture and a half dozen sentry bots had been fused into a carapace-like armor that vaguely resembled some sort of uniform.
The thing’s mouth split in a volcanic grin as he stretched his forehooves wide, and then two great skeletal wings wreathed in flame spread from one side of the room to the other.
And yet still more scenery porn.
Then Rampage reached a part of him that wasn’t covered in steel: his face. Her glowing-hot hoofclaws sank into his black, charred hide with little explosions of fiery ichor. Now the Warden let out a roar as the mare went into a spiked frenzy, trying to claw and dig her way into his fiery eye.
Ender's Game reference?
“Warden Hobble!” yelled a mare from the doorway. “Here’s our resignation!” I turned and saw the half-dozen guards, Silver Spoon, Snails, and even Psychoshy laying down a withering spray of fire at the Warden.
Awesome.
He threw the chunk of metal at the gathered guards, but Snails and Twitchy’s horns glowed and sent the steel arcing up and smashing into the wall above them.
I'd call bullshit, but given the radiation, I can buy Twitchy pulling quite a bit.
I just dangled there before him and saw the robots floating around us, their cameras watching as he brought me close to his maw and bit down on my left foreleg. I felt the metal start to deform, and I beat on his face with my stump. Either he liked the taste of metal, or he’d gone completely mad and didn’t care. I guessed the latter as my leg was nearly ripped out of my body at the shoulder. I could feel my flesh straining, bones shifting, and synthetic organs threatening to follow the limb out.
Eh, you know, he probably just needs his fiber. After two centuries without, I bet he's backed up as all get out.
Also, lots of fun. Fun for the whole family, that's what this is.
“Warden Hobble, this is the O.I.A,” a voice said over the PA system speakers, synthetic and masculine-sounding. It made us both freeze. “We would like you to release the mare in your custody. She is one of our operatives, investigating a threat to the kingdom for us, and beyond your jurisdiction.” Was it Watcher? It sounded like Watcher, amplified a hundred times...
Hi!
“I am sorry to hear that. Please remain still,” the synthetic voice buzzed, and then went silent. The Warden looked at me in bafflement, then snorted and moved me towards his mouth once more.
Suddenly the left wall began to glow. A perfectly round, white patch spread rapidly, and then bulged outwards, and suddenly a blinding line of green as thick as my hoof blasted through, pierced the Warden, struck the far wall, and then vaporized it as well. And the wall behind that. And the wall behind that. The beam disappeared. I looked off to the left, out the hole... due west towards the Core.
A clue . . .
Then a hoofclaw swept out of the smoke, ripping into what remained of my left leg and halting my fall. The spur ripped free as it fell, and I felt blood pour down my torso as I dangled there. Rampage grinned down at me. “Damn, Blackjack! Your ass is heavy.”
+1 fat Blackjack joke.
“Not sure what the plan is now. Guess they get free while we die,” Rampage said with fatalistic stoicism. She sat beside me and opened the bag, her eyes growing wide. “But at least we die rich!”
I looked over at what had to be thousands of bits.
Well, they're at least worth something in Meatlocker.
The panel covering my PipBuck had been stripped away, and the device was doing something... and the warden’s terminal was doing the same.
>EC-1101 Routing Waypoint accessed.
> Next waypoint: Shadowbolt Command, Shadowbolt Tower, Hoofington.
He he he. Also, am I remembering things wrong or did she have to deliberately make a connection before? If so, this could be a subtle sign of the routing's true nature.
“Wait! Leave me behind! This is my best chance to get obliterated!” Rampage shouted as she waved her hooves impotently, trying to get back to the prison. Lacunae selectively ignored her, for which I was grateful.
Oh, you. Actually, that works for all three of them right there.
“I thought you’d died,” I thought at her.
“How could a pony die when they were never a pony to begin with?” she replied cryptically, but before I could really ponder what that was supposed to mean, she continued, “I was merely stunned and trapped on the roof between turrets,” the alicorn thought at me.
And bringing it back around to Rampage as well. Also, deliberate obtuseness works against Blackjack just like obliviousness does against Rampage.
Within me, the curse gave a sudden lurch, and I felt something fundamental inside me break. It was as if I were slipping out of myself and drifting away on a stiff breeze. I tried to fight, but there wasn’t anything left for me to hold onto. A strange current was sweeping me away. Lacunae was shouting. Snails was talking about boats. And then I felt something familiar...
Dying.
Again...
Good end for a chapter and a volume.
- Chapter Forty Eight Overall Thoughts:
- I think that this was a great way to end the Hightower arc. Where in the last two chapters I felt the pendulum swung too far in the direction of action and the chapters were a little light on story and character (in the foreground), in this one even though there were plenty of action scenes I think there was easily enough of the more filling stuff to justify even a longer than normal chapter.
The major foci beyond the immediate goal of getting out and keeping Blackjack alive were Rarity and Doof. While Doof had already been portrayed both relatively subtly (his time as a Marauder generally, and for example the party scene where he was frustrated with not fitting in—that is to say, his difficulty with women) and explicitly (the memory leading up to and including his assault on Twist) as complicated, having both genuine goodness of character generally and an unsettling sense of entitlement where women were concerned, all surrounded by an air of being just a little out of his depth, here he's amplified on both sides, but primarily the negative. On the one hand, he's presented in a fairly positive light as a prisoner, with the guards finding him sympathetic over the first few years despite all his fighting. Likewise, there's his Psalmlike devotion to the idea of asking forgiveness and getting the chance to explain himself to Twist, which in itself would come off as positive, but combined with the preexisting sense of entitlement—the idea that he deserves a chance to talk to her about it and she's unjustly denying it to him—seems less so. Add to that how he's let the rebuff feed into his previously (mostly, relatively) minor undercurrent of misogyny, making it swell until it overran its banks in a flood of "CUNT"s and sexual violence, and we're left with the monster of the wasteland, before he even left the prison or was augmented at all.
Rarity appeared in her capacity as the motivation behind and leader of Project Eternity, then the figurines. It starts with Fluttershy confronting her over the case of a victim in a crash who wouldn't die even as he burned for hours, only to expire right after Rarity's arrival. Rarity defends herself on the grounds of working to protect her friends, to keep them from dying, but is countered by Fluttershy's insistence that there are things worse than death (incidentally, in context the "worst possible thing" reference worked impressively well played straight) and that neither she nor the others would accept anything bought with the death of others. Now, in addition to Rarity, who was written wonderfully in this scene, Fluttershy stands out, reminding me of her conversation with Discord in the hedge maze before he bent her mind, with how she responds to Rarity's accusation regarding the leak of megaspell technology to the zebras, as she calmly and firmly states that she accepts that she was wrong and regrets the action every day but still hopes that it ends up well. It's far from enough to garner sympathy from me, but I can at least respect the maturity in her hindsight and how she carried herself. That aside, Rarity's breakdown over all her effort and the crimes she had committed being for nothing just as it was starting to look like the talisman could be reaching a point of viability left her with the epiphanies that if she couldn't protect her friends, she could at least try to give them something of the friends they used to be, and that if they couldn't accept a gift taken from others, she'd just have to give it of herself. This led into the scene depicting Octavia's splitting and the bonding of her soul fragment to her contrabass, giving Rarity a chance to see just what she would be putting herself through and to tell Snips and Snails just why it had to be her.
In the present, there are some good character moments too. Snails is the major one, as he makes for a point of light silliness in the midst of the grim goings on of the last few chapters. He's delightfully dopey, oblivious to much of what's wrong around him, and with what he's done, in a way that's distinct from the other ghouls. He plays pretty well off of both Blackjack and Silver Spoon as well. Silver had a few instances of reproaching Blackjack for how she was dealing with ghouls, first with pretending to corrections officers that she was on the S.W.A.T. team and later with Snails, that I can't help but wonder (and I feel awfully self-absorbed for saying this) if I may have influenced in my very vocal condemnation of Blackjack's actions with respect to Silver Spoon at the time. Snips makes a redeeming sacrifice to give the chance for everyone else to get out alive, which also played on some of Blackjack's weaknesses and came on the heels of Lacunae's apparent death. Rampage's explosion over Blackjack's (predictable) forgiveness of and apology for Snips's curse was viscerally satisfying in a way that reminds how even those (both in the audience and in the story) who want Blackjack to be unflaggingly good can nevertheless be frustrated by what that ends up meaning in practice. Then there's Psychoshy's insistence on trying to contribute to the fight against Hobble in the end despite her clear inability to do so was a great moment for her, which tied back into an earlier tirade about how dangerous and unstable Blackjack is. The tie there is because of the undertones of insecurity and jealousy as she tried to stand and fight, looking to me like she was trying in that moment to be Blackjack because even though Blackjack had told her she wasn't interested in anything with Stygius, Psychoshy couldn't believe that he would want to be with her, that he would instead leave her in an instant for the woman he was with first, just like Sanguine had. Lastly there's an explication of the griffins' culture of Contract, and relatedly Carrion's backstory of pledging his lifelong loyalty to a good stallion only to be sold to Ahuizotl by his lesser son, which sets up his Dobby moment next chapter, only more badass and less kid-friendly.
This isn't to say that everything in the chapter was stellar, though. It was once again burdened by an overlarge cast, though this was helped somewhat by losing Lacunae and Snips over the course of the chapter in addition to Graves in the last, even as Snails and some named corrections officers are added. There was one point that stood out to me as not making much sense, when Blackjack was able to recognize one group of ponies drawn in Doof's solitary cell as the Marauders, but couldn't identify any of the individuals apart from implicitly Doof himself and a guess at Echo. My problem there was that I don't understand how she could tell they were the Marauders absent some description of a unifying factor, since individually they were apparently too poorly drawn to be distinguishable. On a larger scale, it seemed to me that having two ticking bombs at the same time—the curse and the missile—gave something of a lack of focus, especially as the effects from the missile were so much more pronounced, where for most of the chapter the curse seemed to be a sometimes-present painful inconvenience with less giving it a real sense of urgency. I think it was for this reason that at certain points I actually forgot that they needed Snails to undo the curse, despite its repeated presence and the dialog to that effect. Relatedly, it felt to me like all that happened probably had to take a fair deal longer than half an hour, an hour tops, but that's probalby a place where opinions could differ. It's hard for me to say how I think the twin-bomb structure might have been done better. For this chapter in isolation, it perhaps could have been something along the lines of the missile providing the time limit, and the curse functioning more as something that gets progressively worse as she becomes damaged, so her soul's attachment to her becomes weaker not as a function of time but of the punishment she takes, leaving her in progressively greater pain and more vulnerable, and crucially in a way that her regeneration and healing can't fix. That leaves intact the need to get Snails specifically, but adds focus to the time limit. The problem is that a curse on that model wouldn't have fulfilled the immediately extortionary function that Snips needed it to, so it wouldn't make sense to have been on her in the first place.
So, at this point, the story of Project Eternity has largely been revealed. Likewise, we've been filled in on Deus's time between his arrest and becoming a cyberpony and being put on ice. There is some taste of things to come as Cognitum intervenes to save Blackjack and company during the end battle against Warden Hobble. There've been two more apparent deaths, one of which was undone during the denouement, which should perhaps have sown the seeds of doubt over the permanence of the Snips's. Hightower is finally destroyed in the conflagration that was meant to happen two centuries prior, and like Barad-dur, this time not even the foundations remain. Though it ends on a victory, it came at a high cost, all the more so because as a result of Snips's curse, Blackjack finishes the chapter with her second death.
- Chapter Forty Eight Editing:
- Xanthe had created. A half dozen spark batteries
three spaces after period
I would have happily killed him, or allowed them to… if it would not violate my contract.
"contract" should be capitalized
afraid of you on some damned level. You’re a fucking cyborg
three spaces after period
What more did they want from me? It doesn’t matter
The question mark shouldn't be italicized
those damned screams and whispers. Go on,
three spaces after period
While most of the RadAway in the store room had been lost,
"storeroom"
Xanthe returned with Cerberus in tow. I glanced at the zebra and then at the robot. “You understand your mission?”
I suppose it's implicit in the sentence, but nothing ever said that Xanthe left when she was last the subject of attention a few paragraphs ago
There’ll be other ghouls to disintegrate,” I said, earning a surprised and slightly
should have only one space after quotation
as if the blade was diseased and reeking.
"was" to "were"?
With that, we started our climb; first up through the shattered windows and onto the narrow sloping ledge of metal that ran around the interior, and then up to the crumbled rubble around the breach in the prison wall
semicolon to comma?
He floated over the heads of the glowing ghouls below and head for the wall before I finally lost sight of him in the rain and smoke.
"headed"
the zebra fretted as she looked it over. Carrion, his feathers blackened
only one space after period
how long would she last? Or would our minds start
only one space after question mark
“You’re nothing but-“ another shake. “You’re just-“
second hyphen for dashes, "another" should be capitalized or there should be ony one space after the first quotation
that held four ponies…this was where he ended up
should have space after ellipsis
Would that…. could it work?
should have only three dots in ellipsis
Images came in bursts. I saw her winging her way down to the largest puddle of blue flame, nearly standing inside it as she soaked up as much radiation as she could. Then of her standing on the cusp of the hole. Then the alicorn took flight, swooping her way higher and higher along the face of the prison. Red beams sprayed from the turrets at her, and her shield flickered and flashed as she pumped her wings, the Hoofington rain around her glinting crimson and white. Then she soared up and landed on the edge.
This sentence doesn't match the rest: you should probably cut the "of"
I pulled the scope to my eye, slipped into S.A.T.S. and queued two shots at the pristine missile pod.
comma after "S.A.T.S."?
“Oh we are so fucked! We are so fucking fucked!”
comma after "Oh"?
And I never would.” He shuddered as he shook his head hard. “I don’t know what
should have second space after quotation, period
Rarity heard about it and immediately went personally to the scene of the crash.”
“We’d been doing more research
first paragraph shouldn't end with quotation mark
I said as I looked back at him. The unicorn gave me an uneasy
closing the door behind me. Twist definitely didn’t need to see
plumbing at the moment. The floor was getting
only one space after period
formidable door marked ‘Gun Vault.’ I took
period to outside of quotation marks?
I stabbed with the sword, but it was hard trying to find something vital to chop into without stabbing into myself.
I'm not sure the motions are such that you can stab while trying to chop. Maybe "hitting myself," "slicing myself," "cutting myself," or something would be more accurate
balked at the sight of two ghoul pegasi mares, one with blood on her mouth
"pegasus mares"
“You with SWAT?” the remaining ghoul shouted over the din, pushing me back towards the wall and away from the fight.
SWAT? What the heck was… oh, my armor.
Say you’re with the SWAT or whatever you have to.
Should there be the dots in "SWAT"? That's how it was written on the armor, but not how it's written in the narrative or dialog elsewhere.
Then captain Sourcup said we were sticking tight, but others said we should evacuate.
"captain" should be capitalized
fire exploded out the gap. I tried to lunge,
only one space after period
Blossomforth suggested trying to fly up the central shaft and hope the robots or beam turrets didn’t dust us before shooting our way into the office.
"hoping"
Once you get into the warden’s office,
“I still don’t see how you’re going to get into the warden’s quarters.
to be consistent with the other cases this chapter, should probably capitalize "warden's"
Missile Launcher and missiles sounded like a good place to start!
"Launcher" shouldn't be capitalized
marked us as friendlies. About time some things
only one space after period
fluttered her crumpled wings. “I mean, I know he was
four spaces after period
I knew Kingpin had it good, but wow.” Rampage muttered as she
period should be comma
Stuff it in!” I said as I magically levitated the
“Wait wait wait!” I shouted and carefully waved my
should have only one space after quotation
Hot. No air to breathe
I could muster to lift the missile launcher. I focused,
only one space after period
That left the Warden… the warden who was probably watching us choking to death at his door,
should the second "warden" be capitalized?
found one that said ‘Camera Focus.’
period to outside of quotation marks?
spot a button marked ‘intercom’
should "intercom" be capitalized?
or by what we did.” He said as he bowed his head
period should be comma, should only be one space after quotation, "He" shouldn't be capitalized
Most appeared to be interviews with prisoners. I spotted
to keep himself restrained. “I am here for
“I can’t. Don’t you get it?
only one space after period
“You sanctimonious rich fuck!” Doof screamed at him,
should have only one space after quotation
all who oppose her. She sows destruction
three spaces after period
living space. The glass case that had held parasprites was replaced by the black book. She stared
Rarity ignored it. A second knock,
only one space after periods
“Oh. Well... um... I need to talk to you about something,” the pegasus muttered, and Rarity actually grimaced.
I think that, especially given connotations, what Fluttershy does is more murmuring than muttering
I’m afraid I’m going to have to... um...,” her voice dropped to a whisper.
maybe cut the comma? And I'm not sure that "her voice dropped to a whisper" is really a speech tag, so should it follow the quotation as a separate sentence?
Rarity said with a roll of her eyes. “The official report is
only one space after the period
countless empty glaze jars laying in heaps and
"lying"
“Hello?” I called out as we walked past the workshop
should have only one space after quotation
bad vibe to it. for the first time since starting my
"for" should be capitalized
The floor of the room had been carved with strange marking that looked like zebra glyphs, and yet at the same time there was an odd difference that gave them an air of something wholly other.
"markings"
The floor of the room had been carved with strange marking(s) that looked like zebra glyphs, and yet at the same time there was an odd difference that gave them an air of something wholly other. The markings in the floor gave the inexplicable impression that they were meant to be felt rather than viewed. Holes were punched into the floor within the markings, and I knelt as I looked down and spotted red fragments of gemstones in the voids. There were all kinds of strange markings on the walls, diagrams and designs, some crossed out and others annotated with circles and comments.
Four might be a little much for four sentences. Maybe trade out a couple for imprint, impression, device, pattern, or something?
Beneath the pony was written the question: ‘If a soul is infinite, can the soul be split infinitely?’
should have only one space after colon
“So...how do we know it worked?” Snips asked with a worried frown.
need space after ellipsis
The gilt had rubbed off on some of the corners, but it was still inscribed with “Best Magic Act.”
should be single-quotation marks, period probably outside them
over at the figurines. “Clay’s nice and easy
only one space after period
Well we’ve dealt with all of those,”
comma after "Well"
“Oh... heh... supposed to say ‘Be Pleasant...’ whoopsie...”
" 'Be Pleasant'..."?
‘Too much smoke,’ he’d scribbled on his slate.
comma to outside of quotation marks?
“Hey. Long time no see
only one space after period
“Right... lift the lockdown... warden’s terminal... sure...easy peasey faciley...” I wasn’t sure she was quite with it, but she was our best chance.
"Warden's"?
She muttered something in zebra.
The striped mare gave a little grin and babbled something in zebra, but saluted smartly...
Here, as a language, "zebra" should be capitalized . . . I think
“Wait...” Psychoshy croaked as she fought to her hooves.
should have only one space after quotation
letting...you fight
should have space after ellipsis
I’m capable... of kicking as much... flank as-
second hyphen for dash
Side by side, we walked back down the hall towards a pair of double doors marked ‘Warden.’
period to outside of marks
Not sure if you’ve noticed, but things are getting smokey up here.
Smokey plumes shot up in little geysers.
"smoky"
I will have control! This is my
across the office. Rampage charged straight
three spaces after exclamation point
Xanthe...still stood there gaping.
should have space after ellipsis
took aim through it’s scope as the Warden swiped at
"its"
as the Warden shielded his face with one leg, his other hoof ripped at a hunk of his own armor, scraping off the metal in a heap of scrap, and then it threw the jagged spray of shrapnel right at Carrion.
"it" is unnecessary
“Blackjack! I have it!” Xanthe shouted from the terminal, and a moment later a voice said, ‘Lockdown, Lifted. Guards, please return to your supervisors for assignments.’ I dared a tiny little smile.
Since it's actually being said over the intercom, rather than written or referred to, should those be double-quotation marks? If so, would the sentence be split after the first comma so the rest would be a separate paragraph?
Then the fourth fuel pod blew. The explosion below collected in a massive fireball that swept up the central shaft in a glare so intense it would have blinded me if I still had the eyes I was born with. The heat was such that I thought for a moment that the Warden had breathed fire over me again. The swirling ball of flame crashed into the underside of the floor with such force that everyone not already airborne was tossed a yard into the air... and the floor exploded upwards in clumps of blazing heat. I had the fortune to drop down on one of the beams as the smoke swirled up around us.
. . . How is all this affecting Psychoshy and Stygius and Xanthe, who are pretty squishy at the moment? Okay, Xanthe has the suit, but would that help against the light and surrounding heat?
The panel covering my PipBuck had been stripped away, and the device was doing something... and the warden’s terminal was doing the same.
"Warden's"
“It seems the lockdown was lifted,” Lacunae said in my mind as she pulled Rampage and myself up towards her.
"Rampage and me"
I’d beaten it. I had
only one space after period
- Other Editing:
- ch 1:
but I certainly did as I felt the bite of one that traveled through my temporary shield.
"travelled"
ch 2:
Eight pellets of lead traveled less than two feet,
"travelled"
ch 11:
Once the capital of Equestria, Canterlot and the surrounding area should now be avoided by everypony who isn't a Canterlot ghoul and doesn't have a really good reason to be there. The city wasn't hit by any balefire, but that's where the good news ends; the zebras detonated a megaspell inside the city that sent out a pink cloud laced with some really nasty magic. Princess Celestia and Princess Luna were in the city at the time and put an enormous magical bubble around the city to trap the cloud inside, probably saving much of central Equestria from suffering the same fate as the capital. Sadly, and I'm sorry if you've just left a stable and haven't learned this yet, the Pink Cloud trapped and still building inside the bubble was enough to kill even them; while many of us believe that Celestia and Luna live on in another form, their bodies died with Canterlot. The ruins of the city are still filled with the Cloud to this day, as is the area under the city that was drenched by Cloud-infused water when the bubble failed, and both are filled with feral Canterlot ghouls. If you've never fought a Canterlot ghoul before, try to keep it that way; they're extremely hard to kill and very dangerous. If you really must visit the city, I'm afraid that, though the general Guide includes more information you need, there's no edition of the Guide specifically for the area; the ruins are still mostly unexplored. My advice to you is to find a non-feral Canterlot ghoul guide, but that's not likely to be easy.
On the one hand, this is in-context. On the other, it's an encyclopedia entry. On a third, it's from the post-apocalypse, so standards probably aren't what they once were. In any case, just thought I'd raise the inconsistency and let you do what you will. PH has a sizable majority of "pink cloud," but FoE a massive majority "Pink Cloud." I've picked out the relatively few capitalized cases from PH, but if you'd prefer to go the other way or just leave as-is let me know and I can do the other search/try to remember not to raise the issue in the future.
ch 14:Through the dust and smokey haze approached a pony shape that seemed made of jagged steel.
"smoky"
ch 24:
Canterlot was consumed by the Pink Cloud.
"pink cloud"
ch 39:
“Ah… yes. That can happen on exposure to Pink Cloud,”
"pink cloud"
ch 46:
“You seem to know a lot about this stuff,” I commented, getting a smokey snort from the mare.
"smoky"
ch 58:
Perhaps alicorns who traveled in time?
"travelled"
ch 59:
Who are you to deny that, Proditori?” Lancer snapped.
“Does that mean you are Achu as well?” P-21 asked.
should have only one space after each quotation
ch 63:
If I didn’t have obligations to my stable, I might try traveling a bit further afield,” she said sincerely.
“Of course, considering the vast distances of space, the odds of it traveling to us are staggeringly small.
"travelling"
“I’ve traveled with Blackjack. I don’t need lessons in dealing with the unexpected.”
"travelled"
ch 64:
Okay, technically, that had been from Taint… but anything to get her to finish off the pouch.
"Taint" shouldn't be capitalized
Ways to shut down the Phoenix Talisman once and for all.
"Phoenix Talisman" shouldn't be capitalized
ch 65:
hugging the offending case between my hoofs.
"hooves"
ch 67:
He tried again and again for several minutes... and then Pink Cloud rolled down the hallway and through the guard station.
The Pink Cloud was dissolving the elaborate tapestries, making them drip in clumps of reeking fibrous matter.
"pink cloud"
He heaved once again, his Pink-Cloud-softened hide tearing, but this time he adamantly remained standing in the center of the lift.
"pink-cloud-softened"
The Cloud swirled in banks and eddies, and where it drifted, ponies died.
Goldenblood, however, barely felt the burn of the Cloud.
but the magical bubble keeping the missiles out kept the Cloud in
All the while, the Cloud thickened and the quiet grew.
"cloud"
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by Somber Tue Jun 24, 2014 1:14 am
I love your reviews, Icy. I really really do.
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by O. Hinds Tue Jun 24, 2014 1:37 am
@Icy Shake:
Ah, thank you very much as always.
You know, I've been imagining Silver Spoon with alicorn proportions? This entire time? And I only just realized this while making this correction. Huh.
Ah, thank you very much as always.
On the one hoof, it ought to be capitalized, as far as I know. On the other, I very much do not fancy spending ten minutes each to load fifteen chapters to change two letters. It's a pretty minor problem. Somber might want it taken care of if he decides to have one last big sweeping edit after the story is complete, but until and unless that happens and unless he or one of the other editors requests it, I say don't worry about it. If you happen to spot some when going through a chapter, flag them for me with the other errors you post, but I don't see a need to take up our time with a big story-wide search-and-destroy operation. Thanks for offering, though.Icy Shake wrote:On the one hand, this is in-context. On the other, it's an encyclopedia entry. On a third, it's from the post-apocalypse, so standards probably aren't what they once were. In any case, just thought I'd raise the inconsistency and let you do what you will. PH has a sizable majority of "pink cloud," but FoE a massive majority "Pink Cloud." I've picked out the relatively few capitalized cases from PH, but if you'd prefer to go the other way or just leave as-is let me know and I can do the other search/try to remember not to raise the issue in the future.
…Icy Shake wrote:Hey. Long time no see
only one space after period
You know, I've been imagining Silver Spoon with alicorn proportions? This entire time? And I only just realized this while making this correction. Huh.
Hm. Okay, I've added Psychoshy and the others in the doorway falling back into the corridor and Stygius and Xanthe struggling.Icy Shake wrote:How is all this affecting Psychoshy and Stygius and Xanthe, who are pretty squishy at the moment? Okay, Xanthe has the suit, but would that help against the light and surrounding heat?
Probably, yeah. Actually, I think I forgot this bit and have griffins willing to fight griffins in Germaney in my headcanon… Eh. Carrion seems quite the idealist, anyway.Icy Shake wrote:Yeah, I have trouble seeing it work out that way in practice.
:DIcy Shake wrote:It's too bad that unlike Boo, she isn't a cat. I bet she'd be able to get through then.
Good point.Icy Shake wrote:Wow. Kind of insensitive there, huh? Ghouls aren't ponies anymore? Why not "ghouls and living," Blackjack? Especially since you have a living zebra with you, too.
As I recall, that was basically the reasoning for making Red Eye Corrupted Generosity in FoE.Icy Shake wrote:Oh, and as part 3928423 in my unnecessary and unending quest of justifying Blackjack as a potential Element of Generosity, I'd like to note that right here it looks to me like she's so desperately insistent on giving Snips what he most desired that she's losing sight of the fact that some things aren't hers to give—in this case, risking the lives of Psychoshy and Stygius by spending more time there. I think this is an interesting potential failure mode of Generosity, and would actually like to see a Rarity episode or comic based on it someday.
Oh, that's why you split it up.The posted message is too long.
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by O. Hinds Tue Jun 24, 2014 3:52 am
I've just finished reading through the first eighteen pages of 68. It is awesome. It is so very, very awesome.
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by O. Hinds Tue Jun 24, 2014 3:53 am
Seriously. Awesome. I cannot at present think of a non-spoilery way to tell you how awesome it is.
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by O. Hinds Tue Jun 24, 2014 3:54 am
I could sum most of it up in two words, but, ehhh, I do not wan to ruin the surprise. :D
(And of course I'd need permission from Somber.)
(And of course I'd need permission from Somber.)
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by O. Hinds Tue Jun 24, 2014 3:56 am
And these are just the first eighteen pages!
And dear me I'm multiposting a lot here and I'll stop now, sorry. But, you know. Somber's writing here is extra, extra "horrible".
And dear me I'm multiposting a lot here and I'll stop now, sorry. But, you know. Somber's writing here is extra, extra "horrible".
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by Stringtheory Tue Jun 24, 2014 10:21 am
I think by now we all know that 'horrible' is code for 'awesome', also can't wait!O. Hinds wrote:And these are just the first eighteen pages!
And dear me I'm multiposting a lot here and I'll stop now, sorry. But, you know. Somber's writing here is extra, extra "horrible".
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by Vinylshadow Tue Jun 24, 2014 10:37 am
*somehow makes strangling gestures with my hooves*
Don't even talk about new chapters until they're released, that's worse then a mare or buck teasing you but not letting you near them
Don't even talk about new chapters until they're released, that's worse then a mare or buck teasing you but not letting you near them
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by FeatherDust Tue Jun 24, 2014 12:34 pm
I'm so many pages behind right now...
I was just thinking, is the machine even CAPABLE of offing Goldie? We have identified that he is most likely a CanterGhoul now. I doubt "your mind makes it real" trauma can do it... You gotta sever the head, right?
I was just thinking, is the machine even CAPABLE of offing Goldie? We have identified that he is most likely a CanterGhoul now. I doubt "your mind makes it real" trauma can do it... You gotta sever the head, right?
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by Vinylshadow Tue Jun 24, 2014 12:47 pm
Sounds about right
heads almost always a weak point
I think vaporization also works
heads almost always a weak point
I think vaporization also works
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by Guest Tue Jun 24, 2014 1:28 pm
Kinda curious about the viability of that as an execution method myself. Haven't we seen memory orbs where the person who's being riden(? I suppose) recieves fatal damage.
Fairly certain that we were riding in either Shujaa or Twist when Twist had the phoenix talisman placed in her.
I can't remember which one at the moment but I do know that shujaa dies from the event and it's possible you could argue Twist does as well but is revived by the talisman. If it plainly states that she died and was revived I don't remember.
Maybe there's a degree of seperation in that because you can't read the person's thoughts or something and that's why you survive.
Fairly certain that we were riding in either Shujaa or Twist when Twist had the phoenix talisman placed in her.
I can't remember which one at the moment but I do know that shujaa dies from the event and it's possible you could argue Twist does as well but is revived by the talisman. If it plainly states that she died and was revived I don't remember.
Maybe there's a degree of seperation in that because you can't read the person's thoughts or something and that's why you survive.
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by Vinylshadow Tue Jun 24, 2014 1:46 pm
What, you mean the fact if Blackjack didn't guess the passwords, she would've died trying to access the memories?
I think that was a spell cast on the orbs themselves to prevent any random pony from viewing them and rendering the final judgement
I think that was a spell cast on the orbs themselves to prevent any random pony from viewing them and rendering the final judgement
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by Guest Tue Jun 24, 2014 2:00 pm
Noooo. I mean that BJ has experienced memory orbs that have the person the memories are taken from die in them.
BJ can feel what the person feels on an emotional and physical level while in them. From what I remember the only thing she doesn't get is what the person was thinking in the memory orbs.
Or maybe it's the emotional part she doesn't get...
I in any case was suggesting in these situations the memory orbs are or should be about as good as the simulations that are supposed to kill GB. But they haven't killed BJ.
At the end I also suggested that the reason could be that not getting the thoughts of the person you're riding may put a barrier between you and them that keeps you from dying in those circumstances.
BJ can feel what the person feels on an emotional and physical level while in them. From what I remember the only thing she doesn't get is what the person was thinking in the memory orbs.
Or maybe it's the emotional part she doesn't get...
I in any case was suggesting in these situations the memory orbs are or should be about as good as the simulations that are supposed to kill GB. But they haven't killed BJ.
At the end I also suggested that the reason could be that not getting the thoughts of the person you're riding may put a barrier between you and them that keeps you from dying in those circumstances.
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by Vinylshadow Tue Jun 24, 2014 2:35 pm
BJ's already had that sort of thing with the mental therapy, I believe
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by FeatherDust Tue Jun 24, 2014 4:00 pm
So here's the deal. Well, here's part of it; trademark law is hideously complex.SilentCarto wrote:Technowolf wrote:Because Hasbro is very conservative when it comes to what they think can be trademarked, leading to silly stuff like "Cadance" instead of Cadence (which can be an actual name) or "Shockblast" instead of Shockwave (an actual phenomenon).
I guess I'm sort of glad that MLP isn't the only brand suffering from this kind of stupidity, but... gah.
You can trademark a common word as a trade name provided you trademark it within the context of your product. You can trademark, for example, "Twilight" within the context of small plastic ponies but that doesn't stop somebody from using it as the title of a book about vampires. Or you can trademark "Typhoon" washing machines, and that in no way stops somebody from making a Typhoon remote controlled car or a Typhoon blow drier.*
If you do trademark a common word, you're stuck with that "context" thing, which results in a weaker trademark. If you trademark a name that isn't a common word, you don't have to deal with that. A "Shockblast" trademark can be enforced much more broadly than can "Shockwave".
Actually context still matters; a Shockblast transformer doesn't stop anyone from making a Shockblast personal defense device. You probably couldn't even extend the "Shockblast" trademark over even the arena of 'toys'. But it does allow you to spread your protective trademark umbrella over a much wider array of potential products than using a common word.
That's the origin of all this. I still dislike it. But that's where it comes from.
*If you have a particular symbolic way to write your brand name, a specific font or presentation -- such as writing it so it looks like the words are being twisted -- you can trademark that separately to keep people from, say, imitating the look of your product's name brand while the text actually says "Hurricane". (This gives Hasbro grounds, if they wanted to pursue it, to attack the makers of My Tiny Pony or similar thing as infringing on the MLP trademark.)
I think most people eschew the camel and just say "Littlepip".
Shun the zebra, my brethren! Deny the donkey and eschew the camel! In purity there is strength!
It's probably kinda like Naboo's elected "Queen".
ARGH.
And if she WAS actually elected, who in the heck votes in a teenager for political office?!
It's obviously a ploy to avoid the grumbling of traditionally anti-monarchist American audiences instead of sticking to Star Wars's fairy-tale roots.
Well, hospitals are already kind of unsettling by default...
And then you populate it with actual monsters that are silently stalking you as we speak.
That was a really awesome analysis.
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by Guest Tue Jun 24, 2014 4:15 pm
@Elected Queens
It's easy! You have only one candidate, and you can either vote for them or not vote for them! :P
It's easy! You have only one candidate, and you can either vote for them or not vote for them! :P
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by Vinylshadow Tue Jun 24, 2014 4:24 pm
All hail Queen Whiskey, the glorious Drunkjack
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by Dutcher Tue Jun 24, 2014 5:08 pm
O. Hinds wrote:And these are just the first eighteen pages!
And dear me I'm multiposting a lot here and I'll stop now, sorry. But, you know. Somber's writing here is extra, extra "horrible".
Chapter 68 - Morning [Coming Soon]
Awww yissss Glory time
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by ARoundCorner Tue Jun 24, 2014 7:14 pm
Is there anybody that could e-mail me a pdf of the next chapters, 68 and 69, when they come out?
I'm going to be in a place for the next month or so that *ahm* china *ahm* that frowns upon google and all it's affiliates, so I won't be able to get on the hub page.
my e-mail is chencharley_el@yahoo.com
if not, i'll be back in a month anyways.
Thenk Yus!
I'm going to be in a place for the next month or so that *ahm* china *ahm* that frowns upon google and all it's affiliates, so I won't be able to get on the hub page.
my e-mail is chencharley_el@yahoo.com
if not, i'll be back in a month anyways.
Thenk Yus!
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by Icy Shake Tue Jun 24, 2014 7:27 pm
I'm happy to hear that's still the case. It's nice that others can get something out of them in addition to them being something fun to do and a way to try to remember things better.Somber wrote:I love your reviews, Icy. I really really do.
Achievement Unlocked: Quintuple Post!O. Hinds wrote:And these are just the first eighteen pages!
And dear me I'm multiposting a lot here and I'll stop now, sorry. But, you know. Somber's writing here is extra, extra "horrible".
My understanding has always been that she gets physical sensations, and nothing else. She can infer emotion based on things like vocal tone, heart rate, breathing, perspiration, the feel of the facial expression, posture, etc., but she's basically limited to the sort of thing you'd get from an exclusively tell-y narrative. My interpretation regarding how the computer would kill Goldenblood was that there would be a simulation of whatever the executioner wanted him to experience, but the killing itself would be done physically via some robotics or the life support system itself.Last wrote:Noooo. I mean that BJ has experienced memory orbs that have the person the memories are taken from die in them.
BJ can feel what the person feels on an emotional and physical level while in them. From what I remember the only thing she doesn't get is what the person was thinking in the memory orbs.
Or maybe it's the emotional part she doesn't get...
I in any case was suggesting in these situations the memory orbs are or should be about as good as the simulations that are supposed to kill GB. But they haven't killed BJ.
At the end I also suggested that the reason could be that not getting the thoughts of the person you're riding may put a barrier between you and them that keeps you from dying in those circumstances.
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by O. Hinds Tue Jun 24, 2014 8:38 pm
And they're good for pointing out errors that need correcting, of course.Icy Shake wrote:I'm happy to hear that's still the case. It's nice that others can get something out of them in addition to them being something fun to do and a way to try to remember things better.
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Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion
by Guest Tue Jun 24, 2014 9:24 pm
Icy Shake wrote:
My understanding has always been that she gets physical sensations, and nothing else. She can infer emotion based on things like vocal tone, heart rate, breathing, perspiration, the feel of the facial expression, posture, etc., but she's basically limited to the sort of thing you'd get from an exclusively tell-y narrative. My interpretation regarding how the computer would kill Goldenblood was that there would be a simulation of whatever the executioner wanted him to experience, but the killing itself would be done physically via some robotics or the life support system itself.
Fair enough. I'm sure memory orbs were explained at some point in PH or FO:E but far enough back that I don't have a good enough memory of it to dispute that interpretetation. I remember that the memory orbs lacked one of three, mental, physical or emotional. Physical is out because the Deus orb would be entirely pointless if BJ couldn't feel what he felt 1:1 and mental is too because Pinkie always communicates vocally to BJ and again the Deus orb, he spoke into a mirror instead of just thinking.
But I don't have any evidence against the inferance proposal for the emotions. That sounds fine to me actually.
Killing him physically could be how it's done and I wouldn't dispute that if it was, it just that given all the options BJ was presented I think it's heavily implied it's the simulation itself that's killing him. Though it's entirely possible that those just exist as torture methods to play while the procedure is carried out.
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