Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion

[Harmony Ltd.]

From what I get, the souls are soaked into the Starmetal, which as it is part of the Eater of Souls, lead them to be absorbed / eaten by the Eater.

I can't exactly picture the whole meta-physical process, but basically, second solution : the souls are sent to the Eater. They aren't stored into the rings themselves.

[thatguyvex]

From what I get, the souls are soaked into the Starmetal, which as it is part of the Eater of Souls, lead them to be absorbed / eaten by the Eater.

I
can't exactly picture the whole meta-physical process, but basically,
second solution : the souls are sent to the Eater. They aren't stored
into the rings themselves.

Okay, and the Enervation fields seem to get stronger and stronger the more souls they eat, which is why they seem to be spreading...

... Well, crap, what happens when the Goddess dies and the Eater absorbs not only that soul, but the numerous souls attached to her? That's probably the largest concentration of magical energy in the world next to the Tokomare itself. If it absorbed Trixie, Twilight, those two magical twins whose name I can't remember, plus any alicorns that don't escape the balefire bomb explosion... how much larger would Hoofington's Enervation fields become from taking all that in?

[Harmony Ltd.]

I got the impression that the enervation field was only reinforced in the rings which absorbed souls, not for the whole "network" as a whole.

I may have understood wrong, though.

[thatguyvex]

Yeah, I wasn't sure exactly how it worked either. Its possible that the amount of magic energy in a soul might not even have an affect on the strength of the Enervation fields, but even then, with the fight between the Enclave and Red Eye's slavers coming up soon after the Goddess death that entire area would be poised to have its Enervation rings gain a massive boost in souls, which in turn would create fields of Enervation all over that area. If it isn't localized and it is that souls just get transferred over to Hoofington, which in turn boosts the whole network... that's not going to be a good day for Hoofington. Granted, no day is a good day for Hoofington, but still...

[Harmony Ltd.]

With each passing day, the temptation grow to just let the Remnants have their way with the city.

[thatguyvex]

If only Blackjack and company could do the same. But that would probably cause more problems than it'd solve. And they don't have a spaceship...

... they should get a spaceship. Guess they'll have to settle for an airship.

[Derpmind]

[Harmony Ltd.]

Hmmm...

I don't know if you remember...

But there's a whole spaceport not far from Hoofington.

Supposedly with some still functional rocketships in it.

That BJ's ancestor used to walk on the Moon with.

And to get moonstone back to Equestria.

Moonstone which is highly reactive to starmetal.


....


All I'm saying is, it's possible that there may be a legitimate use in the future for that track : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQR0bXO_yI8

[Vergil]

From what I get, the souls are soaked into the Starmetal, which as it is part of the Eater of Souls, lead them to be absorbed / eaten by the Eater.

I
can't exactly picture the whole meta-physical process, but basically,
second solution : the souls are sent to the Eater. They aren't stored
into the rings themselves.

Okay, and the Enervation fields seem to get stronger and stronger the more souls they eat, which is why they seem to be spreading...

... Well, crap, what happens when the Goddess dies and the Eater absorbs not only that soul, but the numerous souls attached to her? That's probably the largest concentration of magical energy in the world next to the Tokomare itself. If it absorbed Trixie, Twilight, those two magical twins whose name I can't remember, plus any alicorns that don't escape the balefire bomb explosion... how much larger would Hoofington's Enervation fields become from taking all that in?

Given Littlepip's encounter with Twi after killing the Goddess in the original FOE, I don't think the eater will absorb everything at least.

[thatguyvex]

Hmmm...

I don't know if you remember...

But there's a whole spaceport not far from Hoofington.

Supposedly with some still functional rocketships in it.

That BJ's ancestor used to walk on the Moon with.

And to get moonstone back to Equestria.

Moonstone which is highly reactive to starmetal

That would certainly be one solution to the Tokomare; hit it with a rocket full of moonstone. Though given how much of a reaction there was to just a little bit of moonstone and starmetal coming together, smacking the Tokomare with a big chunk of moon would probably, at the very least, reduce Hoofington and most of the local environment into a big smoking hole...

... overall, probably an improvement for tourism.

Given Littlepip's encounter with Twi after killing the Goddess in the
original FOE, I don't think the eater will absorb everything at least.

Good point, though I think Littlepip was trapped underground for a while after the bomb went off, so its possible in the interim that BJ and crew do something to stop the Eater, or at least cut it off from consuming more souls.

[Derpmind]

Starmetal rings are scattered all over the world, but remember that the ring in Tenpony Tower was inactive. The starmetal around Hoofington is creating enervation not just because of the massive amounts of death in the area but, mathematically much more important, they're physically close to the Tokomare. Plus, the area the goddess is in (can't remember the name of it right now) was a toxic dumping ground before the bombs dropped. I really doubt that they would need pest control over there.

[Icy Shake]

old chapter editing:

They like to call their slaves ‘servants’, but you’re wearing an explosive collar all the same.

The distinction between slave and serf may not seem like much to you, but it’s the difference between raiding settlements, slapping bomb collars on prisoners, and working them to death and accepting volunteers, giving them safety and food, and working them for half the day.

Just to be clear, the Society does use bomb collars to keep serfs from leaving, but only after a contract is (supposedly willingly) signed, right?

[thatguyvex]

Starmetal rings are scattered all
over the world, but remember that the ring in Tenpony Tower was
inactive. The starmetal around Hoofington is creating enervation not
just because of the massive amounts of death in the area but,
mathematically much more important, they're physically close to the
Tokomare. Plus, the area the goddess is in (can't remember the name of
it right now) was a toxic dumping ground before the bombs dropped. I
really doubt that they would need pest control over there.

Heh, unless they were dealing with radioactive mutant pests, but I suppose all of those appeared only after the bombs dropped. Oh, the name of the location I think is Maripony, but I could be wrong.

[SilentCarto]

I normally answer questions like this rather than ask them, but my Windows Search has been misbehaving since I got my new computer. What chapter was that in?

I believe that I mentioned this in my post on the subject, but Chapter 39.

It's entirely possible that I derped and missed you saying that.
On the up side, guess who got his windows search working again today?

So I wasn't too clear on this, but is it suggested that the Enervation rings sent all over the world are just soaking up and storing souls at their own locations, or are actually channeling the souls of those that die along a kind of conduit all the way back to the Tokomare in Hoofington?

BJ describes them as something like a sewer network. Her death-dream after Hightower gives us a good idea of what the network looks like from the inside:
This time, I was getting ripped through some sort of murkiness like so much rainwater being sluiced through a storm drain. I’d like to think I’m one of the few ponies who knows exactly what that feels like. Enervation’s piercing scream surrounded me on all sides, and every few seconds I passed through a shimmering, more-loudly-shrieking silver ring that sucked me in and spat me out ever faster.

And, if you recall her Star Dream, she saw the network from afar:
I looked back at my world. There were so few glimmering lights, and there seemed to be almost a spider’s web of shadow draped over the entire world. Some light escaped… but most seemed caught in that dark web covering everything. ... And with each light that spiderweb captured from my world, its song grew…

[Derpmind]

They like to call their slaves ‘servants’, but you’re wearing an explosive collar all the same.

The distinction between slave and serf may not seem like much to you, but it’s the difference between raiding settlements, slapping bomb collars on prisoners, and working them to death and accepting volunteers, giving them safety and food, and working them for half the day.

Just to be clear, the Society does use bomb collars to keep serfs from leaving, but only after a contract is (supposedly willingly) signed, right?

I think the bomb collars were phased out of the Society when Somber actually got around to writing it her in chapter 55, so that quote back in chapter 9 is going to be edited out. We're shown the Society has fences and guards instead of bomb collars.

[O. Hinds]

old chapter editing:

They like to call their slaves ‘servants’, but you’re wearing an explosive collar all the same.

The distinction between slave and serf may not seem like much to you, but it’s the difference between raiding settlements, slapping bomb collars on prisoners, and working them to death and accepting volunteers, giving them safety and food, and working them for half the day.

Just to be clear, the Society does use bomb collars to keep serfs from leaving, but only after a contract is (supposedly willingly) signed, right?

Ah, thank you.

I've relayed the bomb collar matter to Somber, just in case.

[SilentCarto]

If only Blackjack and company could do the same. But that would probably cause more problems than it'd solve. And they don't have a spaceship...

... they should get a spaceship. Guess they'll have to settle for an airship.

But Blackjack is the ultimate badass! She's got independently-targeting particle-beam phalanxes! You could fry half the city with those puppies! She's got smart missiles, phased plasma-pulse rifles, RPGs... she's got sonic electronic ball-breakers! She's got nukes, she's got knives, sharp sticks...

That BJ's ancestor used to walk on the Moon with.

Technically, her ancestor's surrogate mother. Marigold is a distant cousin.

[thatguyvex]

BJ describes them as something like a sewer network. Her death-dream
after Hightower gives us a good idea of what the network looks like from
the inside:
This time, I was getting ripped through some sort of
murkiness like so much rainwater being sluiced through a storm drain.
I’d like to think I’m one of the few ponies who knows exactly what that
feels like. Enervation’s piercing scream surrounded me on all sides,
and every few seconds I passed through a shimmering,
more-loudly-shrieking silver ring that sucked me in and spat me out ever
faster.

And, if you recall her Star Dream, she saw the network from afar:
I
looked back at my world. There were so few glimmering lights, and
there seemed to be almost a spider’s web of shadow draped over the
entire world. Some light escaped… but most seemed caught in that dark
web covering everything. ... And with each light that spiderweb captured
from my world, its song grew…

So it is sucking up souls from across the entire continent? And theoretically that could include the Goddess and some of the composite souls thereof? It would also include the metric buck-ton of deaths that would be incoming from the Enclave vs Red Eye vs Everyponyelse fight coming up in the main FoE storyline?

Yeah, that'll suck for Hoofington, depending on just how much stronger the Enervation fields will get after eating up that many souls. Might put Blackjack on a severe time limit to deal with things, once that all kicks off with the Goddess blowing up.

But Blackjack is the ultimate badass! She's got independently-targeting
particle-beam phalanxes! You could fry half the city with those puppies!
She's got smart missiles, phased plasma-pulse rifles, RPGs... she's got
sonic electronic ball-breakers! She's got nukes, she's got knives,
sharp sticks...

I am no officially calling it that Blackjack defeats the Legate using her most ultimate of weapons... the sharp stick!

[SilentCarto]

So it is sucking up souls from across the entire continent?

No.

The entire world.

I am now officially calling it that Blackjack defeats the Legate using her most ultimate of weapons... the sharp stick!

That would be pretty awesome.

[FeatherDust]

Oh my god.
Maybe somebody already noticed this, I'm like four days behind on the thread, but...

Okay, first, remember that Eclipse is Luna's alter-ego. (I can't remember who all is in on that secret; I'd forgotten until I saw you guys talking about it in this thread.)

“You aren’t supposed to be doing that,” a dark pegasus muttered beside [Goldenblood].
...
He gave a small snort. “Oh please, Eclipse. The princess isn’t going to need this report.”
“You never know. She might,” the pegasus said with a mysterious little smirk.

They're bantering. Luna won't need the report because she's standing right there in the room.

Suddenly there was a shout and and shove, and for a moment, something metal touched [Goldenblood's] mane. Then Psalm was there, darting in, and there came a muffled shout as Goldenblood was shoved to the floor.

“Are you okay?” Eclipse asked as she knelt beside him. He glanced up in time to see the glittering mesh descend down and land firmly atop her inky head.

Suddenly the machine let out a massive mechanical shriek, and the screens went wild. One exploded in a shower of sparks as the reek of burning electronics filled the air. The gold glow of Goldenblood’s magic yanked the mesh from her brow...The Crusader finally let out out an immense pop, and a cloud of rolling black smoke erupted from the top as the machine let out an anemic whine.
...
Once they were out in the hall, Goldenblood muttered, “He was probably hoping to have a peek in my mind.”

The plan was to slip the hood onto Goldie as "a joke", then fake a computer failure* so they wouldn't have to be seen dumping the memory-copy, which they could sift for data later.

The plan worked, except they got the wrong pony. They got a scan of Eclipse instead.

Who is Princess Luna.

Horse has an AI with a copy of Luna's brain.

Fillies and gentlecolts, let me introduce you to Cognitum 1.0.


* Or induce a real failure, so long as the memory copy remains safe. That's probably why Horse was more worried about Sweetie Bot than the computer -- he expected the computer to blow out; the damage to his favorite toy was a surprise, and thus upset him.

[StoneSlinger88]

Goldenblood might've stopped the copy mid-transfer-- leaving a corrupted and incomplete version of Luna for Horse to work with. Luna's mind not being "all-there" may be why Cognitum is so screwed up.

[FeatherDust]

Totally possible.

On the other hand... vuff. I will have to go back and look at Eclipse's earlier appearances, but this chapter makes it clear that she's as deep into this stuff as... Golden... blood...

Oh...
Ohhhhh...
No wonder Goldie is so determined to have himself executed for all the crimes of the OIA. Luna is hock-deep in it all! She knows about most, if not all, of it. In her Eclipse-guise, she's mocking her own pretense. "Princess Luna sits on her throne and makes impressive speeches while the Ministries do all their acts behind her back. Poor Princess Luna."

She's knowingly fooling around with horrific experiments of every sort and then playing dumb. I mean, that's... Luna's evil.

Goldenblood is determined to take the fall for the mare he loves. He's going to be executed at the end so that she can look like an innocent dupe rather than -- well -- basically Nightmare Moon without armor.

And... holy crap, if he was (as we presume) fake-executed by dragonfire-sending, that means the whole thing of Luna finding out something so terrible that she ordered her friend's death -- that was all a charade! Luna rages and screams and sentences him to summary execution, and the whole time it's an act!

...and so now I'm wondering if Goldenblood set up the entire Pink Cloud thing himself. Celestia, the entire city, that's collateral damage... he alone knew what Luna had become. It would be so easy to once again make himself the monster, because he couldn't allow Luna to be the unquestioned leader after everything she'd done as Eclipse... It doesn't quite track with the conversation with Trottenheimer, unless that conversation was earlier, and it was only at the end that he really realized what he was helping into a "thousand year reign".

He even said in the recording how much influence the zebras had on him. With the OIA and his own knowledge, would they even NEED a zebra to produce the pink cloud talisman?


Edit: I keep triggering chains of thought for myself. I said "only at the end that he really realized what he was helping into a thousand year reign". I may be more right than I even intended when I called it a 'what'. Don't I recall that right before his arrest and execution, Goldie completely flipped his shit? He was ranting and raving about something related to the eater of souls. Now I'm wondering if what he found out was that the Eater was influencing Luna; that it was in her head, and over time its influence would only grow; that she's doomed to go Nightmare again, sooner or later, and he just helped secure her rule. What could he do then but figure out a way to ensure her death, to prevent the monster that's gnawing at her psyche from having her as its pawn?

Sorry. I'm rambling.

[Harmony Ltd.]

@ FeatherDust, RE Luna : I'll just share the following link which express a few thoughts that have already been had on the subject => https://cloudsville.rpg-board.net/t976-fallout-equestria-setting-discussions#163192

If you have time, try to watch at least the second half of the video to understand the source ofte ramblings.

[FeatherDust]

Yes, please come put on my brain-scanner. I promise we'll purge absolutely everything it extracts from your mind.
...
...after our techs ensure that they've wiped anything that was extracted from "Eclipse", right?
...right?

Oh, I see you got there first. Okay. :D
Except I trust that the Purge button worked -- they just faked a failure to avoid using it.

And worse, I couldn’t think of any way to tell somepony!

What, does your broadcaster not work when you're in Enervation? If you can't reach Lacunae, the Goddess can't stop you right now!

Clearly the goddess's mind-adjusting restrictions don't require constant contact; she's fully aware of the enervation effect, and it would be virtually meaningless to put a restriction on that would fall away as soon as the E-field got strong enough.

Onery radgator? Tank.

Ornery.

I spotted this one my first go-through, 'onery' is still correct as an alternative spelling.

Who says? My Merriam-Webster's doesn't list that spelling, nor does dictionary.com. It appears to always be a misspelling of ornery.

It is entirely possible that he could be making shit up here

That would be some bizarre and oddly specific shit to make up.

I was gonna argue that he might just be eliding some of the 'greats', but then I realized that as (possibly fake) royalty, he'd have a keen interest in having an accurate (possibly fake) family tree.

On the other hand, it's possible nobody else really cares how many greats there are, given they way they treat the past as kind of pointless, and "great great grandfather" is just a shorthand for 'distant direct ancestor'.

[Somber]

Sorry, everyone. It's been a rough week and I've been really, really depressed lately. It takes all my energy just faking being normal at work so my students don't know. That and the antidepressants really are wacking away at me. And my computer broke so I'm down to my crappy laptop and... just everything. Sorry. Thanks so much for letting me know that 55 was an improvement. I'm glad I can do better. We'll try and get that chapter 9 wrinkle straightened out. And add a little bit about why she couldn't use her broadcaster. I forgot, but BJ wouldn't. Dawn could very well have a jammer installed.

Anyway, sorry for being silent so long.

[Vergil]

Anyway, sorry for being silent so long.

No worries, it happens to the best of us.

[Ketchup]

Onery radgator? Tank.

Ornery.

I spotted this one my first go-through, 'onery' is still correct as an alternative spelling.

Who says? My Merriam-Webster's doesn't list that spelling, nor does dictionary.com. It appears to always be a misspelling of ornery.

If you google 'onery', it'll give you Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary with the definition as a 'variant spelling' of ornery.
It could be wrong, I thought it was a typo at first.

[Kippershy]

Somber, not sure if anyone has pointed it out here but back in the FOE thread someone said you had references to Society using bomb collars back in chapter nine.

Might wanna check that out. Haven't checked it myself mind you, but yeah. Just to let you know.

[Harmony Ltd.]

Somber, not sure if anyone has pointed it out here but back in the FOE thread someone said you had references to Society using bomb collars back in chapter nine.

Might wanna check that out. Haven't checked it myself mind you, but yeah. Just to let you know.

We'll try and get that chapter 9 wrinkle straightened out.

[Kippershy]

Just looked back and saw it. Now I can't even edit it out or even delete of my post as a whole.
At least there's no foul intention behind it, so nothing to be ashamed of.

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