You should be reading this / Twilestia edition: Nine Days Down by JoeShogun · 4:38pm Mar 3rd, 2016
Celestia amuses herself by playing damsel in distress for Twilight and the gang, only to have her fun backfire when she's thrown into Tartarus, very much actually in distress, and an all-too-vulnerable Twilight is dragged with her.
Celestia's panic feels real, and her determination to protect Twilight at all costs is palpable. Twilight herself is unprepared to see the lengths Celestia will go to in her defense. Not all of Tartarus' denizens are immediately hostile, and Celestia even has a decidedly less-than-hostile history with some of them. Tartarus on the whole here is a death-world and their adventures are hair-raising.
I was afraid early on that we'd see too much OP Celestia and/or Useless Twilight, flailing and stumbling when out of her element. JoeShogun averts that nicely when Celestia actually has to get her hooves dirty, and is decidedly not omniscient or omnipotent. Later we see Twilight on her own and she proves that not only can she avoid breaking down completely but can be a stalwart badass in her own right. It really gears up when Twilight starts (perhaps unintentionally) acting like a true Princess of Friendship.
It's aptly tagged Adventure / Dark and earns its Teen rating. There are some squicky moments and in Tartarus, (nearly) everything is out to kill you, so even the nicest characters learn to shoot first. It's not all hopelessness and moral quandaries. Remember who's starring in this story, and while Twilight may take a while to get her bearings, she never forgets herself and the lessons she's learned.
For the Twilestia fans, note that there's no Romance tag. There are hints, and not all of them require shipping goggles. It's even lampshaded by another character early on. Remains to be seen if it will come to anything but it's fun to speculate.
There are a smattering of typographical errors and grammatical quirks through the story; none are game-breakers if you're reading for the story and plot and characterizations. It's 40K words in and still Incomplete, last updated mid-February.
Criminally under-viewed and under-thumbs-upped, if you ask me, which you implicitly did by reading this far.
Hmmm..