Octavia's Reprise - Chapter Seven - Author's Note

STOP. FULL SPOILERS FOR Octavia's Reprise - Chapter Seven BELOW!

Vinyl making her guest eggs in her kitchenette is entirely reminiscent of myself; I tend to make scrambled eggs and bacon for anyone who winds up staying the night. Thankfully I’m a bit of a better cook; in fact, my friends rather enjoy my eggs. And I know I don’t go into a lot of detail here on how Vinyl’s eggs taste, but every time I think of them I’m reminded of a dream I had not long prior to writing this chapter in which I ate small, black scrambled eggs only to find out it was actually cat poop. No idea what my subconscious decided to base the taste on, or why I’m sharing this, but either way it took a really long time for me to get the imaginary taste out of my mouth. Yuck. I didn’t even know you could taste things in dreams.

This chapter marks the first swear word in my piece. That and some of the club stuff in an earlier chapter are what led me to give this a teen rating. Initially I wanted to avoid swearing all together, even one that some would consider pretty vanilla. The fact that there aren’t others though leads me to hope that it really stands out, and its impact is that much more severe, if that makes sense.

Octavia’s breakdown in the apartment here feels a little extreme, but I couldn’t figure out a way to bring it down and still maintain the impact it would have on Vinyl. I hope it still comes across okay.

I didn’t initially intend to bring the train attendant from last chapter’s flashback around a second time, but once I had the idea I thought it would be a fun way of reminding the girls of how much fun they used to have together. It’s fun how writing can work like that sometimes.

And now we finally get to take our characters to a locale we’re all more familiar with. I plan on having some fun with various episodes and cannon here, if I didn’t already give off that impression.

Let the record show that I don’t necessarily think Discord it THE strongest force of evil… And bear in mind that at this point he’s yet to be reformed. Just taking the time to try to avoid any potential arguments :P

The last section was originally the opening section for the next chapter, but I move it up because this chapter was running short on words, and because I felt it left off on a better cliffhanger. I hope you guys agree.

The original use of Rarity’s shop was confirmed by Faust herself; I’m glad I got to have a little fun with it.

Enter fan favorite: Lyra Heartstings! I admit that the Lyra seen here is pretty tame compared to others that I’ve read. In truth, I love the eccentric, human-obsessed Lyra the fandom more often than not turns out. For mine though I felt the need to keep her a little more somber. Reasons why can be discussed a little more later on. Maybe someday I’ll do a story featuring a more fun side of her personality. On the note of humans, I also made sure to leave my piece derived from them; I’ve tried to maintain a sense of actually being in the world of the show, and there’s actually very little to suggest she could possibly have such an interest. Besides, trying to shovel it in there to get a laugh would have felt entirely out of place in their conversation. She also wound up being a very hard character for me to work into my story while also maintaining her cannon appearances, like how in the very first episode we see her waving to Twilight while in Canterlot, then can be seen in Ponyville the night Twilight arrives. I also wanted to include something on her being at that fateful wedding, but I couldn’t find a way for it to naturally come up in the conversation, and I didn’t want to force it. I had thought about the idea of her being traumatized by it as well, but the Lyra we see on the show is generally pretty cheerful during the ceremony itself once all the craziness died down. Again, maybe something I can tackle in a different piece someday. The idea of Lyra playing her lyre in the park was largely taken from the beautifully painted images of her doing so in shortskirtsandexplosions’ Background Pony, though I don’t believe the idea is unique to that story. I did at the very least give the fandom a nod with the fact that Lyra and Bon Bon are sharing a living space together.

Here I really ground where in the show’s timeline everything is taking place. The first chapter probably did a good enough job of that with the invasion/wedding, but this helps. I’m sure these two major events were more than just a few days apart (we all know it was on our TV schedules), but it lets me take some context from the show for some references and jokes, and also takes the prominent ponies we all know away from the story. Why, you may ask? As much fun as writing Rarity was earlier in the story, part of me is wary of trying to write so many distinct and very well known personalities. On top of that, I feel like having them around would distract from the story, leading readers both wanting to see more of characters not actually important to the plot, and because I feel like throwing them in there would give the plot a detour with a lot of unnecessary interactions just for me to have a spot of fun. Maybe another time.

Right now the next two chapters are both looking rather short. I could combine them together, but then they'd be over a thousand words longer than the current longest chapter. I'll debate how I should approach this in the coming days, but am willing to listen to requests if anyone would like it done one way or the other.