Preview of the Next Chapter of 7DSJ · 4:03am Jun 26th, 2014
The house was deathly still as Sunset trudged up the stairs, in desperate need of sleep. It had been a long day: doing the laundry with Twilight, going with Blossomforth to her pre-natal checkup, then a full day at work made longer by the store’s annual inventory for tax purposes, and by the time she’d arrived home at 11:30, anything else was far from her mind. The only thing she wanted to do was throw herself in bed and dream of whatever bizarre things that her subconscious decided to bombard her with.
As she went up the stairs, she looked briefly at the open door of her foster parents’ room. Both of them were out for the weekend: Velvet was going to be in Denver for the week at a conference sponsored by the HHS; Night Light, as a physicist, was attending some experiments at Fermilab and teaching his classes for the week via remote from there. Thankfully, Twilight was here for the weekend helping to watch Spike, and either Shining or Cadance would be shuttling the youngest member of the family to-and-from school for the duration of the week. Sunset could take the subway to school, and one of the seniors at Twilight’s school, Champagne Dreams, offered to give her lifts during the course of the week. All in all, it was going to be a dull week at home.
Reaching the top of the flight, she could hear games coming from the room with a woodcarving of a cartoonish dragon holding a sign that said SPIKE’S ROOM. She knocked once, saying through the door, “I must be imagining things – I swear I’m hearing videogames when someone should have been asleep a while ago, right?” Suddenly on the other side of the door there was commotion, the kind only made by an eight-year-old throwing everything into a corner before hastily throwing himself under the bedsheets. After waiting a few seconds more, she opened the door, seeing him in his bed, fast asleep…or at least credibly faking it.
“Yeah, must’ve been my imagination,” she said to no one in particular as she started closing the door.
“Thanks, Sunny,” he whispered.
“No problem, squirt,” she told him. “Now get some sleep this time.”
That sidetrack dealt with, she went towards her room, when she heard some odd moaning from Twilight’s room. At first she thought…. No, not Twily…and it’s probably going to be hugely embarrassing for both of us if she is doing what I think she’s doing. But amongst the moaning she thought she heard the words, “No, go away!” and that was more than enough for her to change her mind.
Making sure that Spike wasn’t going to come out of his room all of a sudden, she put a palm against Twilight’s door, splaying her fingers. As Sunset closed her eyes, a soft cyan glow began to envelop her hand, for a brief span of a second, the whole door was wrapped in the same mystic aura before the magical flash winked out of existence. Well, at least it’s not that. Opening the door, she poked her head in just in time to see Twilight sitting up, breathing heavily, soaked in sweat and a terrified look on her face.
Sunset was at her side in an instant. “Hey, you okay?”
“No….” the bedraggled girl said, pushing the mop-wet hair out of her eyes. “I…I went to bed early because I wasn’t feeling well, and…nevermind. It’s nothing.”
“You sure?”
A minute’s worth of silence compressed into a few seconds followed. “I’m…sure,” came the hesitant response.
Sunset reached over and took her foster sister’s face in her hands. “No, you’re not. I know you better than that.”
“You’re going to laugh.”
“No, I won’t, especially if it’s something that’s really bothering you.”
“O-okay,” Twilight began. “I was in this dark, smoky place. It wasn’t dark like night, but dark, as in horror-film dark.”
“Were you watching horror films with Rainbow again?”
A spell was hidden in the book, wasn't there?
Or scary images from the book.
I swear to god, if a Conversion Bureau scenario begins, I will smack you through the internet.
2235339
Unlikely. The one Twily read was the 1970's fake translation, not the original ancient book.
2235592
Don't worry, we hate TCB as well.
2235645 If she read the fake translation, it's still likely something bad happened. Just because it's a fake doesn't mean people wouldn't try using the methods detailed within. Remember Army of Darkness when Ash messed up Klaatu barada nikto?
2235592
Why would I do that? With the exception of deconstructions and parodies, I abhor TCB.
2235736
This is also Twily, who (by her own admission) is horrid at D&D and doesn't believe in magic in the slightest.
Too bad she's caught in a Law of Similarity Heterodyne with Princess Twilight, exacerbated by the Contagion from contact with Sunset and the Mane 6 analogs. Add her tangential connection to la Musica... (Heck she might just be the reason for Equestrian-style names in an otherwise modern Earth and the skintones: Go back 1000 years, and everyone with European ancestors shares common ancestors.)
(Itchy back and conservation of detail: you wouldn't tell us she had one without a reason, even if the reason is to make folks like me jump to conclusions.)
Or am I just reading things in that make no sense from the perspective of folks with inside info?
2236068
Actually, no, the reason there are Equestrian-style names on Earth is because...well, they already exist. And no, I'm not talking about the Roses, or the Taylors or the like. People tend to forget that our actual names have meanings to them; it's just that we've been so long divorced from them that we tend to forget they once were, essentially, human equivalents to pony names.
Take for example, the name Robert. Its origin is French, for "bright fame". Bright Fame definitely sounds like a pony name, doesn't it? All I did was try to keep the distillation of human names as much as possible, replacing ones where I couldn't do it (the Brentwood Museum, for example, is the real-life Getty Museum; in all my research I couldn't find out what that name meant.) Foreign (Santa Monica, for example) and older (Baldassare) names I kept, on the thought that like in real life, names go out of vogue and tend to be forgotten ("Shirley" is an old male name until it was resurrected in the 20th century as a female name); RL names that I kept were ones that had a clear equivalent to Equestria (e.g. Pony/Donut Joe.)
However, in-universe, it could be possible that Musica Allegra could have had an influence on names.
2235937 Even if Twilight doesn't believe in magic and thinks she'd be bad at it if it was real, doesn't mean that if she says the right (or wrong) words in a sarcastic it wouldn't trigger something.Or perhaps Octavia if you want to go for something Bloodline linked.
The reason the book is fake is because it was copied more recently. The actual information might still be accurate, especially if it's something like a memetic cogitohazard.