Introductuons and JTANH.

Well then, I guess I should take this opportunity to introduce myself and talk about my ongoing project, Journey To A New Home.

I'm ShadeOps21, call me Shade for short, and I hail from the Land Down Under, otherwise known as Australia. I've been an active fanfiction reader for many years, and a writer for almost two years now. All of my previous works can be found on Fanfiction.net under the name of "TheShadeOps", and are mostly set in the Modern Warfare fandom. I do have one Ace Combat piece that follows AWACS Thunderhead but is on hold for the time being. I also have two MW/MLP crossovers there as well. Not going to plug them any further, but if you're interested in them, go check them out.

"Journey to a New Home" is my first real attempt at a MLP-based work that I'm committed to on this site. I once tried before with another piece that was more military operations based with humanised characters, but that failed to take off (I have since deleted it).

For a bit of background, JTANH follows Alvin H. Davenport, call sign "Chopper", of the legendary Wardog Squadron from the video game Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War (Squadron Leader if you had an EU or PAL release). For those who haven't played the game, Chopper is an AI wingman that flies alongside the player character and silent protagonist "Blaze" with fellow pilots Kei "Edge" Nagase and Hans "Archer" Grimm. In mission 18, known as The Journey Home, Chopper is shot down and killed after a surprise attack from enemy forces at a rally that the government had organised in November City.

I decided to take this and run with the idea that most HiE fics seem to take; after a horrendous accident or misfortune, the human character finds themselves teleported to the world of Equestria. However, given Chopper's circumstances and nature of arrival, he will be unable to return back to Osea even if the opportunity arrives. With the story, I made the call to make the pony characters anthro, as I felt that the interactions between Chopper and actual ponies would be harder to write with what I had in mind. Whether this was the right thing to do or not remains to be seen.

Regardless, I am really happy to say that I didn't expect quite the initial viewership this early on. In the back of my head I had the feeling that this would be one of those stories that just faded into the dark to be forgotten after the twenty readers or so. Still, 165 views, 23/3 likes and dislikes, and not yet a month old.

I'm pretty happy with that.

So for those of you reading this that have read JTANH, I want to say thank you.

Now here's a picture of Chopper.