Story: The Engineer’s Wings.

So here is it, the quick little story that turned out to not be so quick or little. Funny how one’s anticipation of how long a story will be can be so off the mark.

I suppose the next thing I need to mention would be what I alluded to in one of the notes in the story before I removed it. That being the ending chain of events. You see, the final confrontation with Nightmare Moon underwent three major changes in order to arrive at the version I posted. I had always intended for the defeat of Nightmare moon to be, Scoots and friends deliver the main six to the moon, main six defeat Nightmare Moon off camera.

Thing is, when I originally scripted it in my mind I had the tower being the final challenge to the heroes. But even when I was typing up the original rough draft I figured that was too lame to have all Nightmare Moon’s efforts to win be off camera, so I added the space fight scene on the way to the moon.

Yet, even then the ending felt more anticlimactic than intended, and it came down to the tower itself. You see, The first version of the tower used temptation and trickery to separate the heroes until Scootaloo and Rainbow Dash wound up alone. E.G. a library to get Twilight to stay behind on a lower floor voluntarily, or Flutters choosing to go in the orchard portal because she figured that if she was going to be useful it was going to be on the ground where forest critters might be.

And the more I looked over that version, the more I disliked the fact that most of the team hadn’t seemed to faced any meaningful threat since they’d left Ponyville. So I completely re-scripted the tower accent chapter, adding the forced separation of the team and the banishing-spell-infused steam and guardians. In fact the fight with the mirror shadows was the only scene that survived the rewrite. Another big difference was that in the first version the mechanical skill challenge was inside the portals. And the fight with the mirror copies ended by giving Scoot’s and Dash the key piece to rebuilding the portal machine to make the exit portal out of the pocket space and to the top of the tower. Thing is in that version nothing was pressuring Scootaloo so I had her taking several hours to assemble the exit portal machine.

So ultimately the entire ending arch felt too low action/ low pressure on the heroes, so that’s why the big delay to end up with the version of the story that I posted.

Another thing I wanted to touch on here was that in the comments of the story someone mention that my story had a ‘Last Exile’ feel to it. Now that I have had the time to re watch it I can say there are indeed many more similarities than I realized. That said, it never crossed my mind to include an airplane race in my story, or a casino with chocoboo racing for that matter.

Although if I were trying to make a Last Exile style pony story/crossover, I’d definitely would’ve added something akin to the cave race where the teams are given a beat up plane to fix up and race. Since I can’t see Scoots being allowed to race her jet plane against propeller planes in normal races.

So while unintended I'd say there was some influence from Last Exile.

And the last thing I wanted to mention was with regards to the changelings. Originally I had them give their reason for starting a war with the first interrogation abroad the Cloudsdale. But when I wrote it I decided that the conversation was going on too long, so I had the interruption come in earlier thinking, ‘I’ll just have Chrysalis explain that "love burns brightest among the uncertainty of war" when talking to Celestia.’

But then when I wrote down that part I felt shifting the camera off of Scootaloo in the throne room diminished the impact of what Scoots was feeling at that moment, so I cut the conversations between Twilight and Shining, and Celestia and Chrysalis entirely.

Well, that’s all of the inside author’s notes I can think to share with you.

So until next time, have fun out there!