If You Insist

by RainbowSenpai

Prolouge

Here I am alone, scared, and worst of all lost. Not in the sense that I don’t know where I am, but in the sense of I have nothing left.

Not only was my whole squad wiped out on this suicide mission that I dragged them to, but I've failed the two people I cared about the most.

They gave me strength even after they lost everything that day just like me. They lost their family, friends, and the city they grew up in.

The invaders that killed their parents were cruel militaristic creatures that looked to close to the human race, not only in looks but in actions. Their appearance was almost identical to humans, the only differences were that they usually had purple or red eyes, they had no nose, but just holes where the nose should go, and their skin was so pale you could see most of their veins in their body. They were usually around seven foot tall towering over the average human.

There was Jeremy Thompson; he was 17 athletic, strong-spirited, and loyal. He was incredible, never abandoning anyone, ever. Then there was Nareene Thompson; she was 14 small, shy, and kind. She had amazing medical skills for her age, and was the nicest person you’d ever meet. Together they kept me from insanity, keeping me busy and gave me something to hold on too.

The two of them had nothing to do with this. If they’d only stay at the camp this wouldn't have happened this way. But they cared too much for my safety, our safety.

There was four of us in the elitist group my government formed before the invasion.

First there was George, our technician, he was an expert at hand to hand combat, rivaling my own, and he used a set of daggers in combat. He was the most generous man I've ever met; giving to all whom deserve his protection. It was his greatest gift to the world.

There was Karen, our medic, she was an expert using two-handed swords, and she used a two-handed bastard sword in combat. She was the epitome of laughter; I mean she was always trying to make you feel better. To be quite honest it was very annoying seeing how happy she always was.

Then there was Joseph, second in command; he was an extraordinary soldier, former leader of the Ritter der Blut Wölfe (“Knights of the Blood Wolves” German elite task force) he relied on a short sword and shield. I did not know anyone more honest than him; sometimes it was ridiculous how he would tell the truth on the most embarrassing things, these of which I don’t feel comfortable thinking about.

And then there was me, Isaac. I was the leader of this group, I am a master of stealth, and I use a katana and a wakizashi, a sword similar to the katana only shorter. I have a special cloak I wear that gives me the ability to literally disappear, and is also bulletproof, some could say that it is magic.

None of that matters now that I am stuck in this cell on the alien’s ship. Everything was going according to plan until the kids showed up and got caught. Now they’re dead, my teams dead and I’m going to be pushed into this portal sending me to who knows where.

Oh here they come now to get me, and it looks like their leader and a rather large bodyguard.

“Get up!” The larger one growled.

“Now, now, be nice to our guest, he’s not going to be with us for much longer. He has the privilege to go into our transporter, sending him to a random point in the universe,” The leader calmly said.

“You think I care? I have nothing left to care about,” I said blandly.

“Oh but you do, without you here on Earth who’s going to protect it? We both know you’re the only one capable of leading this planet to victory, and now you’ll be out of my way for good.” He said smugly.

“Fuck off,” I spat at him.

“Take him to the chamber; I’m tired of his rudeness!” He yelled to the guard.
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It took about 30 minutes to get to the room. I knew the ship was large, but I had no idea it was this big on the inside. I've only seen it from Earth, and it was always looming overhead.

The room was small; the only thing really in it was a metallic ring in the middle of the room embedded in the floor. It was similar to the transporter that I used to get onto this ship. I’m glad the crashed ship’s power still worked to get us on this airborne fortress, to bad that’s the only good thing that happened.

So there I was I still had all my equipment on, and handcuffed with these weird glowing cuffs, standing in the middle of the transporter, the bodyguard standing a foot or two from me at the controls on the wall.

The Commander just staring at me with those pale eyes these things had, smiling all the while. Without a word he signaled the guard to send me through, and in an instance my handcuffs deactivated and I was surrounded with a blue light. I grabbed my sword from its sheath with a satisfying sound. His head hit the floor shortly after.

Blood shot onto the window the Commander was peering through; on his face was a mixture of anger, sadness, and hate. And just like that I was sent through the portal with a smug grin on my face.

Then the world around me faded from view.
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It was just a peaceful winter morning in Ponyville. And at the public library Twilight was sleeping in her bed. While she was wistfully dreaming in her deep sleep spike, her faithful assistant, woke her.

“Umm… Twilight?” spiked asked cautiously, “I have a letter from the princess, it seems important.”

“Oh thank you Princess, I can’t wait to read all these newly found books,” Twilight said in her sleep.

“Twilight!” Spike said a little louder than before.

“Oh Princess this one I like a lot, I didn't know you touched yourself like tha–”

“TWILIGHT!” Spike shouted, cutting Twilight off, not wanting to hear nor know what she was dreaming.

Twilight was awoken abruptly, looking around to find Spike standing next to her she yawned and stretched.

“What time is it Spike?” Twilight asked, ”Is something the matter?”

“No, not really, just a letter from the princess,” Spike said, “But what were you dreaming about?”

Twilight laughed nervously. She began to blush a deep scarlet on her purple coat.

“Um… what are you talking about I wasn't dreaming, where you dreaming? Because I certainly not dreaming about anything. And I especially wasn't dreaming about the princess!” Twilight spat out nervously.

Wow she is a horrible liar, Spike thought. Oh well none of my business anyway.

“Alright, well anyway here’s a letter the princess sent to you,” Spike said, handing her said letter.

Twilight looked over the letter several times, looking shocked at what she was reading.

“What is it Twilight?” asked Spike, “did something bad happen?”

“It says here that an enormous amount of energy surged in the middle of the Everfree Forest, and that she fells the presence of an unknown object being the source of the energy,” Twilight explained.

“What else does it say?” Spike asked.

“Well it says here that she wants me and the girls to check it out,” Twilight said.

“Well I’m going back to sleep, tell me about it when you get back,” Spike said sleepily.

“Your no fun,” Twilight said begrudgingly, “I’ll just explore it with the girls, the scientific possibilities are endless!”

“Have fun,” Spike said before covering up.

“Bye Spike,” Twilight said while putting on her snow boots and scarf.

Looking at Spike she noticed that he was already asleep.

How can he fall asleep that quickly, Twilight wondered? Oh well I better get the girls together.
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"At least half of us are here," Twilight said hopefully.

"We'll be fine Twi," Applejack reassured her friend.

"Well why did Rarity choose now to go to a fashion convention with Fluttershy!" Twilight groaned, "The princess specifically wanted all of us to go into the forest."

"Where just gonna have ta make do sugarcube," Applejack said trying to calm the obviously deteriorating Twilight.

"Let's just go already I'm getting bored standing around like this," Rainbow said impatient.

"Wait where's Pinkie?" Applejack asked concerned.

"I couldn't find her anywhere," Twilight explained. "We don't have time to look, right now we need to get going."

It didn't take long for Twilight to pick up on the energy emitting towards the center of the forest. She could feel that they were close.

"Alright girls it should be through this clearing," she told AJ and Rainbow.

"I hope it's an alien!" Rainbow squeed

"Aliens don't exist," Applejack said, "Um they don't exist do they Twilight?"

"Um girls you should come look for yourselves," was all she had to say.

What the girls saw surprised them, It was a large figure on the ground. It had a black coat on and was face down in the snow. It's breathing was short and shallow.

"Think of all the things he could teach us," Twilight said hardly able to contain herself.

"Um Twilight, he's starting to move," Applejack pointed out.
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It’s felt like forever since I moved. My muscles were stiff and my body was cold. I couldn't even open my eyes right away. Am I dead?

But when I did open my eyes I noticed that I wasn't dead, and that it was snowing all around me. And everything looked so bright and colourful. Yep this is the weirdest thing that has happened to me. Well at least I’m not naked. I quickly felt around my body to make sure that I indeed wasn't naked, which thank goodness I wasn't.
“Well at least I still have my gear,” I muttered.

Just then Isaac noticed he wasn't alone. When he looked to his left he saw 3 colourful ponies staring back at him with huge eyes.

“What the hell are you things?” I shouted.

This startled the equine beings in front of him. There was a purple one who’s jaw dropped, a rainbow one that was now flying and giving him a death glare, and an orange one giving him an equally lethal glare.

“HEY BUDDY WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?” the rainbow one shouted.

Isaac was shocked at what he heard; it was actually talking to him.

He then started to stand ignoring the rainbow one.

Just then all the ponies present stared up in awe at his impressive height. But out of nowhere he collapsed on the ground, unconscious when he hit the forest floor.

"Uh, should we help him?" Applejack asked nopony in particular.

"I'll go do it," Rainbow said excited.

"No Rainbow, that thing could be dangerous," Twilight started, "I'll go first."

"No fair! He could hurt you too ya know." Rainbow Dash said pointing a hoof at Twilight.

"Rainbow I have magic, if I need to I can just levitate him away from me." Twilight explained

"Fine." Rainbow muttered crossing her hooves knowing her friend was right.

Author's Note:

I hope you enjoy this. And if anyone would like to be an editor for this story just message me, I could use the help.

Comments

[AwkwardTaco]

The grammatical errors in the description alone deterred me.

[La Barata]

Have you ever seen the English language written before?

[RainbowSenpai]

3475879 Sorry I was never really good at grammar. But I'm trying to learn more about the rules.

[cheezesauce]

Review: If You Insist, KalibarxTavi, 6/12/2013
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/144790/if-you-insist
Goood morning! I’m cheezesauce, here to say a few words about your story, and hopefully those are words you’ll find useful. My first impression as I browse across the covers and synopsis is relatively positive. Especially that comedy tag, because from my experience, I’ve noticed HiE fics with general comedic themes fare much better than those focussed on dark on gore. Even for those that include war and combat. Just take a look at ‘Name’s Ellis’ for example.

I have to say though: I got rather confused by the second half of the synopsis. You see, first you talk about a human getting captured by hostile alien invaders, whom I assume are either the ponies, or some other monster things that aren’t. Then we know he was transported to Equestria and has to get back, which at a glance, seems to read as if the aliens were the ponies themselves. It’s only upon scrutinizing the sentences did I go like “Ooh” and realize that you actually had two alien races here—one being ponies, and the other being the monstrous aliens. So yes, you might want to clear that up a bit. Now, let’s move into the story itself.

The first sentence is a nice opener, setting the overall mood and immediately raising issues to be tackled. Starting off with someone being lost and scared is much more interesting than opening with “It was an ordinary day at Ponyville...” Well, unless there’s a special, usually comedic reason for opening like that. I do have one nitpick here, though. Instead of using “most of all”, try “worst of all”. It fits better, and probably sounds nicer too. Next, you’ve almost used ‘most’ quite a number of times just within the first two paragraphs, making it sounds a little repetitive. Further on, there’s a little bit of info-dumping about what has been lost and how he ended up there after that. Info-dumping must not be done in excess.

As I go along, I’ll pick out stuff that doesn’t seem quite right, like this one there.

He was the most generous man I've ever met; giving to all whom deserve his protection, was his main gift to the world

It’s as if you wrote until ‘protection’, ended off with a period, and then suddenly decided “Oh wait! There’s one more thing I want to say about this guy,” and then proceeded it at the end. One way of correcting it would be to start a new sentence. As in ‘It was his main gift to the world.’

Actually, the more I look at this paragraph, the more I’m picking out odd sentences. Here’s another example:

“There were four of us; we formed the elitist group my government formed before the invasion.”

Well, this one above is technically correct, but it looks strange, doesn’t it? Why do you insist on connecting clauses together with a semicolon, when they aren’t related? You can, if you want to, but why do it? It sits perfectly well if you do it like this: “There were four of us. We formed the elitist group my government formed before the invasion.” You should avoid using ‘formed’ twice too, because it sounds repetitive.

A large part of this massive paragraph is telling. As in, the ‘Show vs Tell’ type of telling. Ideally, instead of giving descriptions of each character, you should let people see them in action and draw the conclusions from there. For example, if I have a character named Mary, and I want to show that Mary was a kickass killer, I would have a scene about her stabbing daggers into the guts of a gang of thugs with one arm tied to her back and not even breaking into a sweat. That’s showing it out. And it’s much more vivid than having the narrator or a character say: “Oh, Mary is this real badass girl...blah blah blah.”

And also, if you have no other choice but to tell it all out, do it in smaller paragraphs. Walls of text are not enjoyable to read, and people have a tendency simply skip past them to the next paragraph.

Oh here they come now to get me;

Yup, the protagonist sounds exceedingly nonchalant. That’s the intended effect, I think, although character wise, this guy doesn’t seem to fit the image of a matured adult. From the way he reacts, talks, and describes things, he seems more like a teenager. Like in the line below, for example.

handcuffed with these weird glowing cuffs,

Hey, I’ve also got very little idea of how the evil aliens look like. Maybe adding some descriptions of them along the way would be good, so that people can imagine them out how you want them to.

“I've only seen it from Earth, it was always looming overhead”

You need an ‘and’ here. Or you can change the comma to a period.

I grabbed my sword swinging it at the brute beheading him.

Heh, you’d think the aliens had to have more foresight than this. After all, they must have been pretty efficient in order to exterminate the entire human race... right? It’d be nice if he was actually holding the blade, then you can describe how it felt as the blade sliced through flesh like a knife through butter. That’s being descriptive. It makes things vivid, more real, and people will immerse themselves in it. There are many opportunities for you to slot it in, with the kind of action you got.

Instead of saying “After that I just passed out,” for example, try something like ‘the world faded into darkness’. It’s not that hard. Yet, little bits like these count. They add up to the overall quality of the fic. And though, as a reader, you won’t be explicitly point to these bits and explain why you didn’t quite them, you would still feel them in some way.

So, let’s backtrack a little bit. For this section, I’m going to talk a little more about the plot. You’ve got the main character facing total destruction of the human race. Since he has lost everything he has cared for, he has become an indifference shell of himself. I think he could use more despondency in his emotions over there, by the way. Not a single tear has been shed on his part, and no vows to exterminate those monsters that have taken away everything from him, so on and so forth. Still, not that sort of glaring inconsistency you’d notice right off the bat, I think.

After that, we have a scene about Twilight receiving a letter from her beautiful and apparently very lustful princess to investigate a happening at the Everfree forest. Which is probably going to be a dangerous excursion. In the later scene at the entrance to the Everfree Forest, Twilight’s friends feel shallow in terms of characterization in the following scene. It’s as if they’re just paper cut-outs of themselves, saying the same old lines despite the uniqueness of the situation.

As a rule of thumb, spell out all numbers. Meaning you write six instead of 6.

I also notice that you have two short Everfree forest scenes here. These two scenes are from the perspective of the mane 6 should be combined together to improve the story’s flow. Having a whole train of short, chopped up scenes is generally a no-no, even to show breaks in time.

After that, the story swaps back to the protagonist’s perspective. Which is also in the first person perspective, and that means that you can’t have a line that goes like this:

“Well at least I still have my gear,” Isaac said to himself.

Instead, it should be ‘I said to myself’, because you are writing as if you are Issac.

Also, techni-coloured does not need to be capitalized. It isn’t a name or proper noun. Although it is a rather long word, I guess, but that’s irrelevant.

I’ve come to the end of the plot. Overall, it seems to be rather standard material for this genre. After all, the human has to by some means travel to Equestria. Variations include having the human die and then reborn in Equestria, or mystically teleported there. Most versions end up with the human pulling off some impressive act of bravery and self-sacrifice, often emerging as a hero in the world of Equestria. I’m not sure if this is where this story is heading, but probably somewhere along those lines from my past experiences.

I have one more point share, and this is a positive one. From the comments about the severity of grammar mistakes, I’m guessing that the version of the story I’m reading must have been a much edited one, and I’m happy to say that you’ve done well on that part. There aren’t many basic errors that jump out at me at first glance, and even those that are caught with the editor’s eye are not too many. All in all, it doesn’t matter that your story isn’t top-notch, for many do not start at that level to begin with. What matters most are the improvements made to becoming a better writer, a skill that doesn’t only apply to the world of Friendship is Magic, but to other areas of life. And that is what writing is about. Good luck.

3475879 La Barata, by the way, is also a reviewer of WRITE. :)

--cheezesauce, WRITE’s perpetual underground lurker.

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