Octavia was an ordinary pony. She lived in an ordinary house, walked around on ordinary grey legs, played ordinary concerts in front of prestigious audiences across Equestria, and went on ordinary bomb disposal missions with a top secret government spy. But one day, everything changed. Except the house, it’s not like it randomly blew up or anything.
Some nitpicks
"Fell" should be "had fallen".
You put "a" twice. Also, volcanoes erupt, not explode.
Anyway, this looks like a really promising story. I can't wait for the next chapter!
4084245 Octavia is a musician, not a geologist. I thought it was in-character for her to use the term incorrectly. You're right about the rest of those points, though. It's in-character for me to go fix them.
Well...
No critic for this one, is... fine i guess
4084245
NEXT CHAPTER?!?!?!?
"Curse you, Looooogggggiiiiicccccc!!!!!!"
Well that was entertaining, but what a mess of a story. Through I guess that's the point.
I suppose the blind-collaboration thing explains all of the tone shifts. I'm not sure that ended up being a good thing, though; the times I've heard of that sort of thing working, the participants agreed on tone and an overall plot ahead of time.
ObNitpick: Jellied petroleum isn't explosive; it just burns. Celestia would know this, which makes her statement doubly-odd. There several other substances that could do that, but you can actually get away without needing a name. All that's important is that the barrels on the baggage car are explosive. Given the later tone of the fic, calling it "Acme Explodium-12" would actually fit quite well.
6492380 Well, thanks for being honest.
Even though I was one of the collaborators on this story, I agree that it came out rather half-baked. Only I think we should have leaned the opposite way. The tone shifts were half the reason we decided to make it a blind collaboration, rather than a normal one. But since this was our first try at the format, many of us were too conservative and just tried to continue the story on autopilot from what the person before wrote. So we wound up with something too disjointed to call traditionally good, but not disjointed enough to be "so bad it's good".
I think our later stories make better use of the blind collaboration gimmick: in those, we stick to premises that lend themselves better to episodic plotting, and we make more of an effort to twist the plot in different directions as much as possible. And for that matter, more of us write our segments as comedies.