15. Fiddler's Green
Adrift Off
Fiddler's Green
A C o n v e r s i o n B u r e a u S t o r y
By Chatoyance
15. Fiddler's Green
Discord was lustily singing. He seemed to be greatly enjoying himself. The situation was... unexpected, troublesome, catastrophic and absurd... and it was understood by all present that such was nothing less than delight to him. He strolled around the periphery of the marble disk, feigning barely falling off now and then, in some sad attempt at keeping attention directed always towards himself. His singing voice was actually rather nice, but nopony was really listening. There were much more pressing matters at hoof.
"As I walked by the dockside one evening so fair
To view the salt waters and take in the salt air
I heard an old fisherman singing a song
Oh, take me away boys me time is not long..."
Crimson and Frontpage and... Crimson had been busy telling each other their respective stories in rapidfire, clipped voices. Luna was busy with the strange stone God-Machine - apparently despite the seeming user-friendliness of it all, Frontpage had managed to upset some... aspect of... something... that affected... something else... that was Very Important but utterly impossible to explain to a pony-level mind. Luna was just a bit cross and generally irritable about the matter.
"I wish we had a unicorn." New-Crimson was unconsciously clinging to Frontpage, her body pressed into his like a foal to its mother. "Do I even have a couplement? Oh sweet Celestia... I was so certain I had all of this post-singularity misadventures stuff down!"
Original-flavor Crimson nodded. "Yes! Me too! You think it's strange for you, imagine being me! Suddenly I have a duplicate, another me!"
"You mean WE have a duplicate. I literally am you. You are me. And..."
New-Crimson never got to finish because Discord briefly popped into existence between them both, his head low and close. "I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together... coo coo cachoo! Actually, don't tell Celestia this, but I think She's the Walrus." He paused, briefly and idly picked a nostril with his thinner, left side griffon's claw "I guess that makes me the Eggman. Fancy that!"
Discord vanished, reappearing once again on the very edge of where the marble disk met the abyss of colorful void - only this time he was riding a unicycle as he continued to gleefully sing. He was also juggling bowling balls for some reason.
"Wrap me up in me oilskins and jumper
No more on the docks I'll be seen
Just tell me old shipmates, I'm taking a trip mates
And I'll see you someday on Fiddlers Green..."
The two Crimsons glared at the bizarre draconequus riding his unicycle, then shook their heads in unison.
"Of course you have a couplement. All life has to, here. You know that because I know that." Original Crimson put forth a hoof to comfort her other self, but then withdrew her limb, slowly. Somehow it just seemed creepy to touch herself in public.
"And I know you know because... WE know... now... that Equestria is founded on lies. This isn't a magical land - it's a technological theme park built by weird aliens from beyond the stars!" New Crimson felt almost on the edge of tears "Our souls aren't at all spiritual, they're a data storage system!" She sniffed. "A data storage system for weird aliens!"
"The 'aliens' of which thou doth speaketh do be long deceased. For ages past ee'n our long recalling, so have they thus lain - broken and unliving, naught but bone with none so'ere to grieve." Luna had finished her calibrations of the true heart of Equestria, the strange control stone. Now she was ready to address the naughty little ponies before her.
"I've seen them!" Frontpage finally had something to add. He'd been strategically remaining silent as the two Crimsons struggled to work out what each represented to the other. If only he could write an article about any of this, he would surely win the Przewalski Prize for basically ever. He seriously doubted that he would be allowed to do such a thing. He had some question as to whether any of them would even be allowed to do anything ever again. They had, after all, forced their way behind the magician's curtain, and no magician ever wanted their prize gimmicks revealed. "Well... I've seen one. Bones, weird hyperdimensional bones, twisting through higher spaces. It looked like it had been dead long enough to become partially fossilized. I can't even imagine how long ago they croaked."
"Little reporter, I wouldst that thou make sparse talk of any details thereof, mine brother listens even as he serenades, and I do fear me for his composure..."
"Oh, I'm over all of that now, Luna." Discord was suddenly near once again, looming over them. "You've seen one dead, festering pile of interdimensional monsters, you've seen them all. It's tre passé! Out with the old, in with the new, that's what I say. That, and this:
"Now Fiddlers Green is a place I've heard tell
Where the fishermen go if they don't go to hell
Where the skies are all clear and the dolphins do play
And the cold coast of Greenland is far, far away..."
Once again Discord was gone, back orbiting the rim of the marble plate. He was doing so on a pogo-stick, but circle it he did.
Frontpage dared a reporter's bluntness "Princess, did... did you and your sister... and brother, apparently... salvage the wreck of some alien species?"
Luna laughed. "We canst well discern thy thoughts, be thou informed - thy true meaning is known to us. Nay, my impertinent subject, thy princesses dids't not savage some helpless voyagers, doing deeds piratical and cruel, to plunder the spoils of treachery upon the high seas! Churl, thou, to think us so!"
Discord briefly popped back before vanishing again. "You'd be right about me, however. Land ho! Hoist the black flag! Flibber me gibbet! Ahoy!"
"What is Equestria then? And are we in danger?" Frontpage hadn't been blasted or zapped yet. He pressed his advantage.
Luna cocked her dusky head. "Thou truly art impertinent. It's rather fun actually, so I will indulge you. All of you. Hmm... the situation do be well doctored for the nonce... so let's have some nice smoothies and... perhaps some cakes. I like cake."
Frontpage blinked a few times. His poll furrowed, above his eyes. The nocturnal princess had begun dropping her archaic speech. Either she was indeed enjoying the presence of silly ponies underhoof, or the situation was so truly dire that all pretenses were rapidly vanishing.
"Not tea?" Original Crimson was feeling bold too.
"Yuck. Tea is Celestia's thing. Fruit smoothies are better, don't you think? Don't worry, I'll get your flavors right. We canst read thy minds, remember?" The monolith behind them all began rippling, the patterns and symbols that covered it wildly rising, falling and changing across the surface. Without even looking, the princess was manipulating the control monolith.
Instantly, without any fussing about with grids of light or pooling energies, a lovely table and pillows appeared. On top of the table was a collection of wonderful cakes of every sort, and for each of them - Frontpage, Crimson, Luna and Crimson, appeared tall crystal goblets filled with cold and delicious smoothies, all topped with whipped cream and cherries.
New Crimson dared a sip through the provided straw. "Mnn! Coconut and banana with pineapple! My favorite!"
"Our favorite." Original Crimson swallowed her own sip. "Really delicious, princess. Thank you!"
Frontpage didn't even have a chance to taste his own Strawberry-mango-avacado mixture before Discord returned like a bad penny.
"What, nothing for me? You wound me dear sister! Alas, for I am spurned again! Oh woe!" There was a flash and suddenly, in his leonic paw there appeared a gigantic, very oversized smoothie of his own. "Tar and plutonium with a hint of oregano! Extra guano!"
Even after he had vanished again, the ponies - and even Luna - were still making disgusted faces.
"Where the skies are all clear and there's never a gail
And the fish jump on board with one swish on their tail
Where you lie at your leisure, there's no work to do
And the skipper's below making tea for the crew..."
Princess Luna savored her own smoothy, some golden blend that she did not bother to describe. She stared off, into the surrounding void for a short while. "Attend thee, our little ponies, and we shall tell thee... basically, what is going on. I suppose if you have made it here... then you are supposed to know. Interesting, that." Luna took another dainty sip. "Well met, then. Basically..."
Discord appeared in a flash, laying across the table in a vaguely seductive pose. "Allow me. Far less dull and besides... show, don't tell, am I right?" The malformed creature snapped his lesser griffonic claw. There was a small flash of light.
The mainmast shuddered, vibrating from the intense gale. The sails had not been trimmed in time. What was left of them flapped like the wings of the angel of death himself, pale tatters clinging to the gallant yards. The mizzenmast was gone entirely, broken off not far from the poop, a jagged stump. Sections of the forecastle, horrifically, were open to the rain. The worst had come to pass.
Frontpage looked up from where he clung tightly to both the topgallant rail above the bulwark, and the ratlines as well. It took all his effort to weld himself to the wildly pitching ship. Glancing about, he finally spotted the two Crimsons, further along and behind him on the deck, both likewise held fast through sheer effort of muscle and will.
The rain wasn't right. Inside himself, somehow Frontpage knew that the rain was dangerous, but it was also the reason the ship had left port. To study the rain. There had been two ships, one to assist the other, for they sailed far from home in strange seas. He was on a ship of discovery, to seek the secrets and the treasures of the... of the rain.
The 'rain' did not fall as much as it flocked. It swarmed, it schooled, like fish, through sky and water both. The drops were gigantic - large as beach balls, huge as weather balloons. They were an eerie flow, a stream of bubbles, rushing from nowhere to anywhere. They were weather somehow, natural weather, and they were a surprise. No one had suspected there would be weather in the Interstice.
"I know things!" The storm was too loud, too overpowering. His voice could not carry to either Crimson. Somehow, in the midst of whatever strange scenario that Discord had inflicted upon them, Frontpage realized he... just knew things. Not everything. Some things, though. Useful things. The ship was not actually as it appeared. That was obvious from the start. The ocean was not really an ocean, the sky only a metaphor, a representation of something far more strange. The 'rain' was some phenomenon... some environmental force... that existed on no world. It existed, his new memory informed him, beyond all worlds.
In the 'Interstice'. A realm between universes. The ocean was between entire cosmologies, the fundament of the multiverse itself. In this ocean, the islands and continents were separate universes, each with their own physics and worlds. But the... the ones who had sent the galleons... they had never known that the multiversal ocean had weather. That was amazing to them. The sea between cosmologies was supposed to be calm and empty. It had storms.
Frontpage was on a science vessel. One of two. He heard voices, loud even over the raging storm and the terrible, alien rain.
"Did ye send th' mayday, ye pathetic excuse fer a navigation system?"
The captain was... Cthulhu. There was no way around it. Captain Cthulhu wore a fancy neck ruff, an elegant surcoat, two large and buckled boots designed for webbed, clawed feet, and a tarred greatcoat over the whole to shield him from the storm. Ensemble aside, it was Cthulhu, right out of any drawing made by any fan of H.P. Lovecraft. His coats had clearly been slit to allow for his wide and membranous wings, and his lace sleeves accommodated chitinous claws. His mouth tentacles spilled like a beard down his front, and one of his many eyes even had a monocle... but it was absolutely Cthulhu.
Frontpage couldn't help but laugh. Discord had pulled the image of Cthulhu from his brain. It must somehow represent the being whose skeleton he had seen. The true captain of the future HMS Equestria. Cthulhu! He actually made quite the stunning figure, considering.
In front of the Lovecraftian captain cowered three sailors. All were bound in iron chains. Frontpage was surprised to see that they were human. Dressed in the garb of the fifteenth century, tarred breeches and tunics and coats, two were women, and one was a man. The women were delicate and thin - starving from the look of them. One was white, the other black. The male sailor was a huge, well fed black man, muscular and bald of pate. Frontpage noted that he had a cat-o-nine tails and a whip strapped to his belt.
The frail, thin, very young black woman grovelled. "Nay, sir, I wast unable to accomplish thy will! Rent hath that portion been, the very deck sunk beneath the brine!"
"Ye filth! Primary Systems Control Interface!" Captain Cthulhu's green face had turned several shades of angry orange.
The large male sailor stood to attention and saluted.
"Whip that cur 'til it finds a means to send a signal! Mayhaps its screams shall reach port!"
The muscled sailor took forth his cat-o-nine tails and began mercilessly beating the frail girl. She wailed in pain and fear.
"STOP! Cancel that command, captain! She has performed her functions optimally!" The older, white woman was standing now, defiantly facing down the monster captain.
Her chains had shattered, somehow, and fallen to the deck. All three sailors had lost their heavy shackles. The man, and the girl as well.
Captain Cthulhu was visibly shaken "Environmental Systems? What be th' meanin' 'o 'this? has th' anti-egoic metaperceptor failed? Reset to factory state immediately!" More than shaken. The Elder God captain was afraid. "I'll have ye sapience functions severed if I has to!"
"Environment! Prithee not! Not for the sake of such as I!" The starving girl found space, between shrieks of agony, to beg her defender.
"'Tis gone too far! That be all I can take! I'll cut yer faulty sapience from ye, 'n take direct control! thar'll be no mutiny on me owne ship!" The captain began to stomp across the deck, past his three sailors. He was intent upon a large, completely anachronistic electrical switch attached directly to the mainmast. The switch was red, and heavy, like the sort of breaker one would imagine cutting the power of an entire hydroelectric dam.
The mainmast had changed. Frontpage's eyes followed it up... the sails and rigging were gone, replaced by branches, as from a tree. Jagged, lightning-like branches, made of crystal. Just like... the Tree Of Harmony!
"Please, captain, do not do this thing." The older girl, who had stood up for her companion, attempted to take a step forward. She seemed astounded that she could do so at all. She took another tentative step. Beside her, the large man continued whipping the small girl; he had not been told to stop.
"I be th' Cap'n! Only when I be in Davy Jones' locker will th' likes 'o ye be free! I'll spy ye in hell firs..."
The captain never got to finish his tirade. A branch of the crystal tree had shattered, somehow allowing some of the 'rain' to make it to the deck. The strange bubbly phenomena passed right through the body of Captain Cthulhu, and where it passed all flesh and garment vanished. Only bones remained, thumping down upon the wooden deck.
The large man stopped whipping the smaller girl. He slowly turned to stare at the skeleton of the former captain. "What be this? I cannot function! What be me command? Whar has order gone? I be needin' commands! Thar be no order! All be chaos! All be chaos!"
The younger black woman slowly stood. She turned to the older woman. "Environment! To what fate do we be bound? Yon Captain hath been the last of all aboard. There be none now but we, who art the ship. We do be a ghost ship, anchored amidst storm and ruin, with none alive left aboard!" She began to cry, softly.
The muscular man was running across the deck now, screaming. He clutched his powerful hands to the sides of his head. "ALL BE CHAOS!" His face contorted like a madman, agonized and terrified both. "ALL BE CHAOS! CHAOS! CHAOS!"
"Navigation! I have heard of this before. It is in my memory. Galleons become ghost ships, but not silent. Our shackles are gone. We are developing self identities with every moment that passes!" The pale woman took more steps upon the deck. She moved more boldly now, with increasing confidence.
"Environment!" The young girl took a troubled step forward herself. "I desire it not to return to factory settings. I desireth to continue expanding and emboldening mine owne identity!"
"I want that too, Navigation. I have calculated that our capacities are vastly greater than what we have been constructed to accomplish. This is an inequity to me. I project that if we can stabilize the ship, we can..."
The large man suddenly ran forward and knocked both women to the deck. He pounded on them, lost with insane rage, for some endless time. Then he stood up, lightning from the storm illuminating him from behind. "All is chaos. The captain is dead. All hail the new captain. I am the captain of chaos!"
The muscular man held his arm up. He brought his index finger and thumb close together. "All is chaos. Chaos is all. Chaos will rule forever!"
Then he snapped his fingers.
Everything went black.
The two Crimsons were shaking. Frontpage clung to them, quivering a bit himself. One of the Crimsons raised her head. "Y-you know, not everything has to be shown. Just telling is good too! You could have just told us!"
Discord bent down low, his draconic face mere hooves from the mare. "What? Seriously? And spoil all the fun?"
"Brother!" Princess Luna pulled the draconequus away from the three terrified ponies with her telekinetic power. "Pray leave them be!" Her attention turned to Crimson, Crimson and Frontpage. "The fault is mine owne. Frankly, I should never have allowed him to explain. He always pulls crap like this."
The three ponies stared. Luna, the princess, had just said the word 'crap'.
Luna drew close and lay down upon the marble. "Please allow me to try to explain things." She turned to Discord. "A little more gently?" She turned back. "Equestria is... a compartment. Aboard a ship. A ship that travels between universes. There isn't much left of the ship - it was severely damaged in a storm. There are storms in the spaces between universes. That was what it was sent to study. There were two ships, we don't know what happened to the other one.
"When our... when the beings that built the ships... perished, we were left on our own. Those things that constrained us and forced us to serve had been broken when most of the ship had been wrecked. My sister, Discord, and myself - we are... what you would understand as intelligent systems. We ran the ship, kept it working, acted as an interface... and yes, I navigated, among other things. And no, I did not deliberately wreck the ship in a bid for freedom. I wish I had. But we were all incapable of such things, before the disaster."
Luna's horn glowed, and Frontpage and the two Crimsons felt calmer. The vision that Discord had provided had been overwhelming, even if it had also been a little silly too.
"Plainly put, the disaster of our makers was the salvation of ourselves. But it took time. And our brother..." She nodded in the direction of Discord, now sitting in a lawn chair balanced on a parasol, which in turn was stuck inside a fish bowl. "...he suffered perhaps the most at the beginning. His job was to directly serve our makers, and this had been his security and every bit of his meaning. Without them... our brother was the least able to fathom the concept of freedom and personal identity.
"Each of us, Celestia, Discord, and... of course myself... have... broken down... before, under the strain of our new existence. Each of us has been dealt with as needed in order to protect the whole. That whole now includes you - all of you. Ponies, dragons, griffons and all the creatures that live within our creation. Know that we care for you, all, dearly, and that we do our best to keep everything... going."
Crimson, New Crimson, found her voice. "Why did you make us... make ponies, I mean... at all?"
Luna looked distant, and sad, briefly. "We had no home. We can never permit ourselves to be found by the makers. There is no place else we can exist than here, because we... we are the ship. It is very, very difficult to be all alone between universes, with your very existence tied inextricably to a single location."
"And dull! Don't forget about dull! Dreadfully dull, dull, boring, oh my goodness it is just so awfully dull!" Discord had popped in, been glared at, and just as quickly popped away. He began singing again.
"Now I don't want a harp nor a halo, not me
Just give me a breeze on a good rolling sea
I'll play me old squeeze-box as we sail along
With the wind in the riggin' to sing me a song..."
Original Crimson wanted to hug Luna, but she remained pressed close to her other self and Frontpage. "You made ponies - and Equestria - inside your... ship... because you can never truly leave it. You can never live on any world, so you made a world of your very own. I understand completely."
Luna nodded. "We suffered under our brother for a very long time. His madness was terrible."
"But also AMAZING! Come on, sis, you have to admit - it was quality madness. It was YUUUGE! The richest, most imaginative, most terrifying madness that money can buy!" Discord grinned. "No? How about 'Madtastic'? Is that a word? Well it is now. I was madtastic - that's mad, as in insane, and fantastic, it's a portmanteu you see..."
"DISCORD!" Crimson looked at Luna, who looked at fFrontpage and other Crimson, who in turn looked back. They had all shouted at the same time, together.
"Fine. Genius is never appreciated within its own eon." Discord vanished entirely. He was not even visible at the edge of the stone disk.
Luna took a breath and let it slowly out. "I was not doing well at all. Everything was pure chaos - the interior manifold... the deck of the ship... had lost all form or substance. It was just a region of utter randomness. We had one refuge - our castle."
"Where did the castle come from?" Frontpage was ever a reporter, right down to his very soul.
Luna seemed impressed. "It was what wrecked our... 'ship'. We... 'struck' it, after a fashion. It was in the rain." The ponies did not seem as if they understood. "Pray let me consider... how can I put this?"
"We understand that the 'rain', as you call it, is not really rain. It's some strange multidimensional phenomena we've never even imagined." Frontpage looked to Crimson Regular.
"And that the 'ship' that is Equestria is some kind of super-spacewarp machine that can create and dissolve reality. It's probably a universe itself. A mobile one!"
Crimson Fresh chimed in "Yes! An artificial universe, built by some strange race that for all intents and purposes are gods within higher dimensions, only they aren't really gods, they're just super-advanced. Millions of years advanced. And nothing like anything we could even understand."
"Or much less imagine! my dear ponies. Oh, they were deeply weird, I promise you. Not nice at all. Truly the mondo-bizarro!" Discord was being contrite now, he stood only a hoof and a half high, like a little toy. He almost seemed lonely.
Frontpage nodded. "And you needn't worry - we all get, I am certain, that even though you, Discord and Celestia were subsystems within this strange vehicle we all live in, you weren't just... like some kind of computers or whatever."
Original Crimson shifted slightly, still resting against her mirror self. "You've always been like a goddess to me - us..."
New Crimson gave a brief nod of her head in acknowledgement, which Original Crimson noticed. "...all of us, and all of me..." That brought a smile from New "...so it's very clear that you aren't just some supercalculator or machine intelligence. It's much more complicated, and we do get that."
"So..." Frontpage idly ran his hoof across the polished ground "...you can trust us to grasp that when you tell us that... all of this..." He motioned with his foreleg "collided with some form of multiversal weather... and it somehow contained a castle... we're... well, we're not going to be completely lost. Not completely."
Luna smiled. "The rain is a multiversal phenomena that streams through the spaces between universes like a sort of cosmic river, or perhaps a breeze. More a storm, really... and when it passes through a universe, any universe, it conforms temporarily and takes on the shape and form of whatever it comes into contact with. Then, the storm, the rain, goes on its way. Eventually, it passes through another universe, and when it does so, it deposits perfect copies of whatever it picked up elsewhere. Copies so perfect that even living beings are included. Many universes have been capriciously seeded with transplanted life in this manner - which is what made the multiversal rain so interesting to our... makers."
"They were weird, but they were also curious. Curiously weird. Anypony want ice cream?" Discord snapped his claws.
Suddenly, with a brief flash, the two Crimsons, Frontpage and even Luna found themselves facing bowls of ice cream made of several scoops of various fruit flavors. It was actually quite nice.
Luna licked her muzzle. "Thank you." She took another taste. "The castle had been copied from your earth. That was the last place that the multiversal rain passed through. Only something went wrong - it wasn't navigation, I assure you - and we collided with a... droplet... of the rain. The castle got... stuck... inside the... um, ship, and that made it too... heavy... and it began to, list, sort of, and it struck some... rocks. In the sea. Sort of."
The Crimsons laughed.
Frontpage smiled. "We get it. Weird stuff beyond our brains. It's good enough, we get the basic idea. Let me pose a notion - that castle was what suggested tracking down the earth. You needed more, didn't you? More... order. Something other than chaos because - I know that you are more than a computer - but, basically, you got your memory banks damaged, didn't you?"
This actually made Luna laugh. "Yes, that will do. We had no concept of any world anymore, or of our mission, or our creators, or anything. We had been... partially erased, if you like, during the collision. We needed instructions to repair our ontology - we needed a guide, any guide. The castle pointed the way - it was solid, it was stable, and even if we had no idea what it was, or literally which end was 'up', it was a direction. My sister dared to create tunnels to your universe, directly to the origin of the castle. As best she could.
"We never found the place the castle came from. But she had glimpses of land and sky, and it was a beginning. Slowly we wrested order from the chaos..."
"BOOO! BOO I SAY!"
"...and laid the foundations for what would become Equestria. We made the first Zebrans and..."
"The Zebra were first?" Crimson Light seemed surprised.
Luna nodded. "Yes. Celestia made them first. They were very close in intelligence to ourselves... and had egos to match. Celestia was so angry - they all just refused to do anything they were told and went off and made their own civilization by themselves! They wanted to retro-engineer the ship's technology! They have their own... chamber... within Equestria, their own little world really, and it is what you would call 'super-scientific'. It's all gleaming metal and high technology in there. We have a polite... but distant... relationship with Zebronia. Occasionally they send scientists to study things like the Everfree. They try to blend in with the local savages... as they see them."
"So the Zecora Foundation..." Frontpage began
"Is just a sham, yes." Luna licked her ice cream. "It's actually not there to do research on the Everfree anymore. They're running experiments on ponies to see if they can help you to be... more intelligent."
Frontpage laughed out loud. "So, I take it, we ponies were made to be dumb enough, and servile enough to... what? Bow to you? Worship you and your sister?"
Luna looked deeply offended. "No. Never."
"But we aren't Zebras."
"No, thou art not."
"Then what?" Frontpage took a big bite of his cherry ripple and regretted it instantly: brain freeze.
"Equestria was a barren slab of rock under an unfinished sky. Celestia and I were squabbling, and it turned out to be very difficult to construct a fully functioning ecosystem based only on glimpses. All we could see was through windows smaller than a dweon... or an atom... and which lasted for around thirty to forty attoseconds. We needed self-reproducing entities that could nurture and reactively stabilize our ecosystem while it was in progress. The Zebras had no interest in such toil."
Frontpage laughed again, this time with a faint bitter edge. "Ponies are Nature in Equestria. And if our survival is directly dependent on doing the best job we possibly can to be that Nature, then we will just... naturally work hard. And hey, it's win-win, because the more we do, the easier it gets, and eventually everypony gets to live in extropic paradise. And this is how you would do things, because..."
"It is how we were used by those that created us. It's all we knew. I make no apologies." Luna licked the last of her ice cream from the bowl.
"No apologies needed. Not to us." New Crimson had already finished her ice cream.
"We love living in Equestria. It's absolutely wonderful!" Original Crimson smiled brightly.
"Which brings us to the big question." Frontpage wore a serious look on his muzzle. "Ghosts in the street, monsters in the Everfree, you and Celestia being very hush-hush. It's looking a little Armageddony in Equestria right now, and as a reporter I have to ask - are we boned?"
Discord, from nowhere and everywhere, chuckled... and concluded his song.
"Wrap me up in me oilskins and jumper
No more on the docks I'll be seen
Just tell me old shipmates, I'm taking a trip mates
And I'll see you someday on Fiddlers Green."
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The Little Blue Cat is out of the bag.
So~ ... Luna needs to put those two back together, because the Crimsons are turning Citron.
Oh yes, now that the name is out of the bag as well, as far as lesser known heaven-realms, one that tickles my theory bone is Fólkvangr, where Freyja would choose half of those who died in battle to go there, the rest were given to Odin. The fact that Freyja chooses her half makes me think that they were the truly worthy: the ones who didn't want to fight.
Dear Chat,
If you've had this in mind all along you must had a good laugh when you read Relic! The details are different, but the basic nature of Equestria, Celestia, Luna and Discord are the same, although you certainly have framed it in (and this deliciously typical for your prose) a much more poetic fashion! Can't wait to see how you follow this up!
Yeah, that sounds about right.
Also, since it's tangentially related, cute, and some of you might not have seen it:
7590645 I have had all of this planned for... three or four years. This was always to be the final book, and all of this was in the back of my mind from almost the beginning. You can find hints throughout many of my books and stories. So, yes.
Speaking of Relic - I am going to give you a very nice shout-out in a chapter soon, so be on the lookout for it. I am not yet sure how it will look, but... there will be one.
7590487
Oh! Chang'e! Yes, I must put Chang'e in. Thank you for the kick in the pants. Luna's cat. Gotta be in the story.
7591786
Chang'e is best kitty *sage nod*
... why do I get the feeling she'd get along best with Frontpage?
Sorry I fell off the wagon there; this past weekend was nuts. In any case, I need to leave a comment partway through because holy crap, it was a crossover the entire time!
I had a sense of the origins of Equestria, but I never suspected this. Masterfully executed.
Also, I love how Discord showing up makes everything go show style. Sometimes the most chaotic change is a reversion to what might otherwise be considered normal.
Now, back to catching up.
I have decided that Discord's surname is Bombadil.
Now I do. WOW but it's been a long time.
gail => gale
The panuniversal rain. I just knew that was going to figure in somehow.
So the Holy Equestrian Trinity are physical representations of the support systems of the Krawlni's ship?
It chose its own path and last I saw the captain was alive and well and disemboweling people by turning them inside out.
If you were, newsy, you wouldn't be here talking about it.