An accident during a research project causes a girl to be thrown into Equestria. Mysteeeeeerious. Now she has to try to get back home, but that's going to be a challenge...
This story takes place in its own original subsection of the pony multiverse. It has some mild crossover elements with a bunch of stuff, but that part's probably going to stay small enough that I can justify them as shout-outs and not have to add the Crossover tag. At least, for a while. It's not a major part of the plot, in any event.
Characters will be added as they show up. May or may not add the dark tag depending on whether the comments think I need it; the story doesn't need it now, but it might later on. Description can and will be heavily revised as chapters are released, bwahaha. Same with the image; the current one only reflects what you guys know so far. And the title isn't gonna make sense for a long while, unless you live in Delphi or something. The reason for all this being, this is gonna be a fairly long story, with plot twists and stuff, and it wouldn't be any fun if I just spoiled the surprise.
Oh, and don't knock this story just because of the human tag, I'm going somewhere really fun with that bit. Pinkie swear~
First, the bit at the beginning is odd. It is incredibly awkward for a piece of prophesy mumbo jumbo, and doesn't really fit Equestrian lore very well. If it's going to be folded into Equestrian lore later, do it later.
Second, your pacing is altogether too quick. Events just move by in a blur, with very little attention given to any of them. This would be fine for, say, a comedy where you want to keep the laughs rolling, but for a high-fantasy adventure it's out-of-character for the genre.
Third, there's no terribly great tie-in to established Equestria. There are ponies, and the town is Ponyville, and that's where the similarities seem to stop. This is not inherently a bad thing, but it requires a lot more literary gumption to muscle through it.
Fourth, it seems to be all dialogue, with almost no descriptions of the scenes or characters to be found. This includes the wall of text that a pony just launches into about adventuring, which brings me to:
Fifth, you made a fucking arrow to the knee joke. I almost missed it in the wall of a paragraph that it's contained in, but overplayed jokes like this done straight with no twists are just... ugh.
532811
First off, thanks a bunch for giving me your feedback, this'll be a great help and I really appreciate you taking the time to let me know what your impressions are.
To your first and third points, I did realize a good bit of that myself, and hopefully most of it's going to be addressed in the next chapter. In all honesty I probably shouldn't have sent this story out until I'd finished that chapter, but...well, hindsight and all that. For now, know that this story is a pretty heavily AU version of Equestria. It's a fairly chaotic place compared to the show's Equestria; you could probably swap out the human viewpoint character with a pony without greatly impacting the actions of anyone in the (first third or so of the) story, including the viewpoint character herself. And there's reasons for that, at least one of which I'll get to in the next chapter.
I'll try and work on the pacing, though in my defense I was trying to go for a bit of reader confusion here. The character knows exactly what she's doing and is following a plan that was put in place in case something like the events of the story so far happened, but the reader's being denied this knowledge in order to keep the story interesting. I guess I should add some more of her thought processes so that the readers know that it's just them that are out of the loop; the character already knows everything she needs to for now and is trying to solve her situation with all haste. She is still a bit confused at her surroundings, though, and has a lot of groundwork for her return home that she needs to lay down in a short amount of time, which translates into a very busy and hectic day from her perspective, and I guess I was trying to convey that with the pacing as well? Ah well, just more to do when I go back to edit this I guess.
The dialogue...urgh. I swear, I made a concerted effort to avoid ending up on a featureless plane of disembodied dialogue, but apparently that didn't work. I guess I'll have to go back and add some more gestures and other things when I finally get to the next chapter? The problem is that the events of this chapter are basically
character wakes up -> realizes things have gone horribly wrong -> talks to people to find out what the area's like -> goes to find job to get the assets needed to go home
and due to how the plot's set up, I can't really avoid this. After I've added the window dressing there isn't a whole lot I can do to avoid walls of text given the lack of real action, but I'll go back over the chapter and try to minimize the damage as much as I can...again.
As to the whole arrows, knees thing: I kind of did just throw it in, but not entirely out of nowhere. The innkeeper as a character sort of developed out of several consecutive "hey, this would tie up several loose ends at once quite nicely" thoughts in a row. The adventuring thing's going to be fairly big later on in the story, but it's not a thing in the main character's homeland, nor is it a thing in the Equestria the reader knows; thus, I needed to have someone give exposition on it early enough that she (and ye) could form a decently accurate mental sketch of how the world she's in works, as opposed to assuming it's like where she's from and getting promptly roflstomped by a passing wallaroo or something. Since she was already going to be waking up in an inn, I just made the friendly neighborhood innkeeper, one of very few people she'd be at all likely to encounter before setting out to do what has to be done, know all about adventuring, and have a reasonable excuse to tell her about it.
Now, as we all know, all barkeeps, innkeeps, and other people in charge of common adventurer meeting points were once adventurers themselves (otherwise they'd never be able to quash the bar brawls), and their retirement from that profession is why they're in their current job. Therefore, I made the innkeeper's retirement be due in large part to getting shot while on a mission with a much-less-experienced adventuring group, and I just sort of assumed that anyone who noticed that his backstory could in fact be shortened to "I used to be an adventurer
like youbut then I took an arrow to the knee" wouldn't mind given that it was a reasonably detailed backstory to begin with. It won't be too hard for me to change, if you really think the general reaction's going to be less "I see what you did there" and more "Oh, not again."