In the Dark
Twilight awoke to complete darkness, and an impossible silence. She could tell, somehow, that this wasn't the darkness of a closed room, or even that of a basement. She had only experienced such an overwhelming absence of light once, as a captive, deep, deep within the wealthy, gem-filled bowels of Mount Canterlot. But what was really unnerving was the silence; it was such that she could not just hear herself breathing, but hear her heart beat, her blood pulse, her joints creak, her guts work. She could hear the sound her eyes made when rolling in their sockets.
Something about the silence made her loath to panic; it seemed to somehow discourage rash action, or loud speech, or any speech at all for that matter. She repressed her horror, and thought with desperate, methodic intensity. From what little she could sense, her working hypothesis was that she was in a room, designed for sensory deprivation. Twilight started checking her surroundings. She was lying on her side - presumably, on a floor of some sort. She probed the space around her with her limbs. They met no obstacle besides the floor: no wall, no ceiling. The floor itself felt smooth, soft, bland, like a hairless, poreless, endless portion of skin. It did not even feel warm, like skins do, or cold, like floors do. Twilight warily rose to her hooves, to a concerto of creaks and sloshes and exhalations. No problem so far.
Twilight lit her horn. She tried to make as bright a light as she could manage. It changed nothing; all she could see was herself, her own body, and the shadows it cast upon itself. Everything else drank up the light in absolute darkness, without even a reflection, or texture, or grain, or nuance of any sort. Pure, uncompromising blackness. She gave up, and reduced the light to a minimum.
Twilight jumped, as high as she could. Still nothing. Not even air currents. The air was as still as the worst summer nights in Manehattan, neither warm nor cold, and odorless save for her own natural smell. The black ground absorbed the impact of her jump, so efficiently and completely that it was unnerving—like a thick carpet. She tried tapping the ground: no sound. Pounding: nope.
She started walking. She kept walking. Then she walked on some more, for who knows how long. Twilight was beginning to get frustrated, and frightened; her mind was beginning to fill the oppressive silence with imagined, hallucinated sound, and her brain began to fill the darkness with fleeting patterns. Twilight broke into a trot. Still nothing. She'd had enough. The silence grew so loathsome she couldn’t help but panic. Twilight galloped, she galloped as fast as she could, she ran until her throat was raw and her legs couldn't carry her. A wall, an obstacle, a pothole, a slope, a feature, a damned feature for the love of…
Twilight took flight. She still wasn’t completely used to her wings, and sometimes forgot that she could fly at critical moments. Now, she poured all of her efforts into her wings, beating them in a desperate effort to find a ceiling, a roof, something. As Twilight kept flying higher, and higher, and higher still, the horror began to overwhelm her. There couldn't possibly be a room this large, anywhere. Unless...
Twilight’s flight muscles jerked and seized in pain. She plunged to the ground in a barely-controlled fall, one that felt surprisingly shorter than the endless rise. Either she had flown much lower than she thought, or space here wasn’t working as it should. More evidence for this being a magical place of some sort. She crashed inelegantly on the unbearably dull ground, and it felt like she hit it with no velocity at all, her momentum cancelled as if she had never even jumped. She tried to steady herself, her heart pounding against her chest—it wasn’t just a figure of speech, the scholar in her observed; it almost felt like an act of violence. She stumbled on her own feet, and, finally, collapsed. She cried, a crumpled mess on the ground. Quietly at first, voicelessly, but soon she started sobbing, then bawling. And not a single of those sounds made any echo in the emptiness.
"Help!" she finally screamed. "Is somebody there? Please, for the love of Celestia... I want to leave! I want to see the light again!"
Light. Light everywhere. Everything was a pristine white, without texture, without a sense of surface or distance. Even the ground was alight, so that Twilight cast no shadow at all. Still, she was glad to finally be able to see herself. Her own hooves had never seemed so interesting since that time she ate the wrong mushrooms on that field trip... She laughed, she dried her tears... even her snot was a welcome sight; she dropped it on the floor, hoping it would constitute a marker... and it faded, like it had never even been there. She saw that the same was happening to all the sweat that her running had caused; it should have formed a puddle around her, yet it disappeared as soon as it left her body.
Twilight seriously considered whether she was dead.
"Is this Tartarus?" she shouted with a raw voice. "Am I dead?"
She couldn't help but perceive a mocking, condescending quality in the silence that followed.
"What do I have to do to get out of here?" she tried.
A long, white cylinder seamlessly rose out of the hitherto utterly uniform floor. It kept rising until it was at chest level with Twilight. Then its extremity bloomed like a flower. The smooth, seamless top of the cylinder opened, showing that it was made of a number of juxtaposed, imbricated membranes, like geometric petals. The petals were retracting, sliding on each other, away from the center and disappearing into the sides, revealing a big round shiny red button in the center.
She must have been hallucinating at that point; despite the deafening silence, she was overwhelmed with a sense of being the object of gross, unrestrained, roaring laughter. It reminded her of a roomful of teenagers in their first sex ed lesson.
Waaaaait a minute... Twilight narrowed her eyes and tilted her head at the big red button.
The sensation of laughter redoubled. The teenagers' teacher had just asked them what they thought was so funny about the word "penis".
Twilight had had enough. Beet-red, she smashed the button down with every intention of breaking it. The silent laughter stopped, replaced by a giddy anticipation. She looked left and right, confused and terrified with anticipation. Nothing had changed. She waited, and then waited some more, and, as nothing happened, she slumped her shoulders, and gave a sigh.
And was instantly catapulted into the air as if from a cannon, screaming in sheer, undiluted terror, while the class of teenagers were howling and slapping their knees and holding their sides and falling to the floor.
As she spun through the air, the terror overwhelmed her, and she fainted.
Can you find your own plot without a map?
"Miss? Are you okay?"
Twilight felt she was gently being prodded.
"I'm not, I don't—wait, what?" She opened her eyes. It was noon, and the sky was an endless blue. She was sitting on the ground, her back to a wall, in the middle of a bustling street. Presumably, she had just fainted. What a dream.
What a dream indeed, she thought as she began raising herself. Awfully long and detailed and horrifying, for something she had from fainting. She considered the child, an obvious street urchin right out of a Chuck Chickens novel, newspapers under the arm and all, while reflexively adjusting her long... flowing... period... dress?!
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Title is already in use. Change it.
5041526
Yeah? And who are you to go about issuing orders, then?
Considering how many fanfics there already are around here with identical titles (care to take a guess on how many "Diamond in the Rough" and "The Equestrian Hunger Games" stories there are by now?), I think we'll survive having more than one "Solipsism."
And since none of your stories are named "Solipsism", it doesn't directly affect you anyway, now does it.
5041526
5041945
My, my. I called it "Soliptsism" because I thought "Alone in the Dark" was way waaay too generic. If I call it "You Are (Not) Alone" people might think it's an EVA fic. Hm...
I don't understand the oddities in the last paragraph, I don't understand the point of the story in general, and I really don't understand why you think this belongs in the LessWrong group, the Sci-Fi group, or even the Philosophy group. How was this anything but weird for the sake of being weird?
The same goes for Princess Twilight Meditates, but at least that one was somewhat comprehensible. It still doesn't belong in Sci-Fi or LessWrong.
What is philosophically significant about either one of these stories? What justifies the label of Sci-Fi for either? And what do either have to do with rationality? You seem to be adding your stories to as many groups as possible, even if they're only tangentially related, in a bid to get readers.
5043670 Well, frankly, I was unsure whether it fit into Lesswrong, but I felt the "what do I know and how do I know it, what do I want and how would I get it" and "rationalists should win" mentality informed this story; how Twilight reacts to the dark, to absolute sensory ignorance, to the unknown that refuses to let itself get known, an environment that does not react productively to being prodded or tested. She's methodical, she's meticulous, she tries to remain rational and cautious for as long as possible. She only cracks in frustration when it seems like she's tried everything and nothing works, and none of her assumptions or hypotheses are any help whatsoever. This process will turn out to be important in the sequels.
In general, I'd expect any story I write to probably qualify for "relevant to Lesswrong interests", because the Sequences have informed my mindset in a very deep way, and can't see myself writing fics that don't qualify as Rational to some degree.
The reason it's in the Philosophy group is because it's in the format of a thought experiment; "what if there was nothing in the world other than you? what if all you actually were sure of was your own existence?" It's barest-bones speculative fiction.
The reason it's in the Sci-Fi group is because the tropes and minimalistic, functional aesthetics employed lean more towards sci-fi than fantasy. When I set off to write this story, I was specifically inspired by the Stanley Parable.
The reason Twilight wakes up in a period dress is because it's a Sequel Hook. For now, the idea is so; she's in Victorian Trottingham and HRHS Challenger is leaving port in the greatest oceanographic expedition in history. That one intends to be more in the style of 20000 Miles Under The Sea and Heart of Darkness. That story is still in the backburner and not ready for publishing, but this bit has been sitting around in my drawers and, after "PT Meditates" got a decent reception, I thought I'd get it out as well.
Do you find my answers satisfactory, or do you still think I'm abusing the groups to draw readers under false pretences?
5043830
Mmm. Well, not intentionally, at any rate.
It would help if you showed that Twilight's mindset was informed by this, at least, more than you already did, as it was quite subtle. I would expect Twilight to be talking to herself, trying to reorient her thoughts and organize herself in the only way available to her at the moment.
Mmmmmmmm. I don't think writing characters rationally (without idiot balls) justifies putting it in LessWrong. This story did not display a significant amount of rationality to my perception, it was just a curious happening that Twilight reacted to emotionally. Just because you adhere to the memeplex doesn't mean that what you write is relevant to the other adherents' interests.
I didn't really see a thought experiment. I saw a curious happening in a curious world that Twilight reacted to emotionally, with no real exposition, explanation, or justification, and then there was a random scene transition to this new setting that you're writing for.
It doesn't really fit as Sci-Fi or Fantasy. The style of the writing doesn't determine its genre, the details of the setting do. This doesn't really have a setting. An alicorn princess with a thing for science wakes up in a nondescript world, does some things that could be either emotionally or rationally motivated, some strange things happen, and then she wakes up in a different, more familiar setting.
???
This doesn't make sense as a prequel. The last paragraph is entirely disconnected from the story; she could have had any sort of strange dream and would act precisely the same way.
I hesitate to even call this a story.
I no longer think you're abusing groups to draw readers in; rather, now I think that you aren't writing into the story enough of what you think you are. I don't see a philosophical experiment, I don't see a particularly rational character, I don't see Sci-Fi, I don't even see a story. It's just a sequence of descriptions.
I'm sorry. I don't know how to react to this. I shrug in your general direction?
5043914 Nah. no biggie. Your perspective makes sense, and you make good points. Next time I'll try to be a little more strict. However, consider this:
My idea of writing rational fics is to avoid making them explicit author tracts. I want my character's actions to be informed by a rational approach and mentality, as deep-seated assumptions rather than as an explicit creed. Rational is not opposite to emotional, and, in fact, I believe the Twelve Virtues are fundamentally emotional ones.
5043942
I would still entirely expect this from Twilight in character.
5041945 Well, it makes you seem to lazy to find a name that wasn't in use.
5045595 I'l freely admit to being one heck of a lazy colt.
No hard work for me; if I can get away with a short-cut, I'll take it!
No Applejack, I.
Never even thought of pretending otherwise. 
Is it solipsistic in here, or is it just me?
5045793 I wouldn't know. Ask the Mannish Boys.
oi57.tinypic.com/24g66oz.jpg
5045818
I have no idea who that is.
Pretty nice, At least that's what I would say
5045828 That is Noraki Kakyoin, bearer of the Stand Hierophant Green, to which I thought your name referred.
animetree.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/jjba-stardust-crusaders-kakyoin-and-hierophant-green1.jpg?w=848
Lali-ho!
5046061
I'm an oddity in the fandom, I think, in that I don't watch anime. At all.
Alas, it is simply a reference to the regular ol' Tarot card. Or rather, the concept it engenders.
5046111 If you're a fan of Tarot, you might enjoy Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders. It's an anime unlike any other.
A period dress?!?!?!!!!!?!!!?!!?!!!
...I don't get it.
So far, this is more "Twilight meets crackfic setting." than anything else.
5046605 If I say "steampunk" instead, do you think people would get it?
5049077
Yeah I dunno really. The idea was to convey that she is wearing unfamiliar clothing, but how do you point that out? Maybe like "She was wearing a dress straight out of pre-Industrial Equestria?" "She had never seen this clothing before in her life?" I dunno. I can't get anything that really "snaps"
5046111 Thank goodness, another one.
The animes, they're everywhere, and they don't know the proper origins of things.
5041526 Funny, your name appears to have already been in use. In the Warrior Cats books. Perhaps one should exit the greenhouse before hefting pebbles.
5057682 Alrighty then.
Your profile pic has the Amazon logo on it, which is trademarked.
I just found a fic with a similar "literally dark" theme. Although this time the dark space was a lot more solvable, and Twilight wasn't alone.
Well, this was certainly weird.
5618890 I try
Boa tortura psicológica, mas a piada foi fraca.
6527465 I appreciate your curating efforts. Thank you for keeping the lesswrong group free of chaff.