This story takes place in Calm Wind's Wonderverse, between Act 2 and Act 3 of Piercing the Heavens, though hopefully it's understandable on its own.
"The impossible happened... Rivet started making mistakes.”
“Doesn’t everypony make mistakes?”
"Even if ‘everypony makes mistakes’ was a legitimate excuse, most ponies mistakes don’t almost injure ponies, and definitely don’t almost kill ponies.”
Rivet is, before anything else, a genius. A master of machines and the lead engineer for the Wonderbolts, he's the first pony you go to for all problems mechanical, from inventing new training equipment to rapid repairs. It isn't much exaggeration to say he's one of the rivets holding their base together.
They leaned on him so much, it seemed only natural that he start to buckle under pressure. The machines he designed to get the Wonderbolt recruits up to speed have started to malfunction, and ponies have narrowly avoided getting hurt. Now he's under probation, forced to take a break from his work.
No one is listening to what he's saying.
No one is seeing that a saboteur is on the loose.
With both his job and the well being of the Wonderbolts on the line, he calls the only person he can rely on to solve the case. He calls his old friend and rival, ex-detective Keen Eye.
Cry me a Rivet... That's great! XD
Well, that was a sort of brutal fight.
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Thankfully the rest of them wont be anything like this one.
I wrote Crashin' to be an outlier in every sense of the word.
I have to admit, so far so good. Though this isn't the type of story I usually read, I do like it, it feels sort of Sherlock Holmes-ish almost with the analytic thinking and almost sardonic pessimism.
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Glad to see that tone is working. I picked it not only to fit the tone of a mystery, but for a deeper reason. I'll probably explain in more detail in a post-epilogue author's note, but from the outset, I wrote this story as an Anti-Wonderverse story. I don't mean like a hate story, meant to bring down the original. Rather, to differentiate myself, I tried to take as many stylistic and thematic opposites to Calm's writing style. Calm uses mostly objective third person narration with an overall optimistic tone, so I chose a pessimistic first person narrator that colors everything he describes. I was kind of worried he would come off as insufferable...
You missed some punctuation marks, but other than that, all's good.
I demand the next fighter to be Twister.
*cheers*
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You are in luck.
*Cheers very loud*
*Grabs trophy and places it next to Dash*
WOOHOO!
OH MY GOD
THAT FOOTAGE AT THE END
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This is a somewhat egregious excerpt. First of all, I almost thought you were interrupting the story to address the readers as an author. Then I realized you were interrupting the story to address the readers as the character. Either way is pretty bad. You should find a better way to blend a description of your protagonist into the story, rather than breaking the flow of the story's current subject, Rivet. Rivet's description was fairly placed, and it mixed physical features with some of his character. You could probably do the same for Keen Eye in the next chapter (I'm assuming that they get a dressing-down, so you could invite a self-conscious character description with a judgmental once-over from Spitfire). Here is not really the place for it, though.
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Ah, thanks for pointing this out. The logic I was going for was Keen thinking "I just described Rivet, might as well describe myself and get that out of the way." Plus reveal a sort of hypocritical nature of him saying that to expect a description is shallow and immediately give a description anyway, but you're right in that it broke the flow. I'll see how I can edit around this flaw later.
I see that you use the word "people" in this fic a lot, just to let you know.
Damn, we just got cliffhangered.
Maybe his parents thought it sounded cool?...Or perhaps it's the family name, in which he came from a long line of Justices.
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That line was intended to be more reflective of keen's mindset than it was to be a judgement on the name, showing him as someone who reflexively scoffs at holding ideals in high regard. Sorry if I ended up stepping on any toes.
Umm...I just wanted to let you know that the mare of Squad Zero's name is Shine Struck in case you didn't already know.
And yeah! Swift knows his stuff! Congrats on having the first fic that displays Swift doing something similar to actual lawyering.
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...I literally flipped through the old chapters and double checked the names, and my phenomenal memory still mixed up things for me.
Tiiiiiiiiiiime to go do some editing.
I wonder how he and Dash know each other?
Silver being his badass self as always.
Oohhoo, can't get anythin' past Silver
I'm with SOARINDASH1 here...
I've been meaning to read this for a while, and I'm QUITE enjoying it.
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Sorry for late response, I needed time to think of an answer, and got distracted.
I don't know.
At first this hiatus was caused by me being busy, and my mental and physical well being taking a temporary dip.During this time I realized...I developed an unhealthy relationship with this story. At some point my motives for writing it got muddled.
It might have been from the start. I always had more than one motive for writing this. The first was the pure, creative one: "I have a story I want to tell." The second motive was more mercenary: a testing ground. I had been praised for my writing before, but I always had massive weaknesses when it came to writing quickly, and completing longer projects. I couldn't go pro without working to fix those. I thought giving myself an audience would help fix that.
It worked...for a bit. Eventually, life started getting in the way, as it does. This wouldn't have been a problem if it wasn't for the second motive. Every time I stopped updating it wasn't just taking a break from a hobby project, it was proof that something was "wrong" with me, that I didn't have what it takes to go pro. Not updating a mystery about small horses meant I had fewer employment prospects, and was more likely to starve to death in the future. (my subconscious can be melodramatic...) This self-imposed pressure made it easier to procrastinate. I heard "real life comes first" and viewed my troubles with this story as troubles with my real life long term.
In other words, it became that I wasn't "doing work to tell an interesting story," but "trying to tell an interesting story to do work." One I realized this, I took a deliberate step away, in order to get my head on straight.
I want to finish this story, I still have the remaining plot in my head waiting to be put to text, but I need to put myself and my own self-improvement first. If I don't, I'll fall into the cycle of creating pressure for myself, running away, then guiltily returning only to add even more pressure.
Still, it's was heartening to see someone read and presumably enjoy this story even now. You probably sped my "recovery" process up a bit.
Thank you.