Dawn Patrol
The beach, her shore soaked with a thin layer of fresh sea foam and blood; smells of smoke and saltwater purge the clean air "Colony gutted, not even corpses remain"...
This is the dream or ironically, nightmare, I continue to awake from every night that I live and try to pass as a guard in this goddess forsaken colony, yet I know not why. I may have found the reason she disappeared; at the cost of my own sanity, I fear for my life.
"There is murder and conspiracy afoot", said my dark princess not even a month ago, "you're here investigate and snuff it out."
I began my search and it took not long to find the conspiracies this island hid from sight as I arrived. She may look quaint Yet the air is laced with anticipation, the colonists antsy.
It was a hard search for the killer but I found them, using the best deduction possible. I pulled out of the mess and entangled lies, Majority Vote, he was not who he seemed; I noticed as I sifted through his dream, a recurring pattern; he gained so much from peridot loss of her life.
She was a thorn in his side since her and Andi "equaled a minority" together, oh but he wouldn't kill her, no he is a politician, so he paid Sunspot to finish her off so he wouldn't get his own hands dirty, and Sunspot hated her as most did, so he went along and agreed.
That fateful night Sunspot set a trap knowing her routine, he pushed her off her boat while she was taking inventory and in utter panic sabotaged her boat and sent it adrift, it was long gone before anypony could have known to stop it, although that is just theoretical, I truly believe that Sunspot was bribed to kill her and that is why Majority has "debts unpaid".
I wouldn't have known until I realized I could find out; using his thoughts I found, Majority could profit off her death in more ways than one by killing her; then the town could reclaim her house, he gets the money from that house to pay off Sunspot for carrying out the job or as he says, to pay for his "debts"; he used her death and her boat's disappearance to gain both votes and the others trust in his leadership.
There wasn't something right about it; he then uses the kelpie scare to encourage them to chase the kelpie. So then they lose scent of the truth , the Minotaur incident didn't help the loss; after the thoughts of peridot die down; the Minotaur takes the spotlight as now that he got rid of the thoughts about peridot fade so then he fires a guard and lower taxes to secure remaining votes, they almost got away with it cleanly, but since I came along; I've pieced this together, but I think they're onto me.
I never liked this island, it has a way of hiding truth; she was holding together a web of lies but the web was thinning long before I arrived, as tension thrives on a foundation of lies; this mystery brought me to uncover more than I would have liked, in my years as a nightmare, this is the worst case I've ever been on.
I found not only contradicting takes on murder but hidden lovers and deceit, it started with Moonstruck and Littlemoth who bedded and after, the mare, Littlemoth, fled to stay "pure" for a guard Pegasus who loved her, though obviously, she didn't feel the same, yet after all this, she blamed herself for peridot's death more than others; she knew she was suspect; I found no hard evidence that she was to blame though.
I also suspected cabotage at first as he was also a trader and could have killed her for her profit; that didn't make sense because then what happened to her boat, oh poor Leif, his music forced to attack, used not for beauty but malice stirred on by bad blood, but in the end I can't blame any on this island more than myself as I have only sat by and observed the events unfolding oblivious to the mounting of invasions by the Moonken.
But most of all it is the fear that now; that I got into Sunspot's dreams and he found me, he long do I have before he finds out it was me and he kills me too, I mean no one just about in this town will miss a nocturne; I'll be honest.
Oh but if that doesn't put enough icing on my cake, I fear I have gone too far, the colonists talk of full on war at dawn with the Minotaur; it's kill or be killed; that if anyone able bodied to fight; will fight, I send you this message my night mother as I fear for my life and for this settlement, for the boats are gone.
I send this for I may die fighting and clinging to my last breath of air before I can tell you my finding face to face, but please by the light of your moon let this message reach you; then the accused can take their rightful blame and the charges on innocent ponies can be reversed, I am a nightmare and it shall be known by me that though there are guilty ponies on this island, that I am one for I have doomed this colony and its inhabitants....
Dawn Patrol says:
Majority Vote hired Sunspot to kill Peridot, but I'm not buying it. For one thing, my understanding from Dawn Patrol's section of the original was that he was the one telling all the ships not to come into port. So Peridot was waiting for her ship: she didn't have one in the harbor. And this might've been easier to read if it had been structured like blank verse. That way, you could've split the lines at all the places where you've made comma splices now, and the punctuation gremlin in my head wouldn't've growled so much while I was reading this...
Mike
6462450
Exceedingly true. Perhaps it's because I just finished reading Yoruba Girl Dancing, but the prose here reminds me quite a bit of Simi Bedford's narrative style—just without any of the literary finesse she uses to make it work. Comma splices, awkward sentence structures, and weirdly quoted passages (it reads like a high school English assignment at some points)... Not to mention that half the names go uncapitalized. This is unfortunate, as I really like your opening line (I think it captures Dawn's madness well).
Picking Dawn for the Nightmare has a lot of potential; his canon chapter is filled with enough insanity and treachery to fill an entire poem by itself. Unfortunately, though, your piece doesn't ever really take the time to examine his mental state, which was perhaps the most interesting part of his character. It's a pity.
Majority Vote is an interesting answer, although I can't find any motivation for Sunspot to help him. I get that Sunspot didn't like her, but in his canon chapter even he seems to show a bit of sadness for her death—in addition, he notes that he thinks that kelpies killed her. Unless he's somehow altering his own dreams, it seems like he doesn't know who did it either.
A prose piece, this just didn’t hang together. Sunspot is talking about the irony of her being killed by one of the natives of the island she was complaining about being funny if it didn’t mean they weren’t all screwed are just not the thoughts of a murderer. Majority Note being dirty is a reasonable hypothesis, but this story didn’t really convince me of his guilt.
The prose here was awkward in places as well, which hurt.
I'm not convinced that the Nightmare could be any of the characters whose dreams we saw in the original story. Furthermore, while I find that there is some decent motive for Majority Vote to be the killer, I do not find the use of Sunspot as an accomplice convincing at all, particularly since his own dream places the minotaurs and kelpies at fault.rather than himself or no one (as in the case of Majority).