For the Apple family, life at the orchard fosters several qualities: self-sufficiency, a love of nature, willingness to work. But above all, a love and appreciation for family, even if "family" extends beyond siblings, cousins, daughters, or other simple descriptions. It also provides plenty of chances for a young filly to live up to her aunt's legacy as a Crusader.
Inspired by the fourth AppleDash contest before the story decided to make its own path and wound up only mentioning the relationship in passing.
Chapters (1)
I have no idea what i just read
6839806 One of the most common problems I run into in writing is implying what I think is obvious, only to find that everyone else – not having the story in their heads already – can't make any sense of it. So of course I decided to write something where most of the action is implied through dialogue.
Can't imagine the rather didactic and somewhat gratuitous worldbuilding helped too much either.
6840851 I got complete lost like halfway through
Felt like a nice slice-of-life with lots of subtle worldbuilding. I'm ok with that.
6842222 Ah, in that case, if it was around the beginning of the second section/day, that was about when the story stopped following my original idea for it (much more strongly AppleDash, but not enough on its own for the full 5000 words required by the contest) and decided to go off on its own, following Zap Apple and Truehooves. A good example of the benefits of actually having a plan and sticking to it.
6842511 Glad you liked it! I figure that as long as I'm writing a story about magical hooved and clawed animals, it may as well be about magical hooved and clawed animals. And I am very happy that it didn't feel like the worldbuilding was hitting you over the head the entire time.
What happen to rainbow Dash?? what about that ghost possessin her??? I want more information? why can she fly???
Other than that, cute!
6851702 I didn't want to go into too much detail in the story since what happened eight years ago is less important at the moment than how Rainbow's dealt with it, but the gist of it is that Twilight found some magical artifact of Star Swirl the Bearded (think issues 17-20 of the IDW comics), and was a bit less careful with it than she thinks she could have been. In the thousand years or so it's essentially been in the basement, the magic got corrupted, and when Twilight started examining it, it wound up essentially possessing her. The others did wind up breaking her free of the rogue magic, but not before she injured Rainbow badly enough that the latter lost the ability to fly.
In the years since then, she's been researching means to restore flight to pegasi with a good amount of success (Scootaloo's very likely in the air now), but hasn't found anything that works for Rainbow specifically. A day or so before the story, she realized that everything she's worked on so far – wings not channeling magic successfully and such – relies on the assumption that Rainbow's magic itself is still undamaged, and that she might have damaged that instead of anything (arcano-)physical. By now, though, Rainbow's gotten used to life on the ground, and doesn't want to go through another large change in lifestyle.
Yes, eight years might be a bit long for Twilight to realize that, but I wanted enough time on Rainbow's end. I'm rationalizing it as there being a lot of potential medical reasons she needed to rule out very thoroughly as well as needing to read up on magical medical practices, and that damaging a pony's innate magic is analogous to – and only slightly less incomprehensible than it would be for a lot of us – something ravaging someone's soul.
Cute was definitely a feel I was going for. Thanks!
6853163 Thank you for telling me that. I appreciate it! XD