Rainbow Dash isn't a pony who generally likes to sit around doing nothing, especially when there are big things going down. So of course it would be just her luck that she would end up watching the Map for ponies trying to change history, when Equestria is gearing up for first contact with an advanced alien race just outside. And it promises to be a monumentally monotonous task, as nopony has tried to change the past in over ten years.
Until now, that is.
As the last pony left aware of the changes, Rainbow needs to travel through time and use her own ingenuity combined with whatever she can scavenge from the various pasts to which she travels to defeat foes far more powerful than she could ever hope to be, all the while being careful to avoid altering history even further.
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This is a crossover with the first installment of the Journeyman Project trilogy of video games (and its two remakes, Journeyman Project: Turbo and Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime. Come on, I couldn't resist that title.) It will loosely follow the plot of that game, so if you're familiar with it you'll probably have some idea where this is going.
Reading.
Tracking.
Loving!!!
How dark will this story be?
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'Dark' can be subjective sometimes, but it shouldn't be overly so. Early-to-mid Chapter 5 is probably as far as it'll go in terms of darkness.
Care to tell me more about the Journeyman Project trilogy?
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Sure. I'm not sure exactly what you want to know, so I'll just cover as much as I can without spoiling plot points.
The first installment (simply known as the Journeyman Project, or as I mentioned, 'Turbo' or 'Pegasus Prime' respectively in its later remakes) is a point-and-click style adventure game released for Mac and Windows in 1992 (and 1994, and 1997). It centered around the main character, 'Agent 5' (who was otherwise unnamed and completely silent in the first game) of the Temporal Security Annex. Agent 5 has been selected to monitor the time-travel device, codenamed 'Pegasus', for other time travellers who attempt to alter history, while the other agents who ordinarily work with him attend the welcoming ceremony for the Symbiotry of Alien Races, who had invited humanity to join them ten years previously. During Agent 5's watch, three temporal waves are detected, forcing Agent 5 to travel back in time to reverse them.
Basically it's what I have of this story but with people and technology instead of ponies and magic. As it goes on I have plans to make my work more distinct from its source material.
The three time zones in the game involve Agent Five stopping robots sent by the game's mysterious villain to use nuclear weapons to disrupt world peace talks, destroy an alien ship and a human Mars colony, and assassinate a key proponent of joining the aliens. Puzzles often involve finding items in one time zone and using them to move forward in another - for example, using an oxygen mask from the Mars colony to move through a field of sleeping gas at the nuclear launch site.
In the second game (Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time, released 1995), the Temporal Security Annex (renamed the Temporal Security Agency, for reasons known only to the dev team) has gone public as a result of Agent 5's actions in the first game. Agent 5 (now given the name Gage Blackwood) has become famous as a result for his actions, when he is visited in his home by himself, from ten years in the future. Future Gage tells his past self that they've been framed for stealing valuable artifacts from the past and seeks his younger self's help in gathering the evidence to prove his innocence, before being promptly arrested by a fellow TSA agent. Past Gage uses his future self's time travel suit (a new innovation not available in the first game) to search the locations and times he had supposedly stolen from, eventually uncovering the evidence necessary to clear his name - but not before discovering that there might be more to the saboteur's intentions than simple theft.
Gameplay-wise the second game introduced the ability to look up and down, which wasn't something you could do in the first installment, which restricted you to looking from side to side.
Also, JP2 introduced Arthur, an AI companion who is quirky, talkative, references pop culture every other sentence, and periodically breaks the fourth wall. Arthur was apparently enough of a fan favorite that he was added to the Pegasus Prime remake as an easter egg, although I myself was never able to find him. He joined Gage in both the second and third games, with mostly-optional witty commentary on almost any situation, and a 'help' button that allowed the player to ask him for help if they were stuck on a puzzle.
Finally, the third game (Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time) begins, like the first, with a temporal distortion wave that lures Gage - now played by a much better actor - back to the distant past, where they find a message from the villain of the second game. Of course, the TSA had been shut down as a result of controversy stemming from the character in question's actions, and most of the time travel devices decommissioned, forcing Gage to use an untested prototype called the Chameleon Suit, which allows its wearer to disguise themselves as someone from the past. This leads to the main new mechanic of JP3: dialogue, which can now be used alongside items in solving puzzles. (also, instead of having to use JP1 and 2's clumsy arrow-based turning controls, the cursor can now be used to pan around.)
The first half of the game, however, doesn't feature any of this, instead centering around a scavenger hunt set up by JP2's villain in which Gage is forced to comb through three ruined, legendary cities for pieces of the coordinates necessary to find the character in question, who escaped justice at the end of the previous game and is currently on the run. Most of what happens during and after the search are heavily spoilery, because it features a twist that upends the entirety of the other two games. Suffice it to say that the later half of the game is spent hunting down a series of precursor relics that existed in the ruined cities in question before they were destroyed.
There was supposed to be a fourth Journeyman Project game, to be entitled 'Journeyman Project 4: Resurrection' and slated for release in October of 2000. However, it was delayed by the studio (Presto Studios) taking time to work on 2001's Myst III: Exile, a series that they had taken over from the previous developers. And after the release of Myst III, high-ranking members of the development company - believing that the PC gaming market was failing, shifted to console development, a shift which was, unfortunately, too hard for many staff members to make. Presto decided to 'quit while [they] were ahead' and dissolved their company in August 2002.
Supposedly, a complete design document for JP4 had been created by this point and still exists in the abandoned Presto Studios vault somewhere in California, but all that is known about it is the title and that it would, quote, "illustrate one of the potentially dangerous outcomes of time travel technology".
However, some members of the old Presto team recently got back together and put Pegasus Prime on Steam Greenlight. It has since been greenlit by the community and is currently languishing in development hell while the devs update it to be compatible with Steam achievements and the Steam controller. The remnants of Presto have indicated that high sales on Steam might lead to them doing the same for JP2 and 3, and possibly even reviving the JP4 project.
As JP3 was the first video game I ever played, I am - rather understandably - excited about the prospect. The series remains one of my favorites despite the solid oak read: wooden acting skills of Gage Blackwood's original actor in JP2 and the complete removal of failure states and even score measurement in JP3.
Apologies for the length - there's a decent amount to talk about even in a condensed state.
And also apologies for the month long wait for a reply - I just sort of temporarily dropped out of the pony fandom sometime in early July and haven't really been back to FiMfic since. (I'm not the best at keeping to schedules.)