1
10
453
Joined March 2012
1,360
3,926
An aspiring rationalist gets punted into Equestria - and instead of being turned into a cool griffon, or powerful dragon, or even a standard pony... discovers he is now a milk-cow, part of the herd.
Part of the Chess Game of the Gods crossover.
One of the main points for this chapter was to explain what the main character's strength actually was - the reason (s)he was picked to be dropped in Equestria. I'm not planning on mirroring MoR quite so directly after this point, though I do intend for various Methods and items from the Sequences to be practiced.
And that's the end of the introductory arc, getting our friendly neighbourhood bovine enmeshed into Equestria, tied into the local power structure, and with an excuse to go out and do interesting stuff and meeting interesting people of all sorts of species, without having caused any significant damage to the crossover timeline.
I hear a lot of people dislike using Zecora for her rhymes. You've used her, and made every line besides hers rhyme as well. That's impressive.
What's also impressive is you've managed to avoid the battles and 'loading...' jokes which have been used perhaps a bit excessively in the many stories in the series.
Okay, I've been thinking about this premise, and I realized that actually, this kind of rationality Missy's been using doesn't necessarily apply, because it can legitimately be said that there's an extra-natural force at work here influencing Equestria. Namely, you as the author. 
It's kind of a conundrum.
That's fair enough. I hope that you can at least manage getting the gist of the final paragraph before I post the next chapter, otherwise it'll be fairly confusing.
Actually, that very problem is fairly old hat for rationality, though it's usually described in somewhat different terms.
>>802545 But... Aww I read that like a few months ago. Dang it... Well at any rate, since Missy is working under the assumption that she is the only human in Equestria such an insight as the letter would contain if it did say that Griffon was an alien or some other information would be nigh shattering to her logic foundation as she would have an entirely different set of variables to deal with.
One for instance may be that someone else may decide to expose the lands to something she wants to keep secret or indeed already has. Or at least, that may be what she might end up thinking.
Another thought might be to figure out just how many blasted humans are landing in Equestria.
If you mean a two-legged, two-armed minotaur, such as a certain motivational speaker - go ahead and do whatever strikes your fancy; I'm assuming they're an entirely separate species from the quadrupedal cattle. If you want to play with four-legged cows, and to try to keep consistent with what I'm writing... then we should probably talk about it through private messages.
Not quite; it's against using the term 'supernatural' as a curiosity-stopper. If Missy exists in a reality in which beings from outside her standard three-dimensional space can affect her, then even if somebody calls those extra-dimensional beings 'supernatural', that doesn't mean that Missy can't gather evidence about those beings' actions, analyze that evidence, and make predictions about what future experiences she can expect.
We may be using somewhat different definitions here - which is just one reason among many to get a good grounding on, say, Bayesian Probability. It is said that a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a storm; when you see the storm, how far back can you trace the causality, and how widely? You may never discover that one particular butterfly - but you can still calculate that, based on the evidence currently available to you, there's an 82% chance of 32 millimeters of rain next Tuesday.
Hm... Wait - don't I want to have a high number of total views compared to initial views - meaning that more of the people who read the initial chapter actually go on to read more of the story?
Besides, I'm not particularly worried about the numbers - I've been at this for around a half of a week, mostly weekend. The two Chess Game stories that are closest in word count have been up closer to 3 and 4 weeks, and have about 3 and 4 times the total views - so by the time this thing has been around that long, I'll likely be well on the way to matching the stats of the stories just behind Griffin's and Echo's themselves.
Or, put another way - in about an eighth of a month, I've written half of a NaNoWriMo-scale novel... and I haven't even gotten to the point in the timeline where Griffin goes to Wethoof yet.
>>809234 The sad thing is we both started at around the same day and our stories are around the same length. And yeah, the ratio thing was what I meant. Once again, failing at conveying concepts.
And I have no idea when the heck my story is taking place because I was silly and thought it would be cool to place it on a remote island in the middle of nowhere.
Echo's made Wethoof more tolerant, and has kept a village safe. Griffin is making the world outside Equestria a better place. Missy, meanwhile, is finding and fixing fault with the biggest nation in the world, advancing the legal and scientific systems. That is very damn impressive.
To quote one of my favoured philosophers:
* "There is no justice in the laws of Nature, Headmaster, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don't have to! We care! There is light in the world, and it is us!"
* Look, sometimes you've just got to do things because they're awesome.
You know what I just noticed? This actually provides a VERY good reason why Celestia would get involved in the Game, to protect her ponies from the potentially disastrous effects of the Chess Pieces running wild, spreading their knowledge, or in the case of Jon, just being evil.
If you mean the thing about the Hamiltonian and unitarity; that is a very specific fact I learned a few years ago, from before MLP-FIM aired... From, of all places, a fanfic. I knew I wanted to include it, and was thinking about mentioning Apple-tini from Bridle Gossip; but went a different way, and that's how Micro came to be.
"Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science." Basically, magic follows laws, those laws usually do not exist in the same world-view that human scientists use to justify things, but the fact that they exist in itself proves that something can be explained. If something can be explained, than it is technically science. What most people generally refer to as "magic" (in the sense that it cannot be rationalized due to its nature) is in fact a "miracle" which is something else entirely.
As the good Doctor once said: "Sometimes things in the universe just happen, with no reason or explanation or cause and we call those things 'miracles'. I haven't seen one yet, but this might just be the first!"
Moving on, that rhyming was AWESOME!!!
One flaw: you never gave a description of the prison, or Missy's cell.
It's a small thing, but it's always important when you move to an area you haven't been before to give a (fairly) detailed description of it. For the prison cell I kind of imagined it to be like this:
The cell they led me to was small, but not so small as to be suffocating. I had enough room to stand up and walk around if I kept my steps shallow and my sides tucked in. A not-uncomfortable-looking bed was nestled in one corner, opposite a clean porcelain toilet (Equestria had invented basic plumbing and flush toilets some time ago) so sanitation wasn't an issue. The stones were a uniform grey and brushed clean and the iron bars gleamed with fresh polish, whether from diligence or lack of use I wasn't sure. All in all it was the most comfortable prison I'd ever been in (not that I've been in many but school field trips, ya know).
Reset Password
Resend Verification Email
3,926 ( 131,947 )
More
Less
Post Comment
Refresh
But seriously, I'm curious as to where this is going.
Image: http://affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us/wp-content/uploads/brilliant_681.jpg
Image: http://nerdjunkies.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/brilliant.jpg
Cancel
Send