This story is a sequel to The King Who Would Be Man
Commission for SoundLogic. I've finally decided I know enough about the plot of where this is going that I can start posting it, though posts will go to my Patreon a month before appearing here, in future.
Set in Next of Kin to Chaos, post-Deja Q in Star Trek TNG, fourth season MLP. Twilight's ascended to become an alicorn, but none of her friends have. Discord once promised Celestia he wouldn't do anything to change that status. But when you're billions of years old, the idea of the first friend you believe you ever had dying within a century is unbearable. And Discord doesn't always keep his promises.
Tags will change as more gets written.
Chapters (2)
See my PM.
Hmm. I find myself wondering if Spike qualifies as a familiar, and how both he and Twilight would react to that news.
Heh. She would know.
In all, a most intriguing beginning, especially given Discord's tweaks to the Tree of Harmony. I'm not sure whether or not I want this to fast-forward to Tirek or not; sussing Sparkle out of the Crystal Empire sounds like it's going to be a riot (though Lord help us all if she ever meets Pinkie Pie...) Either way, looking forward to more.
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"EEEEE! It's such a cute bouncing pink pony!"
"WHEEEE! It's such a cute sparkly little alicorn!"
What follows is a mutual squeezing contest. That Pinkie wins because the Q have no pain tolerance.
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I can only assume that Discord would mention that loss at every given opportunity (and some taken ones) for the next hundred million years. At minimum.
An excellent start. I look forward to seeing this fic develop.
Have you heard of a guy called Machiavelli, Twilight? He wrote a book on Friendship too.
And is this guy making a Twilight Zone reference to Twilight?
Like Snow White's stepmother?
Top notch stuff. Looking forward to further instalments :-)
Love it!
This is great stuff. Has the scene they talk about, watching Q interacting on the starship, actually been written anywhere? I'm unsure if ponies have seen humans in your works. I know they have in other crossovers with Star Trek where Discord is Q, and it's a little difficult keeping it all straight in my head what happened in which story-verse.
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It hasn't been written yet. It's in the future of "King Who Will Be Man."
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Well, I'm really looking forward to it. Having the ponies see Q in another setting, without powers, and the aliens that are Star Fleet and specifically their problems of adjusting the orbit of a moon, and seeing the ponies commentary on that would be fascinating.
Oooohhh, Twilight Sparkle, Fluttershy, and Captain Picard in the same room, talking about Q. Looking forward to that!
"Ooooooh! This one is ever better! She has rainbows! RAINBOWS!"
Looking forward to her meeting Pinkie Pie. If anyone could be a match for her going all "SQUEEEEE!", it's Pinkie Pie.
Also, "CUTIE MARK CRUSADERS [insert some vaguely Chutulu-esque sounding eldritch activity here], YAY!"
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I'll go with Cursed Tome Readers
So awesome. I hope we get to see lots more Sparkle!
This fic has me thinking about Q and Star Trek. Early on, it looked like the Continuum wanted to keep humanity from exploring the stars too widely, because that would accelerate their development into "Lesser Powers" or something similar to the Q. Q as we know him was their agent. Later on, even before his rebellion, Q seems to have different motives than the Continuum. He seemed more like he wanted humanity to ascend, but he thought they were more likely to do that by returning to earth and concentrating on improving their society, so for a long time his goals and the Continuum's goals still aligned, even if they had different motives. I suspect once he found out humans were already in the Delta Quadrant, he changed his mind back to agreeing with the Continuum that exploration would be beneficial to humanity's ascension rather than a distraction, and that's when Q's break with the Continuum became inevitable.
It's probably for the best some of the Q headed up to the Crystal Empire, if Passion was fooling around with the Tree of Harmony, god knows what's she's done with the Crystal Heart.
Is the Tree of Harmony similar to the Guardian of Forever, were they both AI programmed by the Q?
Love it! :)
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Passion might have messed with the Crystal Heart, but she's not the one who screwed with the Tree of Harmony. That was Discord, in the last chapter. No one in the Continuum suspects him because they all know he's not patient enough to hack an expert system. Sometimes the people who know you best are blinded by what they know about you. Discord is an expert liar when he wants to be; pouting and protesting that he could have done it if he'd wanted to is taken by the Q as his usual posturing, so if they do pick up any kind of thoughtflash involving him messing with the Tree, they'll perceive it as him fantasizing and self-aggrandizing, not as his shield slipping and letting out a tiny bit of the truth. He's been lying to the Continuum for five billion years; he's gotten pretty good at it. :-)
Personally, I never took Q's demand that the Enterprise return to their homeworld seriously, for a few reasons. He's putting humanity on trial for being a grievously savage race in a universe that contains Klingons and Nausicaans? The test itself is ridiculously easy and mostly gets solved by a half-Betazoid, meaning that technically it is not "humanity" that solves it. Of the four that Q took into his court, one was only half human and one was created by humans but not human; these are the people he's choosing as representatives of humanity? Also, "thou" is singular only, so when he tells Picard "Thou art instructed to return to thy planet forthwith", he's specifically talking to Picard.
My feeling was, the Continuum wanted humanity tested -- not actually locked up on their homeworld (given all the colonies we've seen, it's highly unlikely that they'd even fit.) Q confronted them and accused them of being the thing they are most proud of not being, then put them in a situation that would try to force them to act like the thing he accused them of, to see what they're made of and how well they stick to their ideals. Had they been Klingons, the accusation would have been that they have no honor. So the test was never really about humans being savages or proving that they are not; the test was to see if humans can live up to their own idealized image of themselves, and the punishment would have been locking Picard up on Earth, not all of humanity, because Picard has been chosen as an Exemplar of Humanity. (Later he tries to change tactics and use Riker instead, but that doesn't work, so after that it's Picard every time.)
BTW, I can't believe how popular Sparkle seems to be. My first alicorn OC, created to be deliberately annoying, and everyone wants to see more of her. Go fig.
7462525 Crap, I was fooled too! I wasn't sure what Discord was doing in the prologue, thanks for clarifying.
I think you nailed it with Q and the tests. The Continuum wanted humanity tested, and as the appointed legal ward of the planet ever since he hurled that meteor at it 65 million years ago, Q was the logical choice. But Q doesn't really want to punish humanity, so he makes it a rather farcical trial with lower stakes than rearranging a galactic civilization. It's Q's equivalent of a traffic school test, where you know you can pass it, it's really just a formality.
The thing that makes Sparkle so popular is that she may not be an self-insert for you, she certainly is for me, and probably a lot of your other fans. If I was in Equestria I'd probably try and do exactly what she did, run around hugging ponies all the time.
Making Twilight's friends immortal as well? That's really nice of him, even if it's most likely just to keep Fluttershy alive.
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She's hilarious. If anything, you should keep her mostly out of the story if only to keep scenes from warping around her.
7462525 " BTW, I can't believe how popular Sparkle seems to be. My first alicorn OC, created to be deliberately annoying, and everyone wants to see more of her. Go fig."
She reminds me of a girl I once dated. All energetic, fun, liking cute things. Glitter, rainbows, puppies, kittens, pink and blue, watching romance movies, painting her nails weird colors, hugging, giggling, and snuggling. That's the kind of girl she was. I often wonder what would have happened or what might have been if we kept dating. (She moved away with her family to another state because her dad got a better business opportunity that involved lots of more money. I never saw her again.) Ahhh, enough dwelling on the past now.
Anyway....
I would love to see more of her in your fics because she's really likeable.^_^
you know i love to see a future fic where discord (Q) is introducing his son to the ponies of equstria, there reaction would be hilarious
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I'm planning on it eventually. I've even got a name for him (since the Q go by names in Equestria that represent principles somewhat similar to what their personalities represent, such as Discord for Q and Glory for Suzy-Q.) He'll be Havoc. :-)
It's also funny because other fan writers have Havoc as the name of Discord's father, but then, there are only so many names that describe forms of chaos, and what else would you call the child of the Spirit of Chaos and the Spirit of Righteous Warfare? :-)