Equestrian culture loves cutie marks. Filly Starlight Glimmer hates them and never wants one. So, she leaves Equestria.
"We're preparing for a minor invasion by the griffon mafia," Amber said, looking over her shoulder on the deck of the Immortal Dream. "And as much as I'm thankful you've changed your tune about helping me with Valey... are you one hundred percent sure now is the best time to hit the river for a bath? Gerardo said they'll be here tomorrow."
Felicity bit her lip. "Darling, I know it sounds like a vain request, and yes I would enjoy it, but if I'm to be doing the sweet-talking it's very slightly imperative that I look as sweet as can be. I'm aware of how it sounds, but this is my preparation."
"Well..." Amber shrugged. "I guess I can't argue with that. Hey Valey, want to come with?"
The empty shell yawned and paced in a circle, preparing to lie down.
Amber blinked at it. "I guess I'll go get my shampoos."
"E-Excuse me," a meek, unfamiliar voice stammered from the rear doorway. "Are y-you going to the r-r-river? Can I c-come t-too?"
Amber and Felicity both turned sharply, regarding a meek gray mare with a limp orange mane and eyes that couldn't seem to focus on any one thing. "Meltdown?" Amber tilted her head. "You're out of bed?"
"Darling, I mean this tactfully, but you look awful," Felicity commented hesitantly. "If you're not alright..."
"I d-don't need r-rest." Meltdown shook her head with a slight tremor, the cutie mark on her flank showing a gauge on a pipe turned all the way to zero. "Help me t-to the r-river?"
Amber quickly walked closer, steadying her with a shoulder. "Easy, girl. As long as I'm being the pamper mare, you look like you could use a morale boost too." She hefted Meltdown onto her back. "Bananas, you're light."
"Really?" Felicity raised a skeptical eyebrow. "The hat is sweet, but trying to emulate her too hard is going to be a little bit disturbing."
Amber sighed. "Okay, I feel a little bad now that I said that too. You good up there?"
Meltdown silently nodded.
They reached the river a few minutes later, a proper trail built by now from all the times she and Felicity had gone down to the water. "So, what do you want to do now that you're here?" Amber asked, unable to make eye contact with the mare on her back.
"Let me in," Meltdown requested, her voice slightly stronger. "And s-stand back."
"Stand back? Oh no," Amber chuckled, wading into the river. "The current is strong enough here that if you need me to carry you, you'll need me to hold you or you'll be swept away. But if you want to get wet, I can-"
Meltdown aggressively struggled, slipping free of Amber's back and falling in.
"Woah! Hey!" Amber's eyes shot wide with panic, and she grabbed for the mare... only to touch something searing beneath the surface. "Yeowch!"
Amber scrambled backwards, getting onto the shore as the water rapidly heated around her and a pool of steam bubbles began rising where Meltdown had gone under. Suddenly, Meltdown broke the surface, her eyes once again focused and her mane far more vibrant even though it was steaming and soaked.
"Thank you," Meltdown panted, treading water, her voice far stronger and more coherent. "I thought about it several times, but I wasn't sure I could make it here on my own."
"What?" Amber blinked. "You're... Wait, you make all the fire magic heat? Not your armor?"
Meltdown shook her head. "My armor was a coolant and exhaust unit, just like this river. We don't know each other well, so don't let me impose on your spa date, though. The water should be comfortably hot downstream from me, if you're looking for thanks."
Felicity giggled, having watched the whole exchange from the safety of the riverbank. "A hot bath sounds even better for what I need. I do have to say, though, it was hard not to pick up on your... habitual exhaust, let's call it, with all my work for Stormhoof. Whatever ailed you, we could have brought you down here sooner had you asked."
Amber bit her lip, wading in again and testing a spot safely downstream from the steaming Meltdown. "Okay, this really is nice. Come on, Felicity, let's get started." She looked up at Meltdown. "Don't expect me not to be curious after behavior like that, though."
"It's your outing." Meltdown shook her head. "I wouldn't want to interrupt if there's anything special going on."
Felicity waded in after Amber, letting the current catch her once she was deep enough, and Amber stopped her and began her work. "Depending what kind of special you mean," she said around a bottle of conditioner in her teeth, "either there isn't, or you're welcome to join. What's been up with you?"
Meltdown sighed, dipping her face briefly beneath the water to refresh the wetness in her fur. "First give me updates. We're no longer in the Empire, and Gazelle isn't talking. What's the status of everything else?"
"In a nutshell?" Felicity floated luxuriously on her back, humming in contentment as Amber lathered her legs and her coat. "Wallace and Gwendolyn are likely dead, Garsheeva stayed in the Empire without her brand, no one knows what befell Crystal, who was calling herself Chrysalis, and Valey is also sort of dead but we have her body and it hasn't been worth giving up hope. Now we are south of the mountains and have attracted the interests of a local griffon mafia..."
Meltdown surfaced enough to nod. "You'll want them as your friends, but be prepared to pay to get it."
Amber blinked. "Dodging my question aside, we want to be friends with money-grubbing local griffons? These sound meaner than Empire griffons."
"If you crossed the border without Writs of Harmonic Sanction and want contacts here who won't care when they find out, you'll want them as friends," Meltdown repeated. "The griffons here are greedy enough to protect your secrets if they think it's in their best interest. The Equestrians, on the other hoof, are the ones who keep the border sealed in the first place."
Amber's eyes widened. "I don't think any of us thought about that..."
Meltdown shrugged. "Gazelle and I already have passes, and Starlight and Saffron are natives. Beyond that, you have two that I know of. If you ever get cornered and think there will be trouble, you should think now about who you're going to protect for free."
Amber stopped washing Felicity and stared.
"Darliiing..." Felicity whined.
Amber mechanically resumed. "I'm... going to have to ask everyone else what we do about that if it comes up."
"I'm just mentioning it while I can think," Meltdown said. "I didn't mean to dodge your question. It's just not a very long story. You can probably guess most of it yourself."
"Your cutie mark generates heat," Amber replied. "But it has some downside?"
Meltdown shook her head. "Generating heat is the downside. My brand increases my physical and mental abilities. I don't know if it has a limit, but the heat scales with how much power I draw from it. If that sounds unusual, it's my wish from the Night Mother. And the reason I wished to be stronger and smarter is that without it, I'm essentially an invalid."
Felicity's ears fell in the water. "Now that's a side of you I don't believe I ever quite dug up before..."
"It's a secret," Meltdown answered. "The only reason I'm telling you is because without some way to stay cool, I'm useless, and it's better if you know why rather than assuming it's related to physical trauma from Crystal. Even with this river, I'm well below the temperature I used in the Empire as my operating normal."
Amber winced. "That sounds... Ew. Wow, I'm sorry. But smarter, too?"
"You noticed the stuttering," Meltdown sighed. "I would describe it for curiosity or learning's sake, but not so I can be pitied. Getting a wish that can overcome things like this happens once in a generation. Pity would be better spent on everyone who has a situation they can't do anything about."
"Alright. I gotcha." Amber kept washing. "Were you always like this, or...?"
"Birth defect, though it grew more noticeable as I aged." Meltdown looked away. "It's not a feel-good kind of story, so don't ask."
Amber winced. "Okay, not imagining. So are you just going to live in this river, or...?"
"No. Not as long as I can come back from time to time." Meltdown did a roll in the water, stretching her legs. "But perhaps we should make use of the time we have to discuss these griffons..."
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Hmmm...so what happens if she pulls lots of power without sufficient cooling? Explosion? Super Saiyan flying and fiery aura? What about if cooling is actually impossible, like in space? Can it kill her? Does her name refer to her overheating and literally melting down into a puddle of horse-grease? What about the other way—if you hooked her up to a hyper-advanced cooling rig could she go post-Singularity? Is all of reality just a simulation running on Meltdown hooked up to a quantum cryocomputer?
Yet another thing they could really use Sparky for: helping to fix Melty's armor.
Also, I think the Equestrians would be fairly forgiving of the trespass, given the circumstances. Though I guess Saffron might be the only one who would know enough to have that opinion.
So I think we know now what happened to most of the crew of the Dream. They got shipped back to the empire.
Saffron is a native, she can stay, so is Starlight, and technically, Glimmer.
We're hearing an awful lot from Amber's point of view, did she get one of the Writs and tell Starlight about a lot of the stuff?
Come to think of it... since leaving Ironridge, we've heard precious little from Maple's point of view, same with Gerardo.
...There's too much of Valey's solo adventures we know, either Starlight absorbed Valey's cutie mark and memories somehow, or she was able to restore her with the Star Module.
We've seen little bits of Jamjar's pov, but she told everyone what she knew during those solo excursions anyway so...
Maybe Slipstream decided to stay in Equestria...
I am anxious to find out the real purpose of the Aldenfold. As mentioned it was an Equestrian construct. And I believe it was put up soon after Nightmare Moon. But was it to keep something out (maybe Sarosians still loyal to NM) or to keep something in (but what?) With the power on the northern side I'm leaving toward the latter, tho that may have been simply a practical matter of being the only reasonable place to power it from. It does mean Celestia trusting Garsheeva to maintain it and not take it down.
And I had completely forgotten about Meltdown being on board. Nice to see her again.
9843388
I get that. You may be able to tell, but the first scene of SotS sets up a TON of stuff, some of which doesn't come together for almost a hundred chapters. I call them 'deep foreshadows' and there's quite a few of them - coincidentally, just today one of my readers started re-reading and commenting on that, so it's a little fresh on my mind. My "solution" to the problem of fixating on only the big far-off climax stuff is to have lots of smaller stories running at once. Provide some intrigue and payoff in the foreground regularly. Lure your readers along with nested plots that arise and are interesting on their own. It doesn't have to be in an episodic format, like SotS, to do that. You can do it like Austraeoh did - in the first book there were three-to-four separate adventures that were all connected but each one had an inciting incident, middle, and conclusion of sorts; all the while continuing along one story of Rainbow Dash with deeper mysteries.
You sorta did this in arc 1, with the wilderness / town. Except we spend a TON of time in-town with not much going on, and when we left it didn't really feel like a resolution. I can say that was the point where I felt disappointed. I knew there was stuff going on in the background, but I didn't feel connected to it.
Granted, this approach does have its drawbacks. Now that I AM getting to the stuff that's been been foreshadowed in SotS a lot, some people are complaining that it's not as GOOD as the small stuff. I do think The Olden World would be much improved if it tried some more small things to mix things up and keep it interesting. For all I know you do this in the future and I'm ducking out early, in which case I'm sad to say that even good stuff later really isn't worth going through 100s of thousands of words.
I understand all of this, though I may not agree with the methods. The idea of 'nesting' could have provided a way to make the showing of events (Gerardo investigating, for example) interesting as their own mini-story.
You are also right an every-day short-chapter schedule does mess with tension. Wanderer D's Ranger suffers from the same problem, and all my attempts at a daily fic have crashed and burned. (If I can help it, I write the entire story ahead of time.) But I wouldn't recommend changing that. Your daily updates are part of the appeal of this story, no doubt, and at this point are part of its identity. I trust you've gotten into the niche at this point.
This last thing here is less an actual piece of advice/critique, and more just how I write. I have lots, and I mean lots, of plans. But I also want to be surprised by my characters when they act in ways I wasn't expecting. Allowing them the freedom to choose against the intended plot and come up with their own solutions - based on their personality rather than plot - is generally great and makes a more dynamic story. The balance between sketching and overplanning is a delicate one and it's different for everyone. But don't be afraid to go off the rails. Chances are your characters will find something interesting.
I have a few possible explanations for this discrepancy, though this area is a bit more nebulous since it's not something I can put a finger on and more of a subtle background feeling.
First, it may just be that I'm critiquing your dialogue cohesion, rather than the characters. How they often sound like they're just talking because someone needs to, rather than because it's something they'd say. I may be extra attuned to this because I've fallen into the same trap before - just needing someone to say something so I stuff it in their mouths. It's a very subtle thing. I'm sure if I did a more in-depth analysis I could tear apart the dialogue setup and figure out what exactly it is that makes it feel "flat", but I'm unsure that'd really be of much help since... well, it's very subjective.
Second, I really can't identify any strong character traits in Maple. She seems... generic, with a dialed-up mothering instinct. Her backstory sure isn't generic, but as a personality, I don't see much from her. This is not true of Starlight, Gerardo, or most of the randos. The randos are random and fun but... well that leads into my third point.
Third, character reactions often seem exceedingly exaggerated. Like, let's take the town for instance. The mares barely know Starlight and they tell her their extremely private sob story? Characters speaking aloud feelings that most people would hold inside themselves in public? Sudden, jarring reactions with high emotions for seemingly no reason (such as mobbing Starlight the very next day?) I think I mentioned a few times in my early comments that reactions didn't always seem necessary, and a few times it did push the suspension of disbelief. In Ironridge I was more used to it, but still, a lot of these characters didn't seem like people, more like caricatures. Gerardo himself, who clearly has a lot going on under the surface, still acts into the "ADVENTURE" cutout a lot, which is fun, but often falls flat.
I think I'm rambling now. Whoops! Hope this is of some help, or if not, that it was enjoyable to read at least.
-GM, master of C.R.O.W.S.
Counterpoint: It’s also adorable, if in a slightly messed-up way.