( This story was written for the concept album by Vylet and Sylver. Check that out here: Mystic Acoustics )
Post civil-war, Equestrian scientists and engineers across the world exhibit incredible technological advancements, such as the ability for earth ponies and pegasi to use magic. However, Equestria's unsustainability and overpopulation crisis further threatens the prosperity of the civilization. To search for a solution to the world's dilemma, Celestia and Twilight devise a secretive exploration project known as "Starship Ponyville 327000". Its goal: to launch hundreds of soldiers and scientists into the farthest reaches of space to discover other habitable worlds. Amidst these things, a brave new hero is born, bringing an even more serious threat with her.
Story written by Vylet and Sylver
Proofread by HomieRicky, Lavender, Cadie, and Peacetaker
Artwork by Alumx
I've been waiting so long for this, can't wait to read it!
Also listening to the music alongside, of course.
Hell yes! Definitely hitting up this later this week.
Oh maaaaan, that was great!
Story would get a 4/10, but it introduced me to that album, so I'm giving you a 7/10. I really didn't enjoy the "meta-humor" aspect, trying to make light of the cliches you were using. But I did like the descriptive parts of your story when they didn't resort to that.
Also, that album is just good. Thanks for that introduction!
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you should say it's cliche to point out cliches 🤔 // i'll keep that in mind for future writing ^w^
IT'S OUT IT'S OUT IT'S OUT! YEEEEEESSSSSS!
I would imagine it is difficult to hide a city as big as this one...
Considering where she is going I would expect it to be forever...
Anyway, good story.
I'm curious what might happen in the next part.
Will the spaceship fly?
Well, that was a pretty intense story! Satyrn is an interesting character and I loved the sci-fi elements.
Not only that but the music, artwork and writing all compliment each other so well. This whole album is a wild ride and I'm excited to see what you write in the future.
Haven't read it yet, but there is no way this can top Scrimmy Bingus.
Pretty good read, this last chapter being hilarious
Oh no! anyway, does this have anything to do with your song/animation with the same name?
To me, it has certainly become clear that something is wrong here. This chapter of the story is tied to a video that has 71K views on Youtube and masterfully well-done. This story overall, in contrast, has 574 views. The music befitting this story is AMAZING. If it hasn't already been said, that you made a concept-album to go along with the entirety of a written story (or vice-versa), it is still above and beyond what most bronies should have to do to be lauded for their work, although I am well-aware of the positivity you've received on Youtube. As a fellow writer, however, I am somewhat miffed at the fact that for an album so good, those who listened didn't also take the time to read this story for what it is, and it's not as if based on its length it would be that difficult or tiresome of a task to accomplish.
Now, I'm mostly certain that this fact digs at yourself a lot more than me, and I can see how a lot of people would overlook this work of art as being an additional (and in their minds, unnecessary extra) in the same way that many albums often have additional cover/concept art that goes along with the album itself, (the easiest example I can think of off the top of my head is Gorillaz), especially when the artist in question is multi-talented. However this is NOT an unnecessary piece of the puzzle.
You have a triple threat here. Great Music. Great Artwork. Great story; even for as short and simple as it is, and if you wanted me to genuinely critique it for flaws I would but I'm having enjoying this experience far too much.
And yet people seem to have ignored where the source of the story behind the lyrics comes from. THE STORY ITSELF.
Well, I apologize for ranting there a little bit. Take it to heart that I think what you've done is amazing.
—Joshua Aaron Skousen
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This song is directly related to that animation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6s8qZhTQIg
What is described in the story is also what happens in the video. In fact, now I'm wondering what it would be like to listen to the song while reading the story.
I've not read this yet. I'm going to start tomorrow.
I've been a bit out of it since September, so I had kind of forgotten that this was a thing. I remember seeing the quasi-animation for The Watcher, and thinking that I'd like to see the story. Well, yesterday I was listening to random music on youtube while working, when fate and/or the gods of watch history led me to your music again. I heard several tracks that I liked which I hadn't heard before, all of which were from this album. So I gave the whole album a listen.
Honestly, I was disappointed. There were the few tracks I'd listened to on youtube, and they were still awesome, but there were also these little... cheesy radio-ad blurbs stuck into a few otherwise-amazing songs. Don't get me wrong, the lyrics to songs like The Watcher and Treachery are great in their own right, even as solo songs without a whole fic or even an album to back them up. Some great music in all the tracks, but a few of them just kinda felt like a sad little pitch for the story. I decided that I wasn't going to read the story.
Then I heard the last track, Αστέρι. That just... I don't know. I know enough Greek to pronounce it, and I know what it means. But the sound of it just hit me in the stomach. It's so completely foreign to the rest of the album, but like it was waiting underneath the whole thing and the entire album was just waiting for this. It just grabbed me. By the harmonica bit at the end I was crying.
I stand by my opinion of the ad-like blurbs in the album, but...
if you can do with prose half of what you can do with music, then I will not be disappointed. I am greatly looking forward to this.
Hmmm.
I've read "chapter 1" but it's not so much a chapter as a prologue. There's no story here, just kind of a list of events. Events I find implausible without enough story to justify Celestia creating a terrorist organization to distract the people from an unpopular space program. I mean, I get that it's in the future and all, but without a story (so far, at least) to justify actions that seem so different from the Celestia (and the Twilight!) that we know, it's just jarring.
I'm going to trust that the story justifies it in subsequent chapters, but I would have rather learned these things as the story progresses, so that I see the world in which Celestia made such a harsh decision, rather than just being told that she had.
I guess that I'm kind of treating this like the front jacket flap, rather than a first chapter.
This is another chapter of summary?
It reads more like an outline than a story. I'm curious if the style continues in this fashion, or if it evolves into a story proper.
This is starting to be some weird hybrid of outline and tiny hints of narrative structure. It still reads like the notes one would make for a ~10k word chapter. There are even asides that seem like the author is commenting to himself.
As the story develops more narrative structure, it's starting to conflict with the explanatory outline style. Single paragraphs shift from current events narrated in past tense into explanations given in present tense, even into asides where the narrator speaks directly to the reader, then back into Satyrn's own internal thoughts. It's difficult to follow, laborious to read, and very jarring.
The song and animation do a better job of conveying the content of this chapter. There is, in fact, absolutely zero additional content in this chapter as compared to the animation.
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I was thinking the same thing.
That's right, Satyrn was a massively special Mary Sue from chapter 3? For reasons?
Once again, this is an outline, not a story. Tense changes, author's asides to the reader and to himself, and summaries of events, rather than any sort of narrative.
This is about as exciting as the swordfight in Pride and Prejudice. Sad, because it is my favorite track from the album.
This was weird and didn't make a lot of sense. How did she know he was her brother? Why would she care after so many years without a single thought of him? Why would her brother have the next number unless they were twins? I guess not a lot makes sense here, so...
Right with you girl.
So
I admit, I'm a bit frustrated, and a bit angry. Not because this story was bad - it was - but because of what this whole thing could have been.
This whole thing. The album, the artwork, the snippets of worldbuilding and action in the lyrics and song descriptions on youtube, and then the story. It was all part of this wonderful cohesive whole, something synergistic and beautiful.
And then I read the "story." This wasn't a story. It was a quickly jotted-down story outline, which could later be written into a story. This made me immensely sad. After listening to the album a few times, and some of the songs literally dozens of times, I was hoping for something as emotionally impactful as the music.
The idea, the grandeur of what you tried to do, that is something amazing. To tie everything together. The art was expressive and evocative. The music was sublime. The prose was... absent.
As a musician, feelings are your stock in trade. You - not musicians in general, you specifically - can tell a story with the sparest words, convey a wealth of thoughts and feelings without having to put together dialogue or narrative. You are among the very few pony musicians I've spent money on, and for good reason. Wireless tells a story. It truly does. Maybe I couldn't put the story into prose, maybe I couldn't tell you who was speaking or what exactly happened, but there is absolutely a story there, and I can feel every bit of it. say what you want tells a story. Maybe it's a true story, maybe it's a story you created when real life ground you under its heel, but when I listen to that, I am right there with you. Little Dreams tells a story. The album Love Letters tells a story.
Αστέρι tells a story, too. It's a story that punches me in the gut. It twists up my heart and brings tears to my eyes. There is not a single word in it, but the art and the music and the songs that came before it all combine in a wonderful synergy that lifts me along with Satyrn into the stars. This is what you do.
Sure, I think some of the songs in the album could have done without the cheesy radio-ad promo lyrics. I'd love to see a version of the album without vocals on a handful of the songs. Because the music was so powerful and so moving. Everything in the album was connected, everything led into the next, and at the end was this wonderful denouement that, even just thinking about as I type this, literally brings tears to my eyes.
Some things are better left unsaid. There was so much beauty and depth and fear and warmth and joy in the story you composed that maybe the details didn't need to be filled in. You can paint with emotions things that perhaps noone can draw with prose. Or perhaps it takes someone with more skill than you or I. Perhaps prose is simply not your forte. You found someone whose art complimented your album so very well. If you truly feel that this album needs a prose fiction to go with it, then I beg of you, find someone whose talent in prose can match your talent in melody and verse.
I had to come back to this. One of those things you just can't stop thinking about.
After listening to the album straight through a couple of times (without reading the lyrics alongside), I retract my earlier comments about the album. The lyrics work better as lyrics than as prose, and are not meant to be read - they are meant to be experienced as part of the musical whole.
I found the album worth spending my scant dollars on.
I tried, and it really works when I read the story while listening to the music, they roughly end at the same time.
Two questions here.
So at the end, why did she name the assasin ‘watcher’?
And, secondly, Littlepip in fallout equestria had several nightmares after her ‘first blood’, why it seems that Satyrn decided to kill instead of just impairing the assasin and capture him without hesitation?
Just a random suggestion: read any chapter of this story with the vylet pony’s remix of the kahoot song
I can’t stop laughing even when I’m typing these words
So why can’t the ponies be bothered to look at their orbital scan results CAREFULLY before the invasion happens?
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The story was meant to be read within 5 minutes, which is the length of the song
When I first read about Sylver......
The image came up was the cover of ‘cadance of the dying’
Spoilers
I actually thought she was joking
I retrieve my comment on the previous chapter.
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Actually, wireless is a remix from DJ pon3...
What is with these names? <.<
I like your music. This, I think, did not accomplish what you set out to do.
I quite literally facepalmed here.
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By that did you mean why they didn't search for Statera using orbital scans? Well the answer for this is that Equestria had no idea Statera even existed, since Satyrn hadn't given any hint to its existence either.
Where was Neighpon supposed to be? Somewhere in Japan i presume since what Sylver had shouted is in Japanese
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Bu if they had orbital scans, why wouldnt they find it before?
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Really done nothing Marysue worthy. The problem is the album gives her more depth than the story, in which shes... kinda bland.
That's IT for this song?
terrorists win
32.7 The Creek? :0
picture is broken unfortunately. "Upstream error"