Malfoy stares at it.
“What?” Cherry Berry asks.
“That’s a train,” he states simply.
“Yes, yes it is,” Bonbon answers. “That’s the train that’ll take us to Equestria.”
“That’s a train in a building,” he states.
“All trains are in buildings at some point,” Starlight informs him. “As a matter of fact, the Hogwarts Express is stored in a shed.”
He shakes his head. “No, no. That’s a train, in a building, with no tracks to get out.”
She looks at him like he’d just said something blatantly false. “Uh, no, it has tracks to get out. Through the gate.”
“What gate?”
She points. “That gate.”
He looks at the tunnel she’s pointing at, sloping down and out of sight, a pair of railway tracks leading into the darkness.
“What gate?” he repeats.
Bonbon puts a hand on his shoulder. “That tunnel is the gate,” she informs him. “It’s roughly sixty miles long, and lets out in Equestria, outdoors. The first few times we used the gate, we teleported- but once we had time to actually build something, the train makes it ridiculously easier. And what you’re not seeing is the five more trains on this line, or the forty-four still being built.”
“... Oh. So, an hour and a half in a helicopter, then… What? An hour? In a train?”
But all three girls have suddenly become distracted by something.
He looks at them, waiting for a second, before tapping Bonbon on the shoulder. “What’s happening?” he asks.
Bonbon shakes her head. “Sorry, nothing. Just had some undercover criminal or another try to kill Professor McGonagall when Fluttershy ratted him out. She’s good with a gun, though, so she took him out. She did specify he’s still alive, so she clearly found an easy way to stop him in his tracks without converting his head to chunky salsa.”
Malfoy shudders. “Ouch.”
Bonbon nods. “Yeah… Honestly, I was hoping we’d have more time to get used to school life before the staff found out every one of us Agents are heavily armed, but…”
“No, no,” Starlight informs her. “All they know so far is that Fluttershy has an S&W five hundred, and that she’s fast enough on the draw to beat a magician silly. They don’t know anything about the rest of us.”
“True,” Bonbon mutters, and her hand moves up to her mic. “Readiness Delta Seven.” Her hand drops away from it again. “Anyways, Draco- you were going to spend a day as Silver?” She gestures towards the train. “This is the way there. I will warn you, I’m a lot bigger than you on the other side.”
“Huh?”
Nod. “Yep. Cherry and Starlight will also be a lot bigger. And while Starlight’s a unicorn like you, me and Cherry are both earth ponies- no horn.” She pauses for a second. “And, it would seem Lyra will be joining us on the other side.”
He blinks. “Isn’t she at the castle?”
She nods again. “Yep. She’s just finished papa tango-ing Hermione- all she has left is to explain a few things and she’ll be on her way.”
“How will she get there, though…?”
Shrug. “She’ll teleport. The matrix she gave you may be the simplest, but it’s also the most power-hungry. She makes long-distance teleportation look easy- she could go from Hogwarts to Canterlot and back several times in a row, on the more common high-efficiency teleport, before running anywhere close to low on power. With her custom, extreme-efficiency teleport, that takes advantage of certain aspects of her unique magic, she can actually make it to the moon and back if she exerts herself.”
“All the way to the moon?” Malfoy asks, looking up at the ceiling.
“Yes,” Bonbon nods. “That’s what she told me last month when I asked how her reserves were holding up with all the teleportation.”
“... Oh.”
“Anyways, hop on the train already. I’m moderately curious what you’ll think of Ponyville.”
He looks over at her as he allows himself to be lead into the train car. “Moderately curious?” he asks incredulously.
She rolls her eyes. “Oh, alright. Morbidly curious. But you should know, we won’t transform until we actually hit the other end of the tunnel- and enter the Equestrian universe.”
He scowls, sitting next to Bonbon as the train begins to move. “Well, that’s no fun,” he mutters.
Bonbon nods. “Yeah, it is no fun.”
Time seems to crawl as the train plows on down the tunnel. Before long, too excited to have anything to say to the girls, he gazes out the window… at the solid, fairly featureless wall of the tunnel. He actually can’t tell if it’s moving, just by looking at it; only the occasional puff of smoke or steam racing past tells that tale.
Bonbon leans on him very suddenly, eliciting a surprised yelp that amuses both the other two girls. “You know something?” she mutters.
He looks down at her. “What?”
“I’m going to miss being the same size.”
“What?” he asks again, this time confused.
She smiles, looking up at him. “We turn into humans when we step out one end of the tunnel, and into ponies when we step out the other,” she states. “In between, we hold onto the form of whichever world we’ve been in most recently. With this much space, we kinda know exactly how the size comparison goes.” She sighs. “You probably already know conservation of mass is not one of the constraints of this transformation. After all, you’re a good bit smaller as a filly than as a boy, right?”
He nods. “Yeah?”
“Well, it’s the other way around for us adults. If we were adults on this side as well, we’d be mighty close to conservation of mass- but no, we’re all little girls. So when we cross the border, you’ll shrink and I’ll grow.”
“... Oh.”
A whistle blows somewhere up ahead.
Bonbon straightens up. “Oh, and we’re almost there. That’s the warning signal- the engineer has the exit in sight.”
Malfoy looks at her, and straightens up himself; he’d been leaning against the wall, next to the window. Then, he looks down at his hand. “One thing I’ve been wondering… How do I look? In a full-body mirror, when not freaked out about being transformed into a strange creature?”
Bonbon smiles at him. “You’re in luck, then,” she informs him. “Me and Lyra have several of those.”
Something catches his attention, in the corner of his eye, out the window. He turns his head to look- and a moment later, the window passes through the tunnel exit. As it does so, he feels himself shrink- though, like the reverse transformation, it’s completely painless. He glances down, at his hand- and finds exactly what he expected: A silver hoof.
Then he turns to look towards the three girls- or, other three girls, now.
And blinks.
He’s tempted to rub his eyes and look again, but he knows that won’t help.
They’re… huge. It takes him a moment to match hair- mane- colors to names, and further match them to coat colors and… ponies. Bonbon is cream-colored; Cherry Berry is hot pink, and Starlight is a more purplish color. He himself- now a she- is still the same silver he- she- remembers.
“This is going to be confusing,” he mutters to himself.
Bonbon looks down at him. “Oh?”
He nods. “Yeah. Just trying to think of myself as a filly instead of a colt or boy.” He sighs. “And teaching myself to respond to my Equestrian name, Silversong.”
Bonbon ruffles Silver’s mane with a hoof. “You know, I’d say you’ll get it down pat in no time, but I’m not sure how true that’d be,” she chuckles. “All of my experience is in the Agency- and we regularly operate with codenames, that change from time to time.”
Silver tilts her head. “Agency?”
She nods. “Yeah. The whole ‘Royal Equestrian Secret Service’ thing is a fictitious cover for the Royal Intelligence Agency.” She glances out the window. “To convince Britain that we’re a defensive organization with the solitary goal of protecting our Equestrian subjects. While that is one of our goals, it’s not even our primary goal- they can take care of themselves quite well, for the most part. Our primary goal aligns more neatly into our purpose as secret investigators, infiltrators, and of course, Equestria’s toughest monster hunters.”
“So, you… opened a gate to another world?”
“No,” Bonbon states simply, as the train comes to a halt. “That was Lyra. While off duty. She’d planned to explore this world on her own time- but when droves of owls started coming through the gate with Hogwarts letters, she took it straight to the Agency.” She chuckles, rising to follow the other two mares to the door. “A classic case of something small turning out to be a lot bigger than anypony thought. And, of course, timely action rather neatly heading off a disaster.”
Silver follows after her, not stumbling in the slightest. “That… makes sense, actually.” Then she blinks, pausing for the briefest of moments. “Wait a sec,” she states, trotting forwards to get next to Bonbon. “What’s keeping regular humans from getting on this train?”
“They never get into that room,” Bonbon answers. “While the tunnel is the Gate, it’s easier for us to establish a larger space to guard. That entire room is warded against incursions of all kinds, including Equestrian teleportation. Lyra did a bit of tricky spellwork to get it to not block Equestrian teleports that only contain Equestrians; I will never understand how that works.” She glances down at Silver as the two walk out onto the station platform. “And if they try to enter in a more manual way, the entire room doesn’t exist- that archway in is simply solid wall to them.” She shakes her head. “Another bit of spellwork nopony but Lyra can understand.”
Very suddenly, a green unicorn appears out of nowhere, a matter of feet in front of them. “Hey Bonnie!” the unicorn greets cheerfully.
Silver stares for just a moment, before mentally identifying the white-and-light-blue mane.
Bonbon doesn’t wait for her to figure it out on her own, though. “There you are, Lyra,” she answers. “What took you so long? I just explained everything to Silversong alone!” She gestures towards Silver.
Lyra looks over at her. “Silversong? Has-- Wait, WHAT? He turned into a filly?!”
Silver winces, and nods. “Yeah.”
“Is- um- are you okay with that?” Lyra stutters.
She blushes. “Yeah.”
“Hmm…” Lyra’s horn flickers, as she begins muttering to herself. “Yeah, that looks about right… But why…?”
Silver cringes away. “What are you doing?” she asks.
Lyra blinks. “Oh, sorry. I was just…” She stares off into space as her horn flickers another few times, then finally nods. “Ooooh, that makes sense.” She refocuses on Silver. “When I first made and applied the spell, I assumed biological gender would carry through- truth is, it wouldn’t. If you’d started on this side, it would- our human forms are created on first passage based on our Equestrian forms- but you started on the other side. When the spell expanded your magic to that of an Equestrian, I noticed it gave you an Equestrian form in the process. Not an unexpected effect, but I wrongly assumed it would be based on your human form. Fact is, it’s based on your personality instead- and apparently, your personality was a better match to a filly than to a colt.”
Then Lyra scowls. “And there’s something more in your core magic matrix I’m going to have to research a little. It looks like Earth’s magic fields will have disguised it, much like Equus’ magic fields disguise our cutie mark magic, meaning I won’t have seen it there… but the rest of us certainly don’t have it. Maybe if we can identify it, we can figure out if it’s worth formulating a spell to add it to an Equestrian’s core?”
“Uhh…” Bonbon mutters, looking at Lyra. “Are you sure? I don’t much fancy being a platinum blonde. With peach fur.”
Lyra shakes her head. “Nah- the addition of the Equestrian magic more than doubles the size of the magical core, forcing it to take on a primarily Equestrian shape- which forces the subject to have an Equestrian form as their primary form. Hence why Silver kept her mane colors as a human, and why Hermione will, once she gets them. But that little bit Silver has that no Equestrian has is like a dust mote next to that- say, a quarter of a percent of the magical core. There would be flat nothing in noticable effects, save the addition of whatever capability that bit confers.” Then she glances at Silver. “Anyways, the plan was to explore town in time to have lunch at Sugarcube Corner, right?”
He’s halfway into the Hogwarts grounds- again- to cross-examine the staff when the letter reaches him.
He has to turn around.
There’s another emergency Board meeting.
He turns around.
This had better be important.
His son is still missing.
I'm starting to think you made this too complicated. Its beginning to feel like a chore reading through these chapters where it has to constantly explain how the ponies do anything or why something happens the way it does and it's all done with a bunch of technical jargon I couldn't really care less about at this point.
It's just not very fun to read.
Basically, there comes a point where the explanation of "why/how" can be summerized by "It's magic" or "A wizard did it".
A personal rule of thumb: If you have to explain so much that your story seem more like a lecture on your magic system, you've probably expanded the magic system too much.
What we see the ponies doing here seems completely unrelated to what we see ponies doing in the show. You're explaining it, fine; but it seems like you are turning the ponies into something completely unrelated to what they are in the show.
Other than Bonbon being an agent courtesy of episode 100 (smiley face), everything else seems to come from nothing.
9664487
That's your opinion. I happen to like it a lot. And hope the author keeps it up.^_^
9664590
You did notice the ' Alt. Universe ' tag, right? That means that it's an Alternate Universe, and doesn't have to match the show. When you see that tag, don't expect things to be like they are in the show now.
9664601
Well yeah but it's also a crossover. The whole point of a crossover is that we want to see the characters as we know them interacting with each other. If you're gonna completely reinvent the ponies then you'd be better off just writing a story about that since the crossover element is just gonna get in the way of the reimaging of the pony universe.
9664629
It's an Alternate Universe, and a Crossover. The tags say so. If you don't like such things, why are you reading this?
I for one happen to like Alt. Uni Crossovers. There's all sorts of new things to see. So many new dynamics to explore now.^_^
If you want the characters exactly as you know them, go read the source material. Or, steer away from fics with an Alt. Universe tag. When that tag is involved, you will not find the characters as you know them.
9664629
You make the ponies' behaviors sound consistent... and perfectly reproducible by any author.
I never was very good at repeating someone else's character personality- so that's the first reason for which I use the AU tag. I've also done a lot of stuff on my own here- and you'll notice almost everyone here are background characters in either MLP or HP. As a matter of fact, for the British students, I've been deliberately selecting students that were underdeveloped and/or unmentioned in the books, leaving them blank slates for me!
If you want canon-behaved HP characters mixing with canon-behaved MLP characters, go watch some boring sitcom or some Pyrrhic Bolo battle, because such a story doesn't exist and that's about the closest you're going to get. My stories primarily mix universes, not characters; I modify the characters in order to create some conflicts and eliminate others. I also even modify the universes a little, in deciding exactly how the two magics compare, for example.
If you have an idea for some event or sequence of events you would like to see in any of my stories, please feel free to mention it. I do rather regularly run out of ideas, and that's when I start getting into worldbuilding chapters like this. I am complex, I am detailed, and I have a good memory, so my worlds tend to be complex and finely detailed, even if much of it never comes to light.
9664590
It's worth note that most of my characters are background characters in the show, and there are many different interpretations of who they are. Unfortunately, you simply cannot please everyone; thus, I don't hold religiously to the show, and have my characters behave on my interpretation of them. As a matter of fact, in this story (and some others as well), I've even added hidden layers to developed canon characters!
How convoluted will this story get? I won't read it if it's too convoluted.
9664689
That depends on your definition of convoluted.
If you don't like it, don't read it.
But if you're going to criticize it, be more specific. I'm always striving to improve, but I can't do anything with generic information like 'convoluted'.
9664666
You make this sound like some impossible feat but that's generally how a crossover works. You don't need to alter things to create conflict as the conflict naturally occurs when you mix two universes that had previously existed apart from each other.
When you have Batman meet Superman you don't need to drastically alter the characters or their universes (speaking in TV terms here) to create a conflict you can already see how the characters will conflict with each other based on how drastically different the two are, Batman being dark and gritty and Superman being brighter and more hopeful.
Honestly, I don't mind what you do with background characters, they are more or less blank slates if you ignore B-canon, the issue is that you are drastically changing the Pony Universe when you really don't need to. And if you really want to reinvent the wheel why leave the Harry Potter Universe more or less the same?
There is also no reason to explain every facet of the pony magic, sometimes it's okay to just keep things simple especially when the explanation is being made to an 11-year-old who won't understand half the things they are talking about anyways. This chapter could have just boiled down to "we are going through the gate where it will turn us into ponies when we pass through, heads up we're actually a lot older when we're ponies due to how the transformation works." There simple, whole chapter trimmed down to a single sentence.
We don't need to get an entire thesis paper on how everything works especially when it's being explained to a child and a lot of it has already been explained previously.
9664715
"Ponies go to Hogwarts and stuff happens."
There, we don't need a story to read, because that's what the entire story boils down to.
That's what you're saying.
A realistic merge of the two worlds, with canon personalities & laws & magics & etcs, would quickly result in the ponies basically being shoved to the side like centaurs, wizards lording over them. Then Celestia and Luna not being happy, and attacking. And a war... then the whole world would end in mutual destruction. See Bolo battle with Pyrrhic victory.
Either that or nothing happens, and everything's all happy-go-lucky.
Of course I had to change something. The natural conflict would have been too severe. If you don't like the changes I've made, you are under no obligation to read this story.
The criticism is more coming from the amount of change to the Pony world GREATLY outweighing the current changes to the Harry Potter world. Had you changed the Harry Potter universe more visibly in the previous twenty-six chapters (beyond throwing in a family curse on the Malfoys) the changes to the ponies wouldn't stand out quite as much.
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There are other issues though. With how much you've changed the ponies it feels like none of these characters from a show with the tagline Friendship Is Magic have been doing much friend-making. For the most part it looks like they've just been sticking to their insular pony cliques with a couple minor instances of them deigning to let some of the inferior humans hang out with them.
On top of that though, the only person who actually feels like an individual so far in this story is Draco/Silversong, with everyone else feeling like the semi-autonomous limbs of two competing hive minds. Part of this comes from both the ponies and the Hogwarts staff having instant communications of some sort or another, but it also greatly stems from a near-total lack of non-critical person-to-person interaction. There's been practically zero swapping stories or cracking jokes so far, and that'd make characters feel simultaneously more like individuals AND feel more connected. Like, this feels like the first chapter where any two characters spent any length of time talking one-on-one, it was kept extremely strictly business, and involved the two characters that had the most characterization applied to them so far already while the third most characterized person popped up at the end.
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There is also an issue with the ponies vengefully enacting involuntary permanent magical alterations that changed the base SPECIES of the heir to a family of pseudo-nobility that is not only highly politically influential, but also explicitly wizard supremacist in ideology. It doesn't matter that their magic is going to be leaps and bounds stronger now, or that it broke a family curse (that kinda feels shoehorned in to make the net result look more positive, but I'm willing to wait and see where y'all're going anywhere with it). This is a world where unicorns are viewed as nothing but beasts, and Lucius' boss LITERALLY eats them! (unless you've changed that)
This wouldn't be quite as worthy of criticism if it wasn't for you introducing Hermione shortly afterwards as someone who has ample motive to undergo an experimental spell willingly. I could easily see Draco getting upset that some "unfairly powerful mudblood" got a mana-boost (bonus points for noticing a change to the hair change in relation to her family curse) and in some manner coercing the ponies (whom would still be looking for test subjects) to do so.
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On top of that, Lyra, supposedly one of the more "level-headed" unicorns, thought deploying a weapon with potential destructive power to rival the tsar bomb as a distraction was a good idea simply because she could theoretically reduce the damage dealt! At this point the only reason the wizarding world wouldn't go to war with the Equestrians is because Equestria has such a higher power-scale than the wizards do at the moment!
Taking this all in, these "ponies" are acting more akin to capricious and often malevolent fairies. If this is what you're going for, good job I guess, but at this point with the changes to MLP and the rather cliche nature of the Harry Potter universe's lore it feels like this story would genuinely shine better if written without the shackles of other IPs holding it down. This would also make the explanations of how the magic system works less cumbersome because at least it'd be exposition about magic in worlds new to the reader.
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Also, so far you've written Lucius Malfoy as if he's intended to be a C-list team-rocket-esque comedy antagonist, but the most he's done in this story to elicit schadenfreude is insulting the Weasleys in a bar, and that was immediately countered by Luna deciding to throw down. Right now he's just a man trying to track down his missing child while said offspring has literally been abducted by aliens and subjected to strange experiments that changed them on both physical and metaphysical levels, and it feels like you want us to laugh about that when honestly it just elicits sympathy.
I do actually feel that Silversong being trans is a good change to the source canon, however, I have issue with how much she took the transformation itself in stride. Even as a trans girl and a furry, if eleven-year-old me unexpectedly and PAINFULLY shapeshifted into a unicorn filly I'd be horribly shaken regardless of how happy I was with the end result. It feels like a clumsy Chekhov's Gun to make her effectively incapable of feeling shock (specifically because the Chekhov's Gun is noticeable in the first place), and like an indicator of something actually being wrong with her mentally.
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Finally, NOBODY would be here, twenty-six chapters into the story, if we didn't see enough redeeming qualities to continue reading regardless of our criticisms, so your comments of "don't like, don't read" come across as both arrogant and insulting to a readership who is generally enjoying the story despite having issues with it.
If you have an actual plan that requires so many characters to be OOC to this extent we're going to need some explanation of why, preferably exposited in-universe, beyond "apparently ninety percent of Ponyville is part of Equestria's elite military units. [shrug]" I'd genuinely rather we NOT get an explanation of that one in the comments because it feels crucial enough that it needs to be included in the actual story.
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I do want to close with something positive: I admit if I feel I need to say something it tends to be critical in nature.
I LIKE that you decided not to immediately disclose to the world at large that the ponies aren't naturally human. A healthy level of distrust of humanity, especially Wizarding Britain, is smart. Too few crossover/HiE stories have addressed the sheer amount of xenophobia present in most human cultures. The ponies might be generally friendly, but they're not stupid; in this scenario they'd quickly realize they were appearing as the children of the local dominant species and subsequently that appearing to be children puts them at a severe disadvantage both in combat and in diplomacy, hence assuming the student roles provided to them for reconnaissance.
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Sorry for the absurdly long comment.
I'm still surprised that Fluttershy is in such an agency with her nature