“Where to hide, where to hide…” Rosanne mumbled under her breath, biking past the towering buildings on each side of the road. At any rate, she’d be caught long before she could find a good place to camp out. At the very least, she needed to blend in with others; make looking for her a little harder to buy some time.
Her eyes widened. The arcade! There’d be plenty of people there today, and it shouldn’t be too hard to get herself lost in the crowds.
She made a turn at an intersection, swerving around a few people crossing the road. If she pedaled a little faster, she’d have enough time to maybe even play a game or two to make herself more convincing.
She passed through another intersection. The arcade was coming into view up ahead, and just as she predicted, its parking lot was full; Perfect cover until she could regroup with Night and Wildcat. She could slip inside, get herself a card or tokens or whatever it was they decided to use, and maybe put her hood up. Turned around and facing a game, she wouldn’t stand out at all from anybody else!
“C’mon, just get something already!” Robert groaned. “Damian, are you seriously reading the calorie counts on greasy arcade food?”
“Yes.”
“Agh! Just hurry up, then, unless you want to be ditched in the food court!”
Damian rolled his eyes, sliding the money Robert gave him across the counter. “I’ll take a number two medium, please.”
Robert grabbed Elise by the wrist, tugging her away. “Let’s go get some cards, Ellie. Mister Study All Day over there’s just gonna sit around reading anyway.”
“Hey—at least I’m getting better grades than you!”
Robert blew a raspberry at his friend before dragging Elise off to the card loading station.
“That was kinda mean.”
“Yeah, but, y’know, he doesn’t know how to have fun anyway, Ellie!”
The girl looked over her shoulder at Damian. He’d since sat down at a table and pulled out a book while he waited for his food. She felt someone brush past her on the right—the same woman they’d seen earlier.
Maybe she was just really excited to come to the arcade… or something. Things felt a little off about her, though.
But, she was here to enjoy herself, not worry about some random lady she saw on a bike. She could think about her later.
“Come on, not you too, Ellie! Stop staring at strangers! They might try to rob you or something!”
Elise snorted. “Says the person who carries a stuffed wallet.” She felt her phone buzz in her pocket. “…Hold on, lemme answer. It’s probably Lisa or something.”
Of course, pulling the device out confirmed her hunch.
“Hello?”
“Ellie,” Lisa began, “have you seen a woman around with her hood up? We suspect she may have run from a house we busted for being the origin of the hacking last night, but we’re not sure whether or not she’s dangerous.”
“Umm… yeah, she’s somewhere here in the arcade we’re in. I think I might’ve even run into her not too long ago.”
“Alright. We’ll be there soon. Try to get out as soon as possible. It’s possible we may need to bring the police in as well.”
Oh.
Elise turned, spotting the hooded woman still making her way through the masses of people. An idea entered her mind.
“Lisa, I’ll call back later. I’ve got something to do.”
“Wait, Ellie, wha—”
Click.
“C’mon, let’s go this way!” This time, it was Elise dragging Robert. “I saw something interesting over there!”
“W-huh? That’s sudden. What is it?”
Elise pointed a finger. “That lady over there in the hood. You see her?”
“I…” Robert made a face. “Yeah? What about her?”
“Let’s go after her.”
Author's Note: So this is it. This is how this universe is gonna fold, huh? Not with a bang, or even much of a buildup, but with a quiet, defeated whimper.
This has really, honestly been something that's been creeping on me all this time until I finally made the decision today. Pony-Me ends here-- at least, for now.
Into Equestria was written for the sake of getting a sequel out for people who wanted one. I wasn't ready for it quite yet, personally, and I still am not.
From the get-go, Into Equestria was already showings its cracks. The flop that was its first launch and subsequent rewriting showed just how lost I was finding myself, both in the direction of the story, and what I wanted to make of it. This story, unlike Pony-Me, has no basis, unless you wanted to call the confusion I personally had over it its base.
Either way, the task of writing this story quickly turned from a hobby into a job. By the time I started this story, I had already nearly reached parity with Pony-Me on its ground-up rewrite into original fiction. Pace on that story slowed drastically following the publishing of this story, as it took nearly all of my focus and attention just to figure out what I wanted to happen in the next chapter.
Funnily enough, I did have a vague idea already of a potential sequel before I was ultimately pushed into writing this story. Multiple aspects of Into Equestria-- its sudden introduction of a set of antagonists, for example, were thought of before writing really ever began. I had originally intended to let these ideas stew for a time, but eventually gave in to curiosity and included them in the original fiction adaptation. Much to my surprise, it actually turned out quite well, giving me not only a new set of characters I could direct additional energy and content towards, but also a new, morally-grey character in the form of Rosanne. Presently, Rosanne, Lisa, and "Night"-- the latter two being the aforementioned characters originally devised for this sequel, ended up becoming representative of an entire spectrum of ideologies, all clashing at least once within the story.
But that's enough about the original fiction. We're on a site about horsewords, and that original fiction is decidedly not horsewords.
I do feel a little like I might be trying to delay the inevitable still, but the point is, I just don't have it in me anymore. Pony-Me served its purpose faithfully as a passion project, helping me pull myself back to my feet. This story? This story did none of that. At best, it copied elements out of the original fiction's playbook once that story surpassed the point that Pony-Me left off on, and at worst, it became a stumbling mess that both tried to distance itself from Pony-Me and reach out to it at the same time.
I'm tired of this story universe now. The original fiction is the only thing about this series that I still enjoy. I told myself that I would keep myself going, that I'd force my own hand to see Into Equestria through to completion.
But boy, was I wrong.
Though short, this chapter not only remained unnamed, but it took nearly a month to get to this point. It was my attempt to write a high-stakes chase scene in the universe of Pony-Me, but for a sequel to a story that never really had a true antagonist in the first place, simply tossing one in and calling it a day was too much for the universe to handle. Even the very inclusion of the new characters in this story clashed with Pony-Me's lore; Night, for example, was planned originally to be the equivalent to Nightmare Moon before this story was written. Since the concept of her idea was sitting unused when I began incorporating elements of the sequel's concept into the original fiction, I shortened her simply to "Night", and wrote her into Lisa's backstory as the reason behind the deaths of Lisa's parents. In the original fiction, this was a task that I was able to smoothly accomplish. After all, every character in that story was already being rewritten anyway, so what was one more little tweak in a sea of change?
But with Into Equestria? That couldn't happen. I like to write chapters as the ideas come, and I don't like to retcon my own work. Transferring Night directly from the original fiction back into this story would've completely broken Lisa's backstory for the sake of introducing an antagonist, and so I had to settle... and settle, and settle, and settle. The 'Night' in this story is not nearly as prominent as the one in the original fiction, and the same goes for Rosanne. Unlike in the adaptation, those two have remained largely flat in this story. Night exists solely to be a villain character, while Rosanne's existence has yet to really even be justified at all. There's even less I have to say about Wildcat, who I've considered many times already to essentially be a filler character to create a trio parallel to Lisa, Samantha and Argall in the original fiction. Sometimes, I still wonder if I should simply scrap him.
I keep finding myself returning to the original fiction adaptation in this little chat. I guess I'd might as well speak about it here, if I keep returning to it anyway. When I started writing the thing back in... what, mid-2018? --I wanted it to originally be nothing more than a direct adaptation, stripping out the pony aspects of the story and substituting something else in place of it. That felt boring, short to say. But the Pony-Me universe was too limiting to really expand on much without introducing plotholes, and so I made the decision to split the story off as an AU of Pony-Me. I quickly got to work on rewriting the characters from the ground up, starting with Lisa. Since she was a central character across both stories, I wanted to write her character out in a way that could easily transfer between both the original fiction and Pony-Me, with minimal changes. That was the easy part.
Samantha and Timothy? Things weren't quite as easy. Unlike Lisa, who grew into being her own character by the time work had started on rewriting characters, Samantha and Timothy at the time were still more or less humanized versions of Pinkie Pie and Spike, respectively. There also came the question of who they would be in the replacement for Equestria: would their personalities remain the same? How much of an age difference would there be between Lisa and Timothy's characters? Would the subplot of Samantha's split personalities remain with her character?
It took a while, and the scrapping of an entire set of written chapters akin to Into Equestria's rewrite, but eventually, I worked something out. I even drew a rough timeline of events in order to ensure that their respective backstories were free of plotholes. One very big one that still exists to this day in the Pony-Me universe relates to Timothy. The story described him in a way that portrayed him as an infant, or at most a young toddler when Lisa lost her parents. This was done in order to match him better with my view on Spike's age in MLP. However, in doing this, I realized far too late that his lack of really any formal education in Equestria would lead him to ruin following his own disconnection. That issue was supposed to be introduced in Into Equestria as a subplot in order to patch the plothole, but in the original fiction? Planning out Timothy's character for that story was the way I discovered the plothole. It was fixed by simply aging him forward a few years, and setting his character to be the slightly younger twin of Lisa's character, rather than a clearly younger brother akin to Spike.
I guess while I'm still talking about characters, I'd might as well talk about Rosanne as well. Originally intended to be a sort of sidekick to Night during her introduction into the story, subsequent chapters I wrote that focused on her private life convinced me that she'd be far better off as a counterpart to Lisa; her parents are still alive, and yet she still ran away from her life, just like Lisa. Unlike Lisa's decision, however, this running away would be the cause of her being estranged from her family, and would eventually lead her to begrudgingly working under Night. Deep down, she still only wants to make herself and others around her happy, just like Lisa did in the later chapters of Pony-Me. But her current predicament forced her to constantly choose between the lesser of two evils on a near-daily basis, all while maintaining her false identity of "Pretty Lady" (which was modified to Chrissi to fit Into Equestria).
Night, on the other hand, took Lisa and warped her to the extreme. Whereas Rosanne was a sort of caricature of Lisa, taking some of her more morally-grey aspects and amplifying them, Night pounced on the pain that Lisa felt when she lost her parents, and turned it into vengeance. Even when pointed out multiple times just how petty her actions have seemed, in the end, Night turned out to be no more than Lisa was when she first was disconnected: lost. Alone. Confused. Scared.
And it's the fact that I was able to expand so much on these characters, that made me realize that I couldn't make Into Equestria in the way that I was shaping it up to be. Characters are still being written as flat as ever; events happen simply to forward the plot; heck, the only reason I really even needed Elise as a character was because Lisa seemed to be increasingly unavailable following the end of Pony-Me. Unlike Lisa, Ellie never had anything backing her as a character. Lisa was driven by confusion and disconnection from a reality that was unfamiliar to her, but Ellie? Elise Fairchild is driven by the fact that she's Lisa's student, and really not much else.
Lately, I've begun to fantasize of a fresh start-- a point in which I finally get rid of all the old cruft I've built up over the years, especially concerning story universes. It's why the reboots of both Lab Horse and Wielder of the Orb are slated to be single stories, rather than an entire series like the former once was.
Worlds Reset, in fact, was an early test of that fantasy. Beginning originally as two separate story concepts that eventually merged, it pitched a wildly different concept into the open, and started off running. Things quickly began to bog down and slow when planning began for Into Equestria. Ironically, Worlds Reset was actually intended to be a sequel for Pony-Me, even incorporating simulation technology into its lore in my early concepts of it. In the end, I decided against it, and began a whole new story universe around the concept of the Reset.
Now, I'm not sure if I even know how to return to that story again. I haven't tried yet, but I'm hoping it won't turn out as disastrous as my attempts to return to the Lab Horse series pre-reboot.
...
...
I still really wish I didn't need to write this.
I still wish I could've found a way to save this story, to set it on a skyrocketing track similar to how the original fiction has been going.
I still wish I could've enjoyed writing Into Equestria more, or even become as excited about it as I am about the original fiction adaptation.
But in the end, those wishes fell through. The story stumbled into the spotlight, and was gone before it even got going. It was rewritten almost immediately after first being published, but even that was not enough to save it.
And so here I am, announcing its indefinite hiatus.
As always, thank you for reading.
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I think you had more A/N than chapter!
Seriously, though, so sorry to see this go into hiatus. I hope you get some inspiration and continue this soon!
for what it's worth, i quite enjoyed the whole thing.
wish the best of futures upon you, as wondrous as it can come.