My Little Evangelion

by ProfCharles

Prologue: Today, I die

My name is Twilight Sparkle, and today is the day I die.

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It began 14 years ago, on the day I received my cutie-mark. The day the first sonic rainboom in over a thousand years was performed. The day of Second Impact.

It started as any other—the sun was shining, the birds were singing and I was skipping down the road with my parents. We were going to Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns so I could take the entrance exam. I was so excited; so naive of the pain that was to follow.

When we reached the examination room, I grew nervous. I had studied day and night for weeks; ever since I saw Princess Celestia raise the sun at the Summer Sun Celebration. The examiners looked with on poorly disguised disdain as I attempted to pass the test—to magically hatch a dragon egg. I can still feel their critical, disapproving stares to this day. Cracking under the pressure, I panicked. I couldn't complete the task. In my heart, I knew I was going to fail.

Suddenly, a burst of magic spread across the land. In Cloudsdale, a Pegasus had achieved the speed necessary to perform the mythical Sonic Rainboom. As the magic infused rainbow spread across the land and struck the tower, I felt something in me give way—I felt my mind accept magic in its most pure form. My horn lit up with uncontrollable arcane energies; rogue magic whipping around the tower, warping the very nature of reality. The egg hatches, the dragon within growing tall, bursting throught the celing. My own parents are transformed into houseplants, and the examiners floated into the air. I was unstoppable, uncontrollable. I was terrified.

Then, everything stops, and I find the Princess herself standing over me, speaking.

"Twilight Sparkle, I'd like to make you my own personal protégé here at the school." I will never forget those words. I was so happy, I had passed the exam and I had my cutie mark—a purple star, representing magic. My special talent was magic. It was the best day of my life.

And then the world ended.

Second Impact, they called it. The official story was that a meteorite struck the Great Southern Ice Cap, instantly melting the ice and radically altering the axis of the planet. Sea levels rose dramatically, climate became uncontrollable, earthquakes tore up the land. Coastal cities such as Manehatten sank beneath the waves, whilst the Pegasus city of Cloudsdale was ripped apart, cloud by cloud, rainbow by rainbow, by the raging storms. It took Celestia five years to rebalance the alignment of sun, moon and earth and to restore order to the land. Five years of chaos, of death, of destruction. By the end of it, the death toll was estimated in the tens of millions—over half of our population. The other races were just as badly affected, if not worse; all were scarred by the horrors of the Second Impact.

I didn't know any of this at the time. All I knew was fear, fear and a sense of falling. When Second Impact struck, the city of Canterlot, pearched high on the side of a mountain, was destroyed. The city slid down the mountain, many of the fair towers that it was famous for collapsing into rubble, including the tower I was in. It was so sudden. One moment I was on top of the world, the next digging myself out of the rubble. Aside from the Princess, I was the only survivor from that tower. Not my parents, not even the dragon that I had just hatched had survived. In one dark and terrible moment, my life had been taken from me.

They used to say necessity was the mother of invention. Second Impact taught us differently. Survival is the mother of invention. In the years following Second Impact, pony kind experienced a surge in knowledge and invention. We achieved more technological progress during the 10 years after Secong Impact than throughout one thousand years of peace and harmony. New forms of transport, better building materials and practices, new weapons, computers, medicine: we learned and developed so much in our attempt to survive, to overcome. The height of our technological progress was the city of Canterlot-2, our new capital after the original fell, built at the base of the Canterhorn, upon the runis of the original Canterlot. Each building made of steel and concrete; towers stretching into the air, powered by electricity. It was a home to hundreds of thousands of displaced citizens.

The Princess fomeraly adopted me afterwards, but the disaster kept her busy, so I never saw hide nor tail of her. Instead of teaching me the intracies of magic, I was left to my own devices, and in the chaos of rebuilding civilisation that meant staying out of the way as much as possible. Eventually I was passed back on to my former foalsitter, Princess Cadance, but even she had to leave me eventually, called away on government business. I was left in the hooves of a friend of hers, Lord Fancy Pants, who resided far away from Canterlot-2 in the town of Hoofington, which had survived Second Impact mostly unscathed, but as kind as he was, the noble Unicorn didn't want a child and didn't know how to raise one, so I spent most of my time alone in my room, unloved apart from my books. That is, until I received a very special letter from Princess Celestia...

Author's Note:

Thanks to Inky Jay for proofreading.

Comments

[Doomande]

Hey there Professor Charles, Doomande here with some feedback on behalf of the Authors helping Authors group in here. I know that the norm are reviews on whole stories, or what there is public when they are out, but who do not like chapter to chapter feedback? If you rather would have the normal kind of feedback could I also do that when I am done with your story, but I know from experience that I give the best and most relevant feedback this way, so if it is okay by you would I like to keep doing it like this.

This is a good intro to a crossover, we are shown here very quick how the worlds of the two series, and some of the characters there is taking the place of those we already know. Right now can I see Twilight as Shinji, Celestia in the role of Gendo and Cadance in a possible role as Misato, but I could very well be wrong with this one.

I will not go to deep into the story and writing style yet, but I fond the "jump" in the end rather weird, here am I talking about how we go from the second impact, to how they all rebuild a "better" world, to how all died and then back to what happened in the years after that. I think that you would get a better flow if this chapter followed a linear time line, instead of that jump you made.

Another little thing is that you used hand here "I was left in the hands of a friend of hers", a humanized term, but that is a mistake that all can do, so nothing big there

-Edit-
A thing that first hit me now that I began reading chapter one, I think it would be a good idea to explain where Canterlot-2 is, because right now is it just a unknown big city that we have heard about