A thriller set in The Conversion Bureau universe
It is a cold new year in Chicago. On her way home, Fiona bumps into a stallion named Chase and decides to help the drunken pony back to the Bureau he is staying in. They soon find themselves dangerously entangled in a chain of events that is bound to teach them a lesson or two of both man- and ponykind. But when the future of Earth as well as Equestria is at stake, learning can sometimes be very, very hard.
Gdocs link includes a companion, which sheds more light to some things in the fic that weren't fully explained, such as technology and the course of events predating the story. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HiBcQBCFT4Ovu9aW7R6IpLO12kkH9plxBWJqEuzKIGo/edit?hl=fi
Chapters (6)
A good start, tracking for now to see what comes next.
I'm not sure if it's from the text editor you're using or not, but some of your spacing was a little off in a couple places.
I see this has been trolled to a low score. Here, take these five, well-earned stars!
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Importing from Gdocs doesn't always work perfectly, though of course, there might be some mishaps by yours truly. Besides, I know I have a weird, possibly stupid, way with paragraphs. If I always leave an empty line, the text looks too thin, and the opposite if I leave all the empties out. So I hit the middle ground that pleases me and probably annoys everyone else.
You duplicated an earlier passage by mistake. That, or else this is poor time travel.
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The substance of your comment falls into the periphery parts of my cognitivity. The mental and temporal distortions I'm currently experiencing are mostly due to my current legislative position as a non-authority, who has to make do with the limited equipment, services, and time available to him.
Or "You lost me there" for short.
lol, Skippy is best side-character
joking aside, could have sworn I heard ominous music playing in the background at the end
And so we reach the end of an ambitious TCB story - I did enjoy it, but I can tell you're a novice writer. I salute you for creating a story with characters we can relate to, for bringing your own vision to a reasonably-well-tread universe and for bringing us to a conclusion that made sense.
Within that, though, you have a lot of room to grow. Your last chapter introduced so much new technology which wasn't explained enough in the earlier chapters - it's really not clear what happened to the bureau still. How did this warp-gun work? Why didn't it kill the guards? How come your protagonist didn't get rich off the suit and the gun technology - obviously he was committed to his insanity, but in addition to creating all this amazing tech, he also had time to be a member of a famous band? You had a lot of moving parts and not all of them meshed as well as they could have, but well done for it!
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Vanity strikes and makes me write a reply. SPOILERS
It is true that when I began writing that companion-thing, I lost count of a few things, but if you stretch yourself a bit with all the technical stuff (all of which is actually explained, but the characters choose not to listen), there's only a single plot hole in the story (which I'm not editing out since I'm moving on to other things). How did it come to this? I thought out the events of story and afterwards began filling the plot holes they had created. Honestly, I think I did quite well with the third-person limited narrator and all (which actually changes for a few paragraphs near the beginning).
Anyway, the plot is rather complicated. The workings of the proton warper could've been explained more but by who (the companion doc, of course...)? Bennett was no engineer or technician, he just had been in corporate military for long enough to know a little about its equipment, which brings us to the fact that Andy didn't build the gun, PAC did. Andy just had acquired/stolen/found it (stolen is canon).
Why didn't [the proton warper] kill the guards? -- an extract from chapter 6: "Because Meadow had shot each of them only once, they were still alive thanks to their now destroyed armour." Sometimes it's simple. Also, Andy isn't the protagonist, he's the antagonist. His concluson just wasn't as simple and short.
Andy didn't create the tech for the suit. He (along with Minnie, who did most of the work, being the more qualified one) only reworked the nanites' work ethic to be less consuming. He could've got rich if he'd sold himself out to the corporation, but he hated the corporation, so no deal. All in all, Andy and Minnie were both dying by the time they got their nanites working.
A member of The Wicked, yes, as fantastic as it is, it's not impossible for a determined man to achieve many things during his life -- even in a universe as warped as this one. The story tells us that Andy's at least 55 years old (59 is canon), so he's had the time. Also, he's not insane, just a master manipulator (yes, he's good at a lot of things, deal with it, though he still estimates some things incorrectly).
TL;DR -- no, go and read the whole thing.