Interlogue: Spice Must Flow
A room of rituals has been prepared
Sigils are etched into the floor
A mare walks in to meet her fate
She will soon leave, but through no door.
An audience this strange mare has:
Mages, nobles, peasants, kings.
So silently they stand and watch
As now she steps into the ring.
Before she leaves, they give her things:
A blade: to live. A cloak: to hide.
She does accept them gracefully
Though she glances to the sides.
Who could it be she hopes to see?
A brother or perhaps a friend?
Or maybe parents, strong and soft
To see her mayhap meet her end?
She sees nopony she would like,
But does not shed a single tear.
She calmly walks into the ring,
Stepping surely to hide her fear.
The mages horns are all aglow.
Sigils start shining, all stand clear,
Except the mare inside the sign.
Her presence fades, she disappears—
To reappear in warmer climes,
'mid desert rock and cruelest sand.
She casts a look of longing sweet,
Then begins, soft, to cross the land.
Already exhausted, the mare
Falls to the ground, and she stays there.
Though still alive, her closéd eyes
See not her savior from the skies.
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Fantastically done. I do hope Amber's final tirade gets some gears turning in the minds of the audience. This oh-so-rational society sure did react irrationally to earth pony cuisine, didn't it?
Now for the sequel...
3783011
You have no idea how happy I was to read that comment. Stuff I'm going for actually getting through to readers? Heck yes!
3784415
Thank you, sir for your epic tribute to Amber Spice. That quote you pulled out is a reference to a trio of "Chinese" curses, each more severe than the last.
3786508
As a wise boy once said (on the subject of how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop),"The world may never know."
3819453
What kind of author would I be if it were anything less? Not one who was good at motivating his characters, that's what!
bravo
What, no more chapters to read?! Villainy!
Edit: Oh, wait a sequel. Good, good....
4107611
Mwahahahaha! My evil plan to leave people without chapters to read is finally coming to fruition... Wait, who posted a sequel?
It was me?
CURSE YOU, BUGSYDOR! YOU HAVE FOILED ME YET AGAIN!
My own less-than-sane monologue aside, I'm glad to see you're excited to see more of Amber Spice's adventures. I know I am, as well.
Wow. This sat in my read later list for a long time. I figured it was intriguing enough to read some day, but would only be mildly enjoyable. I actually found this to be pretty good. It was only brought back to my attention by you posting on my user page. This story really needs more views. I just wish I knew how the windigos were dealt with in this AU.
4568310
Glad you enjoyed it, and it's really good to hear that it exceeded your expectations. I plan to get to the windigoes eventually, but I'll admit it's not planned for the near future. I hope the sequel lives up to the standards that this story has set up in your eyes.
Hey, I wrote a review of your story. It can be found here.
Overall, I found it a unique, funny, and overall enjoyable story, but found it a too unfocused at times.
4605708
Thanks. I'll check it out.
Lovely work on the poem.
Now I'm off! I have a sequel to read!
5494372
Finally, someone who appreciates the poem!
Pierce is a character that I love to hate, even if he is a bit shallow.
Yeah, Stocky is a favorite of mine as well. Sadly, Spicy's been married to her job for about as long as she's known Outta Stock, and is leaving the country in the wake of her rather messy metaphorical divorce from said job. Oh, what might have been...
Glad you liked the tirade. It was quite the emotional payoff for me as well.
This fic title sounds like something a Warhammer 40k fan would get, eh?
5772090
The reference is mainly limited to the title, and perhaps the fantastic racism.
Fer the Empreh!
5772674 Yes, For tha emperah!
Great story! How did you get it posted on EQD? I've been trying forever to get my story posted there but it keeps getting rejected for 'grammatical' reasons, I don't understand it. Anyhow I enjoyed your story very much and have added it to my favorites!
Keep writing my friend! I look foreword to your next submission.
LateBronyWriter
6293501
Without reading your story, I honestly could not tell you how this story got featured where yours did not meet their standards. One guess is that I'm kinda paranoid about getting all of my grammar right, and tended to show chapters to multiple prereaders before I dared to post anything. Then again, EqD has historically had some weird grammar hang-ups on things like what kind of dash you can use.
Another possibility is that this fic got accepted in a different era. One in which having a firm grasp of writing mechanics was more important to making it onto the site than was having a good story. I don't think that's your problem, though, given that EqD was claiming that yoir fic had "grammar issues."
Judging by your comments section, a lot of people are enjoying your work. The best advice I can give you is to nab yourself a dedicated prereader or two, and get them to sign off on things like grammar before anything gets posted. If you can't find a friend to preread for you, you can always check out the fimfic prereader groups. Also, the Gdocs to Fimfic converter can be a bit buggy, so you need to keep an eye out there for omissions and formatting weirdness. When you're looking for grammar weirdness, keep an eye out for things your spell checker will miss. By that, I mean look out for homophones (e.g. there/their/they're) and similarly spelled words (e.g. on/one). I hope this helps.
Anyhow, I'm glad you enjoyed this story. Thanks for the fave and the watch, as well! As for my next submission, I already have a sequel posted. It's nowhere near complete and it updates infrequently, but it's still a story I enjoy telling. Right now, though, I'm working on a sort of fusion crossover (the same style of crossover as your fic, actually) with Monster Hunter International, so that'll be the next thing I post. Hopefully it'll get posted by the end of September.
Hope you get yourself featured, and I hope you enjoy my other works!
6293796 I've already nabbed a proofreader to help me with my work, and am looking at a few other readers who enjoy my work and might be willing to give it another thorough review. On that note..... you wouldn't happen to be busy would you?
LateBronyWriter
6293807
Between studying for actuarial exams, learning to make Forex trading algorithms, interacting with friends, and finding enough downtime to keep myself sane, it's hard to find time for anything else. And then there's managing my unhealthy addiction to reading...
Unfortunately, I am super busy.
Maybe you could try asking TheMaskedFerret for help? She's a pretty cool person, in my experience, and no stranger to prereading. It also helps that she's an EqD staffer, too. If I recall correctly, she's one of their fic reviewers. I can't promise she'll have time for your fic, or that she'll like it, but she might be able to help you get it up to snuff.
Good luck!
6293890 Thanks for the recommendation! I'll give her a call. And good luck with your exams I'm getting back into schooling myself.
LateBronyWriter
Heresy? if I read this story, will there be BLAM?
7082338
There will not, unfortunately, be any headshots doled out by righteous commissars, seeing as guns have yet to be invented in this timeline.
There will be explosions, though. And heresy. Extra heresy is to be saved for the sequels, however.
7594111
I just figured out today that your name was a pun. A pun so blindingly obvious that it was hidden in plain sight. I must applaud you for this, good sir.
Huh. You actually read at least one of my blagposts. You, sir, are the second-most thorough and the fastest investigative type that I have yet had the pleasure of meeting.
You are right that this story is a tragedy, though I had no conscious intention of writing one at the time. My only intention, at the time, was to write myself up an excuse to drop a somewhat racist, fish-out-of-water unicorn into the middle of a pegasus-infested desert. And then I started writing, and fell in love with the characters. I knew from the start I was working towards Spicy's downfall, after a fashion, but I kept things lighter, focusing on the fun, the character interactions, and the !!SCIENCE!! I wanted the world (or really, the subset of the world that reads my horse words) to know who Amber Spice was, and I think I succeeded.
Guess I managed to write a happy tragedy in the process. How delightfully paradoxical! What allows that to be a thing? My guess is that this story's end is really just the beginning of the next adventure: the kickoff to a quest of redemption, of sorts.
As you said, though the tragedy label technically fits, the connotations of the tag don't. I know I tend to avoid the tag like the plague, myself, because I don't like being sad, and associate tragedy with the sads. The tags exist to advertise to potential readers what they can expect from a story, so they can find things they like. As "correctly" tagging the fic as a tragedy would actually be misleading, I will leave the tags as-is for now.
Thanks for the insightful comment!
8681367
Oh, so they weren't born alicorns in this story. That clears things up!
8681389
I always liked the idea that they became alicorns via ascension, ever since that was proven to be a thing that happens. The bits of maybe-canon suggesting otherwise (i.e. the journal of the royal pony sisters, if I recall correctly) hadn't been published when I formulated this AU, hence the apparent discrepancy.
Glad that cleared things up.
9321464 And now she must wander the desert with a crappy magician named Trixie... except now she's just a Mud Pony, cuz she'd be in the ocean if she was a unicorn... and a homely middle-aged pony named... Applejack.
(AJ appears out of a portal Discord opens for her and bucks Alondro in the nads.)
You can has review!
9346684
Yay!
9367445
Comedic novel. The author attempts to write his autobiography, but gets so bogged down telling all these crazy stories setting up his birth that he never actually gets around to it.
I knew this had a sequel, I figured the prequel would be character setup and the actual trial would remain a mystery through to the sequel.
9367481
Interesting and amusing.
I suppose one tidbit deserves another, so here's this one: This fic was originally intended to be just a one-shot of around ten-thousand words to set up the next story, but the characters demanded things go differently.