This story is a sequel to Order-naries: Z'Nai
After the Z'Nai attack was brought to an end, the Royal Sisters decided to take a week's vacation from their royal duties. Celestia's vacation has ended and it is Luna's turn to relax and tour Equestria. In Manehatten, the Moon Princess ditches her entourage and drags Gold Heart and Soul Mage on an impromptu, schedule-free exploration of the theater district, leading to an encounter with the Great and Powerful Trixie.
Meanwhile, Princess Celestia finds that the night-time stars refuse to align properly and calls in Ashen Blaze, Gale, and Twilight Sparkle (with Rarity tagging along) to assist in researching the reason why.
Chapters (10)
Great characterization in this one if a little light on adventure.
For some reason I can envision Celestia having a Rage Quit when she fails to get them right, then taking a moment to compose herself before ranting in her letter.
My first fict in this continuity was Of Two Minds and after reading that I immediately moved onto its sequel Multi-mental in Manehatten, but that was still in progress at the time, so still wanting more I decided to delve into the backlog, which brought me to this fic. The original Order-naries fic might have seemed a more logical place to go, but I still had no real clue who those were, and I was far more interested in seeing the encounter between Trixie and Luna that had been briefly mentioned in Of Two Minds.
Because of that however I can say that the Oder-naries really do merit respect as characters unto themselves. Even stripped of most of their otherworldly background, and with little frame of reference to work from, I found all of them to be delightfully entertaining, with all the witty character interplay and banter that makes such fictional entities seem to come alive.
Anyway, the encounter between Trixie and Luna was entertaining enough, if a bit predictable and mediocre in it’s resolution. Luna is, as to be expected from when this was first published, largely based on her then standard fanon persona, but because of the way she is handled, easily reconciled with her full canon debut. The twins were also an interesting add on, but really never managed to serve in much capacity that couldn’t have been filled by any generic guard/escort, beyond the occasional outsiders perspective they get due to their from another world origin, but even in that respect there were all too, and to forgive the pun, ordinary.
The really meat of this story though was the plot involving the mystery of what’s wrong with Celestia. This is also where my backwards introduction to this continuity really factored in. Ash and Gale are more than just OCs at this point, well technically they still are, but seeing them for the first time already fully fleshed out and developed they feel just as deep as the mane cast. I may not understand why Rarity has a crush or what’s got Celstia so freaked about a simple computer scan, but I don’t have to because all the characters just flow so naturally.
I’d already met Ash, if only briefly in Of Two Minds, but in this fic I really got to know and appreciate him. I would later go onto get to know him even better in other fics, but I still somewhat feel that this is when he was truly at his most interesting, with no world ending crisis to resolve. He’s cordial enough to Celestia, if plainly not all that interested in her current problem, yet overtly disrespectful of her authority when it goes against his rather blunt sense of pragmatism. It makes for an odd contrast, a sort of maturity to do what needs to be done no matter the consequences combined with a childishly selfish adherence to his own ideals and the unwillingness to compromise that spawns from both. Then there was Gale, who I’d very much like to speak equal volumes about, but can’t really think of anything more to say at the moment other than that she was the perfect foil to Ash throughout the whole story all the way to the final joke at the very end.
In the end every tension and conflict in this story was resolved with the most simple and straight forward approach, but that’s no real complaint, quite the opposite even. Too many authors get overly invested in epic narratives, when the real strength of MLP tends to lie in the more slice of life aspects, and which I tend to find to be the more impressive works. Anyone can invoke involvement from the reader when the stakes are big and the action intense, it takes an all together different kind of skill to really get a reader interested in the more mundane aspects of life. Not that there’s anything wrong with epic scale adventures, and this particular continuity has plenty of that to go around in other installments, but it’s always nice to see an author that can deliver the full spectrum variety.
I'm sorry, I know it's been a while on here, but I'm just getting into the series. During the starting scene at the theater, you wrote:
""Eh, close enough," Applejack muttered.
"Oi," Soul hissed, "Save the commentary for later please. I'm enjoying this." Applejack looked back and gave Ash a bemused look."
I'm sorry, but I didn't think Ash was in this scene. Was I mistaken?
859531
Fixed.
Good, underthumbed story.
And that ending... Trollestia in her finest.
I just realized that PC could stand for Princess Celestia.
That's very evil. If Ash can normally do things like this spell, no one should have allowed him to boost his magic.