This unpub is the second endeavor I made when I decided to try an attempt at fanfiction within the MLP universe. My first story (which I might talk about at some point, most likely not) seemed like a good idea, right until the point I finished writing it, then it was promptly shuffle it into the dark abyss of DO NOT USE.

Before we dig into it though, I do have a sort of… request? It’s at the end of this post so you can skip down to the last couple of paragraphs if you’re less interested in the unpub but feel like helping me out.

Anyhow, this blog tonight deals with the unpub story of: The Fluttershy Effect (having little to actually do with Fluttershy).

The idea here (playing on the concept of the butterfly effect, not the movie, which I’ve never seen) was what would the world be like without Rainbow Dash’s sonic rainboom that brought our main cast their cutie marks and ultimately united them. Annnddd already you might start to see the problem. This is not a new, or original idea, as many of you reading this may be thinking, ‘hey, I’ve had that idea!’

But some quick story stuff, and things... The story followed Twilight (hey, surprise!) who manages to avoid being ‘changed’ by the temporal anomaly (wow, I have watched way too much star trek). She finds herself in a dark version of Equestria where Nightmare Moon and Discord run free and unchallenged. The land is ruled over not by Celestia but somepony called the Queen of Shadows.

To make a very long story short (a draft of 30ish chapters and almost 100k words) we meet each main character in their new, contrasting lives until at last we come to the Queen of Shadows who, if you haven’t guessed it, is actually a fallen Twilight. After not being accepted into Celestia’s school, Twilight went off on her own and learned magic from less reputable sources, swearing revenge on the Sun Queen.

There are a lot of reasons this one will never get published, the least of which is, it just wasn’t that enthralling. Alternate worlds always have less at stake because the world itself simply doesn’t mater or affect the characters we care about.

But the biggest reason I killed this one was (surprise) I stumbled across another writer doing a very similar story, which I thought was done much better. And this is actually where the request comes in. For the life of me, I was never able to find the darn thing again and I didn’t commit the name to memory.

It followed Fluttershy as the main character, being head of the weather patrol. She doesn’t have her cutie mark and keeps getting strange visions of other ponies she doesn’t know, who also don’t have their cutie marks. She meets up with Rainbow, who is like delivery worker and Pinkie who is a rock sales pony (and that’s as far along as it was when I lost it to the void).

So, if anyone has happened upon it or knows of such a story it would be great if you could help me find it again.