Welcome To The New Age

This blog is meant for those who've read Dawn of the Chiroptera. If you haven't yet and want to avoid spoilers, you've been warned!

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Well, I've learned that if you really want to get comments on your story, saying "there's no such thing as bat ponies" in your description will definitely get you them. Not that I'm complaining, mind you, especially since it resulted in links to bat pony fanart. Can't help but smile when I get that. But it's definitely been a lesson in the way that someone who started writing after the series' end, like myself, might worldbuild differently versus the folks who were getting their start as it was ongoing.

Now, those who read my last blog may be thinking "I thought the contest entry you had in mind involved the Apple family" and you're right! That one is still in the works. I just happened to read The Sands of Time when it popped up on the front page, which got me thinking about the SPOOK contest and possibly entering, then I suddenly got slammed with the idea for this story one random day while out running errands and got to work.

Seeing if I could squeeze a little something in under 10k words about fruit bat vampire ponies was fun, and regardless of how it does, I think it adds some nice worldbuilding to the... dare I start to call it a 'verse? that I'm steadily building.

AU Divergences

Bat Ponies

Everyone's got their personal headcanon on bat ponies, from "always been there, don't question it" to "magical experiment" to just "no." My take on the topic, as shown in the story, is a bit more complicated than that. In The Long Eventide I refer to the bat-like features on the Lunar Guard as an illusion (since the Nightmare Moon timeline from The Cutie Re-Mark Part 2 shows the wings to be part of the armour) and, for them, it is. In my local version of the setting, the pegasi pulling Princess Luna's chariot on Nightmare Night were simply in costume.

But the reason for that costume is the fact that the concept of a bat pony has been in Equestrian culture for a long time, and all of Twilight's research points to the reason for that being vampire-fruit-bat-induced-vamponyism. The Flutterbat incident was just the most recent case, one that happened to occur in the friend group of the future ruler of Equestria and so wasn't about to fade into myth like ones before.

Some bat ponies are permanently batty, like Redeye. Others can make themselves look like ordinary pegasi, but the hunger brings out the bat in them whether they like it or not. Some have the bright red eyes and bat ears, others who got treatment sooner may just have the wings and fangs. And it seems that, for the ones born with it, they still have downy foal feathers for a while before their bat wings fully come in. Or maybe that's only the case for Blossomforth's foal? It's really too early to be sure what shape this new tribe of pony will eventually settle into, but it doesn't change the fact that they're here to stay.

There was a time when there was no such thing as bat ponies. But there are now, and there will only be more as time goes on. As they say, the only constant is change, and the face of Equestria will always be changing.

Season 4 Episode: Bats!

So I tend to have a general guideline when it comes to the show. Everything that was on screen for the first season happened (though what precisely it means is open to some interpretation), as did the first encounter with Discord, as did Luna Eclipsed. Everything after that point? I pick and choose, and be it an event in the future or a glimpse into the past, sometimes things went slightly differently than they did on screen. FOME's called it the "toolbox method" and that's a good way of looking at it. FIM's family-friendly brand of fruit juice vampirism was the tool I needed, but it also needed to be something that could strike more than once for the story to happen. Be transmissible.

So, I thought of the fact that vampire fruit bats have a positive impact on the seeds of the trees they feed from (since that's canon-Fluttershy's argument for a sanctuary in the episode proper), decided that that made sense as a form of magic, and asked myself what other abilities they may have. And we know, from real life, that diseases can hop the species barrier under the right circumstances. So something meant to allow vampire fruit bats to convert other bats into more of their own, resulting in bat-like pegasi when extra magic gets involved, seemed extremely plausible.

And to allow that to take place, little changes altered the flow of the narrative. Fluttershy's "no means no" firmness with Iron Will at the end of Putting Your Hoof Down has lingered, the parasprite incident being brought up dissuaded Twilight from casting any direct spells on the bats, and then Fluttershy's struggles during the episode to communicate with the bats collided with the compromise of Twilight's plan B in enchanting the trees instead. The perfect storm to have her bitten, resulting in a slower transformation, then a process of capturing her that went on more-or-less as it did on the show, just with a potion instead of a spell and some help from Zecora in making said potion.

And clearly, that incident having left a permanent mark on several ponies is something that's stuck with Twilight.

The Friendship Journal

Almost published.

This version of Season 4's friendship journal was never opened up for public consumption, and likely won't be for many years into the post-series future. A lot of this is very personal to those who wrote in it, and in some cases it might even count as classified. So Twilight wants to leave it private for now.

(This does mean that Season 7's episode Fame and Misfortune did not and can not happen, but see the section above. Even when you create a universe that has some roots in the show's events, the ripple effect means that a few episodes inevitably end up on the cutting room floor.)

Because of that, the outbreak isn't common knowledge, nor are a lot of the Mane 6's other misadventures. Luster Dawn is likely going to hear a lot of stories before they're widely known, when times such as this happen to drag those incidents into the spotlight.

And in that way, Twilight really has picked up some things from Celestia.

Noble Titles

This story throws "Duchess" around a lot, and it being my first post-series tale, there's no getting away from the fact that I've tweaked how titles work in Equestria from what's seen in canon. Mostly because canon doesn't seem to want to acknowledge anything that's not a princess, prince, queen, or king most of the time, and I prefer to work with a full ladder of titles. I may do an entire blog post on the system as I've built it, at some point, since it's one of those "in the background" details that are unlikely to be explained top to bottom in a story proper, and those kinds of details are prime blog material.

The major part that applies to the characters is simply that "Princess" and "Prince" are reserved for those actually occupying a throne, while "Duchess" and "Duke" are for members of the royal family who are not actively ruling. So Twilight Sparkle and Cadence are princesses, but Celestia and Luna, having abdicated, and Flurry Heart, not having taken a throne yet at all, are duchesses.

And yes, for those who may be wondering, Blueblood is indeed a duke in my local version of Equestria, not a prince. Not that it makes him any less insufferable about it.

Characters:

Redeye Flight

Cute filly is cute, more at eleven.

This story started as a mental image, of Redeye as she is in the first two chapters. A small filly, quarantined in a hospital and in the process of transforming into a vampire. Such a thing could easily be played for horror or tragedy. Or both. Instead, I picked a different genre and tone. Optimistic slice of life.

Yes, it's a scary thing to go through, and her mind goes to morbid places because she's a child who's grappling with the fact that she knows that not everyone who gets sick gets better. But ultimately she's going to be okay, and at the end she gets to meet other ponies who've gone through the same thing, something important for anyone who's gone through something like this.

We're never directly in Redeye's head during the story, instead either Luster or Twilight's, but she's a filly who wears a lot on her metaphorical sleeves. She likes adventure stories and clearly has a daring streak of her own, as her going to the orchard against her parents' wishes and later jumping off the roof to try to teach herself how to fly with bat wings shows. She's enthusiastic about much that comes her way, picking a favourite princess, favourite former princess, and new favourite juice with glee. She's full of energy, becoming a motormouth once she's well.

Ultimately, she's a sweet little filly who wants friends, and she's not going to let something like transforming into a bat pony stop her. Whatever place she finds, whatever mark she gets, we know she'll leap into life hooves-first.

Twilight Sparkle

I like writing a Princess Twilight Sparkle who would take time out of her busy schedule to read to a sick foal.

Twilight is a tricky character to write. She's the member of the cast we're first introduced to, was the focal point of the entire first season, and even when the focus widened, first to the rest of the Mane Six, then beyond to tell more stories about the world, her arc still shapes the overall trajectory of the series. In many cases, Twilight is whatever the writer in question needs her to be in order to tell the story they want to tell, and so her personality can warp a lot depending on the writer, both within the source material and fandom.

So "my" Twilight? Is, at heart, fundamentally a good mare. Not a flawless paragon of the Power of Friendship, but a good mare nevertheless. She can make mistakes, her emotions can get the better of her, especially when she's frustrated, she can look for (often magical) shortcuts to solve her problems, and she can get trapped in her own head and need a nudge from a friend to see the bigger picture, but even when she's going down exactly the wrong path to resolve the situation she's in, her intentions are good.

Even when she was at her "worst" and needed to learn the value of friendship, her first thought when faced with the signs of Nightmare Moon's return was to do whatever was necessary to stop her. And when trapped alone with Nightmare Moon, her first action was to charge (as part of a misdirection, sure, but still). That is who she is at the core.

And so, in this fic, she's come across a situation that she can help with, and she helps. She goes above and beyond, in fact, not only creating and delivering the potion, but spending time with Redeye, comforting her, and bringing her to ponies who can help her adjust to her changes. Part of it is that she feels a sense of responsibility toward the bat ponies due to her part in the Flutterbat incident, but it's also that... she's Twilight Sparkle. She wants Equestria to be a land where any sort of creature can find a place, simply because she's a good pony and she's in a position to further that goal.

Luster Dawn

This has been my first shot at writing Luster Dawn and her relationship with her mentor, and I love playing with the ways it reflects, and contrasts, with the way Twilight and Celestia's relationship worked. Celestia had been a milennia-old monarch, untouchable alicorn of the sun, and Twilight had to slowly learn that she was a mare underneath. Luster, instead, had Twilight equinized for her early on, and so is much more casual with her, more willing to question her, to joke with her, and to squint her eyes at the thought that Twilight might be looking to make her a successor.

Otherwise, though, she channels a bit of early Twilight in the way that she has friends now, but still has a fundamental awkwardness. Things like Luster having no idea what to do with Redeye and her straightforward child friendliness, or the fact that she spent time lecturing her friend group about all the ways a recent fiction book trend broke magical rules. But when Redeye shows signs of pain she still reaches out, and she's going to be helping the little filly with her schoolwork going forward.

She's a good mare at heart, and probably will have quite a few adventures of her own with her friends as time goes on. The post-series space has a lot of potential, and I know we haven't seen the last of her.

Fluttershy

Fluttershy doesn't feature too heavily in the story itself, with only her appearance at the end and a brief flash into her point of view during the flashback/exposition in the third chapter, but as shown in the AU Divergences section, her actions provide a lot of the ripple effect. I like writing Fluttershy as a bit more stubborn, as finding that happy medium between collapsing into a puddle of anxiety and having a furious outburst a bit sooner than canon allowed her to.

The key is that she's a bit less likely to face her fears for her own sake, and a little more when it's for someone else's sake, just like way back in Dragonshy. She put her hoof down regarding not using magic directly on the bats despite it upsetting her friends, and she hosts the Bat Ponies of Ponyville club at her cottage despite her social anxiety because those who'd contracted the disease need a support group and she has the space.

She may not be a princess, but Fluttershy is making the future better in her own ways, and nothing will stop her.

Other Notes:

• Luster's Ponyville friends used to have a scene they appeared in, taking place shortly after Redeye got her mark, but it was scrapped in the planning stage. It ended up feeling better to end on the note of her being introduced to the club and leave later developments in her story for another tale, but that does mean that I already have notes with names and such for them whenever I need them for a future tale.
• There was also a scene with Redeye talking with Luna in her dreams. That one reached the draft stage, and I may throw it into a "deleted scene" blog down the line. It was cut for pacing issues, as nowhere I put it felt quite right for flow, and so Redeye's visits with Luna remained simply alluded to in dialogue and in the note that nightmares are a symptom of the disease.

• So, how many types of vamponyism are there? As Twilight said, we'll get there. All I'll say for now is that the accepted thaumaturgical definition of a vampire is very broad, and so a lot of things end up under that umbrella, thus why the fruit juice drinkers count.

  What's Next?

  As I noted, I still have an Apple family tale on the horizon. Its outline has changed around a bit since, cutting down the amount of family members it's focusing on to give each a bit more time to shine, and I think it'll be quite the entertaining tale when all is said and done.

  And of course another chapter of The Long Eventide remains in the works. There's a tag I may need to add to the story, after this next one is posted, due to a new piece setting itself on the game board.