Mane 6 vampony story(ies) ideas · 4:09pm May 22nd, 2012
Had this idea while commenting on The Vampony Chronicles. ALL of Mane 6 are, in secret from each other, vamponies from different clans.
Anyway, predicted tags are [Comedy][Slice of Life][Adventure]
Expanding upon the concept, here’s ideas for the clans (this kind of got away from me):
General: Subvert even the most basic expectations. Being unaffected by sunlight is obvious, but they don’t – mostly – even drink blood. What they actually do is use blood magic in certain ways based on clan and being a vampony merely means you had a blood-based enchantment cast on you, though you do get extendable fangs, you know who to blame for that particular bit of randomness.
Celestials
Three words: Magically Binding Contracts. They use blood in spells that affect a pony basically permanently unless escape conditions are met, used to compel certain behavior (or against certain behavior), but also several buffs to strengthen the body, which is how Twilight can take an anvil to the head and be fine in an hour – one of the important ones gives one agelessness. The drawback is, well if you are not a teenager with hearts in her eyes, someone’s skin being like marble is less ‘sexy’ and more ‘golem’ – instead of aging they slowly slide into the Uncanny Valley. Under her (magic) make-up Celestia looks like a robot (though a supremely well sculpted one) and sounds a bit like GLaDOS, but at least she does not think like one, which is more than can be said about some of her ‘children’. This is why she stresses the importance of Twilight’s social life – the Magic of Blood can preserve your body, but it’s the Magic of Friendship that prevents the decay of your personality.
There’s not many of them, like two-three dozen all over Equestria, and Celestia keeps the more soulless pretty much literally in her closet and has them do paperwork (they have already lost the capacity to be bored, or excited).
Twilight has been enchanted for durability and poison resistance, but is otherwise completely free of blood magic or practical knowledge thereof – Celestia is very insistent that she stays as normal as possible for the foreseeable future (to Twilight’s dismay – she really would like the ‘no need to sleep’ enchantment for starters). Now is the time to make friends, getting her magical knowledge up to snuff will take like 200 years anyway, so no need to hurry.
Chaositects
Discord, being who he is, has created a lot of weird and random magical effects and creatures. Most of those had no ontological inertia and disappeared with his defeat, but not all – Poison Joke, Zap Apples and Parasprites attest to that. There were also ponies and other creatures. So here’s the deal: the best way to have a transferable yet permanent enchantment on a creature is to infuse their blood with magic. The Chaositects are a millennium old tradition of ponies seeking to gain rare and unusual magical powers through means dark and ridiculous (just take the making of Zap Apple Jam as an example of the latter). The powers also have drawbacks, and for any vampire weakness in the book there might have been a Chaos Vampire who actually had it.
It’s hard to estimate numbers, as many Chaositects are secretive and able to hide really well – which simply means you are quite unlikely to encounter any of them you do not already have some connection to. In defiance of your expectations, Zecora is not actually one of them, though she does possess some knowledge about the use of the remnants of chaos.
Pinkie has Pinkie Sense, Rubbery Body, Unseen Teleport and the ability to look through windows and to sense a Pinkie Promise about to be broken as powers, and is truly bound never to break any promise she made upon one of her silly rituals. It is fair to assume her family has access to the same powers. Her decision to move may or may not have been supported by her family, but the teleporting made it easier either way.
The Eternal Young
Technically merely the most successful bloodline of Chaositects, the Eternal Young grabbed a bunch of powers they liked that do not require writing the alphabet soup in parasprite blood and went on to do something more fun. The powers are: the Stare (particulars vary by personality, usually a more hypnotic/seductive version as opposed to Flutter’s Penance Stare), minor sense enhancements (mostly romantic sounding, but unpractical, stuff like hearing heartbeats slightly louder, but ‘Shy’s empathy and ability to understand animals isn’t fully natural) and the ability to become a little more like those whose blood they taste (‘drink’ would imply more blood being involved that actually is – that’s really a matter of two dozen drops). This normally has little effect beyond perpetual youth, although the older heterosexual ones tend to become rather androgynous – but then again Fluttershy getting her blood primarily while cleaning the wounds of animals might make her more... wild.
They have a couple coteries in larger cities.
Lunars
The most straightforward guys – Luna just enhanced their combat ability with blood-transmitted magic. Their calling is to be nightly avengers and monster slayers, but there aren’t a lot of them these nights, lack of jobs you see. There are some living around the Everfree, and some old families like the Silverhooves, from among whom Dash hails. This is actually why, when tempted by Nightmare Moon she didn’t go ‘Captain of whom? Never heard of you guys.’ – she is in fact a Shadowbolt already.
The Clan
The again, some Lunars abandoned the call and use the enhanced strength and stamina for more practical purposes. Like farming. The whole blood thing is also involved in traditions of largely symbolic strengthening of family bonds.
By the way, I think the idea of ponies (Pies or otherwise) who share Pinkie’s powers but not attitude merits thought even aside from the whole vampire thing.
TL;DR:
The idea behind vampirism at large is that blood is good for enchanting ponies. You get fangs and the ability to digest blood, anything beyond that is dependent on type.
Celestials get Magically Binding Contracts and enchantments for resilience and ignoring those pesky biological needs. Twilight has just resilience because too many celestials have become detached and cannot relate to normal.
Lunars get combat buffs, night vision and maybe something that makes them look cooler. And perhaps turning into bats?
Chaositects collect magical effects left behind by Discord. Zap Apples are representative of what sort of hoops you need to jump through to get those things to do what you want. This means the Pies have the same powers as Pinkie at minimum, and the clan at large has lots of random abilities and drwabacks.
Eternal Young get what’s in their name by nibbling on young ponies a little, as well as mesmerism (exact nature depends on user’s personality).
The Clan are Lunar farmers. Family is super important to them, strengthened by bonds of blood in more than one way. I’m out of ideas for that one.
Actual story ideas:
Rainbow gets noticed and recruited by a Lunar
“I must ask the most important thing: do I get to beat up bad guys wearing a trenchcoat and sunglasses at night, backflip while quad-wielding vampire swords, and fire two guns whilst jumping in the air?”
“YEAH!”
Meanwhile, Fluttershy becomes increasingly uncomfortable as her mother pressures her to go and start seducing ponies. Story involves the girls dodging each other in bars, Fluttershy going on dates and repeatedly finding something nonsexual of interest to do with the other ponies, Rainbow getting into somewhat wacky training montages, failing to find bad guys to beat up, until she notices Flutter falling in with what she sees as a bad crowd and tries to protect her (from ‘Shy’s perspective those are either totally nice ponies, or somepony to protect Dash from). They move to Ponyville in the end.
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Rarity meets a vampony even more melodramatic than herself, has a brief (parody of a) romance, in the end the guy turns out to be pathetic and runs away. Problem: Rarity is now a completely clueless newborn vampony and the rest of the Mane 6 has to subtly stop her from doing something stupid while hiding that they know and what they are. Lots of tripping over each other to be expected, while Rarity believes herself clever, sneaky and (later) experienced.
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Discord has been sealed again. Now, when extended family comes to visit the Briefly Capital of Chaos, Pinkie has to defend Screwball the flying Earth Pony from them and fight to preserve normalcy in Ponyville, while the Mane 6 gains a new appreciation of her.
Sounds fabulous. I mostly only read stories focused on Twilight Sparkle, but I could make an exception for this I think.
Interesting but it leaves me with the always important "What about Spike?" question.
Why have you not written this?
170813
Because writing is haaa~ard
Also lack of time, as evident by posting delay. Maybe after the finals I'll actually write something.
But seriously, I've never written a single piece of fiction in my life. I don't really feel confident about starting with this one, since I don't really have much of a concept beyond the above.