(contains spoilers)

This story is the second part of the six-part Betwixt Silver and Gold series I began writing in August of 2011. Within a couple of months, I had finished all of the stories in the series, with the exception of this one. By the time I finally got "But Wait...There's More!" as good as I was going to get it, Season Two of MLP:FIM had come and gone, and many of the most-basic ideas of the series and of this fanfic had been overturned.

But I was stubborn--I still think this series has some good ideas in it, so I'm willing to publish the whole thing, knowing full well that the Alternate Universe tag will severely limit the number of people who will bother to read it.

I classify this story as an interesting failure. It's the sequel to a story ("Javelin") that I like, and the prequel of another story ("Luna and the Tree Ponies") that I consider one of my best works for this fandom, so I absolutely had to post it.

Its primary fault, I think, is that it's too long. Plotwise, nothing really happens in this story. Vinyl Scratch tries to save her company, fails or humiliates herself at every turn, and is finally bailed out by the immortal goddess who didn't get her into this mess in the first place. The patience of a reader with this kind of cheat by the author rapidly decreases the longer the story gets. If this story had maybe half of the word count that it has, maybe I would have been able to get away with it.

The problem, I feel, is that this story is too many things at once.

It's about Vinyl trying to save her company. It's also about a test of her character: would she be able to remain true to herself when facing the death of her dream? (Just to make things interesting, the answer to this question turns out to be "no".)

But, as I state in the very first lines of the story, this is also about how mortal ponies deal with living side-by-side with immortal goddesses. Because when I started on this story, I honestly thought that the Princesses created the ponies, and I honestly thought that they had engaged in a conspiracy of silence to protect the privacy of the Mane Six, regardless of the consequences this might have on pony society at large. They were not only deceiving their subjects, but deceiving themselves, in how independent they were truly willing to allow the ponies to be.

It's too bad that the very first episode of Season Two of the animated series utterly demolished this line of thought. Sigh.

On top of that, this is a novel of ideas:

* From the Introduction, there's the idea that the Princesses allow themselves to be restrained by a set of prophesies that allow them to know in advance what dangers will threaten Equestria. This is my solution to a common plot hole in adventure FIMfics: the fact that if Celestia or Luna showed up, whatever jam Twilight and her friends are in would be resolved in half a page. With prophesies in place, they are forced to stay in the palace, because if they overturn just one prophesy, the timing of all of the others would fall apart.

* From Chapter 1, the Telegraph. This is just me getting weird with the idea of a race of creatures that can theoretically communicate telepathically with one another.

* From Chapter 2, the Etheric. With the Schizo-tech level of Equestria, I thought it would be fun to have an Age of Radio in a world that hadn't invented motion pictures yet (once again, this was before Season Two revealed the existence of A/V ponies).

* From Chapter 3, the Etheric program The Risking It All Team, aka "My Little Pony: Explosions Are Awesome". This comes out of a fundamental decision I made about writing a series about a background pony: I was committed to giving equal time to at least one of the Mane Six in every story. RIAT is therefore the Mane Six subplot for this story. It's also my chance to give a backhanded compliment to how awesome MLP:FIM is: If by some cosmic error Hasbro had hired me instead of Lauren Faust to create the fourth generation of the My Little Pony franchise, "My Little Pony: Explosions Are Awesome" is the sort of abomination you would have ended up with.

* From Chapter 5, the whole concept that Celestia was covering up the Mane Six's part in the defeat of Nightmare Moon. At the time, I thought my reasoning was perfectly sound: As "Green Isn't Your Color" showed, ponies shared humanity's fascination with fame. Therefore, the Mane Six should have become famous for defeating Nightmare Moon. But outside Ponyville, it didn't look like anypony knew what they had done, therefore...Princess Conspiracy! The less said about the failure of this line of reasoning, the better.

* From Chapter 6, the character of Oars in Wells. I don't know if anybody remembers Orson Welles outside of Maurice LaMarche's impression of him in Pinky and the Brain, but I've seen a half-dozen of his films, from Citizen Cane and Touch of Evil to The Third Man, The Stranger, Othello, even F for Fake and his narration of The Man Who Saw Tomorrow and of course The War of the Worlds. To show a little of Mr. Welles' utter lack of humility, I think I completely nailed the character. It's a sad thing, though, that I can write in Orson Welles' voice far better than I can write in the voices of Twilight, Rainbow Dash, or any other canonical pony character.

* From Chapter 7, the Fall of the Black King. Part one of the worldbuilding that I would complete in "Luna and the Tree Ponies".

* From Chapter 8, the pony version of The Tale of Genji.

* From Chapter 9, a crossover with every good FIMfic I had read to that point set in Canterlot, plus the first appearance (as far as I can tell) of Classic Doctor Who characters in FIMfiction. Oh, and in case you are wondering, I'm not done with the Perturb family in this series.

That's what, eight or nine big ideas, in a single fanfic? No wonder this thing was enormous. In the end, I couldn't decide what I could bear to take out, so I left everything in.

So, what did you think of it?