Rejected Scene

Because I love this concept for divination, but this is going to be a happy story and this scene got way too dark.

*****

“The most important aspect of divination,” Luna explained, watching as Twilight carefully arrayed the ritual circle on the floor, “is focus. Clarity of purpose. What questions you hold in your mind as you cast the spell, and your willingness to know the answers.”

“Right. The guidebook said how important it was not to get distracted.” The circle was deceptively simple, composed of three concentric rings of chalk, with four candles on the outermost ring marking the cardinal directions. It was the candles that Twilight was fiddling with. Making sure they were just-so, with no wax or trimmings to disrupt the geometric perfection.

“It is not simply a matter of avoiding distraction,” Luna said, firmly. “It is a matter of your singular desire to learn what your future holds. That is why divination is such a rare art. Any unicorn can cast the spell, but few truly desire the knowledge.”

“Are you… sure about that?” Twilight asked, fluttering her wings to fan the flames just so, completing the last step in her preparations. “I mean, I think lots of ponies want to know what’s going to hap—”

“Applejack dies this year.” Luna’s words were sharp and abrupt. “She slips and falls into the gorge on a rainy day, breaks three of her legs, and lies there in agony, unfound for three days until she perishes of exposure on a cold night. There is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent this.”

Twilight sucked in a breath, and her wings went tight against her sides. She froze for a moment, unable to speak: “Is that true?” she asked, barely above a whisper.

“We are about to practice divination,” Luna said, gesturing at the circle. “If you truly desire to know the truth of the matter, find out, here and now. See her fall.”

Twilight lowered her head and looked at the circle. It took her a moment to speak again. A moment to catch her breath. “Yes,” she finally said. “I want to know.” She lifted her head, and her horn glowed: "To those who seek the truth are all truths revealed. Show me..." She swollowed. "Show me how Applejack dies."

Twilight's eyes shone white, and she stared away at nothing -- then the glow faded, and she fixed Luna with a powerful glare. "I don't BELIEVE you! She dies at 101 surrounded by ponies who love her, and you get me all worked up like that!?"

Comments

[GullibleCynic]

Blasphemy! Applejack is eternal!

[Georg]

Luna: Cast it again and tell me what you see.
Twilight: I see... her fighting through a snowdrift in a blizzard.
Luna: Again.
Twilight: I see her underneath a fallen tree limb in her orchard. She's... smiling.
Luna: Again.
Twilight: But I don't understand.
Luna: Again.
Twilight: I see her... sliding down a ravine with an applecart. These can't all be real!
Luna: They are.

[Lurks-no-More]

"Divination is a serious matter, Twilight Sparkle. You can learn things you would do anything to unlearn, and know that you have to live with that knowledge forevermore."

[PresentPerfect]

I dunno. Shocking as Luna's pronouncement is in the middle, the overall effect is pretty humorous. :)

[Monarch Dodora]

"How do I die? ... That's weird. Apparently I get killed by an overloading divination circ-"

[Titanium Dragon]

That's the trouble with seers, really; they can be real jerks.

Just ask anyone who went to the Oracle at Delphi.

[FanOfMostEverything]

3739092
"But—"

"The future is Discord's domain. It is always changing, always in flux. Only after we make our choices is it set in stone. Far as it is in the future—more often than not—Applejack's demise depends on countless variables, countless decisions.

"Many unicorns who can coax results from this spell often only do so once with a given question. They are satisfied and think on it no more, assuming the vision they saw is the one that will come to pass, regardless of their actions. They are the greatest fools of all, led astray by the diviner's final test. It is not enough to see a future, Twilight Sparkle. One must earn it."

[Tallinu]

If only one could favorite blog posts.

[equestrian.sen]

Dear Princess Jaxie,

I read an article today, on hope. The value of hope, the mechanics of its usefulness, its role in gambling. The public devaluation of hope, and its role expanding the chasm between academic ambitions and social ones. The scaling effects of hope on attention, and their correspondence with mood cycling. The idea was that hope is a consequence of uncertainty and desire and, for many ponies, that hope itself is desirable. Does that sound obvious?

It argued that a scientific mind is one that devalues hope, more so than others. A scientist must be objective, and to be objective is to not favor any outcomes. I think that's wrong. The greatest scientists, the greatest academics, have always been those that cared a great deal about their ideas. They imagined models that were somehow unique, and they fought relentlessly to make those models known. This isn't a corruption of the process. This is the process. Without the hope that one's own ideas might outdo the rest, the sciences are reduced entirely to mechanical data collection and crunching.

I wonder, if I had nothing to hope for, would the world still feel real? I think it wouldn't. It would reduce experience to moving pictures and sounds, with everything being either uninteresting or predetermined. It would reduce life to the slow accumulation of memories and dissociated mechanical responses. If there's any danger to absolute foresight or absolute power, I think it's this. Is it really wrong then that most ponies would rather not know that some parts of their lives, maybe significant parts, are inevitable?

Your faithful reader,
equestrian.sen

P.S. Coffee shops in Netherland don't sell coffee, except sometimes incidentally.

[GaPJaxie]

3752879

You're alive!

Dear Princess Jaxie,

Nope. Nope nope nope. Go back to being probably dead somewhere in California!

I read an article today, on hope. The value of hope, the mechanics of its usefulness, its role in gambling. The public devaluation of hope, and its role expanding the chasm between academic ambitions and social ones. The scaling effects of hope on attention, and their correspondence with mood cycling. The idea was that hope is a consequence of uncertainty and desire and, for many ponies, that hope itself is desirable. Does that sound obvious?

It argued that a scientific mind is one that devalues hope, more so than others. A scientist must be objective, and to be objective is to not favor any outcomes. I think that's garbage. The greatest scientists, the greatest academics, have always been those that cared a great deal about their ideas. They imagined models that were somehow unique, and they fought relentlessly to make those models known. This isn't a corruption of the process. This is the process. Without the hope that one's own ideas might outdo the rest, the sciences are reduced entirely to mechanical data collection and crunching.

I'm citing this as proof that I just mash words onto the page and my exceedingly intelligent readers project their own depth onto it. Also I want the link to that article!

I wonder, if I had nothing to hope for, would the world still feel real? I think it wouldn't. It would reduce experience to moving pictures and sounds, with everything being either uninteresting or predetermined. It would reduce life to the slow accumulation of memories and dissociated mechanical responses. If there's any danger to absolute foresight or absolute power, I think it's this. Is it really wrong then that most ponies would rather not know that some parts of their lives, maybe significant parts, are inevitable?
Your faithful reader,
equestrian.sen

That's okay. Not everyone is cut out to be the oracle at Delphi. I mean, you wouldn't even hold still while I tried to ritually blind you. What's up with that?

P.S. Coffee shops in Netherland don't sell coffee, except sometimes incidentally.

...they just sell books?

[equestrian.sen]

3754787

You're alive!

I got a bit manic in mid-December and started working on a pony search engine, then on machine learning stuff... again. In the last two months, I've hit up Wikipedia over 300 times for articles on abstract math alone. I feel like all my knowledge about logic and learning is finally coming together in a swirling vortex of set theory, category theory, and information theory.

I'm trying to fit in more pony now, lest my post-mania crash create a crater.

Also I want the link to that article!

I wish it existed. I had some vague ideas when I wrote that paragraph.
"the value of hope": as a motivational factor
"the mechanics of its usefulness": directing attention towards important unknowns, improving memory for those unknowns, distributing the feedback of a complex outcome over the simpler outcomes that led to it
"role in gambling": since there's more feedback than just the one from the actual outcome, people feel disproportionately rewarded by their brains whenever something good happens
"public devaluation of hope": people are encouraged to be objective, and favoritism of ideas is discouraged by (modern american) society, except in political ideologies
"academic ambitions": machine-like, end-goal oriented (there is only value in a good outcome)
"social ambitions": human-like, intermediate-process-oriented (there is value in taking good steps, even if the outcome isn't good)
"scaling effects on attention": improved ability to focus
"mood cycling": improved focus results in amplified feedback, which in some cases recursively leads to improved focus, and the amplification can lead to hypersensitivity of mood

That's okay. Not everyone is cut out to be the oracle at Delphi. I mean, you wouldn't even hold still while I tried to ritually blind you. What's up with that?

Yeah, I... I had too much coffee that day.

P.S. Coffee shops in Netherland don't sell coffee, except sometimes incidentally.

...they just sell books?

I walked into one a few days ago looking for a nice place to sit and work on a few things. There were no chairs and no coffee. There was only weed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffeeshop_(Netherlands)

[GaPJaxie]

3755420

I got a bit manic sometime in mid-December and started working on a pony search engine, then on machine learning stuff... again. In the last two months, I've hit up Wikipedia over 300 times for articles on abstract math alone. I feel like all my knowledge about logic and learning is finally coming together in a swirling vortex of set theory, category theory, and information theory.
I'm trying to fit in more pony now, lest my post-mania crash create a crater.

Yeah. The manic phase is great, isn't it? I've been on the depressive side of things for about six months now. It's why my pony writing has been so lacking.

I walked into one a few days ago looking for a nice place to sit and work on a few things. There were no chairs and no coffee. There was only weed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffeeshop_(Netherlands)

Why are you in the Netherlands!?

[equestrian.sen]

3755434

Yeah. The manic phase is great, isn't it? I've been on the depressive side of things for about six months now. It's why my pony writing has been so lacking.

Pony?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXhsk7keig4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p8XXHdk4QQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZDhMKk4tfg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaSP34apa-4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snL_CBW2aas

My actual depression while "depressed" has been pretty sparse lately, hopefully because I've learned to smooth it out through ponies and normal sleep. Now it's more of just non-productivity. I actually started to enjoy it once I made peace with the fact that it's okay to be unproductive for months on end. I spend my -depression months now just catching up on pony fics and new pony artists, or just messing around on forums. There's good stuff to find.

Why are you in the Netherlands!?

Were*. Because my boss is a terrible human being.

I did a lot of design work for a project that's being evaluated by a company in the Netherlands. They start working at midnight PST and stop at 8am PST, so the turnaround time for their questions was at least a day, and they had a lot of questions. I was shipped over to speed up the process. I just got back yesterday.