Altered Visage Chapter 12 · 7:20pm Feb 11th, 2016
Hello, folks! Welcome to your scheduled weekly update of Altered Visage. This week we have "The Best Laid Plans". Spoilers after the page break.
We've reached the end of what I had written before I began posting Altered Visage to FIMFiction. I'm not sure whether I should be celebrating, or panicking. I really need to stop letting other stories (and Civilization 5 and various cartoons I decided to watch) distract me and finish up the last couple of chapters. Regardless, I should probably be talking about this chapter, not later ones that are in progress.
In this chapter we get the second major instance of the Sex tag being used, the first obviously enough being the rape of Chance in No Nightmare (trivia: No Nightmare had The Rape of Chance as a potential title, though I very quickly decided against it for multiple reasons). This one goes beyond what is explicitly described in No Nightmare, which was very vague on the details outside of some horn sucking. This time around it's a sex dream that involves giving a blowjob to Pupa. Was this little scene of sexual activity earned? Does it fit naturally into the story as an understandable progression? I admit the answer is probably no.
Inside that dream is something relevant to the story as a whole, though. I very likely could have done that without throwing in the gratuitous sex, and perhaps should have done so. I was also tempted to throw in a bit of a warning right before it begins with an obvious sign for where it ends so people can skip it, but I'm hesitant to put such things into my stories for any content as it tends to hurt immersion while you read. I suppose the comments and the likes/dislikes will probably show how people react to it. Meh, I guess I can put a warning in the author's notes segment.
Poor Chance. She loses her mother and all her neighbors to the changelings. All efforts to convince the world that changelings are attacking are met with failure. Then she loses father, brother and best friend. Then she goes into heat. Then the plan to warn the world about changelings fails and she gets caught. Then she gets to go back to Equestria, as she wanted, only to be locked up in the dungeons as she realizes how the plan was doomed to fail. I admit, that I realized it at about the same time. After I got to the point where she was taken back to Equestria, I realized there was no way in hell that Chrysalis would just let Chance go wandering about, so I changed my plans and threw her in the dungeon.
This is a chapter that underwent significant modifications in the form of additions. Much like in the chapter Of Angels and Changelings, I had added on an entire confrontational scene. Unlike with that chapter, this was actually a change to the events that happened instead of merely adding a description for a one sided fight. Initially, the changeling cop that accosted Chance outside the hockey arena had actually stopped her right there. Chance didn't put up a fight, she just accepted that she was caught and went along with them. I had been thinking that she would realize she didn't stand a chance, her hopes of warning humans were pretty well dashed, and that what she really wanted was to go back to Equestria anyway. Then I realized how stupid that was. She was incredibly irritable due to the sexual frustrations of being in heat, she had a lot of suppressed rage against these guys invading her home, and she would still hold some hope that she could warn the world. While she fails in the end and the result isn't much different from before, I feel this is a much more satisfying scene with her and Drymanid actually fighting back.
A side thing to note is that Chance at this point in the story is actually referring to herself as Chance instead of Victor. It would seem that he has more or less internally accepted the moniker. The fact that she found her decomposing corpse in the previous chapter may have had something to do with that.
That's enough rambling about this chapter. As a heads up for people who actually get this far into the blog post, I plan on posting a side chapter sometime between now and when I post the next proper chapter next week. It'll be short, not necessary to the overall plot, and under 1500 words long unless it gets a lot of additions to it before posting.
