DO YOU WANT TO HELP WITH SPARKS VISION? · 10:40pm Apr 19th, 2016
Then do so by commenting on this blog.
Not just anything, gosh, I'm not fishing for attention or something.
I have recently come to the point in SVT that I knew would come one day. I have run out of the original ideas that I had when I wrote the first chapter and am now unsure exactly how to proceed. Now I know how it's supposed to end and whatever and I pretty much know the basics of how to get there but there is one thing I do not know.
What don't you know?
Yes, dear reader, Sparks was supposed to be an exercise on not revealing a lot of information and letting the reader just fill it in. But now that that is not the case I remind us all that I've never really done this before and that's why it was suppose to be a practice! I don't know how to sort out what I know from what I've told you or what's essential for you to know when we reach the end. So I need you all to tell me what questions you have so I can make sure I'm adding the answers where I'm supposed to. Can you do that for me please?
tl;dr I NEED YOU TO TELL ME WHAT QUESTIONS YOU HAVE ABOUT SPARKS SO I CAN MAKE SURE TO AWNSER THEM
Thanks!
~Tangy
P.S. Go check out the awesome new cover art. It's awesome.
How about they find their universe's version of StarSwirl's spell, and somehow manage to start up a completely separate time loop just for the sole purpose of trying to find the one that the alicorn Twilight was in?
3881765 Not exactly what I wanted but man that's a good idea. A little too big of a commitment for me to do but I would read the heck out of that story
3881777 The funny thing is that that's actually a partially scrapped idea that I was originally going to use for Remnants of Glory. (It's part of my Spacebound Equestria series.)
The difference is that in the official story, instead of using the power of the map like I originally planned, they find a group of scientists who are able to contact Celestia (who's leading the rest of Equestria away on a spacecraft).
Would love a Flashback of Pinkie's arrival to the castle and how she met RD and Rarity. Applejack would be nice to see, wonder what happened with her...and how did Twilight evade Nightmare so well?
How long since NMM came back and banished Celestia? How has everyone survived eternal night?
Why hasn't Blueblood swept in and woo'd Luna and helping her break from Nightmare?
Maybe Twilight could come in and logicbomb NNM?
If Twilight didn't recognize Rarity, then it stands to reason she never went to Ponyville. Since Celestia would have been counting the days, and Twilight was her student, the question becomes why Twilight didn't go to Ponyville. The most likely reason I could think of would be that they made the simplest of all possible mistakes, and got the date wrong. One way that could have happened if Equestria uses an Earth-alike calendar is if Celestia didn't take Leap Years into account. 1,000 years adds up to about 250 leap-year days added to the calendar. So what if Celestia was preparing Twilight for an event she thought was still coming up, but the actual 1,000-years-to-the-day event fell sometime around early fall the previous year? "Hello everypony, it's Nightmare Night, and OH CELESTIA WHAT IS THAT!?!?"
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So much this. Pinkie is a very interesting character what with her history. It also makes you wonder how did she hide this from Luna or why does Luna ignore that she was a leader of a rebellion.
Of course I am always a fan of any scenes that put Dash and Pinkie together as they work well.
Can Pinkie cope with a new rebellion? Is she so scarred from the experience that it will cause her trouble? Can Dash be the catalyst to Pinkie's successfully leading a rebellion or will Pinkie stay in the back ground?
Will there be more Pinkie and Dash hi jinks?
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More likely is that Twilight simply didn't become Celestia's student. In this timeline she likely became a student at the School despite not hatching Spike's egg during the test (really, do all of the students at Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns have to hatch a dragon's egg magically during their entrance exam?! I'm definitely not the first one to suggest it's much more of an impossible task to test the student's ingenuity or something...). She was allowed to keep Spike's egg and eventually hatched him, and of course got excellent marks in school, the works. But none of it was ever enough to draw Celestia's eye. So she ended up becoming a shut in who fluctuated between periods of incredibly low magical power to random, uncontrollable surges due to the lack of training that she needed from Celestia, researching and theorizing only in the most obscure, theoretical, and impractical magics. That said, she, and her family, did manage to catch one alicorn's eye - Cadence - and when Nightmare Moon showed up they rallied to keep their virtually-already-wife/daughter-in-law/sister-in-law safe and out of Moonie's slitted gaze. At least, that's my guess from the previous chapter and episodes from the show (Cadence was babysitting Twi before the Rainboom after all).
As for other things... Well, several questions you might want to consider, as they may help in coming up with future chapters.
Number one and most important:
HOW IS THE WORLD NOT AN ICEBALL YET?! Is Cloudsdale working overtime to keep a massive heatwave over all of Equestria? How long can they sustain that? Alternatively, is NM raising the sun but has the moon at such an orbit where it will eclipse the sun everyday? Does she have some third magic way of heating the planet using only the moon (maybe that's why NM imprisoned Celestia in the moon instead of the sun)? What about the other countries outside of Equestria? Are they at war? Have they caved to Nightmare's whims because there is nothing they can do about it? Are they in a state of panic or mass hysteria?
And related caveat - it was mentioned by Pinkie that Nightmare has been funding the farms to keep them operational even without the help of the sun. What does everyone's favorite farm ponies think about being subsidized by the Nightmare? Does Applejack grind her teeth and despretly try to meet an ever-increasing demand placed on herself and her families' farm? Does NM's forces have a similar arrangement with Applejack that they had with Rarity (Do what we say and we'll leave your little sister alone)?
I have more, but it's late and I've got to get to bed, so I might post additional in the morning. Night!
Is it Nightmare Moon that has figured out a way to keep things working with full night (and the money is just to compensate them for the lesser yields) or was it something that other ponies have found a way to deal with (and if so is it enough or is it a slow death and it is not well known that it is the case)?
We know Pinkie helped a rebellion I was wondering if certain Pony races have differing levels of unhappiness with Nightmare Moon. Are the earth ponies more angry about it than some others and if so are they treated worse (for instance one has to always wonder if some races are more equal than others).
Is Pinkie more skilled than we might think? She was a major player in a rebellion. Did she fight? Is she good at networking (I can see this). Is she more stealthy than we think etc.
3882996 Yes, I love the Pinkie and Rainbow Dash moments...they are the two that have the most to lose in this story, and they play off each other so well. More of this, Tangerine.
But it's your story, you take it where you wanna go...though Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash as friends..they have my heart 
Could Pinkie be pulling a Xanatos gambit.
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Their personalities play well on the show and that continues in this story. They both are "fun" characters but at the same time they have a number of key differences so they want to play off each other and they have conflict but not too much. They work great as friends, lovers, and everything in between.
One fun thing is that Dash is often action oriented it would be interesting if in this story we find Pinkie is secretly more capable than she expects...
3883162 Pinkie's always more capable than anypony expects...even her! She might not look like much up front...innocent blue eyes, bright smile, a soft and squishy exterior...but she's much like an absent-minded professor and a speeding bullet when she wants to be.
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That is the sort of thing I like that is for sure.
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Also, important note: RD, when she isn't teasing them, is mostly protective of Fluttershy, Pinkie, and Scootaloo. Coincidentally, all have pink hair
Is the table still there, and might they be able to use it to contact Equestria Prime?
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I'll remind you of the party cave under SCC. I maintain my stance that if one were to somehow get her to sit still long enough to take an IQ test, she'd score a fair distance above genius level.
3883377 Actually, while the table might not be there anymore, it occurs to me that simply having it there for a while may have given the Tree some ideas of its own. There might be another table/castle showing up at some point if the arrival of the table from Equestria Prime inspired it.
Another thing that occurred to me about what someone said about a lunar eclipse every day giving the benefit of the sun without the light, is that all a plant really needs is ultraviolet light. If NMM somehow bounced UV light off of the moon like a giant reflector, you could have a viable day/night cycle still. At "true night", the moon is white and has the faintly multicolored glow of Celestia's mane. During the "day night", the moon turns a faint hue of purple, as it reflects UV light at Equus. This has the net effect of encouraging plants to grow, even though there's no actual light.
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I'd imagine the same amount of time that passed since the beginning of the series to the season five finale - that is, ~1.7 years. Wait, does that mean that NM will be gearing up to celebrate the second year of her return soon? That might make a good date for a climactic showdown with her.
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Yes, that's a fantastic Idea. We could probably say that It's Celestia's presence imprisoned in the moon that allows her to do that (not that NM will ever admit it).
Also important to note: The actual Tree of Harmony(TM) is literally in a cave directly beneath Nightmare's castle. Exactly how happy is it with this situation? How would it react to its elements and their bearers finally coming together to face NM? Might end up getting a bit more than a rainbow out of that situation. Might end up having tree branches crashing through the roof of the castle.
ANOTHER important note: In the Cutie Re-Mark, Twi and Spike are traveling between two points in space-time. One point is a few minutes before the race and subsequently, the rainboom. The other point is the table and the time is the moment they left in the original timeline. Thing is, while the timeline around the table changes, the table's position doesn't. It's where Twi's castle would be. In Ponyville. Not in the middle of the Everfree with Timberwolves roaming around it. Which raises the important question of WHAT HAPPENED TO PONYVILLE?!
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Mmm... reading back over previous chapters, you're right, it's not totally clear whether NM is paying money to the farms to make up for lost yield, or if she's making direct demands of them. Considering the actions of some of her guards, however, I think that even if she was just making up for lost yield, she (and by extension her guards) would expect the farms to give them some Quid Quo Pro. Not to mention, while she may reimburse and make up for lost yield now, NM might expect the farms to adjust to the nighttime only environment, and is only offering the reimbursement as an adjustment period (NM:"I understand, I do, some things can take some getting used to..."). Once they've adjusted, NM might be expecting the farms to make or even increase the amount of yield they get (NM:"Anything the day/Celestia can do the night/I can do better!"). Except no one can ever actually meet even the amount of food they grew with the sun, simply because the amount of UV light the moon's able to reflect with NM's spell is less than what the sun puts out in a normal day.
And of course, there's a more equal than others thing going on under NM's rule. She may not believe it herself (or at least, think that "everyone is equal beneath ME!"), she may not even encourage it, but her presence fosters an environment where ponies fall back into old, old prejudices. Imagine the look on Starlight's face if she found out one of the alternate timelines she inadvertently created actually led to the return of the freaking Windigos!
All of this would really not sit well with AJ, but what can she do about the holier-than-thou Nightmare Guards or the Everfree encroaching Ponyville with her family and their farm on the line if she acts out? She's gotta be running herself ragged trying to meet the produce yield expectations on her farm, keeping the rest of her family out of the guards' sight, maybe trying to keep Ponyville together despite tensions being high, the Everfree swallowing it up, and fear and paranoia running rampant. And despite her own fear and anger and exhaustion, she feels that she has to keep going, she has to keep it up, whether out of duty or pride or because she thinks it's what her parents would have done...
As for Pinkie having hidden skills, etc. 3883377 had it right - she's at least on level with Twilight in turns of IQ, but her brain's wired all weirdly, so she gets distracted by things easily, and will often take unintuitive leaps of logic to reach her conclusions (usually correct conclusions but still...). She's also probably the youngest of her sisters and was babied by them constantly, so she's somewhat immature as a result (look at me, I'm an armchair psychoanalyst wee.) Combine that with the standard strange abilities that Pinkie and her family have displayed (maybe it's just natural earth pony magic tooled towards the purpose of farming rocks instead of plants, and then repurposed again by Pinkie/The Pie Sisters to aid in making people smile/fight against Nightmare Moon?) and you have someone who you'll be really glad is on your side.
Been thinking through Twilight again. If Twilight never became Celestia's student, the size of her magical wellspring doesn't go away, but training from the most powerful/wisest/knowledgeable magic user on the planet on how to control that wellspring does. So Twilight ends up caught between periods where she can barely lift a quill and spasms of random magical explosions like the one she would have had if Dash had performed the Rainboom. It's why she only works in theoretical magic, she's both too scared of her own magic to try anything practical and too ashamed of her weak spellcasting to do anything practical. Keeping her afloat (barely), is her small group of school friends (Moondancer, Lyra, et al), Spike, and her family, helping her out through the rough times and her own manic-depressive obsessive nature. She's managed to carve out a niche for herself in a small apartment in Canterlot. It's not much, but it works. And then Nightmare Moon shows up. Most of the Canterlot fops (Blueblood and the ponies we as a fandom refer to as "The Nobility") immediately began sucking up to NM. Cadence flees to Twi's family who take her in. She hides with Twilight and Spike in Twi's apartment while Twi's and Shining Armor's parents run a "resistance" network out of their house (mainly just a glorified news/mail service
that keeps ponies and certain zebras that support Celestia or Cadence in the know about the actual current events). Shining, the previous Captain of the Guard, now demoted to a private, uses what connections he still has in the guard to keep any noise about a resistance movement or the alicorn of love out of Nightmare's ears. Twi's Canterlot friends do manage to figure out that Twi is keeping Cadence safe and resolve to help her for various reasons (Moondancer because Twi actually came to her party in this timeline, Lyra because her "best friends" status with Bon-bon/Agent Sweetie Drops still exists in this timeline, etc). Just to tl;dr this paragraph, that's two middle-aged ponies, one an astronomer, the other a writer/editor/publisher, running a secret resistance news/mail service out of their living room while their daughter, her group of nerdy friends, and her adopted son/brother/assistant hide a royal expat/demigod of love in a small dingy apartment while their older soldier/cop/marine son runs counterintelligence to keep everybody looking the other way, all in the middle of the former capital and most likely place to look for a rebellion amongst the less affluent and most hostile to them amongst the more affluent.
And then finally there's Fluttershy, where exactly is she? In her cottage with all her animal friends like in the original, canon, main timeline? Doesn't seem too safe with the Everfree encroaching into the town. Did the Apples put her up for room and board? Or... wait here's a thought. This timeline was the one where Starlight defused the race before it could even start, by teaching those two bullying colts Hoops and Dumb-bell (no, really) that bullying is wrong. So, what if that actually stuck? What if they actually started treating Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash (Gilda? Maybe?) nicely? What if that led to everyone staying in Cloudsdale, and Fluttershy working at a local animal shelter? And what if - stay with me, this is gonna get weird, but just stay with me - Fluttershy and Hoops or Dumb-bell ended up falling in love with each other?? What if they had a kid together??? We're shown in Sonic Rainboom that the pair of them are working in the Cloudsdale weather factory, and if we're going off the assumption that NM is using the moon to bounce UV rays onto Equestria from the sun on the other side of the planet, that doesn't solve the heat problem! One side is still gonna bake while Equestria freezes solid! So that weather factory and it's workers have to be working overtime, double-time, around the clock to pull all the heat that's building from one side of the planet to Equestria and push all the cold in Equestria to the other side of the planet just to maintain a stable climate, with Hoops and Dumb-bell and Gilda constantly working in it, but it's getting harder every day as the earth beneath Equestria loses it's own stored heat and an unnatural, old cold seeps back into Equestria... AND DOES FLUTTERSHY KNOW WHY DASH JOINED THE NIGHTMARE GUARD?! Or is she left in a small cloud apartment above her Cloudsdale based animal shelter, her husband and friends out working 20 or more hour days, watching the animals she's cared for get sicker and sicker from lack of sunlight and the terrible cold all over Cloudsdale as they push more heat to the desperate Equestrians beneath them, wondering why her best friend in the world abandoned her and her family to serve as a loyal guard to one of the worst monsters in history, all while she tries to keep her shelter open and take care of her one-year-old foal, her little Angel, in the middle of an endless night... all while her every move is being unknowingly watched by a Nightmare Guard/Hitman ordered to "take care" of her as soon as Dash sets one hoof out of line oh mY GOD BRAIN WHYNOSTOP THIS IMMEDIATELY AAAAAUUUUUGGGGGHHHHH WHY WOULD YOUDO THAT?!?!
I'm gonna stop now, before I become a gibbering, frothing mess as my mind tries to commit seppuku from the mental images that it conjures.
3884205 You've got one of the longest responses that I've ever seen in a comment box...
3885582 Yeah, I kind of overdid it huh?
Just wanted to get all that out of my system I guess. Took me like, two and a half hours to write that monstrosity and actually edit it to where it was readable by humans. Jeez...
3885650 But it was amazing. I enjoyed reading so very much. You have no idea how much I love it that people like my stuff enough to think about theories and stuff and... wow. Lit me just say that I loved it.
3885650 Ok.
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Well, glad you liked it at any rate. Looking forward to the next chapter, whenever that may be!
If the Tree of Harmony decided to go into Overgrow mode and do something about the castle above it, we might wind up with a Worldtree-sized Tree of Harmony. Something the size of a large town, with a leafy canopy measured in miles. Even if Ponyville is a fraction of what it used to be, I could see New Ponyville being set up in the trunk and branches of a giant-sized Tree of Harmony.
Edit: Just imagine the headache Twilight will have when she ascends, and has to make her castle in that!
Perhaps Applejack could be a member of the rebellion.