Fallout: Equestria - Rising Dawn Reviews: Introduction and Chapter 1 (Part I) · 10:10pm Feb 17th, 2017
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Well, I honestly don't know a whole lot about this fanfic since its once again blind... and the description is only two lines.
What little we know from the description is that its set in the Northern Wasteland and something about a dead Stable... yeah, that's literally all we know about it.
So, I guess lets get started on Rising Dawn by Interloper.
---Introduction---
Short introduction again, so here it is for you:
Formatting
IntroductionChapters Next
- Volume I -
Learning to Fall
Once upon a time, in the magical land of Equestria ...
… all was lost. The virtues of friendship were thrown away - drowned beneath the tides of the Great War. Life as everypony knew it came apart in a matter of hours. Balefire megaspells, the products of a devastating war with the Zebras, fell from the sky and millions of lives were extinguished. Few were spared. Not even the ponies of the Crystal Empire. Long ago the Crystal Empire alone kept at bay the evil that lurked beyond the Crystal Mountains, until they too joined the rest of the world in a pyre of spellfire. As the Empire's thousand year vigil came to an end, a sinister, aberrant darkness washed across the ashen drifts of the Northern Wasteland.
200 years have passed since the North was plunged into utter darkness, and life struggles to persist in a world devoid of virtue. Mercenaries, criminals, and monsters – pony and mutant alike, thrive in this Goddesses-forsaken wasteland. But even then, they are the least of greater evils, for when the bombs fell, long ago, the world was not reborn in spellfire, but in darkness.
Unbeknownst to the nightmarish horrors that swept over the world above them, the ponies of Stable 91, one of many underground shelters designed to spare their inhabitants from the apocalypse, sleep softly within the comforts of their white halls. But it was only a matter of time before their precious little world fell apart and they awoke, screaming, with not a single ray of light to touch their faces ever again.
Well, its certainly a really interesting way to start the fic, its not very long but it establishes where the fic is going to take place, and that's always a good place to start.
Something is definitely about to go down in the Northern Wasteland, I'm very curious to see where this goes. I wish I had more I could say, but there's not a lot to go on here.
So lets move on.
---Chapter 1- Cradle- Pt 1
It starts out with the imagery of rising water that is boiling, the feeling of heat against the main character's skin. As they look down at the turbulent waters and the Stable's Water Purifier, something is definitely wrong here. Our hero jerks upright when he hears his name (Red Dawn) being shouted, followed by the screams of everypony else around them.
The room is shaking as if on the verge of the whole thing collapsing and the alarms are going off like crazy. There's definitely something wrong with the Water Purifier as its rumbling, but there's no clear reason behind it. Ponies are rushing around trying to contain this, despite the fact that this shouldn't even be possible.
I'm starting to think Stable-Tec really should've included back-up Water Purifiers and Talismans in their Stables given how often this kind of thing happens.
All the pies in the room are starting to rumble and screech, and the room is on the verge of exploding. One of the ponies named DD tries to get Red's help, but they tell her to get away from the Terminal she's at. A pipe in front of Red bursts, pouring out steam and forcing them to the ground. There are explosions around Red as more and more steam pours out, making it hard to breathe.
Red manages to put on their breathing mask in order to breathe, then we get a pretty clever use of SATS when Red uses it to avoid most of the blast, but not all of it. They get hit and get sent tumbling, its a rather unpleasant idea of the main character basically being boiled alive at this point.
Obviously Red is still alive as they try to get over to Dew Drop to get her to get out of there. There's a flash of blue light as the machine erupts in a blaze of light. Red scrambles to their hooves and tries to get to Dew Drop as somepony falls off the catwalk above. Red reaches Dew Drop finally through the smoke where the mare is still trying to work at the terminal until finally the machine seemed to shut off... until the terminal exploded as Red pulled her away.
Things are calming down a little as ponies are still running around, then Dew Drop said that something was gone, it seems that the Water Talisman is completely gone now, which means the Stable won't be getting clean water, and that's obviously bad. It seems that the Talisman was the source of the problems that had happened with the system. There is an obvious question of how long the water reserves will survive, but Dew Drop doesn't know and needs to go tell the Overmare.
Red tries to interface with the systems, but of course there's nothing, the whole water system is shot by this point. The Overmare arrives and of course she's wanting to know what happened, not like anypony can really give her a good answer. The Overmare is freaking out, hoping that it can be fixed, but Dew Drops tells her that its going to be impossible to fix. The Overmare tries to calm everypony down after giving them orders to try and figure out how to solve the problem.
Yeah, the purifier is gone and the main character is in bad shape, what a lovely situation they're in isn't it? Since they now lack a Water Talisman, solving the problem is going to be next to impossible unless somepony leaves the Stable like with Vault 13, so, yeah, here we go again. Apparently they only have a matter of weeks until they run out of water, so, yay for great situations, always fun isn't it?
One of the ponies is obviously freaking out over what's going on.
Video belongs to someone.
Red starts thinking about different ways they could do this without a Water Talisman, but its not looking great. They then tell Dew Drops that what she had done was stupid, but Dew Drops says that she had to do it, which is understandable. Its pretty obvious that Red has a thing for DD at this point. A stallion approaches who's in really bad shape but tries to pass it off, and finally Dew Drops orders the ponies to get to work on getting the systems repaired.
There's a definite sense of fear around the Stable, ponies are worried about what's going on and for good reason. Water is the lifeblood of a civilization, its why it works so well for a disaster in Stables, while admittedly its a bit cliche by now, its a good way to get a Stable Dweller into the Wasteland. They take the Stallion Box Cutter to be healed, its actually interesting that the Stable has Pegasi as well, that's not something you see too often.
The Stable seems to be continuing as before:
I looked over my shoulder down the hall and saw that the engineering level was far behind us. Away from all that destruction … everyone else was going back to doing their thing.
They didn’t know. It’s not like the purifier hadn’t broken down before. We always fixed it back up, and they’d always have their water running again.
But they didn’t know.The Stable is, actually pretty nice, this is a side to Stables you don't always see since usually they're a mess or there's nopony left alive in there. Most ponies at this point don't actually know about the purification system at this point.
Its just a matter of time before things get worse though.
---Final Thoughts---
Its actually a really good start to the fic, of course it means we've got a Stable Dweller for the, well I lost track of how many times this is used, but its been a lot.
While its true that the idea of a water talisman going out again is overdone, this fic actually takes an interesting take on it by having it all go horribly wrong on screen. Its not something you usually see while reading a fic and its something you didn't really expect to see, but its pretty good.
Really this is a well done fic, its not perfect, but its a good start to the fic. The only reason I skipped the Character Analysis so far is because I don't think I can do a good job so far.
I'll be reviewing this again at some point of course.
The introduction gets a score of 3/5.
Chapter 1 gets a score of 4/5.Fallout: Equestria belongs to KKat.
Fallout: Equestria - Rising Dawn belongs to Interloper.Now we're finally all caught up and the review requests is all done, which means on Sunday, we get back to where it all began in Stable 2.
Video Made by Me
This was shorter than I expected, but I guess that's because you only reviewed Part I of Chapter 1, not the entire chapter. Nevertheless, thanks for the taking the time to write a review, and thanks to whoever it was that asked for the review!
Anyway, you gave the intro a 3/5 so I was expecting some criticism there. What did you find wrong with it? Was it because it was too short? Too wordy? I rewrote the introduction this week to make the wording less flowery, and more in line with the rest of the story's vocabulary. You must've read it before I could publish the edits, though.
Thanks again.
4426804 Oh, sorry I always give a short intro a low score, sorry.
4426814
That hardly seems fair to anyone. An introduction is an introduction, not a prologue. The introductions to every Black Library Warhammer 40k novel are short, and suit their purpose to introduce readers to the setting - which is exactly what an introduction is supposed to do.
And besides: why write more to convey a message when you can do it with less? Introductions are written to be concise, unlike prologues, which set the stage by giving deeper background not only on the setting, but on important characters (like the protagonist) and history as well. It's why prologues are written as short chapters, and introductions are written as short paragraphs.
4427124 Fair point, sorry.