Mar
9th
2017
Probably the stupidest possible response to all the "Blink" inspirations & variants: why should unicorns have all the fun? · 10:44pm Mar 9th, 2017
Forget about focusing on the horrors (and single wonder) which are apparently inherent in teleportation. How about we try this instead? Every time a pegasus flaps their wings, a kitten dies.
I thought about writing that.
Briefly.
And then I considered that pegasus flight is actually nature's way of keeping the kitten population under control and if every pegasus was grounded for a full day (as Fluttershy immediately asks the palace to legislate), Equestria would be destroyed by a mewing plague of big eyes and shed fur.
So. Kittencalypse.
...I already wrote my auto-downvote story for the season.
This one's going to require bribes. Lots and lots of extremely blatant bribes.
So that's why Fluttershy can hardly fly!
Of course they need to keep the kitten population under control. Just imagine what Ahuizotl could do with a whole army of cats.
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"...I have to fly to the palace immediately and stop this! Um... let's see... there's about one gallop between Ponyville and Canterlot, plus a little for me because I'm on the wrong side of town... I go about two body lengths on one flap if I'm already at top speed, but it takes a lot of flapping to start going that fast and then there's more flapping on the other end if I'm trying to brake... so in rough total wing flaps, I think that's going to work out to about... I'll take the train."
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And there's our villain!
If only it was Bunnys & not kittens! Then, we could hope for Angel Bunny to die.
Given the rate of cat reporduction, I assume this would be a Dwarf Fortress crossover.
In any case, I have considered writing a story entitled Blunk, but I'm not sure what it would entail beyond the title. Besides, Titanium_Dragon already covered the basic subject matter with Dying to Get There.
(Also, every time an earth pony takes a step, the time until the heat death of the universe is cut by a minute.)
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Anyone else just flash on an image of every pegasus in Ponyville frantically hovering while Rainbow's screaming "One of these has to get him! Flap harder!"
ETA: Actually, that's probably the end of the story. With Ahuizotl defeated in a way which makes him vow not to use that tactic again, Fluttershy begs the palace to turn off the spell which leads to kitten death. However, it turns out the magic can't be cancelled, only redirected -- and it has to be another mammal of roughly the same adult size. The Wheel Of Magical Lottery comes up lapine, and then we close on all of airborne Ponyville attempting murder.
Eighty downvotes and counting!
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Twilight's really stupid Best Perpetual Embarrassment Forever little brother?
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Wow. That would probably make earth ponies by many orders of magnitude the greatest entropy/energy problems. I mean, consider the differences in information lost between unicorns: nothing? I mean, if the new one is identical except for some metaphysical thing... does it matter? ; pegasi: the life of one pretty complex animal ; earth ponies: the per-minute energy output/entropy increase of he entire universe at that moment. And the frequency of them happening goes in the same order: most unicorns don't teleport at all, and pegasi probably fly less than earth ponies walk. Dang, earth ponies are destructive.
I'd have to bring a pegasus on every embark...or capture one as soon as possible.
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Now that would be an interesting thing to drop into a crossover with Young Wizards.
for some reason a weird online comic called "Starslip crisis" comes to mind: their "starslip" transportation system works by switching places with someone in an alternate reality who happens to be in the right place...something like that. at one point, someone overloads the system and blows up their alternate's entire ship...
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I was going to make a Dwarf Fortress joke, but I see that that's already well in hand. :)
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I believe it was Ray Bradbury who wrote a story where someone invented a way to travel into parallel universes. The device is powered by converting every single bit of matter in the current universe into the energy required to make the jump. In other words, every single transport commits total genocide on everything and at the moment you left home, you destroyed it. The current possessor of the device is currently moving from universe to universe in search of someone who will not lie about what's happening and stop telling him this idiotic 'You can't get back because there's nowhere you can return to' @#$%.
Guess how many times he's run out on someone telling him that.
Teleporation horror's a thing now? Good lord...
Twilight Sparkle picked her way out of the library, keeping her hooves flat against the ground and shuffling in order not to step on any of the mewing mass of mouse-hunters. Moving in that slow fashion took nearly an hour to get to Sugarcube Corner, where Rainbow Dash sat morosely at a table, batting kittens off it whenever they climbed too high.
She sat down after carefully brushing the chair clear of cats, took a deep breath, and looked at her somewhat naked looking friend, trying her best to phrase her question in a gentle fashion before just blurting it out. "So, all of the pegasi in Ponyville are molting because of the spell I cast?"
> Every time a pegasus flaps their wings, a kitten dies.
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> I have considered writing a story entitled Blunk, but I'm not sure what it would entail beyond the title.
Crossover? Crossover.
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The clickbait potential of a title like Blunk, combined with the subject matter...
You like the featured story box, don't you?
Clearly, the real solution is to make teleportation totally innocent, but have some other form of commonplace magic be horrible. Possibly telekinesis is why Celestia and Luna constantly have to slingshot the Sun and Moon around. Or maybe the dragonfire letter spell uses the souls of dead ponies to power it.
Story title: "Would it matter if they did?"
mew
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I remember that. mew
It was a parallel universe where you happened mew to be where you wanted to be instead of where you were.
mew
If I remember correctly, cumulative differences resulted in the woman Vanderbeam was in love with having died in a sabotage attempt that she'd survived mew in the universe they'd just left.
There was some other stuff; I should probably read it again sometime soon. mew
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Hmm. You may be onto something there...
Now the catch is writing something before the bandwagon finishes pulling out of the station. Which is apparently Mixed Metaphor Junction.
If word gets out, every pegasus that has ever encountered Opal would start flying nonstop.
"Kittens!" Fluttershy shouted. "The spell only affects kittens! Opal is to old!"
"It's still worth a shot! Keep flapping!"
"Just you wait, Rainbow Dash. I've seen a Griffon recipe for turtle soup!"
No, no, no...
How about a brand new teleportation spell comes into service that is so much easier then the normal variant that all unicorns start teleporting everywhere and forcing pegasi out of the package delivery business.
This then results in the weather board of Cloudsdale financing a ton of papers that superficially appear to scientifically prove that teleportation is actually suicide resulting in the banning of the teaching of the spell and severe governmental limitations on the uses of it.
This leads to unicorn protests about their 2nd amendment right to the use of magic countered by pegasi protesters with signs that read "Teleportation is Murder!" and "They Stole Our Jobs!"
oh, excellent :3
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He's a true villain alright. Remember his plan to damn an entire valley to 800 years of unrelenting heat?
Nopony would get anything done anymore. They'd all be too busy
ing.
I guess this explains why sometimes pegasi are just in the air, flapping their wings, when they could very well just stand around.
I'm not talking about when height allows you to see farther ("Applebuck Season"), I'm talking about when just hovering there gives the pegasus doing so no advantage whatsoever.
Brilliance.
But can you write it within the next week under the prompt "Usurper Princess Fluffypaw"?
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Clearly, *blunk* is the sound effect of a teleporting unicorn hitting the fourth wall and being forcibly interrupted back into realspace.
Nah, that's all wrong. It's every time a foal says "I don't believe in breezies," a breezy drops dead.
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I suspect, though, that if you tried to explain this to the average pegasus, you'd be done and they'd still be waiting for you to get to the point. Or possibly confused by the notion that they aren't just standing around.
I've got a story idea I've been considering, inspired by all these "explaining the mechanics of teleportation" stories. Not sure if I will actually write it, but the idea is completely absurd and it makes me chuckle when I think of it... so, maybe? If I do, I fully expect the comments to be filled with variations of "What the hell, Hoopy?"
4449692 I would wonder, in that case, if you were actually jumping anywhere. That's not a cross dimensional teleporter, that's a bomb and all dimensions are just stacked on top each other and you're falling into the next one
Kittencalypse... sounds like what used to happen in an older version of Dwarf Fortress where too many kittens/cats would cause such a framerate drop that it would end your Fortress.
Wait, Estee. Why can't earth ponies get in on the fun, too? Every step an earth pony takes causes a living thing on the exact opposite side of the world to jump three feet upwards from its original position.