TRS: The Beginning

As every good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, so does The Rescue Service. In this blog post I’m going to pontificate a bit over the beginning – essentially author’s notes that did not feel appropriate to release while the story was updating. If everything goes well, I may get time to speak about the middle and the end later.

(Spoilers ahoy!)

1. Prologue
The reason there is a Prologue at all is that TRS was originally supposed to be a quite different story. Avorin and I came up with the Rescue Service about a year before the first chapter came out, as a solution to Cheerilee’s problem in The Toymaker’s Marefriend. We imagined it would be a good setting for a shared-universe story where different authors would contribute chapters about the kinky situations a recurring team of rescuers would encounter in the line of duty.

So there had to be a short introduction, explaining the basic premise, and introducing our viewpoint characters Finey and Bellchaser. After reading that, we thought, one could jump directly to one’s favorite author’s chapter. Droll, yes?

In the end, nothing ever came of that. A few people did express interest in writing guest chapters, but also said they weren’t sure they could match the quality already there. Which is a kind of praise, I suppose. Or else just standard-issue authorial self-doubt.

Technical notes. The story deliberately jumps a lot between narrative tenses and persons. At first, this was intended to reassure guest authors that they could write in whatever narrative voice they wanted to. Then, even after the guest-chapter plan turned out to be a mirage, I had to keep up the zig-zagging perspectives to stay consistent with that beginning. If I’d known I would end up writing almost everything myself, I would have restrained myself considerably in this department.

I don’t remember exactly why I chose first-person narration for Finey. Probably because I thought it gave a slightly noir feeling that fit the plan well. The present tense was to segue smoothly into chapter 2, which was written concurrently.

Trivia. I tend to think of Mr. Warmblood as the puppeteer from ‘Inspiration Manifestation’.

2. Happy Birthday
This was to be the first rescue-of-the-week chapter. I and Avorin quickly singled in on Octavia as somepony who could carry a sexy chapter if the Service was based in Canterlot. We brainstormed the outline of the chapter together, and then the plan was that Avorin would write the sex scenes and I would tie them together with some additional development of the general concept.

We managed to flesh out about two thirds of the chapter in this fashion in a shared Google doc before we both lost steam, and then it all lay dormant for about a year. When I came back to Fimfiction and discovered that people seemed to like Toymaker, I decided to give writing another shot. I got Avorin’s permission to fill out the remaining blanks myself and let the whole thing out in the world to swim or sink.

At this point, there was no plan for the chapter to lead anywhere in particular. In fact, the original reason why Octavia was taking the lead was simply that we didn’t want our protagonist to be a rapist . . . but getting blackmailed into kinky sex would all be in a day’s work in the Service. Applause, curtain, next rescue. (The mind boggles, in hindsight, doesn’t it?)

Technical notes. Much of the story is told as an introspective flashback from a waiting-in-bondage present, a structure I also used in Planked. I think it worked pretty well here – it gave Finey the opportunity to regret his actions while he told them, but lent some immediacy to the panicky ending.

Trivia. I tried to make it at least plausible, until the narration catches up to the present time, that it was Hissy Fit who had tied Finey to a bed as punishment for breaking the rules. No idea whether that fooled anyone.

3. Repair of Farm Equipment
Where the Octavia chapter was first supposed to be ‘sexy clop’, this would be ‘comedic clop’, to show off the variety of things the concept could be used for. I’m not sure how well that went; comedy is not really my strength.

Looking back, the chapter really is a bit of a wart, the only one that doesn’t lead anywhere in the overall plot. Shortly after it was published, ‘Hearthbreakers’ aired and made me a true MarbleMac believer – but that meant I couldn’t do anything more with Big Macintosh in the story. The story had to be set before ‘Hearthbreakers’ (otherwise Mac would never even think of boinking Marble’s sister), but that meant I couldn’t do anything with Mac that would prevent him from being available to hook up with Marble later.

Technical notes. For variety we switch to third person limited, and past time. The earliest drafts started with Macintosh already in the middle of being rescued by Pinkie, and then dropping into flashback while he tries to tune out her aimless chattering. It didn’t work very well, and it felt too close to the structure of the previous chapter and Planked – I was afraid of ending up with a concept of a ‘typical Troposphere flashback’ – so I rewrote it in chronological order, except for the italicized connecting segment at the beginning.

Trivia. In my mind, I think of TRS as being in continuity with The Toymaker’s Marefriend, which makes Mac’s fear of revealing his fantasies to Cheerilee particularly ironic.

4. Animal Welfare
This is the first chapter that was written after an enthusiastic reader had convinced me into making this into an actual story with a plot in it, rather than a loosely connected clop cavalcade. I knew immediately that if it was to become a real story, it would have to take seriously how fucked up Octavia’s treatment of Finey had been. But I couldn’t jump right into that without making a big ugly break from the pattern I’d already set, so the idea was to keep doing a few rescue-of-the-week chapters while we saw Finey slowly go to pieces in the background, and then jump into the real story.

This chapter is where I try to achieve that. It had been established in the previous chapter that Finey called in sick after his ordeal with Octavia and Vinyl; now he has returned to work, but still isn’t at his best.

At this point Cressie and Pokey were just supposed to be yet another rescue of the week. The idea for the chapter grew out of Kaidan’s fic Flur’s a Good Dog (which now has a different name; I suppose the owner of the original protagonist OC withdrew permission to use her or something).

In Kaidan’s story, the protagonist’s boyfriend gives her a magical collar which cannot be taken off and prevents her from speaking, and tells her she’s now a dog. She’s pretty enthusiastic about that until the boyfriend informs her that as a dog she cannot be his sexual partner anymore (she didn’t think he was into bestiality, did she?); instead he has Rainbow Dash over and makes the protagonist watch while he and Dash have sex . . .

Very well, then. There are plenty of people who get turned on by imagining being treated that way, and I have nothing unkind to say about them. But the part about Rainbow Dash struck me as something of a plothole – what did she think she was doing? If she were hooking up with the boyfriend for real, I can’t see how she would want his ex still around, even in a crippled state. And on the other hand I don’t think Dash would agree to have sex with a guy simply to let his girlfriend live out a fantasy; there was no indication that Dash and the protagonist were meant to be particularly close friends.

Thinking about how this would look from Dash’s side eventually led me to Bellchaser’s adventure in this chapter. One easily sees the points of inspiration: the pet-playing sub who doesn’t speak, the outsider, the one-night stand . . . but on the other hand I didn’t seek to replicate Kaidan’s scenario exactly, so I decided to sweeten Cressie’s lot a bit and make it clear she had a way out if she wanted. It is still vaguely ambiguous whether she’s really being abused by Pokey or not, though.

The demands of this episode helped inform Bellchaser’s developing character, in particular her casual promiscuity, which was necessary for her to agree to the strange arrangement so readily. I also had to make Pokey the perfect charmer with 110% charisma – which is surprisingly difficult to write; I don’t know if I succeeded or not. But that was the idea.

Technical notes. Not much to say about the narration here. Bellchaser gets to be a viewpoint character, told in the first person because her thoughts about the situation were the important point. In what is to become a signature move of hers, she starts out in past tense but eventually catches up to the present.

This is also the chapter where I figured out how to do chapter titles. It seems to be common for authors of longer stories to choose rather pretentious chapter titles, such as a single sequipedalian abstract noun per chapter. I wanted to do better than that and pick titles that a) don’t spoil the chapter for a first-time reader, but b) clearly reminds one who has read the chapter which one it is. In order to give myself a bit more structure I decided that c) the chapter title must appear somewhere in the chapter itself (but ideally in a context where its meaning is at least slightly different from what makes it work as a chapter title), and d) where possible it should describe something about the situation the rescuers are called out to handle.

By the time I came up with those principles I had already published chapters 2 and 3 under placeholder names, but it was surprisingly easy to go back and find something that would work for them.

Trivia. I have a clear mental image of the layout of Pokey’s apartment – it matches exactly where I lived between 2003 and 2005. No idea why that’s the right place for him, though.

Status after four chapters
This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. – Churchill

The beginning has lasted for exactly one-fourth of the total number of chapters, which seems like a nice fraction. The middle will start in the next chapter, where Finey’s problem rises to the forefront of the story.

Just for the historical record, here is what plans I had for the direction of the story while putting the finishing touches on chapter 3. Taken from a PM I wrote around that time:

So here’s what I think, still very tentatively: A better writer than me might be able to show the F-O-V threesome while both keeping the drama alive and not being a bonerkiller, but I’m going to chicken out from that and let it happen off-screen. At the end of the day Octavia lets him go, and thinks that’s the end of it. The matter is then kept in the back burner for a few anthology-like chapters, with small glimpses of Finey plunging into depression and despair because he still feels the threat hanging over him. Eventually he confesses to Bellchaser, who convinces him to go to Hissy Fit. Hissy unexpectedly (?) takes Finey’s side 100% (yay supportive bosses), is enraged at Octavia and seeks her out get give her a large piece of her mind. Vinyl overhears the confrontation and realizes with horror that the “birthday present” she did some pretty nasty things to was not a voluntary/paid participant like she thought. This causes the Vinyl-Octavia relationship to deteriorate, and Vinyl shows up to attempt to apologize to Finey. Meanwhile Octavia is on the defensive and . . . hmm? Finey and Vinyl may eventually hook up.