As She Stands Before the Gates of Hell, Ready to Fight...

So... yeah. I'm pretty sure I remember promising an update on Filly Fluttershy back in May. Unfortunately, the last couple of months have been pretty rough. I haven't had much time for writing lately, and worse, even when I do have time I can barely write anything. It seems like whatever driving spark I had when I wrote The Chaos Vortex has left me.

Nevertheless, the next chapter is almost finished. I have a few bits left to write in the last scene, and after a few rounds of reading and editing, I'll have it posted. Hopefully, I'll have the chapter up by the end of the month.

With that said, I do have a sneak peek:

Rainbow Dash stood at the foot of a bed. Off to one side of the bed, there was a simple nightstand and a large wooden cabinet. On the other side stood a dresser and mirror, and further away a martial arts dummy and two doors, one for the bathroom and the other for the closet. A few birdhouses hung from the ceiling above her, and tufts of nesting material were tucked away in coves along the walls and on the support beams above.

To Rainbow Dash, this room always seemed to be having some kind of identity crisis. The room was one part bedroom, one part haven for small animals, and one part personal training dojo. And yet everything in here was kept perfectly tidy and organized: everything from pictures and articles of clothing to animal feed to weaponry and pieces of equipment had its own neat little place in this room, and the room was more than big enough to accommodate everything inside it.

Today, Rainbow wasn’t interested in the room’s decor. Her eyes glanced past the heart-shaped bedpost finials in front of her, past the butterfly-patterned comforter that had been pulled to the foot of the bed, and under the butterfly-engraved headboard to the pegasus who lay comatose in that bed. Rainbow walked around to the side of the bed to get a better look at its occupant.

Fluttershy had been moved to her own room in Skyworld after they had all returned from the Chaos Vortex. Her tunic, damaged by the flames, had been removed, exposing her chest and barrel. What was left of her wings were now wrapped in bandages. Normally, Fluttershy would have been placed in Skyworld’s medical wing, but even the doctors agreed there was very little they could do for her anymore. She hadn’t woken up since she was brought here, and neither Celestia nor Skyworld’s doctors were sure that she would.

Rainbow Dash moved from Fluttershy’s bedside to the cabinet and stared at her own reflection. The bruising around her neck had healed after a quick Drink of the Gods, but she could still remember the feeling of Sombra’s form binding her, strangling her. She lowered her head and closed her eyes, unable to look at herself. ‘I screwed up,’ she kept thinking to herself. ‘I took my eyes off him for him for one second, and now… Now Fluttershy…’

Eyes squeezing shut and holding back tears, she lifted a hoof and punched straight through the glass. The entire door shattered, and she could feel shards of glass rain down on her foreleg. When she opened her eyes, she saw blood dripping from the numerous fresh cuts in her leg. She looked down into the bottom of the cabinet, down at the hundreds of glass shards as if trying to find her reflection in them again. Instead, she found something peculiar among them.

Poking out of the sea of broken glass was a pair of weapons in the shape of cats’ paws. Rainbow recognized them. They were the Paw Pad Orbitars that Fluttershy had used three years ago on her mission to the Lunar Sanctum. Rainbow always thought that Celestia was sending Fluttershy to die on these missions, and she’d cracked a joke that Celestia was making it blatantly obvious by sending her out with these weapons.

Rainbow took a closer look at the orbitars. They were part of a set, which practically made them twins, and yet they were modeled after completely different looking cats: one based on a tabby cat and the other a calico. Rainbow looked from the Paw Pad Orbitars to Fluttershy and back, and the look in her eyes hardened with determination.

‘No,’ Rainbow thought to herself. ‘Not if I’ve got something to say about it.’

So whereas KI:U throws you into the Scorched Feathers level right away with Dark Pit taking them helm, I figured I'd write an intro scene about the lead-up into it for the Filly Fluttershy version. I wanted to go into Rainbow Dash's thoughts after the battle against Sombra/Chaos Kin and Fluttershy's sacrifice, and it even gave me a chance to explore the changing relationship between the two of them, from Rainbow being the dark copy/bitter rival to Fluttershy to someone willing to kick down the gates of the Underworld to save her, even if some of her reasons for doing so are selfish. I did say in the last blog that this chapter would explore what drives Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash in this story, and I think this is a good first step, even if this is only the first half of the intro.

Now as I said before, hopefully I'll have the chapter out by the end of the month, because there is no way I'll be able to get any writing done for at least the first half of August. As it turns out, several Let's Play groups, including one that I follow, are doing a week-and-a-half long charity stream of platform games.

Yeah, the trailer's basically a ripoff of the first Sonic Mania trailer. In past years, some of these groups were involved in charity streams to raise money for children's hospitals and mental illness research. This year, all donations are going to the International Rescue Committee.