FINALLY! · 9:36pm Dec 4th, 2017
I'm sitting here in a local coffee shop on the town square with 15% battery remaining and a completed draft of the next part of Chapter 6 waiting for me to proofread it. I FINALLY managed to finish typing out that long conversation with Luna. Expect that tonight or tomorrow, and the rest of the chapter to roll out within the week!
A snippet for those of you who like spoilers from the raw drafts...
“What’s a Deep One?” Twilight asked.
“It’s a creature from the lower depths of the Dreamtide,“ I explained, “They’re known for being able to ford the Ora and incorporate concepts into their form and manifest them at will. I don’t know how they do that, but I think I might be more malleable than them at this point, because they all have a few defining characteristics and limitations that, as far as I’ve seen, don’t apply to me.”
“Which is concerning, seeing as the Deep Ones, due to their metaphysical nature, do not see organic beings as having an innate right to live.” Luna said darkly, narrowing her eyes again.
I raised my forehooves defensively, “Woah, hold on, I don’t have any qualms with organic life. I mean, I was organic until all of this happened.”
Luna took a deep breath, sitting back down. “Yes, I have been informed of the explanation you gave Twilight for your existence. Perhaps you could walk me through it though?”
“Well... I mean, some of the details are shaky, but this is what I remember.” I began, “I am originally from another species on another planet. On my planet, magic is not widely known, because magic users and magical creatures keep it hidden from the general population, and have infiltrated the world governments to do so.”
This caused a few concerned brows to be raised.
“Well, not me! I was just a hedge witch! I studied in secret and had no way of being involved in those groups!” I said defensively before continuing, “Anyway, I was at some sort of festival when I was ambushed by some magical entity... The details are foggy on that. Really, it was, it as if an occult hand had reached down from above and moved me directly out of my world. It ripped my body apart, then tried to perform transformation spells on me, which turned into direct attack on my existence when I tried to defend myself. I managed to keep my consciousness intact long enough to hijack a transportation spell it had weaved, and next thing I knew, I was here.”
I looked around, thinking maybe I should continue, but Luna and Crowley had gone rigid.
“Meta,” Luna said, her eyes fixed on me, “were you able to interpret the method this spell used to ford the Void?”
I took a moment to decide if there was a better way to phrase this than the simple fact, but there wasn’t really, “It used a brute-force method. Actually, I’m not sure it was even a competent spellcaster, it was just able to harness so much power.”
The room was dead silent.
“Meta.” Luna finally said, measuring her words carefuly, “did you just mean to tell me... That an entity, which is not only powerful enough to tear away a spellcaster’s body... But is powerful enough to cross multiple worldlines and ford the Void at will... Created a transportation spell, which it left in the Void, which could also bring an entity across the void... And targeted it for this planet?”
I took a moment to respond, the gravity of her question taking a moment to process. “...Yes.”
In the universe. In every universe, there are constants. Without those constants, the universe could not exist. One of them is that math and logic hold true, another is that spacetime has a stable configuration, another is that there is a finite speed at which one can travel... And another is that the barriers which make said universe not connected to other ones, and keep its matter from being sucked out into the Void between universes, cannot be penetrated through direct means. The Void itself was not even a real place, only the term we use to describe the not-space between those barriers, in which nothing can truly exist. Directly crossing between a universe and the Void, let alone between one Universe and another, was comparable to say... traveling faster than the speed of light using contemporary physics: theoretically, very possible...
...With enough energy to convert the entire mass of a planet the size of Equus into pure plasma.
In the corner, I heard Twilight finish putting the implication together, a whimper escaping her throat, “Ohhh shit... Oh shit... Oooooh shit oh no....” she started curling into the fetal position.
Luna closed her eyes, “Twilight, breathe. The potential existence of such an entity is not a new concept, nor does our knowing of it change the fact that it would have existed before: this is merely another bridge we will have to cross...” After giving the room a moment to relax, she continued, raising a hoof, “Meta, I want you to continue from there. There is another detail I wished to clarify...”
I'm excited to see that a displaced is going to tell the ponies about the old one and they're actually going to react to that. In most stories the displaced essentially says “I came from another world and” before he can finish twilight starts asking questions. But in the few stories where they describe the old ones to the ponies they generally have less questions and react like “So a bored supergod sent you here, cool”
for the record this is a supergod.
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4741802
The thing that Displaced her isn't what you're referring to, but I'm glad you like it! I'm really happy about how I took something that's almost universally ignored and just used the simple thought of "what if someone actually thought about this for five seconds?" to turn it into a cosmic horror story. Gonna have lots of fun with this concept from here on out... :3
4741867
Prase super god my genius has been recognized also what do you think of the comic pics I posted?
4741914
The Warren Ellis thing is intriguing, but it doesn't look like anything from my story. If you'd posted something like The Crimson King, Kuyubei, A.M., or the Orobouri, I'd tell you that those exist in Meta's multiverse, but I don't know anything about that comic, so I can't really discuss it.
4741922
Actually I meant was the third picture funny, I thought that it was a hilarious type of of over exaggeration.
4742102
Ohhh...
Yeah, I like that sort of description. XD
Wait a minute. 15% battery remaining? Is that a laptop or... no. Don't tell me you're one of those maniacs like Ironwolves21 who writes lengthy fics on their phone, with their thumbs. XD
Seriously, though. I have a hard time even with mushy laptop keyboards. I like my Filco mechanicals. I guess some people can text on capacitive touchscreens really fast, though.
One of these days, I'm gonna take some big mechanical keyboard and stick a Raspberry Pi in it to make a modern Amiga. Bunsen Labs Linux, battery-powered, portable, with toolbox latches on it. The ultimate word processor.
4742226
I was in a coffee shop on a laptop. :|
Sometimes I write on my phone, but it's just too hard to read through and edit pages upon pages of text without a big screen and a keyboard, so I don't use it for actual drafts . I've been thinking of putting together one of those Raspberry Pi laptops myself, but these $200 ones I buy every couple of years seem to be doing it for me just fine...
4742237
Laptop keyboards seem to be getting worse every few years. The Thinkpads with the scalloped keycaps were great. Then they went to the flat "island tile" or "chiclet" style like Vaios and MacBooks with no scalloping and hardly any travel, and now the new MacBooks have "butterfly switches" where the scissor stabilizer has been replaced with a living hinge like a tic-tac lid, and even less travel, with exposed contacts that fail if so much as a mote of dust gets under the key.
I like Cherry MX keyboards. My current writing setup is an iPad Pro with Scrivener and a Filco Majestouch Minila Air (MX Red) Bluetooth mechanical keyboard. There are very few laptops with low-profile mechanical keyboards, and they're all monster-sized, heavy gaming laptops. There practically aren't any laptops tailored towards dedicated typists.
4742250
I like your name by the way. I was at the train station the other day thinking about how cool it would be to have a scene in the sequel where Meta or another Marilyn is fighting someone in a New York City train depot on Earth, with trains whipping around them.
4742252
There’s actually kind of a story behind it. My first Xbox Live gamer tag was b00msl4ng, after the Razer Boomslang mouse, but that Xbox had a hard drive failure and I lost the data for that account (I think that was before they added an account recovery feature). I created that account way back in the day, to play MechAssault in 2002, when the Xbox Live service first debuted.
Then, when Halo 2 came out, I got a new Xbox and created a new account where I went by Querulus, which is Latin for “inclined to complain”. Incidentally, Queri is where we also get words like quarrel, or quarrelsome. I thought it appropriate that, on a service where people are tempted to rage over voice chat, that I would have a gamer tag that articulated that rage. Plus, it was based on an OC from a Powerpuff Girls fanfic I never got around to publishing. Unfortunately, most XBL players don’t know any Latin, so I’m sure you can guess what happened next. Every other game, some knuckle-dragger would chuckle and snort, “Queer-ulus, wow, what a fag”. I got sick of having to explain it to people who couldn’t pronounce it correctly.
Then, I had this one match on Terminal, the map with the monorail running through the middle of it that squishes unfortunate players, where it was 4v4 Team Snipers and three of my teammates quit because they were deranking (deliberately lowering their rank so the matchmaking system would match them up against easy prey; Microsoft introduced various algorithms and methods of Bayesian weighting to counteract this later). Now, it was 1v4. Me, all alone, versus four opponents.
I, quite rationally, figured that since this was Snipers, combat would take place at long range where the attritional effect of getting dogpiled by multiple Spartans at once is not in play like it is with mid-range weapons. It’s simple mathematics. Unlike the constant spray of rounds from an SMG or Battle Rifle, each Sniper Rifle is semi-automatic and holds four rounds. Four chances to hit the target before needing to reload. One headshot or two body shots are a kill.
Four players, working together, would have sixteen chances to kill me with a headshot if I were out in the open, but I wouldn’t be out in the open. I would be sticking to the shadows, where I’m less likely to be spotted. It is far easier for one camper to track the movement of one of four players than the reverse. Also, since it’s slayer, the only way they can score is by killing me. All I need to do to win is to get one more kill than all of them put together. If I only got one kill per life on average, as long as I got that extra kill, I would still win. I weighed my chances, and then set my plan into motion.
The opening stages went well for me. Almost too well. They ran straight for the station in the center, and we traded shots across the tracks. I was averaging two or three kills per life. They got more cautious later on, but the whole thing made them straight-up furious. They lost the ability to maintain their cool, pretty much right out of the starting gate. They screamed through their microphones in proximity chat. “QUIT! QUIIIIIIT!” Among lots of colorful vulgarity, of course.
I would not quit. I was enjoying this far too much. I lured them onto the monorail tracks, leapt out of the way of the oncoming train and watched as they were crushed to death. By the end, they’d lost any semblance of composure, and I had a 1.5 kill/death ratio well into the double digits. The only thing I heard over their mics before their party backed out of the post-game lobby was a groan of utter defeat.
From that time onward, I was Querulus no more. I am Train Dodger.
Unfortunately, my plan to pick a more generic-sounding screen name didn’t work. Now, instead of hurling homophobic epithets, people ask me if I dodge trains in real life. To which the answer is, no, of course not. What sort of lackwit would purposely put themselves in front of hundreds of thousands of pounds of steel moving at sixty miles an hour?
Ahahaha, I thought for a moment you were referring to Lovecraft's Deep Ones.
I guess it's okay, we get cosmic horrors anyways.
4742415
They're a Lovecraftian entity from Dragon. I'll make a blog post about them at some point.
4742416
Huh never read that one. I'm more familiar with the Deep Ones from the Shadow over Innsmouth.
4742419
Yeah, I think that's where the last writers got the name. They're vaguely similar, but not the same.