Void Trials: TCT (The Concept Trashbin) · 10:38pm May 29th, 2018
Hello, Obsi here. I hope you all enjoy Void Trials. You better do, because today I will indulge in one of my greatest pleasures: Talking about my story instead of actually working on it! 
Specifically, I will highlight a number of ideas, characters and backgrounds that I either discarded, changed or will certainly not find the space to include.
Changelings are awesome. And from what I heard, nearly everyone liked Ciloa and wanted to feed me my own guts for killing her off- Oh, spoiler warning btw- And yet, I didn't really explain how changelings became part of Equestria or do anything special with the race. And I never will!
The reason for this is a complete revamp of Void Trials 2 (The first version never saw the light of day, but I have ~4 chapters saved up somewhere). The first version actually saw a changeling as the primary antagonist! In fact, in this version, it was the robots who didnt really have much reason to exist instead of the changelings. However, this concept has been scrapped. And sadly, this means that the backstory story of changelings and how Princess Cadence came to disappear will not be in the story. (Did anyone even notice that I left her out whenever the princesses were counted out? I dont think anyone did. I probably wouldnt have noticed myself)
Princess Cadence will not make an appearance in Void Trials. Neither will Flur Demon Baby.
For anyone who liked The Iron Horse:Everything is better with Robots, you probably spotted a few references to that story within Void Trials. But did you know that before I rewrote the first part, Turing Test actually made a cameo? Yeah, she basically fulfilled Toastys part in Void Trials 1, introducing robots as sentient beings to the reader. Back then I also wanted to imply that she would actually be a nanny for Shetty when Twilight was working.
Did I mention Toasty? I think I did, the loveable teasing robot.
She wasnt intended to ever make a second appearance. She was gonna show up in the Turing Tart (remember what I said about references? 
) and then never again. A comment actually reminded me of her existence while I was writing the first chapter of Void trials 2, and only then did I decide to include her. And she was perfect. I love writing her dialogue, it's hilarious to me.
Speaking of one note characters, guess who was also supposed to only show up once: Magna Opus. I mean Magenta. But in chapter 4, I realized that I could include her whenever Shetland needs to drive to a new place... and for this convenience to happen, she logically has to always be in the same place as Shetland. And so, I decided to make her a recurring character: out of sheer convenience
At one point, I played with the idea of shipping Shetland with Gan. I think everyone got by now which ship I am advocating, but do note that the story is not tagged a romance, nor will it receive that tag in the future.
A detail I included in chapter 2 of Void Trials 1 is exactly how many children Twilight had by far. I also told about 2 people, they are not allowed to comment the correct numbers and I will remove their comments if they do :P
I hope nobody is keeping their hopes up for a "Shetland, I am your father" reveal. Its not gonna happen. Her "daddy" never learned about her and Shetty is at this point completely indifferent to the topic.
There is a character I tried to include in Void Trials 2: Abraxis, the jerky unicorn colt who showed up in the Nightmare Night special. (which I consider one of my weaker stories). If he showed up, I would have included a backstory in which he became Twilights student, instantly competing with Shetland for Twilight's attention and feeding into Shetland's race jealousy. he would have torn open old wounds and allowed me the space to further explore Shetlands mommy issues. But I have probably crossed the halfway point of the story by now and it's simply too late to revisit to include a character like that at this point.
I once played with the idea of having aliens as side antagonists. But could I really include freaking ALIENS and then not really explore them too much? No, no I couldn't. There won't be aliens. Though if you think about it, this IS a different planets, so all the ponies are actually the aliens-
I am probably going to write a clopfic starring Toasty at some point.
As you all are probably glad to read at this point, that was my dumping of old and scrapped concepts. Have fun and write some damn cooments
This is Obsi, writing out.
