"Director's cut: A Giant Adventure to Equestria, chapters 9, 10, 11 · 4:50pm Jan 22nd, 2019
Out of all the chapters so far, partly because of how they would originally going to be, to what it is now, chapter 9 took the longest to edit. Only Chapter 15 took longer. Like chapter 8, I thought about naming chapter 9 "Fear of a Princess", but decided not to.
First, the talk Starlight had with Eric wasn't part of chapter 9 at first. She was still going to stay with Eric alone at Fluttershy's, but because Eric himself asked her too.
That's because originally, after Applejack and Rarity went to Fluttershy's and told him what Twilight wasn't threatening him, he was going to want to see Twilight right away, and she would come to Fluttershy's to apologize. However, he would still feel nervous, and wanted Starlight beside him to ease his nerves because she had so much power. like I said in chapter 2 and 3 director's cut, this was originally going to be Starlight's first real appearance in the story, before I thought of the Nightmare Prevention Spell idea.
Twilight was even going to come with flowers to further show how sorry she was, which would've eased Eric enough to want to be alone with Twilight. She would apologize then try to hug Eric, and he would yelp in pain from his hurt arm as she started to tighten her hug. This was going to be when she found out that the shaking hurt his arm, and she would run out of Fluttershy's place, crying. Queen Chrysalis would've still appeared at the end of chapter 9, so that'd still been the same.
As for chapter 10, the "full" version of Twilight apologizing to Eric was going to be here at first, right after Eric apologized to her. But because the clock was ticking because of the smoke, I thought that the "canon" Twilight would first just want to get Eric out of the cave. Time was running out, and he was getting close to passing out from the smoke by the time he was done talking. Because I'm trying to write the characters as they were during the middle of season 7, I edited most of Twilight's apology out of chapter 10, and put the full version in chapter 11. Other than that, Chapter 10 stayed the same during and after editing, other than the usual fine tuning I always did in chapters during editing.
Speaking of how the "canon" characters during season 7 might act, this is another reason why I thought Starlight could fit so well in the role she ended up having. The "canon" Starlight can and does struggle with empathy, especially in season 6, despite truly caring about her friends. But she could realistically get around this by being able to personally relate enough with someone/somepony to let her be able to use the empathy she does have, as she did with Eric's struggles in this story, And Eric being a type of character she could do it with was, to be honest, pure luck, when I thought of how his character would be like. Even so, I personally don't think the season 6 Starlight yet gained enough empathy, or knew enough about friendship, to have had the type of talk that the Starlight in this story did, but I can see the season 7 and beyond Starlight do it.
One more thing about Starlight in Chapter 9 was I had her leak red smoke from her horn, when she found out Twilight hurt Eric. But I took it out during editing. They didn't have a brother-sister bond yet, so I thought having her leak red smoke here, despite being pissed at Twilight, would've been a bit much. However, nothing about that scene changed, not even the lines. She just didn't leak red smoke.
Because I wanted to not let the story not go over 15 chapters, I scratched a part of what was originally going to happen, after Twilight saved Eric. After Twilight saved Eric, she was going to be too weak to teleport them out of the caves. Eric, with a super-strength spell cast by Twilight with the last of her strength before passing out, was going to drag her out of the caves by himself, then get found by the Mane 6. I decided to just skip this, well before I even started writing chapter 10, and just had Twilight be able to teleport them out of the caves. If I'd kept it, this probably would've been the main plot of chapter 10, and much of what actually happened in chapter 10 would've been in chapter 11. The part with Starlight being injured by Chrysalis stay the same.
Chapter 11, other than having the full version of Twilight's apology added in, didn't go through any real changes as I was writing it, and during editing. However, because of the shorter length of the chapter, during editing, I added more to what Twilight said during her apology, to try to further show her true feelings at the time.
