[HICHE] ADKoPD: Episode 9, Tales of a Traveler

Ah yes, a much better title than last time that tells a well-informed audience member exactly which two things from ponies and Stargate will be featured in today’s adventure. Welcome, friends, to Episode 9 of “A Different Kind of Pegasus Device”.

[G-Docs Chapter Link – Tales of a Traveler]

We open on a ship floating dead in space as a pair of Wraith Hives and six Cruisers exit a hyperspace window behind it. A Cruiser approaches, and something glows from within the dead ship. Hold that thought. Back on Atlantis, Zipzee has the idea to send a team to visit a planet of shy pegasi the Breezies knew about as a sort of casual mission, but that’s not the mission we’re looking at in this episode so put a pin in it. The actual mission is going to be led by Rainbow and Applejack, also featuring Berry Punch, the fandom’s town drunk, and Diamond Mint, best know for being friends with the first Expedition member who died.

The Jumpers for the two missions line up in the Gate Room and Rainbow’s leaves first, the camera following them through the wormhole to a Spacegate over a normal-looking planet with a normal-looking town filled with normal-looking technology like cars and school buses. Welcome to the world of My Little Pony Tales, the one-season cartoon dubbed as Generation 1.5, perhaps the single oddest thing to come out of the nineties. It uniquely eschewed magic for modern life and did the ponies-in-school thing before Equestria Girls. The unnamed town features only earth ponies as we follow a cast of seven, but the only one we need to worry about in this story is Patch, the prankster who was Rainbow Dash before Rainbow Dash. After her friends don’t believe her when she sees the Jumper landing in the forest, she goes off to investigate, walking right past Applejack and Berry Punch in the process. After Berry Punch socializes the needed information out of the local ice cream parlor patrons (Tales had a whole episode about how efficiently gossip spreads), the team realizes that the Wraith have seemingly forgotten about this planet, letting its technology develop far beyond most others, yet these ponies don’t even know their Spacegate exists.

After a fruitless search, master detective Patch realizes the obvious when she passes AJ and Berry again as she leaves the forest, doubling back and following them to find everypony at the Jumper. Upon being discovered, she regales the team with her previous encounter with alien ponies (ripped from the Tales episode “Up, Up, and Away”), convincing them to stay a bit longer in hopes of finding a way to track them. Because convenience is the best plot device, after Twilight refers back to the Wraith map she saw in “Enemy in the Sky”, a fleet of ships arrives above the Tales planet. Enter the Travelers. Based on the SGA faction of the same name, they are galactic nomads always on the run from the Wraith; recently they’ve been being chased nonstop, but because Wraith ships need downtime to recover from hyperspace travel every so often (as they’re organic and have no shields, just regenerative properties), they’ve been staying mostly ahead, except for the fact that they can’t stop for lengthy repairs so their ships are beginning to fall apart, and were jury-rigged scrapheaps to start with. Most of the ships are the standard Traveler model from SGA that look like a Steelix’s head, but the featured ship we care about is a pop culture chimaera of my own invention: Ajanc, Mongolian for “traveler”, made by combining sections of (from front to back) the Nautilus from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Thunderbird 3 from the Thunderbirds puppet TV show, the LEGO Rock Raiders’ LMS Explorer, a Crystal Pony cruiser resembling a smaller SGA Aurora-class Ancient warship, and General Grievous’ flagship the Invisible Hand (the back half that tore off in Revenge of the Sith). The Travelers themselves are the sparkly-bodied, large-winged alien ponies from the aforementioned Tales episode, who have the ability to turn into sparkling clouds and zip around in ethereal form, surviving in space and even passing through walls, which is how they say hello to the Expedition, appearing inside the Jumper.

After that wall of text that would in visual form take one shot to establish, our heroes learn the above after landing on Ajanc, which the Travelers refuse to add ‘the’ to, treating it like a pony’s name instead of a simple label for an object, as they depend on it for their very survival and stuff. Ajanc’s captain Dazzleglow is annoyed by the Expedition’s presence, which she sees as distracting them from spot repairs before leaving again, but Patch’s friend from last time, Brightglow, takes them on a tour of the ship. Lots of incidental stuff happens in the draft, but we don’t have time for that here, because the Wraith ships from earlier are arriving: one Hive and five Cruisers. Wait, something’s missing… Remember that glow from the dead ship at the beginning? It was the self-destruct charging, and it was left behind to take a Wraith ship or two with it after its engines had given out for good. The Travelers are hard wired to prefer escaping, so most of their ships leave under the onslaught; meanwhile, Rainbow’s all “Fight back, you cowards!” and takes the Jumper to attack the Wraith alone. Eventually, Diamond Mint convinces Dazzleglow to stay and protect Patch’s planet, which the Wraith would ravage if they saw the technology it has, so Ajanc is taken into battle. It uses random salvaged weapons, including a drilling deflector shield, to take out several Cruisers before becoming too damaged to continue, mostly by over-stressing its own systems. Being generational ships, most Travelers spend their whole lives aboard them, so with a heavy heart Dazzleglow decides to sacrifice Ajanc to use its self-destruct as a final weapon, evacuating the ship before sending it on a collision course with the Hive Ship. And because I can only write in references, the Travelers’ self-destructs are a cluster of those seismic charges that Jango Fett tossed at Obi Wan during the space chase in Attack of the Clones, draining all sound away before bursting out shockwave discs that can cut ships in half (despite the whole space/sound issue). Anyway, Ajanc is shot apart and the seismic charges take the Hive with it, with only one Cruiser surviving the flying debris to report the Traveler fleet’s escape, seeming to have been sufficiently distracted to have not taken notice of the planet.

Unfortunately, when the Jumper Gates to rendezvous with the rest of the fleet at a designated post-escape meet-up point, we get some bad news. During the trip, one of the bigger Traveler ships fell apart while in hyperspace, destroying some other ships behind it and forcing the rest to drop out of hyperspace at scattered points along the way, separating everyone (not all ships had working hyperspace window generators and had to rely on following other ships). Dazzleglow has to help the Travelers pull themselves together again, hopefully before the Wraith begin picking them off, and has no ability to aid Atlantis. Saying their goodbyes, the Jumper team returns to update Patch and then leaves for Atlantis, but not before giving the townsponies a quick glimpse of the Jumper so Patch’s friends will believe her. Upon arriving back at Atlantis, however, they discover the other team has just beaten them back, and everyone has messed up manes. What happened on their end? Find out next time…

I admit that I went back and forth on whether one of the Cruisers had taken notice of the planet’s tech or not, and though it’s not directly included, I might have tried to stitch it in if I had more time. I also completely ignored where Patch would be after the Travelers arrived, but as she doesn’t fit into any later scenes, I’d assume she was just left on the planet. Atlantis isn’t the only group of ponies facing the Wraith on a footing more equal than throwing sticks, and “Tales of a Traveler” is where I chose to highlight that, despite any thin areas in the writing. It also shows that, after the Crystal Ponies were defeated ages ago, there’s a reason the Wraith still have a stranglehold on the galaxy despite this resistance. I also just really like the idea of the Travelers and had to work them in somehow. And congratulations to me for coming up with and working in a plot-relevant reason for Diamond Mint’s history to be important to this episode literally while I was writing this summary (seriously, that whole speech of hers didn’t exist when I posted the last episode). Join us next time as I try at least reflecting science in this sci-fi story in the concurrent adventure, “Fliers on the Storm”.