[HCHE] ADKoPD: Episode 13, Valley of Lost Dreams

And now we’ve reached the halfway point of the story, complete with the biggest all-out battle thus far. This massive event was positioned to act as a mid-season finale if need be, giving me a chance to take some time off and work on other stories before returning to tell the rest of the adventure. Lotta good that turned out. Also, this title references “Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams”. Not relevant, I just wanted to tell you that. Welcome, friends, to Episode 13 of “A Different Kind of Pegasus Device”.

[G-Docs Chapter Link – Valley of Lost Dreams]

This episode wastes no time diving headfirst into the thick of it. We open on a dream message from Ribbon to Twilight, much like she’d done in a G1 episode: the Wraith are coming. Atlantis sends a team to Dream Valley as Autumn Gem is pulled from the Crystal Outpost on Gaia and sent to the Outpost Lab in the Purple Mountains. There, she gets a view of what exactly they’re dealing with: a group of three Wraith Hives, accompanied by 3 Cruisers each, is closing in on Dream Valley. I’d also like to point out that, back in the day, I went through the trouble of rigging up what the Tambelon-style dialer would look like when dialing Atlantis, minus the constellation symbols. I just like my efforts to be appreciated.

Especially because we’re dealing with Equestrians and not Earth politicians, every facet of Atlantis is immediately put into the defense of Dream Valley instead of saving them for Gaia. This is helped by Twilight’s reconstructed map from the Wraith antenna station seeming to indicate that these Hives in fact are the party that’s heading for Gaia, so if they can be stopped here, all the better. All lore that follows during the preparations and the attack itself is from one G1 episode or another; it’s really an interesting series to watch for some G4 fans. Rarity’s magic drags her to finding one half of the Flash Stone (“The Ghost of Paradise Estate”), a powerful artifact that the Wonderbolts are dispatched to find the other half of. Also called in is the police force of the Crab Nasties (“Fugitive Flowers”). After evacuating everypony but the fighting force to Atlantis, the Wraith Hives arrive in orbit. They send down a swarm of Darts, expecting a pushover pit stop to collect more food for the trip to Gaia, setting up a skybeam on the surface that was only featured once in SGA, so I’m guessing at its function. We then descend into my unfortunate trademark pattern of having a vague order of dissociated events of a line or two with one really big extended sequence taking up most of the words but stopping shy of the conclusion.

Starting here, several chapters are scattered around based more on the names I could come up with than where prominent story divisions are or should be, and could probably use a revision. To begin with, “Balance” invokes more G1 lore (“Mish Mash Melee”) and involves the weaponization of the Frazzits, small fluff wisps kept in a barrel underground that send everything nearby into chaos. And that’s the last we hear of them. Then, in a rather spectacular sequence, Fluttershy uses Atlantis’ control chair much like she did at the Outpost back in “The Device Reawakens” to send a swarm of drones flying through the Stargate and up into space as a glowing stream, wiping out one of the Hives and two Cruisers, damaging a third. Unfortunately, in her moment of ferocity, she used up every last spare drone Atlantis had that wasn’t already loaded into a Jumper, and there are still two Hives left. Whoops.

In the Dinotopia reference chapter “Find the Light”, a Cruiser tries attacking the surface directly. With the Darts putting Rainbow Dash’s Jumper squadron on the run, Autumn does some technobabble messing with the Outpost Lab’s computers, which ends up activating a long-dormant security system left by the Lanteans and releases a G1 McGuffin, the Rainbow of Light (“Escape from Midnight Castle”, et al.) from the Rainbow Bridge the Stargate is sitting on top of. Precursor to the Elements of Harmony in inspiration in- (and out-of-) universe, its function here is based on the superweapon from SGA’s “Sanctuary”. The Rainbow of Light sweeps across the landscape destroying everything Wraith while leaving everything pony alone, clearing out the ground forces and Darts before turning skyward directly through the approaching Cruiser, where it proceeds to wreck another Hive and two more Cruisers. In G1 it’s magic, but in this story, though looking like magic, it’s still technology, and again unfortunately, removing the ZPM from the Outpost Lab earlier took away the failsafe for its power source, meaning that as it destroyed Wraith ships, it was using itself up, and as it tries attacking the last Hive, it begins being shot apart and loses its attacking power trying to keep itself from disintegrating. The Rainbow of Light only manages to wreck the last Hive’s engines before a swarm of kamikaze Darts exhausts the last of its power and it fades completely. Whoops. For those keeping track, this follows the basic Stargate formula: if the main characters find a cool toy, they must lose or break it as soon as possible.

The tally of the Wraith armada now stands at one stationary Hive, three pristine Cruisers, and one damaged Cruiser steadily shutting down in orbit. And the draft now stands at 261 words left before reaching the aftermath section, so we’d better wrap this up quick. An idea I had was to sneak onto one of the damaged Wraith ships, the G1 pegasus Masquerade disguising herself as a Wraith (like Teyla in SGA that time or two), but I don’t know to what end. In the chapter “Blue Ribbon”, the telepathic Ribbon tries reading the Wraiths’ minds, granting another clue regarding Wraith alliances, but the Wraith feel this connection and push back, perhaps briefly taking control of Ribbon, that part’s not planned too well. It’s around here that the damaged Cruiser begins falling out of orbit and risks crashing near Paradise Estate. Before dealing with that, my only vague plans for a resolution are to hijack one or more of the Wraith ships to destroy the others (likely utilizing Ribbon, as large Wraith ships are largely operated by telepathic controls). What I do know will happen is that the Wonderbolts retrieve the other half of the Flash Stone (possibly referencing a battle with the guy who had it in the episode), reform it, and use its power to stop the falling Cruiser, either by destroying it, pushing it away, or whatever its undefined lore lets it do. Maybe they send it into the final ship and destroy them both.

With everyone breathing a sigh of relief, having saved both Dream Valley and Gaia at once, Twilight finds Autumn Gem disappointed in herself for messing up with the Rainbow of Light, wherein Autumn reveals a deep secret. Though I never mentioned it in the summary of “Harmony Under Pressure”, it was in the draft that the dark magic entity’s appearance had reminded the crystal ponies of their experiences during the time King Sombra banished the Crystal Empire. They varied, but were each a different kind of Twilight Zone horror story. Autumn Gem, however, reveals that her experience was simply to blink and then it was over. As a form of survivor’s guilt, she’s invented her own burden to bear by holding herself to an unsustainable ideal of perfection in her work that’s pushed her to the great heights she’s reached, and this was her first major failure. Feel an emotion, I guess.

As mentioned at the beginning, “Valley of Lost Dreams” was meant as a mid-season finale. In that respect, it brings to a close the impending doom lurking on Equestria’s horizon and begins an open-ended section that, thematically, can go anywhere with less of a sense of desperation, but in actuality isn’t going to be much different episode-by-episode than the first half. Also as it stands, only the final two episodes are longer in the draft than this one. Join us next time as we enter the brave new world of the second half, and meet faces new and old in “The Quest for Power”.