[HICHE] ADKoPD: Episode 14, The Quest for Power

Upon examination of the topics of each episode, I’ve come to realize that the first half of the story has more dealings with past-Gen worlds than the upcoming second half, from almost all to almost none. Guess I wanted more Stargate in my Stargate story. For the time being, however, we’re still riding the past-Gen wave. Welcome, friends, to Episode 14 of “A Different Kind of Pegasus Device”.

[G-Docs Chapter Link – The Quest for Power]

The title again contains the word “power” for the same reason as the last two times, also stemming from the title of the G1 episode that inspired its past-Gen world chunk, existing separate from Dream Valley much like other G1 niches. Also, we’re back to this summary basically being the draft minus dialogue. Oh joy.

So remember back in “Do These Genes Fit Well?” when I mentioned off-hand that the buffalo were also part of the conference about Twilight and Atlantis? Yeah, something’s finally coming of it. Little Strongheart from “Over a Barrel” has been selected to represent the buffalo on the next Atlantis mission. Arriving at the Crystal Empire to be taxied to the Spacegate, she takes a stop at the Crystal Heart, when it suddenly loses power for a second and almost falls to the ground before floating back into place. A stranger in these lands, Strongheart thinks it was reacting to her unwelcome presence, but we soon find out it’s way bigger than that. After reaching Atlantis, whose magic-fueled generators have also had power wobbles, she’s put into a mission team with the presumed pegasus sisters from “Hurricane Fluttershy” who asked about Twilight’s mini wind turbine and another background pony.

We then reach the new planet in the telling SG-1 reference chapter, “The Third Race”, discovering a grounded Stargate in a vast expanse of jagged crystal called the Jewel Desert. I’m sure the crystal bits that scraped the Jumper upon exiting which should’ve been cleared away by the kawoosh of the Gate opening aren’t ominous at all. The desert eventually ends miles later in front of an extravagant mansion called Royal Paradise, and walking up we hear arguing through the door from today’s spotlight characters, the G1 Princess Ponies. In “The Quest of the Princess Ponies”, they are a group of wand-wielding, party hat-wearing toy commercials who protect magic itself, and they’re much the same here…on the outside. The actual story here is a bit hazy, mostly being a lore dump until the Princesses offer to show the Expedition to the plot device. In terms of the lore that’s dumped, we learn that these six Princess Ponies make up one of the Three Great Races of the early galaxy alongside the Flutter Ponies and Crystal Ponies, the Princess Ponies being the ones who ‘tamed’ magic to make it reliably usable; this grouping is based on SG-1’s Four Great Races of the Ancients, Nox, Asgard, and Furlings. We’ve established the Crystal and Flutter Ponies as parallels for the Ancients and Nox respectively, and SG-1 itself jokes how it never explained the Furlings, so the Princess Ponies fit in as a stand-in for the Asgard in one major way. There are, and have only ever been, six Princess Ponies, collectively transferring their minds into new magically-cloned bodies to become the ‘next generation’, much like the Asgard, but with new personalities and names, and they always name one member as Queen for that go-round, this decision being the source of their current arguments, as in G1. In the G1 episode, we mostly followed Princess Tiffany, the white pegasus, but in this story…things are a bit more complicated. The simple fact is that the Princess Ponies are very difficult to distinguish personalities for from the source, so most of their dialogue here is a series of unattributed statements, the implication being that they swap around their group when speaking, each one covering a sentence or two before handing off to the next, and who says what is almost irrelevant, because they’re just that in sync. In other words, I write plot points around how lazy I can be.

The story continues as they arrive in a cavern underneath Royal Paradise to see the Heart of Magic (renamed from G1’s Heart of Ponyland for obvious reasons), the device that stabilizes all magic in the galaxy…with its lid sitting open and the ZPM that powers it missing. This is bad on every level. This leads into the chapter “Fire and Ice”, where an investigation of the surrounding maze of cave tunnels leads to a startling discovery: Desmo, leader of the bat ponies we met a few episodes ago, is standing dead in the middle of a fork in the tunnel, one side of him burnt to a crisp and the other frozen solid. As in G1, these caves are inhabited by two parties other than the Princess Ponies, the Lava Demons and the Ice Orcs, and after the bat ponies stumbled onto this place while experimenting with their Stargate and stole the ZPM from the Heart of Magic (like the Genii of SGA or the rogue NID group of SG-1), they ran into both types of monsters at once and the ZPM went missing in the confusion. The story from here is more of a plan than an execution, in which the party splits to follow each tunnel, each discovering and rescuing another bat pony held by each of the monster factions, Acero and Miri. In a neat twist, they both play double agents to the Expedition without realizing the other’s game and each think the other legit defected; too bad I have no idea where that story thread goes, it sounds interesting. As for the Lava Demons and Ice Orcs, they both want the ZPM for the power it contains to support themselves against the other, even if they don’t understand the interface required to access its power; in G1, the Ice Orcs were your generic “misunderstood” peaceful monsters and joined the heroes with the Lava Demons’ mistreated underlings against their evil leader, but no such luck here, that’s too overdone. The Princess Ponies also continue their squabble over who will be Queen despite it being utterly unimportant right now, but in their defense, these six have been living alone with each other and no new faces for untold millennia, social cues are no longer a strong suit of theirs.

We then enter a haphazardly-defined chapter, “Queen of Magic”, where fighting breaks out between the Lava Demons and Ice Orcs despite Little Strongheart trying to convince them to avoid another senseless conflict. The Lava Demon leader, Lavan, gets his hands on the ZPM, but finds that it’s critically low on power and is fading fast despite not being used. Princess Sparkle (no, not Twilight) tries to stop him, but gets mortally wounded for her efforts, forcing the others to use the last of the Heart of Magic’s fading powers to restore her into a new body, where she takes the name Lilac (a name spoken in the G1 episode that belonged to no one, likely a script error, so I repurposed it) and proclaims herself Queen and drives the monster factions away in a spectacular fashion you’ll have to imagine for yourselves.

Now, we turn to lore to understand how dismal the situation still is. As referenced back at Flutter Valley, ZPMs draw power from a pocket of subspace until doing so makes it reach maximum entropy, and harmony magic can revert that entropy gain to let a ZPM provide power indefinitely if kept recharged, such as this one was while inside the Heart of Magic, helping to power its own recharge. Of course, there’s a problem. Here we can finally look into why Equestria is the only place in the galaxy whose natural systems seem to be influenced by ponies and magic instead of by physics. Throughout the universe is an all-permeating quantum field of magic that “rises to the surface” more in some areas than in others, Gaia being in a rather intensely ‘risen’ area. After the Princess Ponies’ claim to fame of using the Heart of Magic to ‘tame’ the magic field into a usable force the galaxy over (but only within the bounds of the Pegasus Galaxy, hold onto that), magically-inclined beings in the magic-rich area of Gaia were able to affect nature, bending its operations to their will. However, because this is fantasy, magic has a corrosive effect on physics, and the more it’s used to supplement a natural force, the more that force is ‘worn away’ in that area, eventually reaching a point such that if that magic were ever to stop, that natural force wouldn’t be able to take over again (i.e. Celestia’s moved the sun for so long, it now can’t move without her). This is bad for a ZPM charged by harmony magic for too long, because, like cell phones and laptops, spending too long on the charger when full decreases its battery life, and the Heart of Magic’s stolen ZPM is now draining of power without even being used, the constant magical recharge having destroyed its ability to hold a charge. Even putting it back in would only drain it faster than it could recharge itself by the harmony magic, because it’s been off the charger for too long and it’s losing power at too fast a rate to reverse. And without the Heart of Magic, the strain it put on the universal magic field to tame it is ready to snap back like a rubber band, threatening to throw all magic violently out of whack. The Crystal Heart’s power ‘wobbling’ and the Jewel Desert growing over the Stargate were early signs of this. Oh, right, the Jewel Desert completely grew over the Stargate since we last looked. Great.

In the chapter “Zero Power Machine”, with only one play left, they plug the ZPM back into the Heart of Magic for however long it will last, retracting the layer of crystals off of the Gate so the pegasisters can return to Atlantis and convince Twilight to let them take the city’s lone, hard-earned ZPM for a mission of hearsay importance. Over several objections, but also amid more extreme power fluctuations across the city and reports of magical anomalies in Equestria, Twilight relents. Returning through an already re-crystaling Gate, they book it to Royal Paradise where the younger Flitter zips down the tunnels and deposits the fresh ZPM into the Heart of Magic, saving magic as we know it. Yes, the plot did seem to forget about Strongheart halfway through, why do you ask? Did you know that early notes had Zecora in her place instead? Funny how overly elastic ideas can avoid being given importance as the story develops around them.

So yeah, the day was saved, and it only took the relinquishing of Atlantis’ single most useful resource to do it, a very Stargate ending. Other than carrying that sort of a price to mess with the Expedition a bit, the calamitous nature of this episode is pretty self-contained, and the story more or less moves on without it. I didn’t even initially plan for this galactic magical cataclysm to be the mid-season premiere, it just ended up being there in the order the episodes were planned before I split the story in half, so I guess it works out that it’s such a big event. Join us next time for a more long-lasting consequence as we kick off a background mini-arc in “Letters from a Pegasus”.