Happy Birthday!

... to Crystal Dew, the little blue star of this pony show. Granted, I might finish typing this after midnight, so for clarity, her birthday is June 24th, or whatever your head-canon equivalent of that period of the year may be. I use our months because it's easy to interpret and, for narrative purposes, is interchangeable with whatever made-up names or conventions I might have chosen if I were so inclined. Midsummer or thereabouts.

Caution: Spoilers ahead for To Bellenast.

I'm still slow, so no new chapter to post yet, but I'm about 7,000 words into it. It's pretty dialogue-heavy, but then, all of Crystal's adventures/non-adventures are dialogue-heavy. That may make her story seem to take longer, when it has encompassed a relatively short amount of time (no, seriously: not even two full weeks have passed in nine chapters), but it comes as a side-effect of writing a character who likes to ask questions, and though thinks herself exceptionally competent, is inexperienced in the ways of the world. Foresight, certainly, is not among her notable talents.

She did take melee weapons as a Tag! skill, after all, instead of guns. Investing some more points in barter would have saved her some money on that beat-up AER-9. You might have noticed that she put some points into Speech recently.

Alas, Crystal Dew does not always think with her head, but with her gut, instead, or her heart... sometimes even when those decisions lead her to regrettable outcomes. The chapter I'm working on now brings up such a topic in a difficult, even blunt, manner, as Maximillian, a character I initially came up with years ago, continues to show his own speech skills.

One of the themes I wanted to explore with Maximillian was, of course, that of an engineered being given agency and free will, but instead of exploring the development of that intelligence, as so many other science-fiction books and movies do (such as Asimov's I, Robot and Bicentennial Man, one of my favorites) I wanted him to be a machine which, by the time he is introduced, has grown to that point of self-discovery already, and grown beyond it. I wanted him to be a unique perspective to the changed world that a post-apocalyptic Equestria has become. Maximillian has extensive electronic records of history, but little on current events, so he is as unfamiliar with the wasteland as Crystal is unfamiliar with the depths of the ocean or the vastness of space.

Those of you who have read any of Keith Laumer's Bolo books might recognize the term "battle screens" as used by Maximillian in Diplomacy, Part 2. Battle screens are the force fields employed by Bolos, self-aware tanks/stupidly powerful, planetary siege platforms in Laumer's works. I used that term deliberately to liken Maximillian to a Bolo, even though he is nowhere near close to being one (He's more like a Sentry Bot crossed with an RX-75 Guntank). For those of you unfamiliar with the Bolo universe, battle screens are physically impermeable force fields that simply stop anything and everything that collides with them, projectile or beam or blast wave. They cannot be penetrated by anything of insufficient power, and if something below that threshold strikes them, they even transmit that force of impact into energy banks, not unlike how regenerative braking systems on electric vehicles return power via a dynamo.

I didn't want to steal the phrase or concept outright, but I felt using that terminology would give a general idea of imperviousness. For reference, in addition to a combination of Sentry Bot and RX-75 and/or APC, this Bolo on the cover of David Weber's novel in Laumer's setting, Old Soldiers, is one of the inspirations for Maximillian's appearance:

I forget which mark/model of Bolo this particular machine is, but the scale of it compared to the foot soldiers is about the size I was going for when I described Maximillian.

Larger, more advanced Bolos than this one can withstand direct nuclear bombardment on the scale of hundreds of warheads in sequence because they simply do not give a fk. The mighty battle screen stops all attacks until it cannot anymore, which is usually when the Bolo suffers catastrophic overload through simultaneous bombardment or something finds a creative way of getting around the battle screen.

To clarify, Maximillian isn't nearly that advanced, and his "battle screens" are not as capable as those. They are equivalent to the shields used by alicorns, particularly as I describe in Crystal's Alicorn Shield perk in the footnote of Chapter 5: "When cast, the shield raises your effective DT as an inverse function of shield surface area, Endurance, and Magic skill level. This spell can affect allies within its sphere of influence. While using this spell, any enemy attacks that bypass your effective DT and hit you will always score a critical hit."

Simply add a balefire furnace as a power source and you have Maximillian's super bubble. Think twenty or thirty green alicorns all meditating for one bubble shield, then make it the size of a large house.

Ivy made a gun capable of punching through that. Why? Only she knows. Maybe she wanted a gun that could kill Fomalhaut's namesake, should it be necessary. Maybe she saw Maximillian years ago while flying around the southern desert and decided she would deal with him if he ever came knocking. Maybe she simply wanted to practice her craft.

Whatever the case, Crystal decided to be friends with the iron giant. We'll see if that gives Lady Ivaline or Princess Blizziera an aneurism.

Edit: Aaaaand I hit the post button instead of the preview button. Here's a commissioned bit of art of Crystal from 2018 by earthsong9405 (Top left, with the super shotgun), including her cutie mark, though take note that I gave the description for this sketch before I had solidified exactly when she would get the mark: https://www.deviantart.com/earthsong9405/art/Stream-Commission-Compilation-6-755575696

In this, she has her prosthetic leg and no wings, so it's not completely accurate. However, it was also when I finally set her cutie mark in stone. Having a commission done required me to spit it out, after all.