Backstory: Little Filly Lost · 1:19am Feb 3rd, 2022
First, some context. The Dark Steel series is a spin off from The Quicksilver Chronicles. The private investigator Dark Steel is first mentioned in chapter 3 of One Of Us where he helps Quicksilver and Misty find a lost friend. Those events are retold from Steel's point of view in Dark Steel. That story is followed by The Painless Murders and finally Little Filly Lost.
In the first chapter of the story Dark Steel there's part of a paragraph that reads:
I’d worked here for a lot of years. It had been a decent career. I might have even made it to retirement. Then I arrested some spoiled brat of a pony, a colt of some Canterlot elite couple. He got a slap on the wrist. I got a cardboard box to carry the things from my desk. If this place burned to the ground, I’d bring the marshmallows.
That's the only backstory we have on Steel and I've always wondered what happened. Not so much about the specific case mentioned, but what came after. How did he get from an unjustly fired police officer to the rather jaded and sarcastic private detective we see in that story? There was an interesting tale in there somewhere that I wanted to explore.
This story is an example of one where I did not have all the parallel plots figured out when I started. For example, I knew early I wanted to do something with a museum robbery, but it was much later when I figured out just how that would work. The best example of this was Steel getting his fedora. I was looking at some other cover art, and noticed the art for Dark Steel where he has a fedora on. I had a series of thoughts in quick succession: when did he start wearing a fedora, where did he get it, why did he get it, did it happen in this story? I then went back and inserted the hat shop scene into that already completed chapter. It's interesting how writing works.
I also wanted to explore family dynamics and what happens when things go wrong. Not all families are perfect. The show touches lightly on the topic of abuse as appropriate for it's rating. There's Scootaloo and her parents, and Diamond Tiara and her mom ("The Pony I Want To Be" is one of the more emotional songs in the series). I wanted to push this topic a bit harder. Steel encountering Windflower gave me that opportunity.
I knew before I started the story that I wasn't going to show anything graphic. Any abuse was all going to be in the past. What I did want to explore was the effects it had on Windflower. The traces of a bad home life don't magically vanish just because the situation has changed. One has to recover and heal. It takes time, and support. Without the story getting bogged down, or getting preachy, I wanted to show some of that process.
The result was a collection of plot lines and concepts that all merged together into a fun story. Little Filly Lost has more "just for fun" reads (not part of writing or editing) than any of my other stories. Even knowing what comes next, I still enjoy it.
