Reddit Reposting, Episode 2: The Megaproject [not exactly a repost]

This isn't really a Reddit repost, but it may be the best series kickoff. Why? It also doubles as my history with the fandom, as this project has been ruminating on and off the back burner since shortly after I joined the herd. Besides, it is relevant as a Reddit crosspost because I have talked about it extensively over there in the various /r/mylittlepony Thursday threads. Why not blog about it here? I get responses on Reddit and crickets here. Why'd it take two days to write? Because it's long, complex, and still has major sections that lack the focus required to be summarizable.

[EDIT: Episode 1 of the Reddit Reposting series was the G5 review I posted last year, so I updated the title to Episode 2]

Timeline of the Megaproject

June 2012

Have 48 hours aboard the Empire Builder as I head from Chicago to Portland. Plenty of time to think and re-watch some pivotal episodes of Doctor Who Series 6 as well as ponies, as I had no internet connection. The seeds of this project were planted. It was on this pivotal trip that I wrote my first cloppy words, as well. The return train journey was more clop-focused. By the end of the summer, I had about four chapters written. The story's outline at this point would later become the first third of Twilight's Time Tragedy.

2013–2018?

A whole lot of nothing. Girlfriends, college, clop, being single, moving to Wisconsin, getting fired, working somewhere else, leaving Wisconsin, and more clop all took precedence and this project was in stasis. (Un)fortunately, I am not the kind of person who can let things just drop. It was the thought equivalent of those vegetables that have long ago turned to mush. I also lost interest in keeping up with Doctor Who during this time, thanks to contract nonsense between the BBC and Amazon, meaning I missed most of Series 8. The Whovian references are mostly confined to the first third of Twilight's half of the project and, at this point, exist because the TARDIS is an extremely convenient device for long-range group time travel that would otherwise be impractical through pure magical means.

Summer 2018 or 2019

I pull out my bullet point outlining software and write down the entire outline. Doing so sparked creativity that scrapped two of the four written chapters and coalesced into what would become the middle third of Twilight's Time Tragedy. However, it didn't progress much beyond this. Still heavily fogged with what, in retrospect, was fairly catatonic depression. However, the needle moved and the outline now existed in a tangible form that I'd poke at from time to time. The Season 7 finale with the Pony of Shadows was highly inspirational here.

2020

March–June

Early months of the pandemic. We shared the communal post-apocalyptic feeling. I have never seen so many neighbors outside at once. Bike path? Packed. Streets? Empty. Sunshine? Yes. Pony fiction? I'm downing all the horror and bizarre fics I can find.

Into my head springs the idea to write the story of The Great and Powerful Trixie taking the Alicorn Amulet to the Mirror Pool instead of having a magic duel. She gives it the instruction to "take Trixie somewhere where she will be great and powerfully respected" before jumping in. Title of this story stub? The First Unicorn. Why? Find out when I describe the structure of the project. As a hint, this story was inspired in Spring 2020 because the paranoia reminded me of my middle school years in 2002–2003 and I wanted something paranoid, bizarre, and glowing. The important part to note is that this story sharply diverges from FiM canon after the introduction to S03E05.

August

Three unexpected losses in a row blew up my personal life: my beloved Publiq Transportation, a cousin, and a pet were all taken before their time. It's around this time that I first read House of Leaves. The isolation, restriction, and routine connect Trixie's story with Twilight's into one very complex stable time loop. I don't remember whether the third part of Twilight's story originated here, in the Spring burst, or when I first revisited this project after five years on ice. The concluding story of the series that starts with A Fleeting Light in the Darkness was majorly inspirational in how the timelines twist together.

2021

Not much to report. Some fiddling with the outlines. It's here that I realize just what a monster I've made. Because of all the time travelers, I need the literary equivalent of that parametric modeling software that's used to engineer airplanes and La Sagrada Familia to chart out my overall plot. It's a ball of self-referential events with at least four time-travel cohorts. A word from the foolish: don't write stories with more than a single time travel cohort—be like Doctor Who, not like me. I took my first attempt at writing the software I needed, but quickly realized I'd need to learn front-end skills to make the data entry workflow easier so I'd actually use it in a way that I can easily edit the story. Even in its unfinished state, the output from this project's plot looks like a schizophrenic's conspiracy wall. Let writers more talented with prose than me handle the standard stories.

2022

I'm finally inspired to write again? Not sure if mildly manic or just back to baseline. I am writing this summary.

Something Like An Outline [+ status commentary]

I am absolutely open to advice, be it storylines I can drop, plots that I could slice out into a standalone story, or ideas that you're specifically interested to see fleshed out.

Twilight's Time Tragedy

If it weren't for the connection to Trixie's story, this half of the project could be ready-to-write. Major plot holes would all be during the off-page action and gaps between the stories. However, with the connection to Trixie's half, changes to her story would have significant echoes here (and certain elements need to be in place here so that they make sense for Trixie's story).

Each of these thirds would probably be novella length, possibly even novelette-size for parts 2 & 3.

Time Crisis?

(needs a better title)

It opens with a prologue of a filly Scootaloo walking into a the Everfree forest. She walks out with her cutie mark or not at all. Inside, she finds a fighter jet that's been magically preserved for untold thousands—possibly millions—of years. Buried instinctual talent overcomes instinctual equine fear as she approaches the building in the mist and walks up the stairs into the cockpit. The trees part to reveal a runway. She pulls levers and presses buttons in a perfect symbiosis of mare and machine and earns her cutie mark. Whether she lands safely or not remains unaddressed at this point, only that she is currently missing.

Back in Ponyville, Time Turner has been having nightmares about cyber ponies impersonating real ponies [in the original 2012 plan, this was meant as a Cupcakes parody]. Blah blah various exposition and whatnot; summon the Time Council of Equestria's Protection Agency. The important parts are the questions and the Forbidden Library. The Forbidden Library is a room deep in the bowels of the Old Castle designed to house documents that should not exist and prevent information leakage. Matter can enter and exit freely, but information is inbound only. Its containment spell stores the state of mind of ponies that enter and then wipes their mind and restores from backup when they leave. Documents that leave are wiped unless left unopened and untouched for their entire time inside. It is inside here that they do some information leakage experiments with the TARDIS [this is inspired by speculative execution CPU attacks] and formulate a plan for a long-distance journey to answer the following questions (may cut these down for the final plan)

• An uptick in alien and time anomalies starting around 20 years before Twilight's birth and notably picking up after Spike was hatched
• Equestria is on an unstable timeline, warns Time Turner. Every time he does distance travel in the TARDIS to/from Equestria, there are major bumps along the way.
• A solitary strange creature was once found in a cornfield. Stone mute, but liked to jump.
• Just why has there never been a single time-traveling unicorn who died a real death? Even the ones who grew old would disappear on one last journey before they could die.
• Just who were the Forerunners, anyway?

They make a visit to (human) Earth, which is Equestria, several million years in the past and learn that the very first pegasi were created by humans as the first step in their quest to make flying super-soldiers. Before exploring more, they are interrupted by a severe magical storm and herd themselves back into the TARDIS, where they receive an urgent message—the Princess is dying—while in transit back to Equestria. Luna and Cadence both insist they make the detour to rescue Celestia. Upon reaching the coordinates in the message, Cadence and Luna are horrified to see no Celestia present: they were invited to their own death. Twilight is starstruck by Starswirl and then notices that every other unicorn who could time travel was present as well.

Note the strikethrough. When typing a later section of the summary, it was apparent that I copied from an old outline before I adjusted timelines to make Part 3 work. After receiving the message, the expedition returns to Canterlot for an emergency meeting, then sends Luna and Cadence to rescue Celestia.

Luna recognizes the Pony of Shadows is present and was her other half when she was the Nightmare and watches in horror as her future self charges to destroy it. Future Luna and the Pony of Shadows meet in battle as a matter/antimatter pair and eliminate each other from reality, releasing enough magical energy to destabilize the meeting ground. Ponies scramble to make it back into the TARDIS [including present Luna]. Twilight and Time Turner do not make it back in time.

World of Sleepers

This takes place about 100 years after the last time Luna and Twilight were seen in Equestria. Of the ponies from FiM, only Rarity, Cadence, Shining Armor (but regenerated into a new body), Spike, and Celestia are still alive [Flurry Heart was born during this century]. It's primarily a series of six conversations. Overall, a theme of being defeated and done.

1. First-pony Twilight introduction. Twilight is trapped between realities. Eventually, she falls back into Equestria to start the story.
2. Twilight learns that she is now an alicorn princess (to the surprise of Cadence, who assumed she was a changeling until she passed a painful anti-changeling test); gets caught up on the past century. Cadence has taken over from Celestia, who is too depressed to care anymore after the permanent loss of her sister and yet another of her students. There is not much of the Crystal Empire left to govern.
3. Celestia points out that while the pocket universe may have collapsed, Twilight bears the Element of Magic and has true immortality. She can survive being erased from existence. Additionally, Twilight's now an alicorn princess and has an altered cutie mark (the five white stars have been replaced with moons). Celestia hopes a sliver of her sister's atman resides within Princess Twilight.
4. Twilight visits the Elements of Harmony memorial in Ponyville's graveyard and meets Rarity, who feels old and withered from her unnaturally long lifespan. Twilight learns that Rarity cast a spell on herself to stay alive until she could meet Twilight one last time. They pay a visit to Spike to summon the magic energy needed to release Rarity's spell.
5. Backstory sprinkled throughout this middle third is a war that starts with an easily-repelled attack on Canterlot by the Storm King [with Sombra, Tempest, & Chrysalis as his generals]. The war itself takes place off-page [if someone else wants to write some FoE-length spinoff inspired by this, more power to them: I won't be the one to write it] and in the mountainous outskirts away from Equestria, but peace is "restored" through dragonfire and windigos. Atmosphere of this war is inspired by the Hardcore History episode about WW2 battles on New Guinea and the cycles of retalitory war crimes—pony-on-pony violence caused by justified paranoia over disguised changelings would be a recurrent feature in such a war.
6. This "book" ends when Celestia officially retires to leave the rule of Equestria in the hooves of Princesses Twilight & Flurry Heart, thus allowing Cadence to focus full-time on the Crystal Empire. There will be an author's note after the end that you should let the ponies keep what little happiness they've found and not read Part 3.

Heavy is the Horsehead

About 200–300 years after the events of Sleepers, Twilight gets inspired and runs numbers to believe that she can use the fact that she still bears the fully-immortal Element of Magic to perform illegal timeline maneuvers to undo the events of the past and put Equestria back on a timeline where Celestia & Luna still reign. Cadence warns her not to follow the plan. It doesn't work. The Shadow invades Twilight and controls her to dispatch (future) Luna to her fate [remember that from Part 1?]. Twilight uses what little control she retains to pay a visit to the Cult of Equality to strip herself of her powers and become an unsuitable host for the Shadow. The Shadow does not take kindly to Starlight's equality spell and fights back. By this point, Celestia has enraged into Daybreaker. Starlight throws up a shield to protect the wall of cutie marks from an errant fire bolt, but the damage from her struggle with the Shadow means that the bolt impacting the shield explodes her horn. Daybreaker uses the last of her battle magic after subduing the body formerly containing Twilight to give Starlight a prosthetic horn and teleport her somewhere with no ambient magic at all so that she could live out her days with the natural remaining lifespan of a horse instead of fatally dissolving from her injuries in a land of high ambient magic.

The First Unicorn

While the above half may be long, it's relatively straightforward. Write that software to double-check chains of cause-and-effect, then expand the outline into prose. This half, however, desperately needs some input to help me find clarity and narrative focus. Even if I drop the House of Leaves gimmick that Lyra ended up in the IRL human world and compiled the documents before finding me as her publishing agent, there are still at least 4 or 5 distinct stories that I'm trying to shove into a single narrative. As-is, the outline for this half feels like a third-grader telling a story where all the scenes are linked with "and then" instead of a cohesive story with a point to it.

Trixie's Story

This takes place in a lightly alternate timeline of Earth between March 2002–EoY 2003. It's Equestria a million moons ago before magic entered the world and Forerunners are still the dominant species.

Technically, it's March 200?–EoY 200-, but '02–'03 works much nicer for the human paranoia.

• Trixie (in Equestria) buys the Alicorn Amulet, then makes her command to the Mirror Pool to "take Trixie somewhere where she will be great and powerfully respected"—she should've wished to go somewhere where she'd be "powerful and greatly respected" for an easier story. She is transported to the Pegasus Project research facility from Part 1 of Twilight's story where she is captured and observed by the human scientists/glow agents. Eventually, she makes her escape and is rescued by "Dave from Sheffield" and his big blue pickup.
• Some sort of short-lived romance between Trixie & Dave. Give hints to the readers that some of Dave's D&D friends may also be glow agents. Hint at human medium-range time travel experiments. Lots of TODO: make the pieces fit in this section.
• Dave returns for college in the fall. Trixie meets up with Starlight, Lyra, and Bon-Bon—again, major TODO as to which order the equine quartet assembles itself. Starlight was placed here by Daybreaker as a safely non-magical place for her to live; Lyrabon arrived together to investigate a report of a missing mare after following an anomalously powerful magical signature.
• The pony quartet heads west to meet with a wild horse herd and is chased down by BLM roundup helicopters. Lyra defends the herd with a concentrated magic pellet. The quartet meet up with Dave [who has just finished his school year] as he drives them back East. Their best shot at returning to Equestria is to break into the facility where Trixie was captured and use the Alicorn Amulet to transport them back to Equestria.
• The magical storm from Twilight's first third makes another appearance here. It's revealed that it is also the Resonnance Cascade from Half-Life. Why add that crossover element? The portal storms allow universes and timelines that shouldn't touch to mix and the alien invasion provides a reason for why humanity was depopulated enough to allow ponies to evolve to become the new dominant species. Starlight is fatally dissolved from the influx of magic and Lyra falls into a portal and ends up on IRL Earth—thus setting up the stage for the House of Leaves gimmick. The Alicorn Amulet does not work to bring Trixie and Bon-Bon back to Equestria.
• Some kind of adventures ensue. The story ends with an epilogue where an elderly Trixie is the matriarch of a mixed herd of earth ponies and unicorns somewhere on the Eurasian steppes. She gives her annual summer speech reminding her herd to "befriend and make many foals with" the pegasi, once they make first contact.

Lyra's Earth Journal

This will exist as a series of extended footnotes, left and right inserts, and Author's Notes commenting on the main text of Trixie's story as well as giving snapshots of Lyra's journey on IRL Earth hiding from most humans and gathering document fragments from her story that also have crossed over into our reality. Her final entry happens shortly before Trixie's epilogue and describes her last-ditch attempt to push herself into the gap between realities and use the remaining energy in the magic pellets to navigate back to Equestria. It, of course, is unsuccessful.

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That went on for about as long as an entire short story. Smashing that "post" button as-is right now—if I proofread this, it may never be published. Please leave comments, guidance is much appreciated. Again, I wouldn't expect much from this to be published published until 2024, if at all.