So you may have noticed that over in the Brainstorming thread, I have floated an idea for a World Tour story set in Elkheimer and the adjacent Fae realms. I wanted to make sure that at least the basic concept was within the bounds of canon before I started work.

Transcript of the key points from my posts.

The cervid clans are holding one of their great annual festivals, and Lyra and Carrot Top have been invited to attend. Lyra is invited to participate in the great bardic recitations, to share her tales and hear the cervid's sagas. Carrot Top, meanwhile, evidently made an impression on young Prince Fredrick, for he has asked for her to be sent.

But on their way, they fall though into the Fae, and must try and find their way back out while attempting to traverse the realm's perils.

I think I've figured out what the plot will be. Corona sends a couple of her minions (probably going to be Kindle and Smoke), to cash in some favors the fae Kings and Queens owe her and get some help against Luna. The fae decide for whatever reason (not a big enough debt owed, debts technically to Luna and Celestia both, fae love of balance, etc) that they are going to give Luna's side a shot at this as well, so they yank CT and Lyra into the Fae, and declare that there's going to be a contest. Each monarch will set a challenge for the two sets of champions, and whoever wins more challenges gets the Fae support for their Princess's claim.

My idea for the Fae and its denizens (for reference, "Fae" means the location and "fae" means the inhabitants) is kind of similar to thatguyvex's concept of the Shouman kami spirits. The Fae is essentially a parallel plane of existence, overlaid onto Elkenheimer and reflecting its geography. The fae are divided into four Courts, one for each of the four seasons.

Spring is the season of new growth and new sensations. Springfae tend to appear as children, and affect a terrifyingly child-like ignorance of the true consequences of their actions. They quickly become obsessed with new sensations of all kinds, and theirs are the most intoxicating regions of the Fae. Think fields of drugged poppies in which sleepers wither and die, food and drink so delicious that you will never again eat mortal food, and a thousand and one glamours and deadly delights.

Summer is the season of abundance, in every way. Summerfae appear in the prime of life, bursting with good health and good spirits. They are spirited in every way, and though they burst with good cheer and friendship, they are frighteningly easy to offend. And even their friendship can be lethal, for they revel in hunts and duels and a hundred other challenges.

Autumn is the season of decline, where things wither and die. The fae of autumn appear elderly, on the verge of death. They are the quietest and most philosophical of the fae, accepting that everything dies in its time. Their danger, like their Spring bretheren, comes from their blindness to the nature of mortals. The Autumnfae will kill you, not because they hate you or will benefit from your death in any way, but because they know that all things die, and believe it a kindness to kill you now and get it over with relatively painlessly.

Winter is the season of scarcity, and its fae are ruled by the all-consuming drive to survive, at whatever cost. The fae of Winter tend to appear of middle age, past the strength and splendor of youth but not yet crippled by the degradations of old age. There is never enough in Winter, and its fae will pounce on any vulnerability like a pack of starving wolves. On the other hand, though it is very hard to win the friendship of a fae of Winter, if you somehow manage it they will stick with you through anything. for trust has to be absolute when teamwork can mean the difference between life and death.

As for power levels, I'm imagining each Fae ruler possessing original power on the same scale as an alicorn, but a lot of that power is bound up in their various demesnes. So in their own realm, any of them could match Luna and Celestia combined in power, but outside their realms it would take two or three of them to match one Princess. They also keep each other in check through their constant feuding.

As for the questions:

The main primary characters would by Lyra and Carrot Top, with Kindle and Smoke as major secondary characters.

Advancing characters: Most of my plans for character advancement are pretty spoiler-y, so I'd ask to keep them secret until I get to writing those scenes. Suffice it to say that both Lyra and CT are going to have to make some very hard choices.

As for impacts on the Lunaverse... I'm not sure. I'm currently wavering between having Corona's side win, or having it be a draw and nobody gets Fae support. There is one big potential impact: The current plan has Kindle either dying at the end of the competition (which I think would make for a stronger scene), or else being cursed to die come autumn, when the civil war has ended one way or another (If RDD will need him for the season finales).

Could I please have a ruling on whether the basic concept is canonical and whether you'll need Kindle for later in the season?

5363944

I think there was a plan at one point to keep Kindle about post corona's reformation as a villain crazy enough to want to try and have celestia return to her corona ways. Although I don't know exactly what was going to be done with him.

Certainly I think he has a role at season's end. Maybe he could be protected by corona's patronage at least as long as she's around, after that maybe fay as t to try and kidnap him but he can potentially keep out of their way using various anti day charms, cold iron, bells, etc something that could be used against him later?

I was, in fact, planning on using Kindle for one of my two planned Season 3 stories, so I'd like him to stay free.

5364708

Ok... How about Smoke? Will she be needed? And are there any other potential problems you can see right away, or should I go ahead and start writing?

5364954

Awww! Not Smoke, the poor filly hasn't even got a personality yet and already you want to kill her off!

5364954
Smoke, too, is kind of important to both the aforementioned Season 3 story I have planned, and Final Fall. Sorry...

5364954
More to the point. We tend to have a no kill policy here in the Lunaverse. Which isn't to say that characters never die, but rather that we don't kill our characters off just for the sake of drama. Moreover, of the few characters that have been killed off, I think most if not all of them were originally created with that intention in mind and so that their deaths functioned as the final pay off of their story arc.

So if you want to kill anyone off in your story, you may need to just create your own new character to fit the role. Before you go deciding to kill any character off, however, it's probably even more important that you carefully consider why your doing it and be able to explain to us why you think that it's such an important thing to do.

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5365165

I suppose I'd better explain what I had in mind. Remember there are four challenges, one for each season? In the Autumn challenge, each of the four champions is separated from the rest and offered the chance to win their side a vote by trading away something very important to them. For Carrot Top it's her Element, for Lyra it's her memories of Bon Bon (don't worry, neither of them takes the offer), I hadn't figured out what it was going to be for Smoke, and for Kindle it was going to be his life. So the scene was both supposed to underline Kindle's fanaticism (he would literally lay down his life for Corona) as well as just plain being creepy.

Come to think of it, having Kindle just kill himself is kind of uninspired. I'll think of something else for Kindle to trade away.

5365682

The enhancements that Corona gave him?

Maybe Smoke could be tempted to give up her love of Kindle?

5365682

For Carrot Top it's her Element, for Lyra it's her memories of Bon Bon

That seems a little imbalanced. Carrot Top's element would be nowhere near as personal a sacrifice to her as Lyra's love for BonBon. Something relating to her farm or her deceased grandparents from whom she inherited it in the first place would be more equivalent.

5365887
While I could certainly see some fai trying to temp Kindle into that kind of "trade", I can't really see him ever willingly parting with Corona's blessing. Partly out of his own personal pride, but even more so out of his unwavering zealotry. To pawn off his goddess's gifts would likely be the highest form of blasphemy.

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5366172

I considered having him sacrifice Corona's blessing, but rejected it for pretty much that exact reason.

5366282
For Smoke, it would probably be something to do with Kindle.

As long as both get away you can feel free to use them.

5366282

Well if the mission itself is on behalf of Corona to make some sort of alliance then he'd be conflicted between completing the mission for his god or giving up her blessing. Sort of sacrificing of himself for the greater good.

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I think you're highly underestimating just how deeply such sheer zealous madness runs. To someone like Kindle it really wouldn't matter if he's on a mission on behalf of his queen or not, there is still no indecisive "conflict" with in him either way. To him it's not a matter of whether or not he'd ever be willing to part with the fiery mantle Corona bestowed on him or not, because it's simply not his decision to make. In Kindle's mind his absolute and unwavering devotion to Corona is precisely the reason why it would be so blasphemous to even so much as consider parting with her boon. The gifts of a GOD are not the property of MORTAL to squander in the first place.

Kindle is a pony who has "given" himself body, mind, and soul to Corona and so everything he might otherwise ostensibly own now belongs to her as well, which means even the gifts she "gives" him in turn still belong to her as well.

5366172 : On the other hand, CT is the 'boring' one, where her element is really the only interesting thing anyone knows about her and I thought we were going with the idea she didn't like that and wanted to be more exciting/interesting? (Certainly when I had her be very zen-like about her boringness in JULP, I got pushback). If that's the case, she could take the idea of forfeiting her element personally since she might see it as the only thing about her that stands out.

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It's not about "boring", and to be perfectly blunt if Carrot Top were really so petty and shallow that fear of being boring caused her any reluctance in surrendering her element of GENEROCITY then she wouldn't really be worthy of it in the first place.

Moreover though is that it would be beyond foolish to even so much as consider such a trade in the first place regardless. It'd be winning the battle at the cost of forfeiting the war. Stopping Corona from claiming a few fey allies would be entirely irrelevant if in the process Carrot Top sacrifices the only weapon the LunaSix have which can even stop Corona in the first place.

5367615 : I didn't say she should do it, just that her element could be written as just as personal to her as Lyra's lyre is to her.

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My point wasn't really ever that CT should or shouldn't sacrifice element either. Rather, that doing so would not only be foolish on her part, but so grossly foolish that only an equally foolish fey would even attempt to convince her to sacrifice it in the first place. It really doesn't matter how "personal" we try to make her status as a hero to her, CT simply doesn't have the option to give up her element -- as I said, win the battle, lose the war.

Maybe that's beside the point though...

5365682

In the Autumn challenge, each of the four champions is separated from the rest and offered the chance to win their side a vote by trading away something very important to them.

The more I think about it the more this "challenge" seems untenable, especially in regards to Carrot Top. Really it's less a matter of considering what WOULD she be willing to sacrifice, and more matter of what WOULDN'T she. Carrot Top is if anything, generous to fault, or to put it more bluntly a doormat. Whenever someone asks something of her, no matter how much of an imposition or inconvenience to herself it might be, Carrot Top is almost pathologically incapable of saying "no". Granted, she's getting better about knowing her own limits, about knowing that she can't help everyone and even that if she want to be able to help anyone at all she has to at least take care of her own basic necessities first, but neither of those would really apply to this challenge. With ostensibly the entire fate of Equestria hanging in the balance, could there really be any act of self-sacrifice that a true hero wouldn't make, let alone one whose principle virtue is supposed to be GENEROCITY?

It works a bit better with Lyra, because you've got a sort of needs of the many -vs needs of the few angle at play. Lyra can be conflicted, because trading away her own happiness might seem a small price to pay if it can save everypony else. That is at least until she realizes that it's not her own happiness she would be sacrificing. After all, the fey are only asking to take her love for BonBon, not the other way around. If she accepted that bargain it's not really Lyra who would suffer, since she wouldn't even remember loving BonBon in the first place. Rather, it would be BonBon who would have to endure all the pain of having her lover turn her back on her, and that's a sacrifice Lyra could never make. For all that she is a knight of the realm, Lyra's first LOYALTY, her entire motivation for being a hero at all, has always been for BonBon.

I'm just not sure there's anything we've ever established about Carrot Top that could force her through that same kind of emotional dilemma. For reasons outlined above her Element of Generosity, could simply never be an option. So what else does she value? Her mane; no, not even Rarity is possessed of that much vanity as seen all the way back in the piolet when she gave her up her tail to even out the river-serpents mustache. Her farm then maybe; probably not that either because as much as Carrot Top takes pride in upholding her grandparent's legacy, we've already seen in Carrot Top Season that it's something she's willing to sacrifice.

In some ways, Carrot Top and Kindle are sort of the same that way (if for opposite reasons), in that anything they could sacrifice really wouldn't hold much value, and anything that might be unwilling to sacrifice isn't really an option. If, however, you're still insistent upon this challenge though, maybe instead of having each of the four ponies asked to sacrifice something individual, just make it so that only one pony for each team has to sacrifice something. That way we you can still have Lyra's dilemma, and maybe Smoke's too, although I think you'd also have to do quite a bit of legwork to establish that her love for Kindle is actually supposed to be anything of value in the first place.

Actually though, if that's a parallel you're going to make maybe just make it the entire point of the challenge in the first place, that the teams aren't asked to make just any sacrifice, but specifically to sacrifice whatever it is they LOVE most. Kindle could then pretty much bluntly state something to the affect that there is nothing he loves more than his queen, but of course that just like everything else he has given unto Corona, even his own devotion to her is no longer his "property" to trade. Also instead, of isolating them, have the two teams engage in a sort of face-to-face bidding war against each other, probably primarily between Carrot Top and Smoke, though with Lyra occasionally chiming in as well. In that way the offers could start somewhat small, maybe even a bit silly, each contestant offering up ever more increasingly personal sacrifices -- which could include in no particular order things like Carrot Top's farm, mane, or alchemy, as well as maybe Smoke's magic (though I still really don't know enough about her to say what else she might value). Eventually it all culminates with Smoke offering up her love for Kindle, and there's nothing just nothing else Carrot Top has left to offer which could possibly measure up, forcing Lyra onto the spot with only her own love for BonBon as something that could surpass it.

On Smoke giving up her love of Kindle I could certainly see a point of view that that would actually be a good thing for her. The love is certainly unrequited, Corona is always going to be his number one mare, he actually hardly seems to be aware that she feels anything for him. Of course she might see things a little different, denial is a powerful thing, but she's got to see that her current situation is painful and having the love removed would actually make her happier overall. It would certainly be an interesting internal conflict.

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5370200

You have a good point there, and I think I've found something a bit better for Carrot Top to be tempted to give up.