This thread is to help Pen through the task of fixing variance 2. Questionable, Pawz, and I all have some things to say, but we think it would be best to say them in a place we can all come together and have a discussion.

So with that said, have at it!

I'll post comments from my summary first.

To start - The good:
* Nyx was cute.
* Sunset's alias "Phoenix" was good.
* It was good that you resolved the variance question.
* The X-Men theme felt legitimate.

The bad:
Well, the prose felt extremely slapped together and stilted. It did not flow at all. The perspective was all over the place and quite inconsistent. There were too many attempts to generate suspense about things which were obvious, by withholding crucial world-building / mental image exposition until the final moments of the story.

The prose itself is excessively wordy, even by your standards. Descriptions of scenarios took an unnecessary amount of text when a much more concise phrasing could have said the exact same thing in a fraction of the space.
You have the narrator justify the actions of the characters way too much. The reader is meant to draw their own conclusions about much of this.

You hand-hold the reader a whole lot through parts of the story where they don't need it. Ironically, this does not keep the story from being quite confusing, as crucial information is kept hidden for far too long.
Despite the fact that this is a "glimpse" and not a true story, you leave far too many unanswered questions. What makes it odd is that these are often not questions which the reader is likely to care about. They are simply details chucked into the story toward the end which don't tie to anything. Sometimes, the unanswered questions work well - like the whole thing with Luna and what she did as Nightmare Moon to that world. This is quality unanswered questions because it has created intrigue... a draw that makes the reader want to know more.

Random thoughts from our live chat:
Tighten up the perspective.
Don't try to be suspenseful by withholding exposition
Don't use so many words to explain stuff
Don't make Nyx a woobie with no agency. (understandable partially in this case due to the plot)
Quality over quantity - needs to be polished since this is a thank you letter to the fans, but it does not need to be terribly long.
The plot is fine, structurally.

5433215
The biggest problems were prose issues that slowed things down to a snail's pace and obscured things unnecessarily. I think finding and discussing specific examples of them would be for the best.

5433217
Okay, maybe first you could share your deconstruction of this passage:

“Yeah, but did those plans mention a mech soldier?” Sunset snipped, her ears picking up the telltale sounds of a soldier wearing a strength-augmenting exoskeleton. The metal stomping of the mech suit’s feet and the spitting of air from pistons was a sound she and her friends had all heard in at least a few nightmares.

“We can’t panic, Phoenix. It’s just one of them, and we’ve trained for this,” Twilight said, her hand starting to take on a blue glow as she called to her ice powers. “I’ll go low. You go high.”

Lowering her hand from her ear, Sunset nodded before focusing on her palms. As she gathered fire between her fingertips, Twilight placed her hand on the ground. From her touch, ice began to spread across the floor. It expanded to the edge of the wall, then followed the seam around the corner and towards the sounds of the mech soldier.

Meanwhile, Sunset was condensing and shaping her fire, creating a pulsating sphere that threatened to burst in her grip. Still, she kept it under control, slowly adding more and more energy. Finally, Sunset felt a touch on her ankle: the signal. Her right hand clenched the sphere of fire, holding it like a baseball. She bent her knees, then jumped sideways, putting herself into view of the hallway. She saw the mech soldier, and he saw her. The weapons on his suit began to rev, and the heavy metal arms raised to take aim.

Sunset, however, didn’t flinch. She cranked her right arm back and then threw it forward, pitching her fireball at the soldier. It arched through the air like a meteor falling from the sky. It slammed into the top of the mech soldier, just above the pilot’s head. The explosion would not hurt the human inside beyond a few singed hairs, but the force of the blow sent the mech suit off balance. Its automated balancing systems tried to compensate, lifting one of the metal feet to step back.

This was where Twilight’s part of the attack came into play. The floor beneath the mech had become a sheet of ice, and the slick surface did not have enough friction to support the mech soldier’s attempt to rebalance himself. The robotic frame’s feet slipped, and the soldier went crashing to the ground with a resounding crash.

Meanwhile, I'll try and contribute various random thoughts and pieces of advice directly related to various parts of the chapter.

Probably the first thing I'd like to contribute is in addressing how Pen does suspense. There's a fair number of examples of this across chapters where characters are introduced without names. Instead, there are pronouns or repeated use of "the mare" or whatnot.

Now, in storytelling, there are times when you want to do this. I've seen plenty of fimfiction authors try it as well. I think the intention is that it gives that "the hooded figure" sense of mystery. In fact, one of the guys I edited for literally used "the hooded figure" over and over to describe a character for a really long time until we finally learn who it was.

But the thing is, you only need to do this technique when the identity of the person needs to be kept secret in order to maintain the mystery of the story. Or... in cases where you don't want the reader knowing who it is because you're hoping for an emotional reveal down the road. But honestly, this is not suspense done properly. It is not suspenseful for the reader to wonder "who is it I'm reading about?" That is simply frustration. And frustrating the reader is a really poor way to start a story.

What's worse is when multiple characters are nameless at the start of the story. This creates a situation which is super hard to track with your mind's eye. Remember that your reader has a mental image they are constructing of your written scenario. That mental image is made of the things you say combined with the life experience of the reader. Thus, the image is actually different for every reader.

But the important point here is that without names or any kind of description, the reader is forced to make up stuff as a placeholder until you get around to providing details. Then, when you finally do provide them, if they don't match, it's a bit jarring to adjust the mental image.

Thus, the sooner you can get character identities down and sorted, the better it is for your reader, who can then go about interpreting the plot.

I'd like to extend this concept to any sort of description of the character. In your chapter, I'd like to raise the example of the team outfits.

She was kind of wearing a uniform, like a soldier, but it was fancier. It was made of a black material she didn’t recognize, and it had splashes of red color on it. There was also a big, thick belt with a V-shaped belt buckle. The other woman in the room, who was standing back by the doctor, had a similar uniform, but hers had ice-blue accents.

I commented on this in the chapter, but it's worth repeating here. This description is all detail which the reader should have had from the very beginning or close to the beginning. Instead, we only get this information now at nearly the end of the story. Remember, exposition is a tricky process. It inherently slows down the pacing, so you need to deliver it at the right time. The entire process is a balance. If you withhold exposition either because you don't want to slow your pacing or because you want to create suspense, you need to consider the negative consequences of the reader going forward without that exposition. Always always always try to keep in mind how much of your mental image the reader has at any given time. Never leave them hanging in confusion for longer than necessary. It's fine to have confusing or tense scenes filled with unanswered questions, but the reader should be brought out of that ASAP so they can start grasping the overall story.

Next, I'd like to talk about flow.

Flow is basically the idea that what happens in a paragraph follows naturally from what happened in the previous paragraph. It depends heavily on two things. Good prose, and a good grasp of your characters' experiences.

The prose itself is how you translate what the characters are feeling and thinking, and what influences their decisions. You want the prose to feel crisp and clean, with a good assortment of vocabulary as well as quality sentence structure. Watch carefully for repeated words, as those get tagged in a reader's mind and draw attention to the text itself rather than what the text is conveying.

The character experiences are the biggest part of flow. This is where you, the author, compete with the reality you are constructing. You have certain things you want your characters to say and do, right? But you can't simply make them do and say those things. If you do, you will demolish your flow. This is a pretty huge area I struggled with in my earlier drafts. Let's say you want your characters to say "That was a long, tiring flight". And let's say you want one of them to also say "I just remembered I need to send an email to my mom." It doesn't work to force your characters to deliver both these lines back to back. That would be "bad flow". What you must do instead is to allow your characters to naturally produce the conversation you want by letting them dictate their own dialogue with a bias you give them to bring the intended lines out.

This is very much like you, the author, being the conscience of your characters. You want your character to deliver the line "I need to send an email to my mom". So the way you do this is you act as the conscience, subtley pressing that reminder into the character's mind. It bounces around in their head for a bit until it naturally pops out as part of their natural conversation. The good part is that you can also shape the corresponding character's lines to be conducive for this. It's not as easy as simply forcing the desired lines, but the end result is that your flow is fantastic, and everything your characters have to say feels like a legitimate conversation real people would have while also providing the lines you need for the story's plot.

In variance 2, the flow is pretty awful. The dialogue feels like every line was forced rather than delivered as a natural conversation.

Let's take an example.

“You actually came. I didn’t dare believe that… I feared the voices in my head were just my own guilt.”

“Easy, Doctor, you don’t have to worry. We’re here to get you out,” Sunset said as she moved towards him, letting Twilight remain at the door to stand guard. “Do you have your research?”

“Yes, I have copies of my primary research materials,.” He said, holding out the briefcase to Sunset, letting her see the monogrammed ‘S’ and ‘N’ that were near the handle.

“I know I promised to delete it from the servers, but I couldn’t get all of it. My permission to modify some of my earliest work has long been revoked.”

“How far back were you able to delete things?”

“The past six months, since the initial breakthrough in the genetic code.”

“Are the servers in this facility?” Twilight asked.

The doctor shook his head. “No, the primary servers are housed off site.”

Sunset grunted in frustration but nodded. “That will have to be good enough. And where is she?”

The scientist pointed to a door on the lab’s right- hand side. “Her room is just through there.”

See how badly this flows? Every line is precisely what you, the author, were trying to convey to the reader, but without regard as to whether your characters would naturally say those things in the given context. When writing dialogue, always try your best to imagine what is going on inside each character's mind. Take into account their emotions -- (frustrations, fears, desires, loves, musings, etc) -- before delivering their lines. Every line of dialogue must feel like it's coming from that character for the right reason. If you simply deliver the line you pre-ordained, it will feel extremely stilted and artificial. Every character needs to feel like a real person. And to pull that off, you, the author, need to dive inside their mind and discover all those subtle things which make them unique as people. When you do this, you'll be able to give them meaningful lines which flow naturally with the surrounding prose.

5433215 While I'm not a part of this conversation, I am wondering... What is this variant 2 you speak of?

5433254

A chapter from Pen's new story. Coming soon, to a theater near you!

5433264 Ah okay, then you shall hear no more from me

Another issue is this chapter's very dense denouement. In your final scene, it felt like you were trying your best to cram as many canon X-Men themes as physically possible into an 800-word block of text. It didn't really feel like it flowed well with the rest of your story because it was so jammed with exposition that felt more like it should have been seeded as clues in the dialogue throughout the story.

For a great example of that, rather than wasting tons of words on the argument over Twilight's alias (which you pointlessly revert anyway), you could have had those two characters debating the impact that Luna had as Nightmare Moon. Instead, you give that tasty bit of intrigue only a cursory mention at the very end where you reveal what caused Nyx to be created. Remember, gags are nice, but they are not worth as much as genuine plot-relevant intrigue. You do a lot of gags, despite the fact that they should be fairly low-density in a story, relative to the plot and character building.

You've done a fine job ponifying these X-Men themes. The content itself is not bad. It's the presentation which needs work. There's so much unnecessary stuff going on in the first 3/4 of the story which could be replaced with that good content. But still, content is only as good as how well it fits with the rest of your story. Like when you mentioned Harshwhinny... both Q and I made a big face when we read that. I think a part of the problem is that you've got this grand mental image already constructed in your mind, and you want for every little detail of it to get inside your reader's mind. If you have done that, you say "mission accomplished". But that's not actually how it goes. A story needs to achieve a different set of goals. If you want an elaborate custom world to come along for the ride, you need to weave it into the narrative gradually rather than providing an enormous final-scene infodump. Honestly, if I tried to do that in my story, I'd probably have a fifty-thousand word infodump at the very end!

I'd like to say something about justification within the narrative or the dialogue.

You don't have to do it. Truly, your readers will get it. A lot of times, I see you writing about something which a character did, only to proceed to elaborate on it to ensure the reader cannot misunderstand. To the reader, this feels like the author standing over their shoulder micromanaging them. Speaking of that, allow me to quote something from Present Perfect's review of Past Sins three years ago:

My internal (and often quite external) monologue while listening to this story consisted of phrases like "Get on with it!" and "Oh god, are you really telling us this?" and "Who the fuck cares, seriously?" Early in the story, I described the feeling of reading Pen Stroke's writing as having the author breathing over your shoulder, ready to gleefully explain everything you just read so that there's no chance you may have misinterpreted it.

The only thing I can guess is that this is a long-standing habit you need to break. It won't happen all at once, but there should come a point when you catch yourself doing this and just stop. Here's a great example of this problem from variance 2:

Twilight’s hands went and touched the emergency release mechanism, causing it to freeze over. “Well, it’s not just a little ice,” she said before forming a hollow cube of ice around the soldier's head. He could still shout, and the small holes Twilight put in the ice ensured he wouldn’t suffocate, but it also made it difficult for him to shout loud enough to get help.

I can practically feel your mind screaming that you can't let the reader think Twilight killed someone by encasing their head in a block of ice. So you proceed to explain, in great detail, precisely why this was a nonlethal action.

Truly, that is unnecessary. The reader gets it. You mentioned it was hollow. What you need to remember is that whenever the reader is not given explaining details, their mind will naturally construct the most plausible scenario anyway. The human mind has a real talent for this sort of thing. It is how we, as children, were able to watch a movie despite having no clue what 80% of it even meant. Or why we could listen to people talking as we grew up, and when they used words we didn't understand, we'd naturally assign meaning to those words by using the surrounding context to establish the interpretation. So please, allow your readers to draw their own conclusions whenever you get the urge to explain or justify what's going on.

Sunset snipped, her ears picking up the telltale sounds of a soldier wearing a strength-augmenting exoskeleton

This is at once promising and somewhat problematic. The implication that mechanised troops are somewhat common is an intriguing one, but it doesn't connect to any other part of the worldbuilding.

The metal stomping of the mech suit’s feet and the spitting of air from pistons was a sound she and her friends had all heard in at least a few nightmares

“We can’t panic, Phoenix. It’s just one of them, and we’ve trained for this,” Twilight said, her hand starting to take on a blue glow as she called to her ice powers. “I’ll go low. You go high.”

This is reasonable - if wordy - setup. It does suffer from a lack of foreshadowing, however. We don't understand what these mech suits can do or why they're so dangerous.
Both sentences can be cut down. In the first, some excessive adjectives and conjunctions could be removed. In the second, 'as she called on her ice powers' is unnecessary hand-holding. Readers should know what that means, and if they don't then that needs to be addressed earlier.

Lowering her hand from her ear, Sunset nodded before focusing on her palms

This entire sentence can go, save the nod.

From her touch, ice began to spread across the floor. It expanded to the edge of the wall, then followed the seam around the corner and towards the sounds of the mech soldier

'ice began to expand across the floor, flowing around the corner and towards the mech soldier' is all that's required here.
There's also the logical problem of the soldier apparently not noticing the floor freezing solid. Okay.

Meanwhile, Sunset was condensing and shaping her fire, creating a pulsating sphere that threatened to burst in her grip. Still, she kept it under control, slowly adding more and more energy

Excessively wordy.

The weapons on his suit began to rev, and the heavy metal arms raised to take aim.

You haven't described this at all well. We don't have any idea what the mech soldier looks like or what he can do, so this sentence is largely devoid of context that might introduce tension. All of this is indicative of prose that takes so long describing simple actions that there is no room for actual important information, and of disjointed and ill-explained worldbuilding.

Sunset, however, didn’t flinch. She cranked her right arm back and then threw it forward, pitching her fireball at the soldier. It arched through the air like a meteor falling from the sky.

'Sunset threw her fireball'.

The explosion would not hurt the human inside beyond a few singed hairs

Unnecessary child-proofing.

This was where Twilight’s part of the attack came into play.

Unnecessary hand-holding.

The floor beneath the mech had become a sheet of ice, and the slick surface did not have enough friction to support the mech soldier’s attempt to rebalance himself.

This entire sentence is pointless hand-holding.

The robotic frame’s feet slipped, and the soldier went crashing to the ground with a resounding crash.

The ponderous nature of the prose has slowed the pacing to the point where the chain of causality has been broken and the reader is no longer thinking of the force that pushed the soldier around in the first place. The result is a disjointed action scene that is a chore to read.

With that said, a more succinct version might read thusly:

'While Sunset condensed fire in her hand, Twilight knelt down and touched the floor. Ice spread from her fingertips and raced around the corner, drawing an alarmed cry from the centurion. Sunset leaned around the corner and hurled her fireball at the trooper, who was struggling to gain friction on the frozen floor. The fireball hit with a resounding explosion, knocking the unstable powered trooper off his feet to smash into the ground with a crash of metal.'

Or something. Extra references to the mechanical nature of the enemy could be added, emphasis could be switched to focus on the teamwork aspect, etc.
In any event, that does not address the worldbuilding issues. Why does knocking over a soldier in powered armour incapacitate them? If they are so easily neutered, why are the Valkyries so scared of them? Why is this one alone? What can they even do? And so on.

5433286

The implication that mechanised troops are somewhat common is an intriguing one, but it doesn't connect to any other part of the worldbuilding.

My assumption was that this was his version of the Sentinels. Though Sentinels were not exosuits, so I could be wrong there. The characters seemed unusually terrified by the thought, and in the X-Men universe, iirc, the Sentinels were one of the very few things which caused that reaction in the heroes.

The ponderous nature of the prose has slowed the pacing to the point where the chain of causality has been broken and the reader is no longer thinking of the force that pushed the soldier around in the first place. The result is a disjointed action scene that is a chore to read.

Very well said. This is is especially true for someone like me who reads slow. By the time I get to the end of a moment like that, I'm really struggling to understand what is happening.

I really like your "succinct version" of the power soldier takedown. This is an excellent example of how to write action events in a way that the mind can easily visualize.

Why does knocking over a soldier in powered armour incapacitate them? If they are so easily neutered, why are the Valkyries so scared of them? Why is this one alone? What can they even do? And so on.

Good examples of questions the reader may want answered.