Breakdown
Chapter 16: Deliquescence
Starry, starry night.
Paint your palette blue and gray.
Look out on a summer’s day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul.
The lights!
The lights of the interrogation room burn into me like miniature fiery suns, piercing through my flesh and stripping it bare to expose my sins for all the world to see.
I cry out in agony, turning and writhing in vain. The empty eyes of the bloated pony corpse of Erishy open under the power of decomposition to take in my suffering.
I somehow scramble to my feet, push past the startled guards and guffawing general, to reach the safety of the hallway.
But there is no safety for one such as I. Not anymore.
Before me is Applejack, her eyes blazing red with fury. With one smooth motion, she pivots on her forehooves and bucks me right in the face, shattering my jaw.
The beating continues, endlessly, and I welcome it, as the first of my ceaseless torments for my crime of snuffing out two innocent lives in a single body.
Now I understand,
What you tried to say to me.
And how you suffered for your sanity,
And how you tried to set them free.
They would not listen, they did not know how.
Perhaps they'll listen now.
I awaken, without even enjoying the bliss of my unconsciousness, in a dumpster outside of P.A.P.A.’s secret facility. The rain, the fatal deluge that will soon overwhelm the entire world under the innocuous name of “Sandy”, is little more than a brisk pelting of water droplets on my face.
I crawl out, somehow, despite my pain, despite the arm that will not move and the foot that feels like a pulped, boneless mass.
The light! Still, it burns! I must get away, away, away.
I take the dirt path into the woods.
For they could not love you
But still your love was true.
And when no hope was left in sight,
On that starry, starry night,
You took your life, as lovers often do.
But I could've told you, Vincent,
This world was never meant for
One as beautiful as you.
I ran until I fell into this ditch, this culvert, this cesspool for human contagion. And the rain falls, and falls, and falls, but it will never remove the filth of my existence. My jaw is not broken, my arm and foot are intact, but I must be imagining those things, because I deserve every one of my injuries. I have a vision of helping the little yellow pony instead of killing her, but again, the truth I deserve is the one I have told you.
I have hurt every life I have ever touched. When presented with a miraculous new order, one that we humans could use like the power of steam, of electromagnetism, of nuclear fission, to transform and uplift our lives, I did what the worst of us have always done under the circumstances: I cursed the light, and dashed it into pieces. We superior preening intellectuals cannot truly believe in anything that does not inflate our egos, so I seized the most delicate piece of the new magic...and popped its head like a grape between my fingers.
I am unworthy of this new world which I have befouled. My life is a lie, a lie founded on the delusion that witnessing my brother’s suicide as a boy is anything less than being directly responsible for his death in the eyes of my Maker. Nothing I have done since then has extirpated myself of that act, every year since his burial a pointless delay of the inevitable.
I am here, Brother! At long last I have stopped my running! Take me to the eternal place of punishment you have built for me after all this time, whether it be Christian Hell, Greek Tartarus, or Erishkigal’s Kingdom, the place of permanent darkness where the only food is dust and the only sound is the wailing of the justly damned.
Let me absorb the endless rain that falls, until I dissolve into a primordial soup of proteins, fats, and nucleic acids.
Starry, starry night.
Portraits hung in empty halls.
Frame-less heads on nameless walls.
With eyes that watch the world and can't forget.
This tale is finished.
So...what would you think if I slapped that "Completed" tag on this baby and called it a day? I mean, I have proved the point of my story, which is that reality and fantasy should never be mixed together and always results in somebody going stark, raving mad, right?
Y-you wouldn't dare continue this right...?
Um?
What actually happens to the main storyline outside of your story?
I'm so confused, and that doesn't actually happen a lot.
I'd expect Pinkie would find him after Discord was defeated. The way I'm writing her, she wouldn't leave anyone in that state if she could help it.
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Actually, no, you did not. Not even close. You have proven, that it can do that, but not more.
And considering how easy it is to turn someone insane, it was kind of obvious.
Still, even proving the obvious, the story is excellent, and anything added will, most likely, make it worse.
Not the ending I would have liked...
All and all though, it was a pretty good story.
Waaiiit a minute....
I recall in one of the moments where he's in the well he uses the phrase "anypony"(a few chapters back, I think). I'm betting that he falls asleep in that culvert and wakes up as a pony: which one he wakes up as could turn this story on it's head dramatically. There is so much more that can be added to this story, dammit!
Uhh...yeah, I kind of don't really want this to end here. I suppose it's all up to the author though.
Wait, seriously? Seriously? That was it? A climax which felt like the build-up to the second act at best passes us by with barely a wave, the greater plot is completely forgotten, we get no answers for anything, and then you bow out with a Gainax ending which makes even the most muddled and unfocused chapters from earlier seem understandable in comparison? I'm sorry, but what?
McPoodle, you wrote Best of All Possible Worlds, a fic that I have literally proclaimed as the best HiE I ever read. I know that you understand how to tell a story. This is not how you do that, and I can't believe that I'm the one who needs to say this to you. Where are the character resolutions? Where are the thematic links? Where are the answers? Where are the pay-offs to all interesting stuff you raised in earlier scenes? Where's the progression of Franklin's character to reach the point he ends up at? Where's the rest of this supposed shared universe? Where's the sense that this was supposed to make? Where's the point? I can't find the point. Anyone? Can anyone around here tell me what the point of this story was?
I mean, Jesus, man! There's disappointing endings, and then there's that. I don't even know what I just experienced, but I feel like I've just suffered a late April Fools' prank. I can't tell where I am anymore. I don't know what's real.
bestof4chan.com/wp-content/uploads/is-this-real-life-or-is-this-just-fanta-sea.jpg
No, seriously, all jokes aside, this ending was legitimately terrible. I'm not going to tell you to continue writing if you don't want to, but if this is the real ending point, it ends with a downvote from me.
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Look, it's a collaborative fic. I went into this thinking that I'd be crossing over with ten, maybe fifteen other stories, that I could use those to build Franklin's character arc gradually. Start him out rationally, slowly degrade his sanity until he becomes a monster, have the shit repeatedly beaten out of him by the ponies he's trying to mind-rape, and finally to reach a brilliant conclusion to bridge the gap between the dreams and reality in everybody else's PEV fic.
Well, do you know what happened? I got three bites when I asked for crossovers: the authors for Pinkie's, Gilda's and Fluttershy's fanfics. (Well, there were more, but real life ended up getting in the way.) Three. And then the series ends (i.e. the Mane Six are having it out with Discord in the very same storm that Franklin is dying in). And I didn't learn this until I had committed myself.
So this is what you get. I admit that I was jerking the readers around in making them think that the story's finished with this chapter, but since the whole frickin' universe is done at this point, anything that follows is recovery--recovery and epilogue. I suppose I could try to summon a point out it all, but at this point...
So yeah, I'm kinda disappointed, too. And guess what? I've written crap before, and I'll write it again, because I'm an author, and that's what we do. I'm going to consider this a learning experience, so that I can improve how I write first-person fics, how to craft character arcs that are immune to co-writers, and how to deal with timelines and universes that are even less in your control than fanfiction in general.
P.S. Oh and seriously, there's a sequel to "Best of All Possible Worlds" that is currently in progress. It's got a Human tag and everything. If there's anyplace where you're legitimately allowed to be disappointed in me for failing to live up to my potential, it's there, not in a shared universe that I don't own.
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If you can honestly say that you've learned from the experience, I guess that's the best anyone can hope for. I'm just saying that I wish this fic hadn't needed to suffer for it. I admit that collaborative writing like this does lead itself to issues that are outside of your control to fix, but if you'd only gotten responses from those three authors, then surely you could have used some original characters to achieve the same effect that you were going for had you been allowed more crossover opportunities? Set up the Fluttershy arc as the legitimate conclusion, and fill the rest of the story that we had in-between with more characters like Wave Rider? That's what I would have done, anyway.
*Notices new Incomplete tag*
Also, I haven't read the Fluttershy story so bear with me: is Fluttershy actually dead? It'd be interesting if the doctor wakes up as her and has this huge mental dilemma with the personality he tried to kill flitting around his head. Who knows?
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Well, as of the latest chapter of Fluttershy's story...it's hard to tell. I mean, the last sentence of that chapter is "I feel as though there's nothing left of me", but you would think if she died she wouldn't be able to make a judgement call like that, yes?