My roommate is a little crazy, but suddenly claiming that she's a unicorn named Lyra is not her usual level of crazy. And for what she paid me, I'm willing to play along.
Chapters (12)
Sozmioi
Joined 11th Dec, 2012 ·
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So, you meet an alien being brought to your planet by magic and you just straight up give her your full name? I understand backing away from the fake name Rachel gave initially, but I've read enough fantasy to know that this can only end in tears. (especially when she finds your social security number to go with it
)
Overall, the story looks good. It went maybe a little too fast. Slow down, have a little conversation and more detail, please.
I added this to the Pony Roommates group
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The second chapter is a lot more relaxed. Looking back, the first is awfully rushed. I guess I wanted to get past the 'oh yeah usual pony on Earth problems' and into the things that make this one different.
Hm... I gotta say, I like where this is going!
Will the second chapter be about Rhianna - I mean... Rhiannon's point of view? (I'm calling that girl Rhianna from now on)
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The 1st person narrator will be Rachel throughout, though I do not rule out her point of view revealing other characters telling stories to her.
This didn't show up on my Favorites list for some reason; maybe you should make a blog post to let people know it's updated.
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Huh. That sure would explain why it had under 10% of the hits of the first chapter (other explanation being that 90% of the readers decided this story wasn't for them
).
Let me know if/when the tagged blog post gets to you.
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Weeeeellllll, the thing is, tagged blog posts are apparently broken, and have been for some time, and there aren't any plans to fix them any time soon.
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That's what I thought. Just thought I'd give it a shot anyway.
And on top of all that, there's still no Luna or non-trollestia Celestia icon.
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Could be because it was such a long time between my uploading the chapter and publishing it? That happened once before.
Yeah, like other people have said, I only noticed this chapter was up today.
Also, Heinlein, FLCL, and Weird Al references in the same chapter? I love you.
I liked the ending, but I was confused about the setting and where everything is taking place?
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At what scale? This is, except for parts of chapter 3, on Earth. In particular, Manville NJ. I chose that because, well, Ponyville, and that's the first hit for Manville on google. But it's a fictional version (for example, according to Google, real Manville hasn't got any stables. I like verisimilitude but I'm not going to research up a town in detail jus for this).
As for Manville's place in the universe, I think I covered that adequately.
On a finer scale, do you mean I didn't go into enough detail on their apartment?
3362408 I mean, first they were in the apartment, and then all of a sudden they were at the restaurant? Maybe I just didn't read it clearly enough.
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The trip from apartment to restaurant was 449 words long, a seventh of chapter 1, and most of the things that happen in it could not happen in the apartment. So, you probably simply didn't see the words.
Maybe you were interrupted partway through chapter 1 and forgot to go back and finish it when you saw chapter 2? Or maybe you accidentally hit pagedown twice instead of once, and have a large monitor?
I love it when people know the difference between effect and affect
Gah. I left in a bunch of marker-punctuation I put in to remind me to check whether Mondrian's #38 was what I meant (and it was).
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I was this close to constructing a sentence using the verb AND noun forms of both affect and effect, but it came across as excessively pretentious.
The dialogue in this story often confuses me. I'm not sure what the characters are thinking and what are they trying to accomplish by speaking their respective lines. For example, the conversation with Gwyneth and the cards took some effort to puzzle out. Weirdly, I don't get that at all from A Watchful Eye even though characters there also tend to be pretty laconic.
Doesn't this have one negation too many? It sounds like Rachel is agreeing but she's also throwing her hands in the air and talking about conditional probability.
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Rhiannon being able to assign an affect to a tarot deck is something that Rachel thinks is basically plausible, GIVEN that she managed to body-swap with Lyra. Without that accepted, it's stupidly improbable. She's defending her 'honor' as having acted reasonably in respect to the deck. I guess I did have her do a sort of about-face in consecutive lines, but she's talking about two different things there - specific expectation vs plausibility.
As to the difference between this and A Watchful Eye, well, this and Game Night are what I'm writing to relax from trying to thread needles with aWE. So, sometimes, people just say things.
If you could give some other examples, maybe I can clear them up.
Please please please have Rhiannon be an evil antagonist. Throwing money around like nothing, a mysterious job offer for two months from now, and disappearing into another world with no warning?
OH GOD YES ADVENTURE TIME
You NEVER start at 12 on a unit circle!
The unit circle starts at 3 and goes counterclockwise!
Although that is a pretty elegant conceptual explanation for the sine wave.
Awww. No evil Rhiannon. Oh well.
I wasn't quite sure, but is Rachel a brony, or familiarized with the show at least? I was figuring the show didn't exist in this story, but then Rachel started name-dropping stuff.
Also, I think the pony to human years involving no conversion is a bit of an asspull. Even if human years were directly analogous, why would Equestria's age of consent be 18? As well as Lyra being 13, but I suppose Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns includes as a major part primary schooling, considering Twilight only got her cutie mark when she was applying.
Still, sending a 13yo on a transuniversal exchange program? That sounds kind of advanced magic-wise. As well as, um, well, what studying would Rhiannon be doing that could apply to her body on Earth?
EDIT: A-and holy crap, Rachel just got knee-length hair from a celestial goddess possessing her body.
Gwyneth is a huge bitch, but for good reason. I'd like to see more backstory about this world's magic as well as psychers, but that'll come in time.
What exactly is the point of the exchange program? What purpose does it have besides transuniversal relations (and it sounds like it's pretty nonexistent, at least in this world)? Why isn't there some sort of authentication process, and how did Rhiannon get ahead of everyone else if she was a charlatan until now? Or, that means Rhiannon was Equestria's only contact, and this world has serious misconceptions about how transuniversal magic works, so it would be an infant field.
I would say that Lyra should have some way of contacting Celestia, because credible contact between two administrating parties seems pretty vital. I wouldn't suggest that Gwyneth be Lyra's teacher because she is a huge bitch, and way too skeptical. A point that I would particularly complain on is that she can't remember what Rachel looked like the last time she met her, but why didn't she at least remember that her hair was impossibly short for the length it was now? Or, she's accepted that Lyra and Rhiannon have switched, but she's using "video editing" as an excuse to remove herself from Rhiannon's affairs. Again, bitchy, but justified.
Why is James Randi's foundation a thing in a world where magic does exist? Or do you, the author, believe that some extent of magic exists in this world, or that it's plausible?
I like this story very much, but I have a ton of questions...
Ah, I see you write for FiO. That explains the part about conditional probability, assuming you browse LessWrong.
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James Randi's foundation is a thing in a world where magic is extremely rare, there are no competent practitioners, and, where it does appear, is not in-your-face. For instance, the position Lyra found herself in when she transferred initially was very uncomfortable and she was unable to stop holding it, but it if there was an external force, it was not large. It took someone of the magnitude of Celestia being on-site to actually produce the major physical effect of creating hair.
As for LW: Rachel, like me, has read some of 'the sequences', but isn't seriously involved with it. But yes, that was a reference, as well as using Azathoth as the avatar of evolution. It's not going to be a big deal. I will continue to give people who know it opportunities to notice it.
> Why isn't there some sort of authentication process, and how did Rhiannon get ahead of everyone else if she was a charlatan until now?
This will be addressed. Regardless, Rhiannon isn't a charlatan. A charlatan is a con-man who tries to convince people that they can ALREADY do magic. Rhiannon was haltingly, stumblingly, working out HOW to do magic.
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MLP is not a thing in this world. If Rachel name-dropped something that Lyra or Rhiannon had not previously spoken of, that's an error.
A later chapter will deal with age conversion / age of consent issues. What you're seeing is their assumptions about age of consent issues.
The magic to transfer is executed by Celestia herself, not Lyra. Even Twilight Sparkle wouldn't know where to start as of the beginning of season 4. I know of exchange students as young as 11 in real life. They certainly weren't expected to fly the plane! Now... Lyra was involved in a targeting spell so that Celestia could possess Rachel, but Celestia did the heavy lifting there. I'll clarify that.
Rhiannon, as she said, is just trying to get SOMETHING. Earth isn't exactly a magical hotspot. If nothing else, she could improve relations with Equestria, which could in turn result in good things of some sort or another.
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I know, but she's from a different world. They do it differently there.
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Eh. Throwing ~$2500 around? I had that and some to spare in my checking account at her age, and lived in an apartment no nicer. And dumping a guest of unknown competence on your roommate will go over a lot more smoothly if you grease her palms. Just try to imagine this without that.
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Yeah, but there was no warning. (I notice that you haven't commented on Rhiannon being an antagonist)
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Actually, yeah, sine is the y-component of the rotating vector, and cosine is the x-component. The chord thing i hadn't heard.
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What are psychers? Or will answering that spoil the plot?
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Psychiatrists. As in, send her to a mental institution.
As for antagonism, well, you yourself retracted it 2 chapters later; I figured that would be redundant. And if she IS antagonist, no way am I spoiling it. Note, I barely gave you any new information in all those replies.
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Ah. "Psychers" is a bit strange for me, never heard it before.
Don't think I haven't noticed your question-dodging...
But you did clarify some things for me. Thanks!
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yeah, well, someone got annoyed at me a few hours ago for telling them not to worry about something in A Watchful Eye, so I'm kind of on the lookout for what I say.
No, not "Oh shit"! "Oh shit" is not good! It is not a good thing to hear, and it is not a good thing to end a chapter on!
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Is magic rare because humans are ignorant of it, or because there Earth is low-mana level?
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the latter led to the former
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next chapter is coming soon. I wrote the first half already.
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Whew!
Interesting concept. We need more equestrians on earth stories.
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... fixing
4017569 Outstanding.
Whoops!
Aw, I would have liked to see Intrepid.
I'm a little surprised how not surprised everyone is to suddenly be swapped bodies and gender and whatnot.
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Consider that this is already the third body swap in the past 15 hours, or fourth if you count the second time Rhiannon swapped with Lyra, and Shankar and Jack were lectured specifically on how this was a possibility with Rhiannon and Celestia.
Quite an entertaining read! I like the conceit behind this. An exchange student is a great reason to have an Equestrian here for slice-of-life fun without some sort of gigantic calamity.
I can understand Lyra not being too disturbed by a body swap, but I'm surprised Shankar is so nonchalant. Oh well. I suppose at some point so many weird things have happened, what's one more? I wonder why they find their drives muted when cross-bodied? My guess is that they are "out of sync" with their respective bodies so their bodies' signals are coming though rather muted.
Also, you aren't consistent with your "he for Lyra, she for Shankar" which makes it even harder to follow. Errors I found: "He had been addressing Shankar with that, obviously. He replied";
"Lyra left it inherhands"(OK, that one wasn't actually wrong. See? Hard to tell); "Shankar asked for his phone, and pulled up his notes"; "he was taking notes on the sushi. Everyone else was making fun of him for being pretentious about his thoughts, as if he was imagining himself a food critic. But he just wanted to know". Though the last one is debatable. I mean, I'm used to the rules for when you can and can't switch tenses, but the grammar rules for gender switching are a little hazy for me.Anyway, I hope you write some more of this. You've got an interesting scenario here and I'm curious what will happen next.
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High Voltage Culture shock was an alternate working title.
Thanks, I'll fix. The narrator is even more confused than I am and this is one of the things she starts dealing with in my next half-chapter segment. As for the sushi story, Shankar was male at the time.
And the reason that ends at a half-chapter and I haven't put it out yet is that I'm dithering about which of three ways to go next. They really exclude each other. Also, so little time. Also, want to finish A Watchful Eye, or at least part 3.
Hmm. I think I figured out which way to go next.
Holy crap this exists! Like, thank you for coming back to this, I was really not expecting any continuation at all. I'll like, actually comment on the chapter after I read it, but. Yeah, not often something goes for a year without an update and then shows up again. Good on you.
Princess Celestia might not have so many nasty surprises that she has to roar in like a full speed jet and fix things before they explode, if she didn't keep roaring in like a full speed jet and fix things before they explode. "Oh my, what's this that happened?" is a much better way to get information than smacking someone with a magic cudgel so hard they fly back into their own body.
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Or she knows precisely what happened and this is a proportionate response. Pop quiz: who did Rachel swap with?
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Sunset Shimmer...? The bacon hair is sort of distinctive. I don't know why Celestia would tell kid Sunset to fix kid Lyra's problem as a test, then get surprised about it.
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I've seen it happen quite a bit over the past few months, actually.