My fur bristles, charged with magic. The bright colors of the ponies before me blur and shift toward the red; my own lavender appears sky-blue, while the blue sky thickens into a green-yellow haze. I swallow reflexively, bracing my eardrums against the sudden increase in air pressure as I appear at the far end of Cartwheel Lane in Ponyville with an audible pop, completely drained of magic. A moment ago, an age ago, I was in Canterlot.
An earth pony filly stands at the edge of the street not ten paces away and looks up at me, her head low to the ground. Her name is May Flower. She loves balloon animals and coloring books, but I haven’t got either.
“Well, hello there,” I say, flashing my best princess smile. “What are you up to?”
“I’m looking for four-leaf clovers,” she tells me, and pokes at the weeds that have sprung up around the edges of somepony’s house.
“The south side of the street is the lucky side,” I tell her. I point to a patch of weeds on the other side of the street where I know there is a clonal colony of four-leaf clovers.
“Really?”
I nod. She hesitates, crosses the street. Unexpected teleportation, I always find, lends one credibility. Or maybe it’s the crown. I head off down the street. Before I reach the corner I hear her cry of delight behind me, and I feel the thrill of knowing I made her little moment of joy possible.
It’s a beautiful day, and I’m grateful for that. It makes my task easier. I stroll down the street, smiling and greeting ponies as I pass, with a carefully chosen question or lie for each. “Afternoon, Holly Copter. I heard your daughter was brilliant in the school play yesterday! Good to see you, Chatter Box. May I call on you this evening after dinner? I want to ask your opinion about something. Derpy! I saw your poem in the Gazette and read it to Luna, and she loved it!” Head up, chin in, remember to smile. Celestia made it look so easy.
I banter with Old Times while I browse his selection of antique watches. “This one,” I say, “is my favorite. Look at the quality of the engraving on the back.”
His eyes brighten. “I did that inscription, I did. Spent all day at it. The customer never picked it up.”
I buy it, telling him I’ll treasure it forever. When I leave he’s still smiling. Years of close-up work have made him nearsighted. He can’t see me give the watch to a young colt who’s been standing outside all along, looking through the window at the display case.
It’s a difficult optimization problem because the objective function can’t be defined without resolving some long-standing philosophical questions about utility and utility distributions. Measuring my impact is hard enough—how should I compare Old Times’ quiet smile to the colt’s squeal of glee? Is enjoyment proportional to brain capacity? Does it diminish with old age? You see the difficulty.
I stop in at Sugarcube Corner and examine the bear claws and eclairs carefully, ooh-ing and ah-ing while Mrs. Cake watches proudly. I buy a dozen of each and leave. I work my way over to Beech Avenue, handing out pastries to everypony I meet. I’m not hungry.
The distribution of pastries can be an analogy for the distribution of happiness. Suppose that Pinkie Pie enjoys pastries twice as much as any other pony—a reasonable supposition. Should I maximize happiness by giving her all of the pastries? This, on a larger scale, is the problem I face. Some ponies are far out of my way, in less-densely populated areas. Were I to visit them, I could visit fewer total ponies in twenty-three minutes. Does that mean I should never visit them?
I don’t visit Pinkie Pie. I can’t make her happier than she already is. Fluttershy is too far out on the edge of town. Rarity takes the news badly. Applejack doesn’t approve of my methods.
Sometimes friendship means keeping your burdens to yourself.
Celestia should see me now. I know where everypony is and just what each of them needs to hear to give them one moment of happiness. For these twenty-three minutes, I am all-knowing.
At no point do I mention or look at the new star dangling above us, sparkling like a sword point even at midday, slicing a gash in the eastern sky. There are ponies standing in the street, staring at it. When they see my lack of concern, they shrug their shoulders and go about their business. If the sky were falling, surely I of all ponies would be shouting.
Nopony asks about the princesses. The other princesses, I mean. I avoid the ones who would. But there’s one I can't avoid.
“Twi!” Rainbow shouts from above, and I step to the left. An instant later her hooves slam to the ground to my right. She’s in my face immediately. “What’s up? What happened? We got a plan?”
I shrug. “I’m working on one.”
“What about Celestia and Luna? What’d they do?”
I breathe in. I breathe out.
“They tried,” I say.
Rainbow stares at me.
“Rainbow,” I say, and now I finally look at the star. It glistens white against the blue sky, like a pustule seeping through the skin of the firmament. “Remember when I told you there was no point flying out to meet it?”
“Yeah?”
“I was wrong.”
“I’m on it!” she says, and moments later she’s disappeared into the sky, camouflaged by her own fur. She has no way of knowing that it’s still further away than the moon. But it isn’t pointless. It’ll give her something to do. That’s her kind of happiness.
There’s one lie in particular that I’d always wanted to tell, and I see the little orange filly I need to tell it to racing towards me on her scooter, right on time. I flag her down with an eclair and she skids to a stop in a cloud of dust.
“How’s your practicing going?” I ask her as she begins ravaging the eclair. She stops chewing. She’s wondering how I knew about her secret wing-exercises outside town.
She swallows. “Dunno,” she says, looking down.
I lean over and touch her with one wing. “Scootaloo”, I tell her in my most serious voice, without blinking once, “you will fly someday. I promise.”
Her cheeks redden. “Aw, heck,” she says, kicking the dirt, “I’m not worried about it.” But I know that determined look in her eyes. She kicks the scooter around and heads back towards the edge of town, even faster than she came.
Up ahead is the eastern market, on the edge of town. Applejack is at her stall. I can smell her granny’s pies from here. I turn left on Oak and bypass the market. I don’t want to see Applejack today. But that means going past Apple Bloom, who begged her to come to the market with her today but got bored and is now wandering the adjacent streets.
“Twilight,” she says, rushing up to me with a frown on her face. “What’s goin’ on? You run off to Canterlot a week ago to fix up this here stranger star. Now it’s bigger’n ever, and you’re walking around town, jabberin’ and gabbin’ like you were on holiday!”
“Apple Bloom,” I tell her, “you worry too much.”
“You said it was a hunk of rock bigger than the Everfree Forest!”
“Well,” I say, “I was wrong! Good thing, huh?” The corners of my mouth feel heavy.
“But what is it? And what’re you gonna do about it?”
I bend over and ruffle her mane. “Let me tell you something I only learned recently. I used to be afraid of all kinds of things going wrong. I’d sit up late reading books about history, then lie awake in bed worrying about famines and plagues and wars and all kinds of things, yes, even asteroids. And you know what?”
She waits. Smart kid. Knows the question is rhetorical.
“The most dangerous thing, Apple Bloom—the thing you have to worry about the most—is being unhappy right at this moment.”
She frowns, and waits some more.
“A famous philosopher once said that you should live your life as if you would be forced to re-live it again and again, for all eternity. Every moment spent in unhappiness is a little death, Apple Bloom. A wolf or an asteroid can only kill you once, but a worrisome mind kills you a little bit every moment of your life. So let me worry about the star.”
She seems unconvinced, but I’m out of time and hurry on. I don’t think my talk with Apple Bloom ever helps, yet I keep trying. She’s a smart kid. She should see the logic of it.
I’ve done a perfect job, again. I’ve flattered sixty-two ponies, relieved forty-seven anxieties and twenty-four deep-seated fears, and given out one hundred ninety-seven smiles, two dozen pastries, and seventeen small thrills of satsifaction.
I move faster now; there are no crowds out here. I hurry around the curve of Pinwheel Way and turn right on Orchard. Moss grows in the darkness under the oaks by the side of the road. In ten seconds Big Macintosh will come by, pulling a wagonload of hay back from town. The star is burning through the sky like a hot bulb through an old celluloid film that’s been paused.
Nopony else is in view. I stand in the road and stop him, knowing already how badly this will go.
“Big Macintosh,” I say, half-commanding, half-pleading. “I need your help.” I’ve unhitched the traces from him before he realizes what I’m saying.
“Sure, Princess,” he says.
“Please call me Twilight,” I say. I hop over the roadside ditch, landing on moss. “Come here.”
He flicks an ear, then follows. He lopes over the ditch like a cat, muscles rippling. I waste seconds just staring at him. My Macintosh. I know his scent like my own. I’ve re-learned anatomy just from leaning my head against him and feeling his muscles move against it. He stands and tilts his head at a pony he knows only as his princess and his sister’s friend.
This will sound terrible, but I’ve never tried to give Big Mac his one moment, except in clumsy and selfish ways. He seems… above that. I read a book by an ancient Eastern philosopher who said, finally, that true wisdom is to neither delight in this or that thing, nor despair at this or that other thing, but to take what comes and say only, “Yes.”
Or “Yup,” as the case may be. In the end, Equestria’s greatest philosopher was this silent hulk of a farmer. Who would’ve thought it?
I draw myself up to my new, improved full height and try not to shiver.
“I need a hug,” I say.
He blinks, and over his shoulder the star surges four point five miles nearer.
“Please, Big Mac. Please. I’m so tired.”
He chews his lip and says nothing, but I know now I can come close and lay my head on his shoulder. He reaches out automatically and wraps one tree-limb of a foreleg around me. I lean back and sigh, letting all my weight fall back on his chest, and now I finally begin to shake.
He nickers and softly stamps one leg, but stays put. He recognizes an animal in distress. Knows better than to try to talk me out of it. He shushes me, though I’m hardly crying at all, and pulls me closer.
I’m letting him down. It’s a terrible thing when your gods fall to pieces before your eyes. But I’m so tired. I don’t want to be a god anymore. They should’ve chosen somepony else. Somepony who could be a god for a full twenty-three minutes. I shudder, and he strokes my mane. His body folds over me, bigger than the star, bigger than the sky. I breathe in musk and sweat and hay and feel the warmth of his body, his chest rising and falling, alive, still alive. I’ve saved him one more time.
I nestle under his chin and try to form happy pictures in my head: Leaning out over the rails of the bridge into Ponyville, watching fish leap upstream over the riffling shallows where generations of foals have dropped stones to watch them splash. Lying back on the musty cotton cushions of my favorite chair, reading by the light of my horn and the pulsing glow from the library fireplace, a mug of hot cider on the end table, low rasping dragon-snores drifting down from upstairs.
Instead I hear again a ringing in my ears. I smell the ozone wake of powerful magics, gag on the vapors of burnt hair and boiled fat. I see charred hunks of flesh spattered across ancient oak benches. Something dark drips patiently from the crystal chandelier high above. In the center of the chamber, acrid smoke drifts from eight blackened hooves, still hissing steam, fused to the cracked marble tile like burnt-out candle stubs. Glossy rivulets, frozen now, run from their ridgelines to pool on the floor. They look soft, like wax.
“Hush, now,” Big Mac whispers.
His voice rumbles like a wagon, so deep I can feel his ribcage vibrate, and it stills my trembling. I breathe in the cool confidence of his voice. I hold my breath, blink the tears away, then exhale deliberately. I feel the steady bass thumping of his heart, and try to slow my own racing heart to match it. I fit perfectly in the hollow of his embrace. It feels like the earth itself has risen up and drawn me into its bosom. Nothing can hurt me. I close my eyes. For a full minute I breathe in and breathe out and think of nothing.
In the distance I hear the clop of hooves. I look up. His eyes have turned to the star.
In a second he’ll notice that it’s growing visibly now, and I’ll lose him. I can already hear shouts from the direction of the village. I lift my muzzle towards his. It’s a million miles away. He hasn’t noticed yet. My neck angles upwards, pointing my mouth towards his. His eyes look down at me and widen as I reach the halfway point. His neck muscles tighten and begin pulling back, but I’m almost there, don’t hesitate now, Princess, push onward, push those technically virgin lips up against the soft, surprised “O” of his mouth. Take a tiny breath. Now push just a little more.
Now it’s him who shivers, jerking his neck back, but I stay with him, matching his trajectory and speed precisely, our lips locked, seal unbroken. There—there! Just for a moment, suspended between surprise and shock, he stops, and pushes his lips and tongue back against mine. For one moment he is mine. I’m not imagining it.
This is my moment.
And it’s gone. He falls away from me, catching himself with a quick sidestep. His mouth hangs open. I smile hopelessly as he backs away. I’ve kissed his lips a thousand times. I’ve never been kissed.
I never learn how long he would have stood there, what would have happened. At my feet, a patch of road fades into a second shadow, dim and hazy. The star is as large as the sun now, swallowing up the sky. We can feel its heat. Somewhere far above, Rainbow is streaking out to meet it. My heart swells with pride to be her friend, to have given her this moment.
I wonder what it will look like.
I know exactly what it will look like. I computed the time of impact and the exact spot where it will strike in the brushlands southeast of Appaloosa. I've plotted its altitude, azimuth, absolute magnitude, and angular diameter for up to 1/1000th of a second before impact (logarithmic in time to impact).
But I wonder what it will look like.
Bottle Cap and Ginger Gold gallop by, eyes on the star. “The orchard!” Macintosh says, all awkwardness forgotten. He jumps to his feet and rushes back towards his farm, as though he could save his trees from a million billion tons of nickel and iron by throwing burlap over them.
I understand completely.
If only I’d said something to him before, yesterday, now a hundred years ago. Twenty-three minutes is not enough, not with him. Believe me. I’ve tried all of the techniques recommended in six different books on dating and seduction.
I can’t let him die like that, running panicked, eyes white, head thrown back staring at the sky, braying like a frightened animal. So I stand and summon what little magic I’ve gathered since I arrived, pulling it into my horn. I wrap it around space and time and twist, until I’m looking back at all the Twilight Sparkles I’ve been, trailing out behind me in time like a thousand-legged centipede. There is nothing ahead of me.
I reach back as far as I can, to the Twilight Sparkle at the bottom of that cliff of magical energy I fell down when I teleported to Ponyville, which rises like a dam and bars me from every-me further back. I unleash the spell that will save everypony, the only way that I can.
My fur bristles, charged with magic. The bright colors of the ponies before me blur and shift red; the blue sky thickens into a green-yellow haze. I swallow reflexively, bracing my eardrums against the sudden air pressure as I appear at the far end of Cartwheel Lane in Ponyville with an audible pop, completely drained of magic. A moment ago, an age and twenty-three minutes ago, I was in Canterlot.
An earth pony filly stares up at me. She is looking for four-leaf clovers among the patches of weeds that spring up next to the houses. I point her to a patch on the other side of the street and head off down the street. Before I reach the corner I hear her cry of delight behind me, and I feel the thrill of knowing I made her little moment of joy possible.
It’s a beautiful day. I stroll down the street, greeting ponies as I pass. They smile, they talk, they still breathe, their hearts still pump blood. In just under twenty-one minutes I’ll close my eyes and rest in Big Mac’s embrace. Until then, I have work to do.
Someday I’ll find the right words. Maybe some especially clever lie. Or, maybe, the truth. Someday he’ll stay, and hold me, and I’ll fall asleep in the nest of his legs and chest, smiling. I don't know what will happen then.
What will it take for you to write an unabashedly happy story, Bad Horse? A petition? Divine commandment? The words "BH WRITE HAPPY STORY PLS" spelled out on the Moon in huge letters?
Yes, yes, this is brilliant, and clever, and unutterably sad, just as you meant it to be, but think of the good you could you if you put your incredible powers in the service of making people smile instead of making them weep softly while reevaluating their existence and finding it wanting.
P.S.
To other readers: I've read the second chapter of this thing. You want to hit that "Favorite" button. You really really do. Trust me on this.
3872452 "Sisters is happy, right? Right? "
3872473
I don't trust it. The cover could be BH lulling you into a false sense of security.
3872452
Honestly I am a bit frighted. Bad Horse stories always seem to trigger a depressive episode... Especially his really great ones...
3872473
3872523
No, no, it is happy. But it was ages ago. I want moar happy!
Alright.
Fave'd
Like'd
Now to go weep. I may or may not be back.
3872452
piclair.com/data/ze7qd.jpg
Nah, just joking. Loving the story thus far (and yeah, I already clicked that fav button, don't worry).
3872535 That's what you say now. But would you respect me in the morning? (And by "respect", I mean "fear".)
Was my favorite of the writeoff, so I totally dig it as a one-shot. But I'm quite curious what you have in store for the extended version here.
3872669
You have to respect a evil genius who can go out of his comfort zone.
And if you do not fear one who can be good as easily as be evil, but simply chooses not to, then you are a fool.
A fool.
3872669
3872704
Listen to Blue, Bad Horse. How do we know your evil means something if you don't demonstrate—regularly—that you could be good but choose not to. Think of the uncertainty that would impart. Think of how stupid we'd feel over our attempts to redeem you—you can comprehend good, and friendship and all that rot, you just choose to be otherwise. Think of how difficult it would be for people to plan against so mercurial a foe who doesn't show mercy but might—on a whim—because being a Dark Lord is all about not having your options constrained. Think how we would despair over ever overcoming you.
Think of the fear.
3872669
But wouldn't it be a satisfying and enriching experience to give the readers warm fuzzy feelings... and then crush them with the sequel?
3872793 3872810 All right, all right--ONE happy story. But don't blame me if your heart explodes.
3872810
don'tgivehimideas
Ixnay on the equelsay, kay?
3872810
Why.....
I do have to congratulate you for breaking new ground in the field of Making Time Loopers' Lives Miserable, which is no small feat.
Powerful story for its size. I look forward to the supplemental chapters, though I'm curious as to what can be added here.
(Anyway, I should get back to writing my Michael Bay version of this. I've got lots of paradoxes to sort out.)
3872950
The sequel will involve Big Macintosh becoming a cannibal. A cannibal with cancer. Terminal cancer. Also cataracts.
3872953
Why? Because pain is weakness leaving the body, and your heart is far too weak.
3872669
Pinkie Pie does a wonderful job of keeping Ponyville under her hoof. Look at all those coordinated town-wide musicals!
3873033
Every-time I see that phrase, I want to find whoever said it and kick them in the sensitives repeatedly. With steel toed boots.
At the very least his nads will become stronger for it.
3873073
Well yeah. With all that pain, simply massive amounts of weakness will be leaving. If you keep it up, soon they'll be INDESTRUCTIBLE. Make sure you stop kicking then lest you damage your own foot.
'Course, if you did that, it would hurt, thus making you stronger, so you could keep kicking them until your foot was more manly and just plain metal than their gonads, at which point you would express more weakness from their bodies and so on and so forth.
Good grief! I believe I've constructed an Infinite Strength Engine. A paradox!
Crikey. This Quantum Algodynamics stuff is hard!
3873033
No, no, no, that's just gratuitously tragic. Bad Horse is more bleak. Think Russian literature but on serious downers.
So Big Mac will be in love with Twilight but he'll never say anything, not about that, not about his love of literature which he hides because, damn it, he's just an apple farmer. And he can only ever be an apple farmer. He'll just spent agonizing day after agonizing day faced with the perfect bleakness of existence until some day a ray of hope appears, he'll do his best to prepare, he'll try, he'll make an effort, and then he'll be utterly crushed. Only nobody will see it like that, see, so he'll hide the hurt. Just fold it all in. Until, one day, his body just gives in, and we close at an eulogy delivered by Twilight Sparkle who's devastated, of course, but whose words betray than not even she got him at all. He's remembered for the least part of him, for the silence, for the labor. What he thought of as himself will fade as if had never existed. The End. The reader goes and hangs him/herself.
3873201 That's brilliant! Hey, I'm going to have to put that happy story on hold, okay?
3873201
3873258
Dammit Ghost! You ruined it!
No wait. This is salvageable.
Okay. Here is what we do. Bad Horse. Write the happy story. Because you can't have this story.
Ghost is writing it.
3873201
Hmm, lets just take a peak in my Notepad of Cunning Plans.
Ah yes, everything seems to be in order here!
3873258
The lonely person that noone understands is boring and old. Where's the tragic story of the person that everyone understood completely, and was never able to escape an extremely social existence?
3872452 Certainly that would end with the writer of the words across the moon dying, alone and unloved while the rest of the world fails to look up into the sky.
3873258 Darnit, GoH, you just had to open your mouth. Now the gloom of eternal night shall enfold the site as the Dark One spins his web of pain and agony across our blighted souls. Hell, yes, I'll read it.
Woo! Glad to see this posted! It deserves all the attention it gets.
Looking forward to the rest of it, too.
3873258
Hey, now, y'all know what happens to ponies who break their word 'round these here parts, right?
'sright.
We defenestrate them.
And you wouldn't want anything happening to yer fenestras all sudden-like.
3873309
Oh really? Watch me take that plot and turn it 'round into a heartwarming tale.
After the end, pen lifts from paper and it's Big Mac writing this whole thing out as catharsis. He's just come back from town where his attempt to submit something to a literary competition—say one invented by the, ahem, librarian—was interpreted as a really funny misunderstanding. Nobody laughed with malice, but they laughed all the same. Nobody wanted him put down, but they did want him in the little box they set up in their minds for him and those such as him. So he's left and he's in that disused barn where he hides his writing.
Except.
Except someone who keeps an eye on him—oh, for Reasons—notices what happened. And so she follows him and sneaks in. First he tries to hide his work, but she teases the truth out of him and he shows her a page or two. After a while there's a gentle wing across his back and a pressure on his side and she reads and—oh, all the princesses and especially this one how he always loved to see her read—and her eyes lit up and she says it's really brilliant and offers to take it to the contest.
Later, there is kissing.
There. Happiness.
3873383
Everyone dies alone and unloved. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.
...that's it. I'm overdosing on Bleak Horse.
Eyup
I would've liked to see more of Applejack's reaction. Seems like she knew somehow. How did she know, or is it just that Twi can't face the Honesty? There's no 'moment of lie' that'll work for AJ? Ripoff
Somewhere in space there's a tiny, rainbow crater on a big ugly hunk of very quick rock.
Glad I read this.
3874326
While I suppose death itself is a lonely experience, I so no reason why everyone dies unloved.
If... if this was second place... what in the unholy lands of FimFiction was first?
...I will go find out.
3874560
I was just gently teasing our Esteemed Host's propensity for unutterable bleakness. I don't actually believe what I wrote.
Okay... On Ghost's recommendation, I will cautiously give this a watch... A like will be pending next chapter upon seeing where you're going with this.
(My caution comes from the fact that I am not, generally, a fan of bleak/depressing - as might be evidenced by the one and only pony fic I wrote in defiance after seeing something that had a similar, but much more clumsily and poorly handled premise (with the obvious other major difference that this is actually going to go... somewhere...) and just one-too many "Twilight grows up old and alone" stories.)
But I will give it a fair shot.
3872793
I found this comment amusingly hilarious, because despite it being completely unrelated, it actually describes me pretty well...
3874326 "Everyone dies alone and unloved...."
Reminds me of this: All I want to do is die quietly in my sleep like my uncle, not screaming in panic like all the passengers on his bus.
3874857
An asteroid impact...
Again...
Uhm... couldn't Celestia just position the Sun between Equestria and the asteroid? You know, cuz she can move the Sun?
Or maybe they could just nudge the planet to side a degree or two... or create an arrangement of the Sun, Moon, and Equestria such that the asteroid's path is deflected by the gravitational effects.
I mentioned that in the previous story I read about Equestria getting asploded by an asteroid.
It's not a very plausible doomsday scenario in a world where ponies can move stars.
This is a wonderfully written story. I very much enjoyed it. Thank you for taking the time to write it and share it with the world. I'm looking forward to reading more from you.
3875013 It'll take three more chapters to turn around.
3875240 The world of MLP isn't spelled out enough or consistent enough to make anything plausible or implausible. Celestia raising the sun isn't consistent with there being a sun before Celestia, or with Equestria being on a spherical planet. Raising the moon exactly when the sun isn't in the sky isn't compatible with any celestial mechanics we know. You don't know if they're on a spherical planet; you don't know if it orbits the sun or the sun is a gentle magical fire a thousand feet in diameter. You don't know if the moon is bigger or smaller than the sun. The most scientifically consistent hypothesis is that the whole raising the sun / nightmare moon thing is an elaborate prank or game by the sisters.
So, yes, there are plausibility problems with the asteroid. I made it implausibly huge to try to hush those kinds of objections. You have to leave some of your impulses to consistency at the door when entering the world of MLP. It might not be plausible that Celestia can't divert an asteroid, but then it isn't very plausible that she'd be unable to defeat Chrysalis in one-on-one combat. And it isn't plausible that they have electroencephalograms but not radio or telephone, or that they have a labor-based economy when there's a magical pool next door that can duplicate people, or that a third of the population can do magic and yet the only device in Equestria that uses magic is a single apple-cider-making machine, or that gryphons can find anything to eat in Ponyville, or that an entire race of dogs (obligate carnivores) lives underground.
I could construct a hundred different scenarios to explain why the princesses were low on magic at the time, or why magic didn't work that why, or how Discord had interfered, yadda yadda. And it would be reasonable to demand that if we had a clear idea of what is and isn't possible in Equestria, but we don't.
At some point you've got to let it go, man.
3873201
What you described is very similar to something I read once before FimFiction was a thing, and I don't think it ever made it's way here. I ought'a find it.
images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20101111022234/spongebob/images/thumb/b/bb/3_hours_later.jpg/554px-3_hours_later.jpg
Never mind, it's totally on FimFiction! Though I was actually remembering two stories, one a sequel to the other, as a single story. Both very short, though. Took me way too long to find the damn things, with their vague descriptions and unremembered names, but at least now I have them in my FimFiction favourites list.
Ships That Pass in the Night
The Three Notes
I totally had to listen to this while reading.
Excellent work. If really, really sad.
Clever, it's almost like hard reset, forced to live through only a short time, 23 minutes, except this time she can go back at will, and from the looks of it, she has been doing this for a very long time.
Interested and waiting...
3875761
You there. Yes YOU
You should get a MEDAL for those words.
People in the mlp community in all facets like to create headcannon, it natural to try to find an explanation when there is none, but FAR, FAR too many people argue about their validity and whose "right." Too many people just can't get it into there heads that it's a fantasy world created for a young audience and is treated as such. It doesn't have some underlying truth or logic to it, it never had one in the first place.
And that's what I love about headcannon, there is no "right" or "wrong" to what you make oif it, because, technically, non of it is correct.
Goddamn, dude...
You know, I hate tragedies. The biggest reason I dislike End of Ponies is that at the end, no matter what happens, everypony we know and love will still be dead. I hate seeing my ponies die. But this...
You have written a beautiful picture of not a princess trying to stave of disaster, but of a mare trying to get just one moment of happiness, one she denied herself because "there will always be another day," before the end.
Faved, brah. Faved hard.
Ayeeeegh. Right in the feels.
3875761 After this? Well, I can see you've got a very consistent and good quality of writing.
+1 follower for you! COME BACK IN, ONE YEEAH!
encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSx2R0S9NPObFPmz6UsORGzi3NHocs6I4qwx7IUce5lgggFgZbZ
(complementary image free with purchase.)
3874560 What if you died at the same time as someone else standing/laying/whatever position you're in right next to you?
It reminds me of Majora's Mask, albeit abridged and ever-repeating.
Wonderful.
nice
For great justice.
Sigh... I can relate to that.
One time I was at work in the back room, on the computer and trying to get some not on file items to scan again. One of my coworkers, a friend who I was having a little bit of a thing with, came in and we talked. Well, more like he was talking. I wasn't exactly listening, my eyes still plastered to the screen, answering back when I could spare a second to. It was a mundane conversation. I forget about what.
Suddenly, he moved in and planted a kiss on my closed lips, sensually parting them with his tongue to rub it against my teeth.
Me? I simply looked over his face into the screen and continued to work.
After he broke the kiss, he left for the store floor to continue working, probably feeling dejected and unwanted. I realized I had missed my moment quite horrendously as my eyes slowly traced back to the screen to continue my own work.
I replay that memory every now and then, thinking about what could have been if I had passionately returned that kiss...
Dammit, Bad Horse. Your stories are often so relatable and it sucks me in so hard.
3872452
That's the silliest notion I've heard all day. Obviously, you have to find him in RL and plead your case.
Like, chain yourself to his computer and refuse him access until he write something that gives people the happys.
This will work. I am damn sure of it.
Just make sure you bring something to calm him. I would say drugs, but maybe catnip will suffice.
What? It's cheap and look what it does to cats. I know I like to rub around on the ground and spread my limbs lazily when there's catnip involved.
Did I miss this bit when I read the old version of this story? I think I could have done so, since I didn't know where this was going. In any case, it's wonderful. Admittedly less for the writing and more foe being fun and thought-provoking, but it's certainly within Twilight's character, too.
More generally, this has a lot more polish than I remember from before. I'm curious whether that's just my memory, or whether this is as significantly better as I think it is. The sensory hit from the Canterlot scene is still one of my favorite(?) parts of this, but the whole thing is excellent.
Sorry I haven't been participating in the discussion on this story elsewhere. I wound up really swamped with my own projects and general life stuff, but I've really been looking forward to seeing the extended version of this piece. And now I get to.