Post-show, tentatively c. YOH 1508-12 (8 to 12 years after Luna's Return)
Ill Wind is a brilliant Pegasus engineer working on a vital project for High Commander Windvane which could prove crucial to winning independence for the Pegasi from the chimeric tyranny that currently dominates them. Only if he completes the project can the Pegasi hope to gain the power -- by draining it from sub-equine monsters repulsive even to contemplate!
Ill Wind expected to find professional rather than romantic success in his work. Cruelly-cursed by a witch, he does not believe that any mare could ever love him, But when he meets a brilliant but damaged master machinist, he begins to believe that love is possible for even for one such as himself.
Can Love bloom amongst monsters?
*missing quotation mark
*slob
In the author's note:
*double period
Well, that was dark.
The way they refuse to talk about these "sub-equine monsters," makes everything so much worse. That's some pretty obvious denial here. Trying to guess at what they might be, I figure they're either young changelings (possible), or foals from the other two pony tribes (based on all the story hints of the pegasi trying to cut ties with the others). Although, on further consideration, that second option might be a little too morbid. After all, they would have to keep the kidnappings of foals a secret until their device was ready. And even with ridiculous levels of discrimination, it would be hard to argue that the other ponies were sub-equine. Not impossible, but hard.
Which leaves the question of how they got a supply of changeling babies...
4055975
Heh ... well now, discussing the nature of the "monsters" being fed to the machine, when it's pretty obvious -- through the explicit lack of description -- that Ill Wind (and perhaps every other pony on his team) are energetically-repressing admitting it to themselves, might be a bit premature. I'm glad to see though that I made it sufficiently obvious, without breaking POV, that this is a case not only of Villain Protagonist but also Unreliable Narrator.
(And it's too bad that there's no good "evil smile" smiley here, as the Happily Naive and Uninformed Trixie herself is far too innocent to even conceive of the likes of what is going on here. She has a Code Against Killing anyway -- seeing the Device in full operation would probably give her nightmares for a very long time to come).
I think I've succeeded at Darkness here, and the reason why isn't the gore spraying around the lab (which will go away when Ill Wind improves the spatter shield designs), it's the cognitive dissonance between what Ill Wind (and the rest of his team) thinks they are doing and what they are actually doing. I wrote their interactions exactly like those of a sympathetic team of Science Heroes working on the Cool Gadget in any good hard science fiction story, complete with hair-raising accident, a Rescue Romance beginning, and another kind of Romance about to start soon.
There's the Omnidisciplinary Scientist (Ill Wind), the Big Guy (Twist Wrench), the Hot Scientist (Clear Sight) and the Team Chick (Gold Wire). There's a classic love triangle resolution (at the very beginning, so you know it's not going to be the main focus of the story) with Ill Wind stepping aside and actually helping smooth the path of Twist's romance with Clear. And when Ill Wind, under considerable stress, snaps at Gold (who did miss the best chance they had of stopping the thaumic backlash), he immediately apologizes -- he'd clearly rather Pet than Kick the Dog.
(this is so many TV Tropes references so fast that I refuse to link them!)
The only thing is that what they're working on has more in common with the gas chambers at Auschwitz than it does with Tom Swift's Triphibian Atomicar. And Ill Wind and his team are all utterly insane.
Want to know what happened to Clear Sight? The thaumic backlash hit her and temporarily buffed her magic talent, which she normally uses for design work. Her magic talent is to clearly see something -- generally a piece of equipment she's working on.
Briefly, she clearly saw what the Device really is, what the Project is really doing ... she went temporarily sane. And in that moment of shining sanity she realized that the only rational thing to do was to commit suicide. She didn't try to dodge the falling "discorporator" (one of my best euphemisms ever, I think) because she wanted to die. A moment later she saw that Twist loved her, and the knowledge puzzled her, because she knew she was unworthy of any such sentiment.
Then, luckily (?) she went back insane, and she's much happier now.
Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh ...
Yes, you definitely created a scenario where a bunch of ponies think they're doing something much better than they likely are.
So, Random Flag is a changeling then?
4061865
Nothing that nice. Though he would have no problem "helping" the Changelings either, any more than he has a problem helping the Pegasi, or the Unicorns, or the Earth Ponies.
He's a traditionalist.
4061886 Oh, I thought you were hinting at that with the cutie-mark changing, magic powers, and psychopathy.
Wait... gray? Blonde? Pegasus? All over the place? Messed up face?
... Ditzy, nooooo!
4062224
No, not Ditzy. Though possibly kin.
4062224
Let me put it this way -- the "accident" involved a steel mill and Metal Shriek having doffed her face mask the better to see what she was doing. Fortunately, she'd just decided to pull her goggles down, or she'd also be blind.
No one ever believes himself to be a villain. No one has ever dedicated himself to the service of evil as a concept. Darkness, perhaps. Individual glory, certainly. But never evil. Anyone who thinks of himself as a villain isn't a character but a threatening piece of black-painted cardboard.
And when one's job involves using giant hammers to pulverize—I'm sorry—discorporate living, thinking beings so one can suck out their precious magic? Well, then one's mind is going to bend itself into a Calabi-Yau manifold trying to justify it, and one is going to go more than slightly mad.
Of course, this all applies to those with a recognizable moral system. For those with truly alien mindsets, there is no telling whether they even have the concepts of "right" and "wrong," "good" and "evil," much less what they think about them. Not that there's anything like that in this story, of course.
Eagerly looking forward to more. Especially since there's already a slight leak in Valhalla, and I can only see it getting bigger.
4384542
Yep.
They are completely insane. And they have to be, in order to remain functional.
The origin of this story idea was of course "The Rainbow Factory." There's no room for something like that in the Equestria we see on the show, and there's no way that somepony like Rainbow Dash would cooperate with something like that if it did exist. But I loved the sheer evilness of the idea -- I've always been a fan of the concept of bad guys conducting mass sacrifice for awesome magical power -- and so I started thinking about the motivations and personalities of a faction of Pegasi who would want to build something like that. And then I wondered about the process of building it.
I'm a long-time follower of Golden Age pulp science fiction, the best of which centered on heroes struggling against mystery and danger to build some Wondrous Device which would be the key to untold power and enlightenment. So I started thinking about inverting the trope -- writing a story about villains trying to build such a thing. And then, of course, the whole sick notion of doing it as a love story. I had a mental image of the Mignola/DelToro Hellboy versions of Rasputin and Ilsa as I conceived of Ill Wind and Metal Shriek. ("Hell will hold no surprises for us, my love.")
Oh, and I think you've noticed that this is Ill Wind. Fluttershy's cousin. And you may then have guessed at the nature of his "curse" ... he made unwanted and aggressive advances one night to somepony who may have been physically a lot smaller and weaker than him, but who had a power of whose existence neitehr of them were previously aware.
I will eventually get back to this story and finish it.
4056034
How is this related to Fluttershy is Free?
4415712
Very remotely -- I should probably get rid of the "sequel" connection.
** Did it.
So they are Tribalists who think the 'lesser races' should be enslaved or killed for energy? And was that a unicorn that they put through the machine?
~Crystalline Electrostatic~
4632066
Yep. You've pretty much got it. They are attempting to build what will become known as the Pegasus Device, to power their tribalist rebellion. And they are all insane in their own charming individual ways. One of them had a brief moment of sanity, due to her talent and the extreme shock of having the reality of what they were doing literally sprayed in her face.
4632228 Can't wait for more.
~Crystalline Electrostatic~
Oh dear…
I want to say I can't downthumb hard enough but it makes sense. It's an awful piece of ideation but I get the pulp roots. It's even as racist as the old pulp works, and as stupidly nonsensical as the Rainbow Factory roots. It makes no sense even in Nazi comparisons but I may be missing the context that makes it all work. How they got everyone on board, how they aren't discovered, how they haven't been blown the hell up by a competent strike-team that a modern government of any reasonable power would necessarily have or mercenaries paid by the same government from a fund for that purpose... it both does and doesn't make sense. I can't suspend my disbelief hard enough. Plus, villain protagonists are something I hate on principle. I don't want to read about villains, I don't give a damn about them. I don't care about their lives, their loves or their motivations. I need to know two things: where they are and how soon they can be shoved into a shark frenzy. Cut their throats and be done. The longer they exist the more harm they do which makes any story about them merely an expression of the sadism of the writer.
Just making this story makes me think you're just a bad person on some level. I'd probably say hello to you but would never lend you money or tell you where members of my family live.