My name is Morning Star. I was born in Stable 202, I have a dark, silver and white mane, with a light silver coat, my foxy tail is the same pattern as my mane. Being very clever, I decided to study the stars at the age of six. Luckily, Stable 202, was partly above ground, having a beautiful lab, offset from the Atrium, for me to work in. Books, reading, and studying filled my young childhood days. Finally, after about two, to three years, when I was about nine, I finally earned my Cutie Mark. A telescope, facing a bright shining star. Back then, I actually enjoyed living in the Stable. It was comfy, safe, and, away from the real, terrible world. Until ponies started leaving.
The first was Shadow Dust, he had been a close friend of mine, and when he left, I was devastated. I never really had too many friends, and really, Shadow Dust was the best. He was kind, smart, and somewhat witty. He had a black, silvery mane, and a dark black coat. His tail, was also a silvery black, he was a unicorn, but, he surprisingly didn’t use it much. When he was eight he earned a Cutie Mark that had a dust cloud in front of a New Moon, no one really knew what it meant. After him, one by one, ponies left.
The second, was Crystal Clear, she had been a friend, just not that close. She was funny, a good singer, and was surprisingly clever. She had mint green coat with a darker green mane, and tail. She was a unicorn, and she knew how to use her horn well. Her Cutie Mark ended up being a glass crystal. Most likely because she sang pretty darn well.
The third was Tornado, he was… a somewhat “friend”. We hadn’t really known too much about each other, but, we really didn’t care. He was security, and for some reason was always outside the door watching, for what, I don’t know. He had a dark brown coat, with dark, and light brown in his mane, and tail. He was a pegasus, which had been a pain inside of the Stable, since he able flyer, and the Stable wasn’t really big enough for him to actually fly. His Cutie Mark ended up being a tornado, as you’d probably expect.
Finally, I left. At first I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. The first place I had encountered was somewhere called Ponyville. It seemed to be nice at first, until the Raiders, well… raided. Yeah, that didn’t go so well. Anyway after that experience I had done my best to teach myself how to shoot. It took about a year, until I finally was actually able to hit something. Anyway, now, I’m here. Surviving in the Wasteland, considering I’m not dead, I guess it’s been somewhat a success.
And that leads me here, wandering a cracked highway, looking for some Traveling Merchants to trade with. That’s basically my life, well, I’m not always searching for some Traveling Merchants. I’m usually just walking around and seeing what I can see, trying not to get into too much trouble, due to the fact that I can really only hit things with S.A.T.S. (Stable-tec. Automated. Targeting. Spell). As I was reflecting, an explosion went off to the right of me, but it was too far away for any shrapnel to hit me. I galloped to a nearby hill to scope out the area. I climbed to the top and crouched down, staying out of sight as I looked around for anyone. Soon, thereafter, a trio of ponies came galloping down the road, a group of about four Raiders trailed behind them. I instinctively got a bit closer to the Raiders and went into S.A.T.S., levitating my 10mm pistol out of it’s holster. Aiming for whatever I could hit, I fired. I only hit about two of them. One, I hit in the chest, they dropped dead. The other got hit in their hind leg, and they tripped, and fell behind the rest of the group. Realizing that they had a chance to turn and fire, the three other ponies turned and rained bullets on the three confused Raiders. They, also soon dropped dead. I stayed hidden to see who the ponies were, crawling up on the ridge, I noticed that they were looking for someone, probably me, to see if I was a threat. Getting a closer look, I began to recognize them. Slowly, I climbed down to approach them, but they beat me to it.
“Star? Is that really you?” Shadow Dust slowly trotted over to me. As my own memory began to click, I realized that the other two ponies, were Crystal Clear, and Tornado. “It is! Wow, we never thought we’d find you!” Shadow exclaimed.
“You were looking for me? How’d you find out that I left?” I began to wonder if somepony had seen me leaving the Stable. Or, if they had some type of inside source.
“We kind of just guessed, we weren’t exactly sure, but, it was worth looking.” Crystal and Tornado were at his side, Crystal had her usual wide smile, and Tornado had a sort of half-smile.
“We’re glad we found you, and thanks for saving our flanks!” Crystal cheerily said, as happy as ever.
“Nice shot, self-trained?” Tornado began to question. I looked over him and his gear, they all still had Pip-Bucks, and their Stable 202 clothes on, except with some extra armor. Tornado had his service rifle from the Stable. Crystal had a 30. magnum pistol. And Shadow Dust had a varmint rifle, with a blade taped to the end, most likely for close quarters. As I came out of my trance I started to answer his question.
“Umm, yeah, how’d you know?” He gave a slight smirk and said;
“It’s just something you pick up when you’re in Security. You can tell how someone was trained, most times, it’s self taught” I just shrugged it off and everyone went silent. I sighed and said;
“Well, this is awkward.” Everyone sort of nodded their heads.
“What do we do now?” Crystal said. Everyone looked at me, expectantly.
“What are you looking at me for? I don’t know.” Everyone turned their heads to Tornado.
“Umm, well, I think there’s a shipment of supplies going to Ponyville that we might be able to get our hands on. Although it’s protected by Raiders.” I began to think, I wasn’t much of a good shot, but, if we got the jump on them, we might be able to take enough out to get to the supplies, and take whatever we needed.
“Well, I’m in. I really don’t have anything else to do.” I said, everyone else agreed that they would join too. Before we left, we searched the bodies of the Raiders to look for ammo and supplies. We found ammo for me, a couple sticks of dynamite, and some ammo for Crystal. We finally began our trot down to Ponyville, following the Highway. The Highway was dangerous, but, not as dangerous as wandering off. I had learned that the hard way. Entering the Wasteland had been a challenge, at least learning about the dangers. When after leaving, I had begun to wander off. Not a good idea. Radscorpions, Radroaches, etc., almost anything you could imagine. I wasn’t exactly ‘acquainted’ with the Wasteland then, but, now that I have a few friends to go with along the way, it seems that it’ll be a lot easier being out here. I snapped out of my thoughts and galloped to catch up with everyone else. We all smiled as we trotted casually down the Highway, life out here might be tough, but, together, we could make it.
Good luck...
This has got to be the worst story I've ever read in the sense of Fallout Equestria. You told this whole story to us. You didn't show us a damn thing. Not a DAMN thing. Plus, I read this out loud to five people in a chat room. Everyone was groaning and laughing their asses off at how bad it sounded. This story sounded like a monotone librarian who wrote too many instruction manuals.
"It made me lose my boner." -Nyxknight
"It made my tentacles wither." -Brony_Fan_King123
We should all follow our ideas about what to write.
You should follow this one into a dark alley, there you should murder it and think a little bit harder about what to write.
Stories are like convicts, it's all in the execution. Yours was like filling a gas chamber with laughing gas.
Interesting idea, bad execution.
Advice to improve:
1) Find an editor.
2) Think long and hard about your ideas and whether they will succeed.
3) Rethink your stories thoroughly before and after submitting.
When you see lots of "I", you know where it goes...
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They have a point. Someone else reading the story at least once before you publish it might be useful.
To be honest: this isn't good as it is right now. You'll have to work on the story to make it good, but it's nothing you can't accomplish if you're a human being.
FoE isn't easy to write. Some people (a growing number) think that the whole concept of FoE sidestories is overused. That means you have to deliver a really good (or at least interesting) story for it to be recognized and rated well, an average won't be enough and will lead to downvotes. Take the constructive things people say to you in the comments seriously and apply them to your story, then things will become better.
And now for the actual review-thing:
formatting stuff:
- no need for a full stop at the end of the chapter's name
- "I" issue: too many sentences start with "I". You should vary, a lot. Try... anything. Just read a few other (FoE) stories and you'll get an idea of how to do this
- split up the huge paragraphs at the beginning, Bigger paragrapghs look nice but everything above 6-7 lines doesn't look good anymore.
- use the author's note at the start only to say important things concerning the chapter - it's the best to not do it at all.
- go look for an editor/spellchecker/whoever can help with the English language, both spelling, wording and grammar - maybe you are not a native speaker (I'm no Englishman either) In that case, help is needed even more. but don't loose hope.
- the transition from the first huge paragraph to the second huge paragraph is not good. The whole "tell you my legend" thing might serve as a prologue, but the transition is too fast. We don't really know something about the character (apart from what equipment he/she has (which could be done in a prologue, but I don't like it (tl;dr: this introduction tells us nothing about the character))) and all of the sudden we are told that the character is in the wasteland.
- show, don't tell.
character stuff:
- why can a stable pony's skill with weapons (sniper rifles?) "be placed among the finest"?
- we don't know Silver. The introduction (which shouldn't be made that bluntly) tells us that he/she (the gender isn't made clear) has a PipBuck and is apparently good at shooting, but that's it. If you do a blunt introduction chapter, use the space to really introduce your character. Heck, we don't even know what his/her cutie mark is.
- typical "MC unicorn can't do shit with magic"-cliche
- this:
in short: what... why... how...?
That it is an unbelievable for thing for a stable pony to do. If you're on vacation in Africa you don't think "I'm going to bring those dictators down". Your stable pony is alone. Maby he/she is skilled with firearms, but a whole slaver town? Because Silver "had nothing to do"?
-this:
This doesn't work
- stuff. happening. way. too. fast.
The conflict about Stable 202 last exactly one (in ciphers: 1) line, leading from Silver saying "this can't be true" to "okay" without Watcher or anyone even saying something. Not even Silver gives a second thought before he/she says "okay".
- Watcher just pops out of nowhere (just like Shadow Dust) and then suddenly it's quest-time.
As I said before: this needs quite a bit of work to be good. Read a few other stories, maybe take a look at the School for New Writers group or something like that. Your writing will become better by practicing, but knowing a few basic tricks before you start might speed things up a bit.
All in all, try to make your chapters a bit longer. The short chapters lead to no build-up along with no believable solving for your conflicts both story-wise and conected to your characters. Delivering believable dialogue and conflict in around 1k words is pretty pretty pretty hard. I don't want to say you chapters have to be [...] words long, but aiming for around 2,5-3k doesn't do any harm.
Give more details about your characters' personality. But don't tell us e.g. Shadow Dust is a non-trustworthy son of a bch, let him act like it so that readers come to that conclusion by themselves.
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This is a solid review (by the way, you have a hashtag floating on your "you're" there in the first paragraph of your comment), I'm going to add an even bigger thing to your "character stuff" section.
What is horrifying about these two things is that we didn't need to know this. Unnecessary details go a long way in a fic, and these two are so unnecessary that even a parrot would squawk in disgust. Not only that, but you never use a number like this. Rule of thumb: any number that is above a million that is extremely complex, such as 1,239,542 can be typed out. However, if it is eighty-four, you type that guy out. That was easy.
By the way, you do it again in a more cringe fashion here:
See what I mean?
Yikes.
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ups!
Edited it out.
Thanks for the comments, I'll be sure to take in account what you said. Hopefully I can get an editor soon, and I should be able to find someone else other than the editor to find read the chapter to before I submit it. Also, it dawned on me that you're right about the "I"'s in this chapter. I read over it and it seemed like I really wasn't doing so well. So, on top of an editor, and another reader, I'll look over again myself to see if there's anything else I can change to make it better. Nonetheless, thanks for commenting and telling me what I was doing wrong! (I knew I was doing something wrong, I was actually trying to get some feedback.) Anyway, thanks!