Prologue: Feats Beyond Imagination
Starworks
- or -
Neuroprancer
- or -
Johnny Neighmonic
Sanctae
Prologue: Feats Beyond Imagination
I feel wrong. I feel nearly normal. Where was great fanfare? Where was the earthquake and hellfire? Wasn’t there supposed to be a great cry of outrage or a last minute escape? That was simple … disgustingly so. Push a button, a faint hum, a glowing light, a pony is now dying. The world keeps turning.
I sit and shiver on my doorstep. My back is warm. My face is numb against the wind. I am thinking.
It is bitterly cold. It would snow if it still knew how.
Carpet is soft behind me. Take my scarf from the hook. Warm light billows out onto freezing earth.
I always pushed for the greater good. I just make things worse. It’s a burden I must bear to make things better. One life for many.
I laugh. My heart is not in it. I shake my head but I half believe the pretension.
It was so painfully naive to think it was progress. Should have known better.
The forest is dark. The remains of the dying trees whistle in the wind.
I’m still making the choice. I could stop it at any moment. Every passing second is a second in which I could turn around. I could have faith in them. In him.
The little box sits in my pocket. The rod was posted days ago.
I can’t risk it. I have to take responsibility.
I press the little piece of glass.
I must seem like a monster.
A responsible monster.
* * *
A deep, rusty glow washed over the city, glancing off the tall buildings and leaving the cluttered web of streetways deep in shade. Around this time the city became a jagged patchwork of warm orange light, angular black shadows and crimson specks of sun where the fading light happened to strike metal or glass at a lucky angle. The colour was beginning to drain from the evening sky as night drew near and the first, brightest stars were were just visible out of the corner of the eye.
To the magician, all the way down at ground level, only a narrow sliver of sky was visible. It was a river of orange threading between the hulking towers that loomed hundreds of metres over the crossroads of NE1423 and NW3181. The junction was small and cramped, the coincidence of two minor streets in a nondescript residential block with the usual faceless buildings and serial numbered doors. The whole block was awkwardly placed, trapped between the commuter belt and the outer industrial parks, squatting awkwardly in between the two like some grimy obstacle course for the workers. It had little to call its own unless one ascribed value to the intersection of prime number streets, which the magician certainly did not.
Little flashes of blue darted and played among the nest of cabling strung from building to building, criss-crossing the air above her like a mad, black spider web. The short-lived neon arcs spat and crackled from the potential of the energy roaring through the city’s veins. But the normal, flickering blues and flat, evening oranges were being washed out by large splashes of colour that skittered and bounced between the buildings. The pops and snaps of fireworks mixed with the giggling and shouts of foals as an array of deeper blues, powerful reds and a hint of lively green burst around the street. The magician noted it had been a good choice to go easy on the greens this time; green and orange could clash something awful if not deployed carefully.
It was like a kind of art … well, it was an art. The towering, slate grey walls that surrounded her were a perfect canvas: broad, blank, and begging to be filled with life and colour. She loved to take the bland space, with its flat floors, boxy walls, and distant sky, and throw sparks and energy into it with calculated abandon until light and sound rang off the rows and rows of tiny windows and cramped balconies that overlooked her. She smiled.
She was smiling anyway, but that was a performer’s smile, a smile she’d have had even if her little wooden stage had suddenly burst into flame. This smile came from the heart, born of the satisfaction of a job well-done, even if her current audience probably didn’t notice. She gazed out at the fifteen or so little colts and fillies sitting on the thick flagstones that paved the crossroads, and at the older, purple pony standing on the other side of junction, watching but not participating. She narrowed her eyes, suppressing a laugh. The mare was probably yet another magic student trying to work out her spells as the show progressed, too embarrassed to come sit with the foals.
On the one hoof, the magician too found it a touch … demeaning, performing to foals. Certainly it wasn’t quite the same as the more complex shows for the larger crowds she drew in the main squares, nor was it on par with the occasional shows she put on in the bars and clubhouses of Canterlot. Principally, because she wasn’t getting paid. That said, something about the rapt attention and happy laughter was quite endearing, and she was certainly not one to turn down such an eager audience. She knew her basic act so well that she barely needed to concentrate anymore. Well, that was perhaps rather generous, but for this audience she could probably get away with a few mistakes.
The laughter and excited shouts were dying down as the last of the rose-petal butterflies from the previous firework fizzled out into a shower of delicate pink sparks. She flicked a glance up at the sky before checking a small piece of glassware that she had hung round her neck. She noted, with a flash of pride, that her intuition was still measuring up well against her chronometer.
“My little ponies! What the Great and Powerful Trixie has shown you here today has stretched the very limits of magical possibility!”
She reared up and waved her hooves in the air as her star-topped wand, hovering a few hooves to her right, began to spin wildly.
“You, the few fortunate enough to witness this dazzling display of magnificent magic, have seen something unlike anything anypony has ever seen before!”
There was a quiet tittering from the audience. This was not the first time Trixie had been cajoled into giving this little display in their neighbourhood and it was unlikely to be the last.
“The final trick that I, the Great and Powerful Trixie, will share with you tonight is so dangerous,” she leaned into the audience and dropped to a whisper, “so risky, that even the Great and Powerful Trixie will need help, lest her power prove too much and aaallll of Canterlot be shaken to its foundations!”
She stepped back and paced around the stage, talking to the air as her wand span furiously, trailing her by a few hoofsteps. “But what pony is there that can challenge Trixie’s power? What pony has ever lived that could hope to step up on stage and hope to contain the forces that Trixie could unleash?”
They all knew this bit. The crossroads filled with a happy, screamed chorus of “STAR SWIRL!”
She let out a mock gasp, “Of course! Star Swirl the Bearded!”
She turned to face the other end of her little wooden platform and took a deep breath. Unlike the rest of her simple act, this was actually going to require some genuine effort to maintain. Her wand span itself into a whirling ball of colours and light as smoke began to encase it in a dark ball about the size of a pony.
“Trixie, the most powerful magician of the modern age, calls to you, oh Star Swirl. Come to Trixie and together we will show these brave souls the true depths of magic!”
She closed her eyes and focused on the wand and, inside the concealing safety of the smoke, she began to build. An initial, textbook image of Star Swirl fixed in her mind’s eye, she began to paint in thick, abstract strokes of conceptual hue and texture that gave the ephemeral imagining strength and form. In a couple of practiced seconds a web of intricate texture ideas and colour impressions drew together and settled into the shape of an elderly unicorn dressed in scholarly robes. As she blew the smoke from the platform she began to puppet the image, bending joints and moving eyes to make the simulacrum lift hoof to mouth to cough at the departing smoke. She pulled its head up to face her and gave it voice.
“Pony, why have I been summoned here?”, it intoned.
Trixie watched as the audience turned to look at the image’s end of the stage. It was so easy, really. When she was talking they looked to her, and when ‘Star Swirl’ was talking they would look at him, the corner of their eye failing to register the comparative immobility or the tense concentration of whichever pony was silent.
“You were called here by none other than the Great and Powerful Trixie!”, she proclaimed, taking great care to roll the ‘r’s as theatrically as possible. It was the finale, after all.
“Trixie has summoned you, oh Star Swirl, to partake in the greatest magical displ-” Winter wrap up! Winter wrap up! Let’s finish our holiday cheer! Winter Wra-
Trixie turned to glare at the assembled foals as the tinny, albeit cheery, artificial tones floated over the group. One of the older fillies sitting at the back turned beet red and mumbled apologies as she frantically fumbled for the flashing glassware pendant around her neck. Shooting an apologetic glance at Trixie and the other foals who had all turned to stare at her, she galloped off down the street, pausing briefly to hook the pendant over her ear as she went.
Trixie waited until the retreating strains of the young mare’s frantic apologies, acknowledgements of the time, and promises that, no, Mum, she’d not be late to dinner next time faded into the background.
“Now,” she said, making ‘Star Swirl’ roll his eyes, “where was Trixie?”
By the time Trixie had finished ‘combining her power with Star Swirl’ to, today, stop Canterlot from melting for some contrived reason, the dim, hollow ring of the sun was almost flat on the horizon, and on the narrow streets around her the icy glow of magitechnical lighting was replacing the fading daylight. The foals had wandered away after she’d wrapped up her act, leaving behind them nothing but a fading cloud of happy conversation. All of them had thanked her nicely for her show and, in a small way, Trixie could be content with only that. Besides, it wasn’t like the short, half-hour show really cost her anything, besides a firework or two.
She had packed up her cart with the few elements needed for her show: a modest bundle of prettily coloured fireworks wrapped up in their star covered packages; a few basic props and wooden cutouts for her alteration spells; and finally her small, wooden flat-pack stage and the painted backdrop of stars that stood behind it.
The wand was strapped securely to an inside pocket in her star-spangled cape. She often got questions about the wand, especially from other unicorns. The amount of times she’d had to patiently ex- … well, okay, maybe a little impatiently, explain that the entire point was that it didn’t do anything and, yes, she was just using her horn like every unicorn and that that was the point. The wand was there as a focus, something shiny to distract the audience from the fact that her act was, when it came down to it, just a unicorn doing what unicorns do best. Taking attention away from her horn, while simultaneously reminding the audience that the power was still coming from her, was just one of the many arts that Trixie had, over time, become exquisitely good at … if she did say so herself.
Trixie nervously craned her neck upwards and pushed back the wide brim of her magician’s hat. Several earth ponies had been quietly watching her from the balconies of the buildings above her, their expressions unreadable, as high up as they were. She raised a hoof and tipped her hat in the general direction of one of the balconies in a manner that she hoped would be interpreted as sincere, rather than condescending. The entertainer had not had many … altercations in the neighbourhood before, and was confident in her magical prowess. However, if any significant number of them got the sudden urge to come down and buck her in the face she knew she would be running.
She didn’t get much of a response and quite frankly that was one hundred percent fine by her.
Trixie swept a cursory glance around to check she hadn’t left anything, noticing that the unicorn mare that had been watching from a distance had left as well. Magically tapping her hat back into place on her head she started making her way home. The little blue cart, painted to complement her blue coat and magicians garb, rattled magikinetically along behind her, its cargo of wooden pieces gently bouncing as it trundled over the flagstones.
She still had several miles of winding, interwoven roads ahead of her but she already she could see her destination, a gargantuan, flat slab of metal rearing up over the city atop the cylindrical trunks of the skyscraper jacks supporting it. The glittering tops of the foundation towers poked through the smooth upper surface, catching the last of the fading sunlight as night crept up the scaffolding. Despite being obscured behind the towering metal walls either side of her and the cat’s cradle of cables overhead, Trixie could still feel the familiar pressure of the structure’s presence, like a caver sensing the weight of the mountain hanging over their head. The imposing skyplates were among the tallest structures in the city, dwarfing the dense forests of residential blocks that sprouted, like mushrooms, in their shade. The top sides were given over almost entirely to high-density hydroponic agriculture which, seeking cheaper options than costly magitechnical lighting, took advantage of the comparative abundance of natural light.
Trixie lived underneath where it was cooler, shaded from the daylight by thick square kilometers of metal up above and nestled amongst the cluster of foundational skyscrapers. The darkness and claustrophobia of living under a canopy of megatons of construction had driven down the rents considerably in such areas, but as far as she was concerned a little artificial daylight was a small price to pay for such affordable living. Quite frankly, right now the shadowy metal columns with their beading of red and white exterior lights just felt like home and bed. They were a comforting normality after the gaudy extravagance of the city centre.
It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy giving shows in the city centre per se, there was just something about the place that set her teeth on edge. It was something about how all the rich idiots gravitated towards the prestigious central buildings, something about how all the commercial companies clamoured to get their headquarters established in the Castle’s shadow, and something about the Castle itself.
Granted, it was a miracle of modern earth pony construction: a sharp, artificial monstrosity stretching eye-bendingly up into the sky; a great tapering sail; an impossible metal blade at the heart of the city, casting a long, deep shadow like the needle of some titanic sundial. The first and only stratoscraper in the history of Equestria standing over two kilometers tall, strangely alien and distant in both its scope and design as there was simply nothing for the eye to compare it against for a sense of scale. The product of a generation of magitechnical advance and a scant twenty years of construction, the Castle had been a project unlike any before or since. ‘A pillar of metal and glass at whose tip rests the fulcrum of Equestria’, so said the brochures.
Trixie agreed, it certainly was the biggest and most metallic thing in a world just full of big, metal things, but a couple of years of posing in front of it for particularly eager tourists had eroded the mystique. Oh those tourists! She groaned out loud, then stiffened as she noticed the looks she’d drawn. The streets were starting to fill up now, yes, but not enough that a mare talking to herself could pass without comment. She sniffed disdainfully, adjusted her hat, and continued on, trying to ignore the more hostile stares that burned into the back of her head. Where was she … oh, yes.
She could see them coming a mile off these days with their tacky sunglasses, dangling cameras, and blank expressions as they gawped at the ‘local colour’.
‘Oh look kids, it’s a real Canterlot street performer. Ooo, how cute. Oh, isn't she good with the foals,’ - spoiled brats, inevitably - ‘Let’s take a photo, dear. Do you think she’d mind? How much should we tip her; we don’t want to seem rude.’
She sighed with a hint of resignation. It wasn’t all tourists that rubbed her coat the wrong way, it was just that particular breed of tourist that the Tourism Board pandered to. The Board actively promoted the street acts so she guessed she should be thankful, even if it they did turn them from a colourful local tradition to a ‘Colourful Local Tradition (tm)’ like the inept idiots that they frequently were. She was a professional, not some theme park attraction.
She could still see the tattered, faded posters for their last Cloudsdale tourism drive. Great idea that had been, putting up thousands of posters for ‘The Glorious City In The Sky (tm)’ all over districts where nopony would care. Most had lasted around a day before being defaced. They were still around if you knew what to look for, barely more than scraps of paper hanging forlornly from a wall here and there. On some of the more intact ones the image was almost visible. The scene showed a fluffy white candyland, a happy pegasi couple bouncing along with goofy grins, and a little rainbow hanging around for good measure. Not exactly the most honest depiction.
In reality, the floating supercity hung just shy of a kilometer above the streets of western Canterlot, clear above the tops of the mega-construction, but low enough to provide a dizzying claustrophobia for those below its dark, brooding undersurface. Colossal anchor cables and power conduits draped down from the proud capital of the pegasi, tethering it to the ground as it floated listlessly in the evening sky. The bloated underside flickered with a sickly inner glow, and low, growling rumbles occasionally boomed out from the cloud and rolled over the city, more felt than heard, rattling windows all over the city. She’d never been and she didn’t care to.
Either way she couldn’t see it from here, too many buildings and tower blocks between her and it, but she could tell where it was by following the growing tide of pegasi as they whispered through the flyways above her head. Looking up she could see them, free to escape the stifling atmosphere of the city streets as they floated lazily on the updrafts. A quiet cloud of little lives, distant motes of colour, manes and tails tiny streamers in the thick, warm sky. The bright green lamps of the flyway traffic system blazed from their perches high on the side of the buildings above, one every few storeys for each clear path through the maze of limp and tangled cables.
The setting sun leant the air a welcome chill as heat rushed up and out of city, a great shimmering wall of haze and sweat forming above the cooling buildings. Many more ponies were starting to venture out of their air conditioned offices, trying to get home before the real crush began, and the city was beginning to thrum with noise again. While the pegasi, and those few earth ponies and unicorns rich enough to own flight frames, had been able to make their way home already, everyone else round these parts was stuck with trudging through the streets.
Trixie wasn’t interested in trying to perform to commuters. If her experience had taught her anything it was that ponies had one thing on their minds at around this time - getting home - and never gave her the attention she deserved.
She flinched as she bumped into a brown earth pony coming the other way, knocking a thin glassware device off his ear. It clinked delicately as it hit the ground, pulling loose from the cord previously joining it to a small pack in the stallion’s saddlebag. The stallion’s drink, previously floating by his face at a convenient sipping height, dropped to the floor.
“Hey, watch where you’re going!”
“Trixie might say the same for you! You should have gotten out of Trixie’s way, rather than foalishly blocking her path. You should be apologising to Trixie!”
The stallion delicately picked his headpiece up off the floor with his mouth, plugging the cable back in with a free hoof. A scrawl of tiny symbols flickered over the clear crystal surface as he placed it over an eye and worked the strap back over his ear. He slowly and deliberately turned to the remains of his drink, and then to Trixie, looking her dead in the eye. A few other earth ponies turned to look at the disturbance.
“Well, begging your pardon, madam,” he leant a little closer towards her, “but we don’t take kindly to that kind of talk around here.
“That horn don’t make you any better than the rest of us and I am quite happy to argue that par-tic-u-lar point,” what his voice lost in volume it gained back, plus interest, in menace, “at length”.
Trixie shot back a confident, plastic smile as she weighed her options carefully.
* * *
Trixie’s day had now been thoroughly ruined.
Sure, in broad terms, she’d been quite successful: she had made a fair living in the squares of central Canterlot in the morning; had made reasonable trade escaping the sun in the cooler ground underneath Cloudsdale; and the evening spent busking and cooling down had not exactly been bad either. All told she’d made a tidy profit for a good day’s work.
But her long blue mane had kept blowing into her eyes during her performances, she could have sworn that foal had been laughing at her in the square this morning, and she had wasted another water chit on that stupid drink she had put down and forgotten about that afternoon. Now that had been stupid, certainly, and she’d spent the next performance in a foul mood because of it. Had it been annoying? Yes. Had it been foalish? Yes! But had it been a crisis? Not especially. She built pony-error into her water budget like every sensible pony.
Oh, but then that ignorant pony had just had to knock into her and could he deal with it like a gentlecolt? No, of course not! Had to go making threats. Threats! To her! Oh sure, surrounded by all his dumb earth pony lackeys he felt all big and entitled. She should have just … ugh.
Two wasted sets of chits. One had been bad enough but now, on top of her rent, she’d pretty much wiped out the day’s profit. A whole day down the drain for what? A poor memory and some earth pony bully. Great work, Trixie.
She ground her teeth as she ran through the numbers for the hundredth time while she walked.
It wasn’t too bad, she thought. It was a setback, but nothing too terrible really. She could still make it to the end of the month.
Just.
She paused for a moment and closed her eyes. She allowed herself the brief pretense that she could just trot home, stick her head under the covers and wake up when everything was just better. Just wake up, today having been some horrible dream where stupid ponies deliberately ran into her just to-
She blinked fiercely and refocused on the road in front of her, resuming her slow walk home and trying to focus on the practical impact rather than pointless recrimination.
Well, there was only one solution. She’d have to just go out again tonight.
...So much for a ‘mare’s night in’.
A familiar chill crept into the air as she rounded the last corner and stepped into the shadow of the massive forecourt. She looked up at the block of dark metal that rose above her, her eyes complaining about the glaring lights. She was almost home.
The border of Plate District Lower-Forest-North was, like most residential areas camped in the shade of a skyplate, a rather ‘active’ neighbourhood in which to reside, the looming mass of the plate above lending the whole development a foreboding air. There was a constant backdrop of noise from ponies shouting between the seven separate foundational skyscrapers or up and down the stairwells. Why they couldn’t just send shooting stars like everypony else was a mystery to Trixie.
It was, again like most plate districts, an earth pony community for the workers who tended to the hydroponic plantation on the skyplate’s upper surface. Trixie was fairly sure she was the only unicorn in Foundation 5, and possibly the whole lower district. It wasn’t ideal - far from it - but needs must. The upper district was a different story of course, the penthouses being reserved for the primarily unicorn managers and magitechnicians who kept the plate operating.
She levitated her cart up the stairs to her small apartment, straining as she pulled the awkward thing round the tight bends in the stairwell. While she was accepted by most of the ponies in the foundation, she still didn’t quite trust them enough to leave her bread and butter in the outside storage sheds. Low grade magitechnical security locks wouldn’t keep a door closed if you hit it enough times with something hard and heavy. Besides, she was only ten storeys up, a drop in the ocean compared to the four hundred or so metres of livable, underplate space left above her.
She arrived, panting slightly, at her floor as she recognised the large, familiar tag of ‘LIVE DREAM VALLEY’ scrawled on the stairwell door alongside the its smaller friends ‘BUCK PRINCESS’, ‘free green nature’, and several iterations of ‘pink champagne’s an easy ride’. Odd that one could get attached to such … objectionable things, but the familiar insults and ranting slogans were all welcome signs that she was almost home. She gratefully set the cart down on its wheels again, towing it into the narrow hall and along to her apartment. She waved her glassware pendant over a flat panel on the face of the door, and sighed as she pushed it open.
It wasn’t much, a combination kitchen/bedroom, en-suite bathroom, and a window onto the artificially bright and open spaces between the foundation skyscrapers. The view wasn’t anything to write home about, just the other buildings in the block, the pathways and flyways between them, and the plethora of cables forming the local tributary of the River that meant her room played host to a continual faint flashing from cable discharge at all hours of day and night.
With a yawn she let the door slam to, and dropped the cart in its usual resting place. Levitating her cape and hat to a hook somewhat erratically nailed into the door, she crossed the few hooves distance to the bed and tipped, face first, onto the pillow. She exhaled deeply, feeling her energy bleed out into the familiar star-patterned fabric. Heaving her hindquarters up onto the bed behind her she turned to look at her small bedside table and the kitchenette behind it. She hadn’t even bothered to turn on the light, and only the blue flickering and faint glow of the external magitech lights lit the room. Her eyes drifted blearily past the clutter of bedside reading, the upturned picture frame, and the small lamp on the table, as sleep started to take hold. She waved a hoof at her neck until she hit the little pendant, eliciting a soft chime from the device.
“Set an alarm.”
Ching
“Eight Thiohaaaaauuuhhheeemm,” she yawned, eyes closed, snuggling her face deeper into the pillow.
Ch-ch-ching
“Eight. Thi-rty. P. M. You know full well what Trixie meant.”
Ching ching
“...the great … nnnnn powerful Trixie … thanks … y...”
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I Declare this fic, INTERESTING!
I have a correction to make on the quotation used:
"Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from Science." ~Agatha Heterodyne
As can be seen here: http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20081205
Here we are. My first serious attempt at writing anything of any length. This first chapter is just a prologue so forgive the fact that the plot is waiting nervously in the wings rather than being up on stage. Plot-like things (no, not like that
) start happening real soon and will continue to happen for quite a while afterwards! 
Well, I hope people enjoy this. If, for whatever reason, you are interested in some background on where I'm coming from, why I made some of the formatting choices and what I was trying to convey, and so on (no spoilers or anything, just my idle musings) then I'll probably be putting some things up in my blog section.
When it's not 2am.
So, enjoy and let me know what you think!
526101 Actually, it's a reversal of Clarke's Third Law, which states that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws
I'm pretty sure Arthur C. Clarke was around long before a web comic
526081 Success!
526101 Wow. I used to read Girl Genius several years back and I honestly didn't intentionally take the quote.
526133 I was just going for, as Cesar says, a play on Clarke's Law. The 'Anon' is just me, as I couldn't think of a pony name for Arthur C. Clarke!
Also, wow. you people are quick off the mark
So it's a more serious cyberpunk reiteration of the events of the show? Wit Trixie as the protagonist? Count me in. Interesting stuff so far, and well written to boot. Have a track.
Hmm. I don't recall seeing this idea done quite like this, nor anywhere near to this degree before. And it is Trixie-centric (apparently). A very daring choice. I am intrigued.
A cyberpunk version of Friendship is Magic = intriguing
That was excellent. Please, continue.
a.deviantart.net/avatars/g/o/go-on-plz.jpg?1
"Any sufficiently rigorously defined magic is indistinguishable technology." - Larry Niven.
Well, this has my attention. I've been slogging through stories all day, looking for something new to read. I don't recognized the references, but it's interesting and stars my favorite pony to boot!
I'll be keeping track of this!
Awesome! A cyberpunk MLP fic!
Can't wait to see where this goes! The descriptions are really vivid too.
Keep it up!
Oh, not again
526390 Y'know guys, I'm starting to think I'm not the first person to think of doing that to Clarke's Law.
Just as a head's up since I see a few people mentioning her
526270, 526274, 526436: The story is going to be split pretty evenly between two principle points of view; Trixie and Twilight. I'm not going to say any more about that, but I thought I should clarify that Trixie will be sharing some of the spotlight. Hopefully that won't disappoint anyone too much
There isn't a way to order the character tags to put them in order of who appears most, is there?
526385, 527155, 526346: I'm ridiculously happy that this has gotten a positive response.
I'm writing in my free evenings and I'm rather slow, but steady. The next chapter should be ready in, oh, let's say a week or two.
528496
*Shrug* I can roll with that. Twilight is best pony.
528496
When choosing what character tags to place on a story, think about who are the major focus and who are just supporting characters. It can be annoying for readers to click on a story that has Celestia tagged and she only appears once or twice and doesn't go through any significant character development. If the main six appear but Twilight is the only one with anything significant to do, you might consider just putting in the Twilight tag. You want to be sure that if readers click on your story based on the character selections that they don't leave disappointed.
These are just suggestions and things to think over. Good luck with your writing!
528560
Hmm, I actually agree completely. I did try to pick tags that seemed right...but I'm not entirely sure. It depends on whether people see a tag as meaning that the character features prominently or is explicitly used as the main POV character.
You know, I think I'm going to take that advice. The mane 6 and others are hardly inconsequential to the story, but I suppose they will be focused on less.
I've had a think about it and I reckon I'll go minimalist with the tags and only tag Trixie and Twi, as they get preferential treatment. Better to surprise someone with characters they weren't expecting than to disappoint by lacking focus. If it feels wrong or misleading later I can maybe add a character back in.
Thanks for the advice!
Omg... Neuroprancer... Johnny Neighmonic... I love you...
Very nice start, this looks interesting.
Ooh, this looks very interesting. A cyberpunk Equestria, with TGPT as the protagonist? The world-building's intriguing as well. Nice!
I really like this fic it's so well made for a cyberpunk Equestria.
Trixie makes a great protagonist and the way you describe the scenery just makes me happy and builds a great image in my head.
The way everything is set up is pretty great too and if I wanted to take more time and figure out why exactly everything in this story makes me extremely intrigued and happy to read I would make a bigger list.
TL;DR : This story is cool and I love it. You keep doing an amazing job.