Conversation Nineteen
“Let’s try this a second time,” said a small, genderless, omnipresent voice. “Human, are you feeling better?”
“Better than what?” said Mag. She sat against a white wall, legs splayed, in an unadorned white room made of some kind of dimly glowing translucent material.
“Ah, wonderful!” said the voice. “You’ve stopped screaming. Princesses, I think she’s going to be okay.” No one answered him, and Mag could no longer feel Luna’s aura.
“Who are you and what did you do?” said Mag.
“You can call me Maker, and I think I’ve fixed you. One of you, at least. Tentacles crossed!” Mag didn’t see any tentacles however much she craned her neck.
She tried to shift over, completely failed to move her hips, and tipped over onto her side. “Um.”
“Is there a problem?” said the Maker.
“My legs aren’t working. I can feel them, but they’re not working.”
“Are those supposed to move? How odd. That does explain a few things, though. Here we are.”
Mag experimentally curled her toes, with success. She sat up. “We’re good.”
“Excellent,” said the Maker. “Are you experiencing any, er, I think the word is ‘pain?’”
“Nope. But what did you do? What’s wrong with me? How is Celestia, and where is Luna? And who are you?”
“In reverse order, I am the Maker, regent of this edge of the Void, a parent of thoughtfolk, and a warden of the ways. Princess Luna is in dreams, recovering; we’re having a good talk right now, catching up on things, the two of us being old friends from back before she went home. Princess Celestia is pulling herself back together with our help, and that’s going well, I’d say. As for what happened to you all, well, you looked at me.”
Mag fluttered her fingers, wiggled all her toes one by one, flapped her wrists, and generally looked for other things the Maker might have forgotten. “You’re a friend of the princesses, though?”
“Yes.”
“And they are going to be okay?”
“Yes.”
All of her limbs felt fine, but if the Maker hadn’t figured out what legs were for without being told, it was possible that some subtle process wasn’t running anymore. She could hear her heartbeat. She didn’t feel cold anywhere.
This would have been a good time for one of those EMTs.
“You’re sure they’re fine,” said Mag.
“They’re a bit shaken, maybe.”
“Shaken? What does that mean?”
“They’ll be fine. What about you?”
Mag decided to trust him, or it, or whatever. Him. It. Them. Her? Mag got up.
“So that’s how all that is meant to work,” said the Maker.
She tripped over nothing and fell onto her shoulder. Her left side began to tingle.
“Oops,” said the Maker. Mag passed out.
***
Luna sat in her starlit temple with her bonfire and a mug of coffee. Some kind of white, jointed, pony-shaped doll sat across from her on a little metal stand. Luna smiled at Mag as she approached.
“You’re okay?” said Mag.
“Quite well, now,” said Luna. “My old friend the Maker has just been telling me he’s having some trouble grasping the eccentricities of the human nervous system. I take it you are no longer in any pain?”
Mag sat down next to Luna and across from the pony mannequin. Luna had drawn a silly face on it with a red crayon.
“I’m good,” said Mag.
“Yes, I’ve at least managed to clear out that section of her memory without any complications,” said the mannequin in the Maker’s voice. “Princess Luna, would you mind introducing us?”
“You always were the polite one,” said Luna. “Maker, this is Margaret of Wilson, from California and Mississippi. She prefers Mag. Mag, this is Maker, a regent and fellow warden of the ways. While he has told me his proper name, I don’t think most mortals can comprehend it, so I won’t trouble to share it.”
“A pleasure to meet you, Margaret of Wilson,” said Maker.
“Charmed,” said Mag. “So you’re a mannequin in dreams?”
“That was her idea,” said Maker.
“Where is Celestia?” said Mag.
Luna pointed at the bonfire.
“What, like, in it?” said Mag.
“Yes," said Luna. "She'll be well enough in a few moments, but the sight of the Maker temporarily rendered her disembodied and insensate, as the nature of her existence is such that the two cannot look one another in the eye without one or both of them being temporarily reduced to pure Form. She must pass through a rebirth metaphor of some kind before she can return to her proper nature. Worry not; this sort of thing simply happens to us sometimes. Would you care for coffee?”
“Sounds good,” said Mag. A metal mug of coffee appeared on the ground in front of her. She sipped it and coughed. It tasted exactly like the stuff out of the machine at the convenience store.
“You seemed to like it before,” said Luna.
Mag sipped again. “No, I hate it. But there’s just something about awful coffee, don’t you think?”
“I take pains to avoid bad coffee, but to each her own, I suppose.”
“I would have offered you refreshment myself, as per the old traditions,” said the Maker, “but I’ve always had difficulty understanding certain concepts native to the worlds further away from the edge of reality, so I hope you’ll forgive the discourtesy—Hm.”
“Hm?” said Mag.
“Nothing, nothing wrong. I think I had better just... yes.” The mannequin swiveled a few inches.
“Princess Luna, are you sure you can’t turn off her ability to suffer?”
“Well, if pressed, I would tell you it’s more complex than that,” said Luna with obvious reluctance. “Pain is an odd thing. For those of us capable of experiencing it, pain is a deceptively important function of the self. There is no aspect of an individual that cannot experience it, and for good reason, for it is how a being communicates to itself that it’s being harmed. Interfering with a being’s ability to suffer is dangerous.”
“Whatever you two are talking about, I can already tell this is going to suck for me one way or another,” said Mag, peering into the flames. Maybe Celestia would show up with a better idea.
Luna continued. “Add to this the fact that altering a mind on such a fundamental level is prohibitively difficult even for me, and doing so may have unintended and permanent consequences. Do you see what I mean when I call it impossible?”
“How about a weregild to her or her species if anything goes wrong?” said the Maker.
“I’ve learned to dislike the concept of the weregild,” said Luna.
Mag turned her coffee to scotch and tried to drink it quickly. Wherever the two of them were going with this, she suspected she’d want some kind of psychological fortification. For the first time since Celestia came, Mag wondered if she would see another day, at least with her psyche intact. Luna laid a wing across her back.
“Then I suppose her survival must be considered paramount,” said the Maker.
“Of course,” said Luna with a hint of accusation.
“Excuse me for needing a hint or two to understand the value of something I’ve never seen before,” said the Maker, annoyed.
“Just think of her as an exceptionally fragile regent.”
“Oh my. Really?”
“Yes,” said Luna firmly.
“I‘d better start taking this seriously, then, I suppose. On the other hand, you’ve mentioned in the past that regents must be able to accept and accommodate pain for the sake of their worlds, so you’ve just made this simpler.” He swiveled back to Mag. Firelight gleamed on the plastic of his head and the crayon markings that made his face. “Here, Mag, is the problem I’ve been having. So far I’ve been trying to remove all your memories of me, and, shall we say, ‘roll back’ everything in your nervous system to before you saw me. I’ve succeeded in removing the memories, but I can find no way to truly return you to how you were before. Your consciousness, awareness, and experience are heavily interconnected in ways that make it impossible to remove all memory of my appearance without permanently damaging you.”
Mag made herself another cup of coffee. The scotch didn’t help, but coffee had helped yesterday after coming back from Equestria. “Would it help if you left a bit of that memory behind?”
“I think that may be the only thing I can do,” said the Maker. “That, or leave you paralyzed in the left side of your body at best. But if I return a faint sliver of the memory to you, I believe I can build from there and give you a fully functioning body, though it will be difficult for you in the short term. You should be able to handle the rest of it with your own healing processes, and I have no doubt that Luna can make that easier. Do you accept this?”
“I can live with that,” said Mag.
“Then I’ll begin immediately.”
Luna’s horn glowed blue and her shadow darkened, grew, and engulfed Mag. “Ready.”
Mag was never able to describe what followed after that. She could only make analogies to other experiences, and none of those analogies satisfied her. What was it like to remember the Maker? It was like waking up after a major surgery, and the sense that you’d been dismantled and they’d forgotten to put you back together. It was like running your tongue over the gap where a tooth used to be. It was the realization in the dead of night that you wouldn’t make rent, it was the sense of bewilderment and futility she’d felt when she’d first realized she was an adult, it was half a kitten fetus found in the bushes, the sensation of laughing through bloody teeth, the meaninglessness of all words, the sound of dripping stalactites in a lightless cave.
It ended with a glimpse of some vast shape floating in emptiness. The Maker, endless, inconceivable and unanswerable, with a surface texture of scabs and pig iron.
It was over in a moment and it would stick with her forever. Now Mag understood. Of course the Maker couldn’t wash the memory away without maiming her. You couldn’t see the Maker without putting a stain in the skin of your mind that you couldn’t scrub out without tearing away flesh, and you couldn’t see the utter edge of reality without bringing some of it back.
She came back to the dream of the bonfire and the mannequin. Nothing hurt; whatever was left of Mag in this place, it couldn’t feel anymore. Luna and the Maker faced the bonfire and didn’t notice her return.
All of the the bonfire’s paleness and silence had gone. Now it burned gold and blue, as loud as a waterfall and bright as spring lightning. The noise, the color, the movement, the life of it all coalesced at the heart of the flames, where two violet eyes opened.
Celestia stepped out of the fire, running a hoof through her mane and fluttering her wings a bit to shake off stray swatches of light. “Maker!” she laughed on noticing the pony mannequin. “That explains that. Still ideologically incompatible with the concepts of hope and meaning, then? And I see I’ve managed to embarrass Luna in front of her friends again. Speaking of tendencies to memorable first impressions, where is Mag? I assume someone blocked her senses in time.”
Luna shared a look with the mannequin. “Actually, Mag looked directly at the Maker. The sight broke her mind and the Maker has been trying to fit her back together in a way that doesn’t—”
The bonfire spasmed, but Celestia didn’t move. “She what? You what?”
“She was broken, so we fixed her,” repeated Luna in a reasonable voice.
The fire flickered again. So did Celestia’s eyes. “‘Broken’ and ‘fixed.’ You speak as if you’d kicked over another of the palace vases in the night. Since you two seem so at ease, shall I assume she’s made a full recovery?” It was clear she didn’t expect a “yes.”
“Almost,” said the Maker with false cheer. “She should already be here, in fact, and you can look at her yourself. I can’t think where she could have gone. Princess Luna, do you know?”
“She is here,” said Luna. She looked directly at Mag. “When we finished and brought her back into my dream, her psyche structure hadn’t yet stabilized, so she slipped into the dreaming substrate.”
“Then wake us up so I can see her,” said Celestia.
“As you wish,” said Luna.
***
Awake and returned to the Maker’s strange white room, now Mag hurt. She was balanced on her shins, cramps running up and down her thighs, arms flexed and fists clenched. The light was too bright. Every sound would have made her cringe if she could move her shoulders properly, but her muscles were all too stiff.
Mag raised her head and met Celestia’s intent gaze.
“I’m good,” croaked Mag.
Judging by the look on Celestia’s face, that was the wrong thing to say. “LUNA!”
“Don’t bellow so,” said Luna.
“She’s a mess,” Celestia snarled, her snout twisted with fury and her teeth bared, eyes full of hurt and terror.
“She’ll heal,” said Luna. “There will be a scar, but she’ll heal,”
Celestia ground her teeth and paced like a lion in a too-small cage. “Scars and healing. Scars! Healing! Callous little—” she rounded on Luna. “Luna, we are running out of friends, do you understand? What are we if there’s no one left to protect?”
For Mag’s part, she just wanted the argument to end. Angry Celestia was completely different from normal Celestia. Normal Celestia was an angel from on high and a big fuzzy animal. Angry Celestia was a reminder that angels were warriors, and that nature was full of big fuzzy animals that could knock your head off with a kick or a swipe.
None of this intimidated Luna, clearly. “You thought I would cover her eyes the instant we passed through? You’ve never asked me to do that to her before, and if you had, I would have counseled against it. Do you know a way we could have erased all remains of the Maker without also erasing essential processes? I don’t.”
“You could have involved me in the decision, at least. She’s my student! I have a responsibility to look after her.” Mag really, really wished Celestia either would stop shouting or make her point from more than three inches away from Mag’s nose.
“I’m sorry, but I wasn’t interested in arguing with you over this for subjective hours while Mag stood by and listened to us decide whether t’were better to harm her physically or psychologically.”
Celestia drew back and composed herself. “Oh, you’re sorry?”
Luna said nothing for a few awkward seconds. “Um. Yes?”
“Well, fine. So long as you’re sorry,” said Celestia primly, but in a more normal voice. She sat in place, looking coldly down at Luna and Mag. Then her legs wobbled and she began to blink rapidly. She made a sound in her throat.
"Over to you, I think. Here." Luna wrenched all of Mag’s muscles free at once. Mag caught herself before she could fall over, shuffled forward on her knees, and wrapped her arms around Celestia’s legs.
“I really will be fine,” said Mag.
Celestia lowered her head behind Mag’s shoulder. Mag couldn’t see her face, but her voice wobbled more than her legs. “Is that so?”
In reality, this question gave Mag trouble. All her limbs seemed to work, and whatever the Maker had done, it hadn’t even really hurt in a conventional sense. All she had as proof of injury was a sense of degraded wretchedness and the suspicion that though this feeling might fade with time, some part of it would remain with her for the rest of her life.
“I’ll get better,” said Mag. “I just need to go home so I can feel real again. Did you ask the Maker about the thing?”
Celestia sighed and kissed Mag’s forehead, to Mag’s shock. She wiped her eyes and straightened. “Luna talked with him about the thief before you entered the dream. The Maker didn’t know much, though he says the perpetrator ‘smelled familiar’ to him, or rather that the thief had interacted with someone the Maker would have recognized, if that someone had stolen the book herself.”
“Herself,” said Mag.
“Yes, we think the Nightmare was involved somehow. It would explain whatever it was about the thief that the Maker recognized,” said Celestia.
“The Nightmare looked like drowning when I saw it in dreams,” said Mag. “Was it ever a warden?”
“Of the ways?” said Luna. “No, but you might call her the daughter of one. You’ve noticed the auric similarities between the Nightmare and the Maker...?”
Mag managed a laugh. “Seriously? Well, shit. I’ll bet that’s awkward for you.”
“Quite,” said Luna. “The Maker and I have been skirting the subject. I’ve been impressed with his tact.”
“We should go,” said Celestia. “Maker, it was a pleasure to see you again, even given the circumstances. Luna, I’m still furious, but I don’t want to argue with you right now. We can finish that discussion the next time I’m asleep. Mag, reflexively grabbing my tail whenever I leave the plane is unwise, and while I desperately wish this hadn’t happened to you, I hope you’ve learned to be careful. Luna and I don’t have much left to lose.”
That last sentence struck Mag as unnecessary. Celestia’s gentle observation that this was her own damned fault had been almost comforting, leaving her a little more sanguine about the situation, but then Celestia had turned it into a guilt trip.
“Well?” said Celestia.
“I’ll be more careful,” mumbled Mag, unable to make eye contact.
“I regret nothing, though, for whatever it may be worth, I truly am sorry,” said Luna.
“Just wait until I get you alone.”
“One moment, please,” said the Maker. The ceiling of the room rippled and liquified. A white, translucent dollop of it sloughed down and fell to the floor. The ceiling went solid again, and the dollop took the shape of the pony mannequin from dreams minus the crayon.
“We’ve established I can’t say goodbye to you in person, so I’ll let my doll see you off,” said the Maker.
Mag stumbled back against the wall. “It’s not going to start moving, is it? I am not up to that.”
“Don’t worry. It used to move, but too many people have asked me to stop. It’s just there so you have something to look at when I say, Princesses Luna and Celestia, that it’s been a pleasure to see you again. It was nice to make your acquaintance as well, Mag. I wish we’d met under different circumstances.”
Mag waved awkwardly to the mannequin. “Yeah, you too. You’re unimaginably horrifying, but you seem decent. We should hang out.”
“I might be able to arrange that someday,” said the Maker. “Until then, don’t let me take too much of your time.” A wall turned into a mirror, giving Mag a good look at the twin streams of drying blood running from her eyes to her chin.
“How undignified. Rub it off with your sleeve before we go back.”
“What’s a sleeve?” said the Maker.
Mag jumped. “You can hear Luna when she talks in my head?!”
Celestia stepped through the mirror and Mag never got the answer to her question. The cold of the in-between punched through her again and left her lying on the gym floor. She decided to stay there until someone made her get up.
“We’re back,” said Celestia. After a muffled discussion on the other side of the barrier, the metal door clattered open and several pairs of thudding boots approached.
“You’re back!”
“Uh, is she okay?”
“You two just walked into the floor.”
“Is that blood on her face? Medic!”
“I’m a medic. Let me through. Yes, that’s definitely blood. I’ll call the medical department.”
Celestia clopped her hoof on the wooden floor to get everyone’s attention. “Excuse me. Thank you. I need a team of professionals to check Mag for every possible injury related to the nervous system. Mag, please don’t argue. The Maker means well, but he could have done absolutely anything to you.”
Mag was loaded onto a stretcher. She didn’t try to resist, instead putting her hands behind her head and trying not to think about scabs or pig iron. Before they could wheel her away, though, Bittermann shoved her way through the medics with a strange expression and a cellphone.
She held the phone out to Mag. “It’s for you.”
“Oh, right,” said Mag. She put one hand behind her head and made herself comfortable. “Stop the gurney, will you? I have to take this call.” She took a deep breath and put the phone to her ear. “Hi.”
She heard the sound of dishes clinking. “Didn’t I ask you not to call again?”
“I don’t remember that. Just help me out here. Was that you or the Nightmare or what?” One of the medics tried to wipe the blood off her face. She took the cloth away and went to work herself.
“Yes,” said the the Eldest. “Thank you, I’d love another helping.” Mag heard an elderly, feminine giggle.
“Yes to me or yes to the waitress? And stop flirting while I’m on the phone.”
“I’m too used to multitasking to stop, and that’s a yes to both of you,” said the Eldest.
“Yes? Yes it was you and the Nightmare? Are you serious?” Celestia turned and stared.
“That’s right,” said the Eldest.
“Traitorous madman!” shouted Luna.
“Traitor? I’m on the side of humanity and I always have been."
“That’s my mother.” Bittermann wrung her hands. She still looked a little drunk.
Mag put a hand on the receiver. “You called your mother?”
Over the phone there was the clink of glass on glass. "Pray let me refill your cup, ma’am."
“You said I could call anybody,” said Bittermann. “Do you know how long it’s been since I talked to my mother? Do you know how hard it is to get permission for a personal phone call around here?”
“Tell the corporal her mother is doing well,” said the Eldest. The other voice began to chatter happily about her daughter.
“The traitor says your mother is well,” said Luna. Mag took her hand off the receiver so Luna could talk. “You withered, raving old canker, what did the Nightmare promise you?”
“Promises? Not to me. I did it for many reasons, but the only one that concerns you is that you people need a fire lit under your asses—please pardon my language, Mrs. Bittermann—and what’s a little more South American political instability?”
“The book is in America,” said Luna to Celestia and the crowd.
“South America,” said the Eldest. “Anyway, I’d better go. It sounds like dessert has finished baking. If it makes you feel any better, you may as well not go through all the medical tests. The only thing the Maker changed that any human could sense is that your eyes have switched places. Don’t worry, you’ll never know the difference. Goodbye and don’t call again.” Mrs. Bitterman’s phone clattered into its cradle and the call ended.
“That’s my mother,” said Bittermann.
Mag gave her the phone. “She’s probably fine.”
“That’s my mother. Who is that man?”
“He’s got no reason to hurt her. Sounds like the opposite, to be honest.”
Celestia stepped in. “Thank you, Mag, that will be all. Corporal, if you leave to see your mother, how soon can you return? Where is she?”
“A rest home in Nebraska,” said Bittermann with no real presence of mind.
Bradley couldn’t contain himself anymore. “But where is the book? I thought you left to get the book.”
“The book is in South America,” said Luna.
Bradley didn’t hear the edge in her voice. “South America?! How? What were you three doing in there, then?”
Luna took over entirely, flinging Mag at Bradley and grabbing his lapels to support herself. “Yes, gone, thou clownish, scrofulous, whoreson catastrophe of a ninnyhammer! Speak to us that way again and, sun’s blood, I’ll show thee what we were doing.”
Celestia frowned. “Luna, please learn how to suffer fools. Bradley, please pay attention. Mag, I believe we were leaving for the hospital?”
“Eldest says there’s no point,” said Mag, sitting upright in spite of her protesting muscles. A medic tried to push her back down by the shoulders. She gently but firmly shoved him away. “Nebraska, then?”
“If someone would take Corporal Bittermann to Nebraska to check on her mother, I’d appreciate it,” said Celestia to no one in particular. Two guards jogged off.
Mag looked behind her to make sure no one was close enough to hear her whisper, then leaned in. “Can we adopt Bittermann?”
“I thought you already had,” Celestia whispered back.
Bradley raised a tentative finger. “Princesses, before you go, I’d just like to apologize for my tone earlier.”
“I’ve always appreciated a good apology,” said Celestia with a smile. “How about you, Luna?”
“We’ll see,” said Luna.
“Acceptable,” said Celestia. “Our next question is what we do to get the book. We absolutely must take care of this press conference while we still can, but that book shouldn’t be loose, and it most certainly shouldn’t be with the Nightmare. What is South America?”
“A continent,” said Mag. “It’s sort of big, though.”
“The Nightmare will make herself known in time,” said Luna darkly.
Celestia sat in silence on the gym floor for a few minutes. Mag got to her feet and shooed away the crowd. With some urging, most of the scientists and guards fell back a few feet, but the medics stared her down and Bradley just looked confused and offended.
Eventually, Celestia shook her head. “I dislike doing it this way, but I think we have to wait and watch for signs of the Nightmare in South America.” She clopped her hooves together. “Now, then! I’d like to relax. Let’s finish preparing for that press conference. Has Mag’s new wardrobe come in?”
“My what?” said Mag.
“There she goes, evading the real issue again.”
“Who is the Eldest?” said Bradley, unable to quit while he was behind.
“Just some asshole,” said Mag.
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I like that quite a lot.
"He's your God, Bradley. You know, the one you imagined that big bearded guy in the sky from? That one. But he got the whole benevolent part a bit skewed: You see, he figured that the only way to let you keep your free will is if he lets you run free and just gives you a 'nudge' now and again to make sure that this, yes this, is indeed the best possible of worlds. We just had a chat with your very maker, Bradley, so give us some space!"
The beauty of this chapter's writing tells me that, if you are not a professional writer, you should be one. I would buy every single one of your books.
6107171 And that's the power of editors.
Oh, this thing. I remember this.
6107121
I was fond of that one as well.
6107171 6107208
makeameme.org/media/created/ITS-A-DIRTY-eizlz4.jpg
What a pleasant fellow. Very accommodating. I bet he has a nice upper-class British accent, too. I'm sure he takes good care of those tentacles. Pip pip.
Boy do I envy that girl right now.
Messengers. Like the kind that brings you an envelope full of powdered Anthrax. There is a reason the first words any angel in the Bible says when talking to humans are "Be not afraid."
And this is why humans need to be really careful about traipsing across the fabric between realities. There are places and things which simply exist in ways that a mind which can only perceive four dimensions- and one of them just dimly- will absolutely choke on.
...don't ask me how I know this.
The Eldest sure does love painting himself as a Chessmaster. He certainly talks a tough game, and he loves to rant about making the tough choices. Problem being, I don't believe he's nearly as smart as he thinks he is. For all his stories about his brother and how he had to die, we've only the Eldest's word to take for it - and as Celestia points out, he reeks of madness and cruelty. Meanwhile, the Nightmare already has something of a history of manipulating regents who thought they could control it, and the Eldest himself admits his ability to predict outcomes isn't perfect.
Plus, he's an asshole.
I continue to love this story! Thanks Ragnar, I always eagerly look forward to each new chapter every week.
Again, it was a bad idea to let humans have the book.
So, First Luna, then the Maker, how many changes until Mag is not human anymore?
6108137
I don't recall him making any such claim? Only that he can't see the fate of other worlds. He can still see the fate of things interacting with his world though, as his meeting with Celestia showed.
6108664
I think you are forgetting "Getting Magic" after Luna.
Hmm...
Back in Conversation Four, Eldest said this:
and this:
And yet now he is enjoying some dessert at Bittermann's mother's home, telling Mag the book is in South America.
I'm pretty sure he's just fucking with them.
6109263 Okay, the part about the book being in South America isn't an issue (it's amazing how easy it is to portal hop when you can see all possible futures--seriously, the Eldest is ridiculously mobile when he's on Earth) but as for the bit about homes, you totally freaking got me.
Not for long, though. I just have to put in a couple words to clarify that Mrs. Bittermann lives in a rest home. "But that's still a type of home," you say. Not to be depressing, but it depends on the rest home. Some rest homes are homes; some are just hotels with nurses.
e: Added four words, fixed the issue completely. Thanks for saying something, though, no sarcasm. It's always embarrassing when that kind of thing happens and I'm glad when people point these things out.
6108664 Does drinking from the Sculptor's flask count? How about being kissed on the forehead by Celestia? Oh my god I'm doing the "coy author" thing what's wrong with meeeee
6108137 Glad you like it. These are getting harder to write.
6108612 Nobody can seem to agree on a single, cogent meaning to the word "Mary Sue" and I wish that commenter had used a different word so I could better understand their point. There's one meaning, "author stand-in," and there's the one you're referring to, "main character that all the other characters like," and I think I've seen "character the other characters love for no good reason." The TVTropes article has, like, multiple essays on the word and a long list of possible meanings, and the only unifying theme between the definitions seems to be "character I don't like, particularly one the author seems to want me to like." It's just not a very useful critical term. TVTropes tries to make the word useful again by coming up with stronger definitions and subcategories and stuff, but to me their effort just looks like someone giving CPR to the Headless Horseman.
As for whether I'm doing this on purpose, I'm not normally one to ignore the principles of Death of the Author, but does it help if I point out that I've publicly called Mag a jerk in the past? Fun fact, when that judge told her to "Grow up," he wasn't just talking about the shoplifting.
6108868
This is pretty much exactly what Mag would say, though. "Absolutely. We pride ourselves on it."
The answer you're suggesting there is scientific, analytical, informed about biology, and skeptical in a good way. Accordingly, that answer would be more suitable coming from characters who are scientific, analytical, informed about biology, and skeptical. Mag is neither science-minded nor informed about biology, and while she's a skeptical person, it's for different reasons.
She's interested in the philosophical ramifications of the situation. She's interested in the beautiful person who needs help. Celestia does excite her intellect, but Mag is asking herself questions like, "If life is bullshit, then how can someone like you exist?" and "What kind of person would I be if I'd met you when I was 8?" and, come to that, "What will happen to the world when an entire generation of 8-year-olds sees you?"
Then Celestia asks her a question and she's startled into honesty, or something like it. Mag interprets Celestia's question differently from how Celestia meant it. Celestia is only wondering how she should approach the meeting with the regent of Earth. Here's how Mag sees it. A being of endless beauty and perfection (that's how Mag sees her) comes out of the lake and asks Mag what she thinks of humanity, explicitly bringing up war in the process. Mag is a big ol' hippy in some ways, and one of those ways is that she's disappointed to the point of despair with humanity's history of warfare. What is Mag comparing humanity to when she says we're a murdering pack of absolute bastards? She's comparing us to what she thinks we could be if we cared more about each other, attached more value to human life, stopped otherizing and dehumanizing strangers, etc.
A being who, to Mag, represents the very embodiment of peace, comes down and asks Mag whether humans are warlike. "Well, yes, we've warred, and admitting that to someone like you makes my skin crawl with shame. This fact in itself makes me feel pathetic, because obviously I'm human too and better people than me have done far worse to the world. My contempt for myself and humanity is intense right now."
But nobody talks like that. Mag sure as hell doesn't. She's too self aware. She also regards her own contempt as contemptuous, and that as well, and so on and so on. Mag tends to paint herself into this same corner over and over again whenever someone asks her something important, and she sees no good answer to the question, no answer that would satisfy both her desire to answer the question and her desire to express everything she thinks both of that question and her own reaction to it. This is one reason she's so sarcastic and jokey all the time. She just doesn't believe in the power of words to adequately express anything that matters to her, so she almost never tries to say what she means, and when she does, it gets garbled and warped by her habitual facetiousness, pessimism, unrealistic expectations, and self awareness.
Of course, as people have already pointed out, Celestia's offhand question doesn't exactly lend itself to logical answers. If Mag were in a more reasonable mood, she might have realized this and said so. But Celestia is exhausted and trying not to fall apart, so she's not exactly thinking things through, and Mag is in the middle of an existential crisis, so her answer is going to come from the heart rather than the head, if you see what I mean there.
tl;dr, this exchange isn't
Celstia: Is huamnty trash?!!1
Mug: lol yes
Clestia: k
but is a slightly misinterpreted question answered with an expression of confusion and longstanding frustration with history, language, and Mag's own self. Except I just realized the adventures of Clestia and Mug sound sort of interesting. I may have picked the wrong story to tell.
Shit, I was really hoping to never explicitly lay all that out, especially not in the freaking comment section. I was planning to make it clear as the story progressed, and, now that Our Glorious Editor wants to go back and edit previous chapters, maybe add a sentence or two to suggest that yes, I have thought this through, thanks much. I'm kinda pissed about that now.
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And in all honesty, if so many people here didn't have a knee-jerky chip on their shoulder about that topic, you wouldn't have had to. I thought all of that was completely obvious from the context and who Mag is as a character. It's black humor and wry self-mockery, because that's how she copes and how she responds to every other question, too. Yes, she's bitter. Yes, she uses humor and joking to deal with her own sense of inadequacy. None of that is unusual for a human to do.
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They could meet Baman and Piderman, and find the Lost Sandwich, perhaps?
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Booze and a kiss would not make her less human. Having a Moon Goddess in her head and getting her body rehanged by an other dimensional being? Maybe.
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And then crossover with Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff. You know what you need to do.
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6109836 6109879 I was thinking of Dolan and Gooby, or maybe Meduka Meguca, but sure, same deal. But what do you mean, I know what I must do? I don't have a chance in hell of imitating SBAHJ in any medium. What do I look like, a genius?
And oh man, I forgot all about that Hiimdaisy Persona 4 comic. I want to read/watch those again. In fact I almost want to play Persona 4 again. I think my PS2 works, unlike my PS3, so I could always fish all that out and see if I'm less sick of the game. The alternative is waiting for Persona 5 to come out and then getting a new PS3 or even a PS4, but I'm not sure how I feel about spending that kind of money.
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If you have a PC capable of running it, P4 performs very smoothly on an emulator. Save states and xp multiplier codes make it so much more enjoyable to play.
6110213 I doubt I've got a PC that can handle an emulator. My laptop sure can't, and that's what I use 99.9% of the time because I'm never home these days.
I thought the xp curve was just right, personally. My big mechanical complaint about the game was that Yukiko's dungeon puts you in a really awkward position at the beginning of the game, and that I can't skip the boring parts now that I'm done with all that.
Imma come out and admit that I'm probably never going to touch P4 again, and I don't even know if I can play P5 all the way through. Anime gets on my nerves these days, and for some reason I have trouble getting as invested in new games as I used to, and I'm poor as hell.
idk, I love Dark Souls and getting a PS4 would let me play Bloodborne as well as Persona 5. Who knows? Maybe they'll port Bayonetta 2 over to Playstation. They will not. That is never going to happen.
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Might be worth a try. At native resolution, it is really not that graphics-intensive. Mostly, CPU performance is the bottleneck, but if you've got a quadcore, you ought to be good.
Personally, I never really liked it all that much, either. The tradeoff between either doing single-session grindthroughs of dungeons or missing out in other areas annoyed me. I'm more of a DDS kinda guy.
Single most intense and effective introduction I've ever seen in a game. Two sentences and you know everything about who that character is going to be. The voice actor is a genius.
a chapter to look over several times there is so much going on.
a lot of intrigue and behind the scenes kind of stuff.
Harts Fire
6115839 I can answer that second question! It's because, in Luna's estimation, the Maker has no business tinkering with the functioning of anything outside of his usual realm of influence except in the direst of emergencies. He's all power and no understanding, and Luna can only help him so much with constructing any kind of body for her. Luna prefers her current lot in life to whatever living Hell of an existence she'd end up in if she had to live in a body the Maker made out of whole cloth, assuming the body even functioned for more than a couple of days once it left his void or her dreams. At least Mag has a body he can work off of.
Then there's the fact that, on a fundamental level, regents are of a class of being partially made out of ideas (though I'll 100% admit I never made this clear in the text, something I've been meaning to get to and have so far mostly failed to do), and the ideas Celestia and Luna are made out of are simply not conceivable to the Maker any more than the Maker's makeup is conceivable to Celestia or Luna. The very sight of the Maker shatters them like glass, and the Maker can't begin to process what they are on that conceptual level, though he's protected by the fact that, on that conceptual level, he's much more "naked" than they are. This is why regents tend to make each other uncomfortable, by the way. It's also a big part of why Mag is so enamored with Celestia. Celestia is everything Mag doesn't dare to believe in.
He could probably make a wooden doll sentient enough to dream, in which case Luna could occupy the creature in the same way she occupies Mag, but that's worse in some ways in Luna's eyes. Luna has moral objections to letting the Maker create sentient life of any kind because he'd be atrocious at it, but if he managed to cobble something together that couldn't suffer, had no volition or desires, and would have no worthwhile quality of life without Luna living inside it and operating it like a marionette, Luna would still argue that such a being shouldn't be subjected to consciousness, even the bare minimum level of consciousness for dreams. She also wouldn't like the idea of commandeering the body of a creature without its permission, especially if it can't say no.
This kind of comment may be a solid example of why that one person called the story pretentious. Oopsie doodles ~
Thanks for putting up with that, yall.
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Sorry. In my defense I can only say that if I weren't interested--if the story hadn't seized what passes for my imagination--I wouldn't be asking so many questions.
6117672 Sorry for what? Oh, I get it. No, when I said "this kind of comment," I meant the comment I had just written, not yours. I don't remember you actually doing anything wrong. You're just asking polite questions, and the fact that other people asked one of those questions less politely isn't your fault or your problem.
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The Adventures of Clestia & Mug!
I went to a 4chan art thread and asked for Celestia and a human woman making derpy faces at the "camera."
6119620 Owns.
Clestia has a snake tongue. I decree that this is canon.
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Thanks.
IRL horses and ponies have tongues and lips that are nearly prehensile, and are known for being able to open gates and latches that "should" require fingers.
...then, too, Celestia in this story is basically a pony-shaped Dr. Manhattan. If she wants her tongue to be reptilian in appearance, it is.
6168354 I make this exact pun in a later chapter. It's glorious.
6169133 This would be such a smug thing for him to do that I'm almost tempted to treat it as canon.
6170459 The way I remember it, that discussion ends with us all more or less agreeing that psychopathy as a psychiatric term is sensationalist at best and prejudiced at worst.
But yeah, "antisocial" and "socially deviant lifestyle" both mean something different in a clinical context. MLP-likers and internet people don't fit either word.
The waiting time between updates just keeps getting longer and longer. I'm starting to get a bit worried that you're not going to finish this.
6187959 New chapter in one to three days, depending on how quickly my editor gets back to me on a question I asked, and then depending how long it takes me to fix it. If he doesn't get back to me in the next 24ish hours, I'll probably just make the call myself and put the update out there, and if I do then I'll publish it in the dead of night just to annoy him. [edit: He just got back to me, and with a ton more edits and comments than I expected. Estimate is now three or four days. Sorry!]
I've been getting a little burned out, so I took a week off. It helped.
To answer your actual worry, I can't see myself quitting. I've been writing this for months and thinking about it for well over a year. I don't WANT to quit. I've got scenes I'm really looking forward to writing, characters I want people to see, ideas I want to read the reactions to. This has 264 thumbs up, and one of them is mine.
That said, this fic has certain problems that I've been looking for solutions to, and thinking takes time.
I wonder what happened to:
1) Discord's Dimension
2) Breezies' Dimension
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I want to know hat happened to Discord himself.
6192585 i think thats why Tia and woona are still around i think discord saved them
Maybe a comma after recognized, but that's just preference, or perhaps picky pedantry.
On a different note.
So this is not on speakerphone, however:
Now contextually, this is Bitterman interjecting that she had called her mother (in abstract of the conversation she cannot hear), but with her words following directly after those of the Eldest, she appears to be responding directly to "...refill your cup, ma'am."
It just seems a little awkward, you know?
6544807 I usually have a scratchpad or two open when I'm online (unless I'm drunk, then I post recklessly and live with regret).
Enjoy your Cheerios
As a child I once ate a bowl of cereal with ants in it, as my busy mother refused to believe my protests and insisted I finish my breakfast. I remind her of this frequently.
Wow. This is the first time I've ever seen an eldritch abomination break someone's mind, then try to put it back together again.
Maker is one of the few halfway decent elder gods that I've seen, every new regent makes me love this story even more.