It's been several days since Rainbow Dash and her new friends used the Elements of Harmony to banish Nightmare Moon and return Princess Luna to Equestria. Sure, there were festivals and celebrations aplenty after that, but they've all died down and ponies have gone back to their lives and their jobs. Rainbow, in particular, is working a late night shift with the weather patrol in an effort to arrange early-morning showers.
She's more than a little surprised when she sees Twilight Sparkle headed out into the woods north of town with a telescope on her back and flies down to find out why.
Twilight explains that she's there to admire the job being done by another pony, one who hasn't had the chance to perform it in a very, very long time.
Now recognized as a companion piece to I'd Love to See the Moon Rise by thunder-dasher. (Edit 1:40pm EST 12/01/15)
Thanx to An-Twan Star for prereading.
Woohoo! Popular Stories list 12/01/15 (approx 12:40pm EST)!
Aw, yeah!! Feature Box (non-mature) 13/01/15 (approx 9:20am EST)!!!
That was delightful.
Bravo nightwalker, this is a wonderful little scene, and it is rather well written! Cheers to you.
Heh, this was rather lovely.
Nice work.
~Skeeter The Lurker
But Luna only controls the moon O.o
5495182
Like others, I took a bit of artistic licence to expand her control beyond just the celestial sphere itself. It was partly inspired by I'd Love to See the Moon Rise by thunder-dasher.
Edit: I just refound and reread that story this morning, and after having paid attention to it more, Sky really can be seen as a companion piece for it.
5495182
Some fans like to add that she also controls how the whole night sky looks, for whatever reason.
This is a really good story. I always figured Twilight would be one to take notice of how the night sky had changed after Princess Luna returned, but never really thought she'd have a different appreciation for the night sky now that Luna can paint it again.
And then there's this:
I must say, that really brings into perspective how much Celestia must've respected Luna's work... even if she never showed it at first. She knew the night belonged to Luna, so she never would've tried to make a night sky that would even come close to rivaling her sister's. This is one detail I think many people might just overlook when thinking about this topic, so good on you for that as well.
Overall, I quite enjoyed this story.
5495182
5495883
5496311
Celestia has never claimed to be anything but Princess of the Sun.
Luna, however, is by her own admission Princess of the Night, not just the moon.
Same here, Dash. Same here.
Wait, so It's complete? You left it to end there?
B-but.... Gaaaaaaah....
That's not acceptable!
Otherwise; I liked it, seemed cool.
This was wonderful.
I'm glad that we can still see Twilight and Rainbow interacting without being romance. It's just nice sometimes.
congrats on hitting the Feature box. :)
Wow, that was a nicely written story.
We'll done. I don't see many like this.
5499631
Thank you for...
Wait, what?!
*Checks himself* Ohhh.... yeah.....
I love it
this is amazing
Surprisingly good. Definitely gonna recommend this fic!
This was a short but lovely read
This was a wonderful short story, I absolutely loved it.
What he said. Still... Have you ever considered submitting this story to Equestria Daily? You can find out how to do so here.
5505446
Has to be 2.5k words for EQD.
What a great look at the early days friendship between Twilight and Dash, and at what it really means for Equestria in these first few days now that Luna is no longer up in the moon.
Dash's views on work and on sleep were pretty fun too.
I reviewed this story. You can find my review of this story here.
Incidentally, because I forgot to leave this comment earlier:
This seems weird in the context of their surprise over Luna = Nightmare Moon back in the S1 pilot.
You know, that would be really dark.
"Look at how wonderful the night sky is!"
"It is so much better now!"
And then Luna takes a night off and it still looks awesome because Celestia forgot to hold back and Luna realizes that Celestia had just been softballing it to make her feel better.
Not that I've never had similar ideas about the two or anything.
Dash is like me. We schedule our nap and sleep times to make sure we avoid work when that gets mixed up, we get grumpy
Wonderful story, great characterization , ten out of ten
Neat. Very "God's in his Heaven, all's right with the world" sort of vibe. I like the enormity of change that Twilight's able to grok so quickly, and that it flies over Dash's head (and most of Ponyville's, I imagine) because of how staggeringly huge it is. When we think of change, it's almost always some huge upheaval, something that breaks whatever old world was there to make way for the new one, but many changes -- even literally world-shaping ones -- can be small and mundane and unnoticed by everyone else.
Some criticism: Dash's voice sounds off to me. Words like "sought" and "lackluster" work for Twilight, but they don't feel like parts of Dash's natural speech. Rainbow's a lot more casual in her choice of words than Twilight is, and she's the most likely to drop in modern slang (chillax, a'ight). Using it too heavily quickly makes her a parody of herself (much like Applejack and people's tendencies to overuse Ah and y'all and other various Southernisms); I try to work in an instance or two of informal language into the scenes where I write Rainbow, and she feels more like herself without having to invoke the 20% More Awesome! characterisation she often gets. In canon. Looking at you, EG1.
But, it's easy to overlook things like very small specific word choices when I have stuff to think about, and this story has given me some of that, so that's all good.
5547262
Thank you for the critique. You always do provide solid feedback, and it's always appreciated.
I see what you mean about some of the word choice as it relates to voice, and that is something I've been working on. Heh, I even made a similar comment myself about another story a while ago (about how the word "yeah" seemed too languid for the author's very rigid and in-control soldier OC), so I appreciate where that comes from. My own vocabulary still gets the better of me at times! I was trying to capture early S1 characters, when they were still drawn largely in broad strokes, with a bit of foreshadowing on where they'd go. I did try and keep early RD in mind, but I guess a few things still slipped through. She wouldn't have been reading as extensively then, so wouldn't have much beyond a casual vocabulary, so yes, that's something that could be addressed where it a larger issue. I will redouble my efforts of keeping my eye on in the future.
As for the enormity of the change, well, that was the whole idea of the story. "We just changed the world." It's a realization that I hadn't seen really articulated elsewhere. Twilight is the perfect pony to express that and would totally geek out over all the differences that have taken place, eagerly going about finding and cataloging them. She is Celestia's student for a reason; socially awkward but academically proficient. Dash thus gets the role of audience surrogate and stand-in for the rest of pony society, who still have yet to really appreciate the night.
5499507
Well, they have just got to know each other a few days ago and things have been rather hectic since, so no, no chance of that yet. I did want to show a little of where their friendship will go, and thus you have Dash willing to indulge Twilight's nerdiness, even to the point of being willing to listen to her talk about the night sky at length. (As long as it's just the two of them.) But now it's just Dash being good to all her friends, even at the expense of her own precious naps.
Just a heads up, your description says preform instead of perform.
5559496
Now it doesn't.
Nicely done! I loved it!
This was amazing. I never thought about the changes that must have happened since Luna came back. Love the story.
Naturally your attention to detail is incredible and very well appreciated. You know how to keep the ponies in character and bring history to a very great truth or head canon. Amazing job my friend.
This. Was. Awesome
rainbow is a great friend.
Cute.
A solid piece of work. Nice!
. I should make a bookshelf for things like this!
It's got quality, is not overcomplicated and is child-friendly. I would have liked reading it, if I were still a teen! It's definitely something the Web needs! Shame on crapfics nowadays!
This was utterly delightful with some delicious headcanon and thought put into it. I heartily approve.
10111640
Hey, thank you very much! Always really nice to see people looking at older works like this.
10112588
I find that age rarely interferes with quality.