For the past millennium, the small and technologically-advanced Equestrian Empire has waged war against the old and corrupt Cleomanni Confederacy, employing weapons of terrifying might in their struggle. It has been three years since they lost.
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9717013
Just be careful walking that tightrope buddy.
9717055
True, true. A lot of my favorite stories are pretty close to going over the edge, though. I like stuff like Berserk and Battle Angel Alita, although, frankly, they've both kinda gone off the rails as of late. The former has an interminable "Let's fix Casca's brain" arc, and the latter, with its lavish attention on characters in Alita/Gally/Yoko's past rather than the protagonist herself, can get kinda long-winded.
Alita, a.k.a. "Yoko of the Razor's Edge", is a pretty dark shade of anti-hero. In the original canon, before she plummeted to Earth and Ido found her in the Scrapyard, she was a saboteur who was responsible for the deaths of like half a million people and the practical destruction of real civilization on Earth. The only reason why she seems so nice early on is because she has amnesia and can't remember who she was before, because in her distant past, she was a remorseless, relentless cyborg assassin. The movie changed so many things and actually recycled a lot of the plot from the OVA, which diverges from the original story quite a bit.
In the original story, Grewcica was actually an urchin named Makaku who was experimented on by Nova, Vector did not die, Chiren did not exist, Ido still had his mark of a Zalemite/Tipharean, Nova was a hyper-intelligent refugee from Zalem who lived on the surface and experimented on people like some sadistic mad scientist, Ido was the one who found the Berserker Body and had it in his basement the entire time, Alita didn't even do anything Motorball-related until Hugo (Yugo in the original) had already died, and furthermore, Alita wasn't a member of Mars' actual military, she was a Panzer Kunstler and a member of a paramilitary organization bearing the same name, who were both an order of secretive cyborg martial artists and a group of mercenaries and assassins, more like some wayward ninja clan than anything else. The Viz translation changed a lot of the names and dialogue and Americanized them, which made it well-received by its audience, but sacrificed a lot of accuracy.
The trick is to have humanizing (Equinizing?) moments for your characters, just enough to hook people and drag them back in. I've rooted for some rather nasty protagonists in the past. What can we say about John Wick or Frank Castle, other than that they're abrasive, hard-drinking, and they kill people? I've noticed that there's kind of a gulf between blue-collar protagonists and the more upstanding ones. The values they represent, the virtues they extol. I find it fascinating. Something worth investigating in a fictional narrative.
9717068
Yeah, I'm definitely more in the lighthearted category more often than not. More My Hero Academia and tengen toppa gurren lagann than anything. Still, it's nice to dip your feet into other territories every now and again.
9718225
He probably would try and save Twilight, if he wasn't still encased in stone.
I'll just assume there's a reason for it given the same passage of time and the less harmonious nature of the world.
9718216
Night Terror's magic is very, very nasty. He specializes in causing hallucinations that are honestly almost worse than being set on fire or gassed. When the cleomanni are hit by his dark magic, they start hallucinating that they're growing eyeballs out of their body, Cronenberg-style, and the guy's face next to them has turned into masses of shark teeth. Also, their whole body has started on fire with an inextinguishable flame that is activating all their nerve endings, but they can never fully burn to death and the fire can never go out, and them and their allies appear to be mutating while also on fire. What usually happens is they start foaming from the mouth and clawing their own eyes out, or they pull their pistol and shoot themselves in the head, or, they go completely nuts and start attacking the nearest ally. From the outside, from the perspective of those not under the spell, everything looks completely normal, except a bunch of people have gone insane and started attacking both each other and inflicting self-harm in a panic. It's some really sinister stuff.
His charger's locus allows him to amplify the effects of his dark magic and spread it over an entire battlefield, making hundreds of enemy soldiers go absolutely insane.
9718237
His charger's locus allows him to amplify the effects of his dark magic and spread it over an entire battlefield, making hundreds of enemy soldiers go absolutely insane.
So what happens if they decide to use this locus tech to enhance horn lasers? Just cut the fat and go straight for the super blasts. They've apparently worked out the backfiring kinks.
Have a team of unicorns consisting of blasters and shielders. Spells enhanced by Loci. Put up shields whenever the blasters aren't firing or need to recover. Smaller targets, capable of moving as need be.
Seems like something that could be reproduced en mass for the same effort it'd take to make a few Chargers. Though I'm sure there's some reason why they don't do that.
9718259
There are devices that do pretty much exactly that; they’re mentioned and brought into play later on. A lot of the ELF are just regular troops or militia and aren’t very skilled at combat magic. During the war, elite Battlemages would often make short work of enemy formations with wide-area attacks. The main advantage of the charger is it has mobility, protection, and spell-amplification in a single package. Even if unicorns can teleport, their barriers can only take so much fire, and teleporting everywhere is exhausting. Chargers enhance their pilot’s magical endurance, essentially, by acting as a safe platform from which to cast at one’s leisure. Some of the more powerful magical tools, such as grimoires (a kind of magic nuke in a box that acts as a neural interface for multiple unicorns and amplifies their power many-fold) were very difficult to produce, very rare, and tightly-guarded.
9718266
Out of curiosity, do you hold some form of military background?
9718274
Not really, no. IRL, I'm US Merchant Marine, engine department. We are civilians and crew civilian ships, but in times of war, we can be called upon by the Navy to provide logistics support by crewing freighters and moving war materiel around the world.
I've done a little bit of research, but part of the reason why I had the plot focus on an insurgent force where the chain of command is fast and loose is because it makes the characters' interactions a lot more informal in terms of strict adherence to code, decorum, jargon, radio calls, and so on. Insubordination, substance abuse, and freak-outs are common, and no one really knows what the hell they're doing.
A lot of Mil-SF has soldiers that communicate and act like civilians when they have no real excuse for it, but the way the characters are in this story, fighting a guerrilla war as rebels, they have essentially gone rusty and frayed. They're ragged around the edges. They're under immense stress to pull through, and they act out quite a bit.
No, the author hates happiness.
Good fucking grief, hasn't the poor girl suffered enough?!
...you're a rebel faction, not the military. You don't have authority over her military title! Just whatever title you choose to honor. She'd still very much be a sergeant.
There is no hellfire hotter than the pain you put yourself through.
How it feels to read this chapter:
scififantasylitchick.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/books-falling-book-haul.gif
Kill me.
Oh, so what? You going to fight the giant enemy robots with hugs and love? Guns, knives, and rocket launchers are also weapons of death and destruction. Your mech's just a better version of that. If you throw away the more effective one I will object to your using the less effective ones.
If you're capable of asking that question then you have the answer.
media1.tenor.com/images/0ed0efe08174a3272dc58fc5bf8aac1a/tenor.gif?itemid=5909782
She then mutated into a monster as Slaanesh welcomed her into the fold.
God. Fucking. Damnit is this exposition dump shit boring! We don't need paragraphs of descriptions on how ponies blink!
Cool, where's ma necromancy bros at? Holla if ya represent my necro sibs!
So, what? Are we treating the elements of harmony as loci now?
"They're too effective! Yeah! We'd have won the war if we spammed these things, the plot needs to happen! Lock them away and use firearms instead!"
...telekinesis? Hello?
That's one way to bring back the magic of friendship. Good vibes.
9718501
You're correct. They do, in a way, consider themselves a continuation of the legal government, but as a military junta that gets its revenue from shady sources rather than taxation and doesn't provide any public services. The Liberation Front's actual legal authority to hand out promotions and demotions to former Imperial Army personnel is very questionable. If the government were actually restored, in all likelihood, Storm would automatically revert to whatever rank she held before.
One of the central themes of the story is that ponies are essentially struggling against their own nature. The average pony and the average cleomanni are very different from a mental and cultural standpoint. The very same prowess in combat that the cleomanni would be proud of, the average pony would feel ashamed of instead. Storm is no average pony, mind you, but in this part, she's articulating what most ponies would feel about her charger.
Grimoires have a lot of drawbacks that weren't mentioned (because many of those drawbacks are highly classified and wouldn't be found in just any ol' book). For one thing, if they're used incorrectly, they can make your head asplode.
Twilight Sparkle can teleport, and yet, there are plenty of times where she acts totally helpless and forgets to use her magic. It's just a thing unicorns do, sometimes. They occasionally forget they can take the easy way out and just use their magic. Instead, they panic and do it the hard way.
So, what do you think so far?
9718789
...huh. Well I guess a broken clock is right twice a day.
....kaaaaay....so work on that tech so that this doesn't happen? The raw destructive potential of these things sounds more useful than the chargers all things considered. Put the R&R into super strong defenses to protect the users while they use the things, and into making them safer to use.
I know it's 'easier said than done' but they've been at war for centuries. They've had the time.
Oh I'm enjoying myself just fine. I tend to enjoy stories that I read, with few exceptions, but my comment style doesn't change regardless of my views of the story.
That being said, I'm sure everything's finally on the up and up, and soon everything will be all smiles and sunshine and rainbows from now on!
Fucking hell, not bad at all. The kind of shit I'd expect to find on vet tv, at least on the emotional level. They tend to focus more on making assholes laugh hysterically but this softer, more serious, sympathetic side isn't bad at all. Like sympathizers who've been around a while. I hope to see more from you. You do good work.
That said, the exposition might be a bit strong for some. I'm a bit of a nerd so I enjoyed it but i could see how a lot of that would seem like pointless information overload.
9765700
She is totally in denial, yes. But then again, so are practically the whole resistance. Desperation is a major theme.
My reaction exactly.
i
i fucking can't BREATHE
Ply or fly?
Still doesnt stop you from being a total bitch. you literally just beat her!!!
Is argent like the only nice mare to storm? It makes me happy that she actually cares for storms health and treats her like a normal pony would
I guess its another Tuesday
I'm very afraid to ask how he made so much food
Fucking rules are more important than their lifes
Thats such an absolutely beautiful gift to give her 😭
I'd personally go for a centaur type model for my mech
I'm curious about the other races of Equestria. We've seen ponies and griffons, but the rest don't seem visible. You've made reference to Zebras, Yaks, and Changelings, but where are they? For that matter, what about Hippogriffs, dragons, etc?
Are they in hiding? Genocided by the Cleomanni? Abducted?