- Member Since 17th Sep, 2012
- offline last seen 7 hours ago
GNO-SYS
I like reading and writing sinister and macabre stories because I find them deeply cathartic. If you do, as well, then you're in the right place.
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I love this story, I did not stop reading from the 9 sentences to the end of chapter 2.
I hope Commodore Cake is still alive, she was really badass.
Really nice world building
I can't wait to find out what is stopping the cleomanni from ending the war.
This story is taged with "Human," do they show up later?
9301999
Thanks! Indeed, there are circumstances keeping the Confederacy from dealing the killing blow, but they believe that they have Equestria well-contained.
9303482
They show up way, way later. I can't say much more than that without getting into spoiler territory, though.
Riveting. Simply Riveting. Avidly awaiting the next chapter.
It sounds like Pony kind might be best severed to build something like a migrant fleet and bug out. There's no way to win the fight, so it will have to be at least flight.
So now that I got done with the first three chapters I can say how I feel about this.
Overall I love it, it's not every day you see a setting placed after a big wer. Most of all on the side that lost so badly. It's rather refreshing in its own way. So far the story is keeping me engaged even if feels lacking in details at times. Nothing to horabel, I can follow what is going on well but some things come off as rather vague and unclear was to what happend or is going on. But this may be for the best given how long the chapters are. Speeding up some spots is welcome to help it move along.
So over all, I love it and really love the Chargers. Call me a fan of them and I hope to see one kicking some ass soon.
Really good so far. I like this Alt Universe you have going. And the pony piloted Mechas and their weapon system descriptions are really cool to read. Hopefully we see a full picture of one of those charger units.
9364948
1Jaz just finished up a commission that shows a charger fighting a few Confederate walkers, as well as Equestrian troops squaring off against the Cleomanni. I sent him a lot of references I'd sketched, and he really brought them to life.
9368700
Oh very nice picture! Love the detail!
I really don't understand why this doesn't have more views.
Looks interesting, will give it a read.
Finally gotten around to read the first chapter of this story, and it is off on a good start so far. I am a sucker for anything Mecha and and I have been dying to see a real pony mecha story, you made my day with that.
If you are interested in more mech designs let me know about it, Link to my DA Mecha gallery in the link bellow
https://www.deviantart.com/amalgamzaku/gallery/65314007/Pony-Mecha
Just finished reading what you have so far, and I love all the ideas that you are presenting so far, especially the mumurdons, I wonder how they will manage to get them to have some of them join fellow pony side? What could have happened to the Changeling in all this time could they have hidden themselves elsewhere or are they still bidding their time for the resistance to rise up again? I wonder if the ponies had huge advantage over their other races with using deportation and portholes faster and accurate then then what the could do. I wonder what changed everything all of the sudden after wagging was against their enemies for a thousand year. I I hope Twilight went into hiding and finding ways to restore the pony race into strength again. I wonder is the remaining fleets was working to a vast breathing program. I am guessing that the enemies has also raised their own pony communality completely ignorant of their heritage loyal to their slave masters.
Looking forward to see what you will come up with next in this, it's off on a great start.
Took me some time to get to reading this but at last I have completed this first chapter. Lots of setting-building interspersed with the character, a big plus.
Nothing like the feeling of sticking it to the enemy in the form of a raid on said enemy’s supply depot.
I love this story :)
A good chapter like the creator building spiced with a little world building.
Can't wait to hear more about Twilight and what happened to the other princesses.
Interesting o hear that there were several classes of those mechas, wouldn't mind making a gander at them. It was interesting to find how that the Equestrians did had magical generators and that different schools of magic could b applied to the mecha's skill set. I was even more excited to lean that there was another model that could go hoof to hoof with the enemies most powerful designs, I can't wait to see how it will look like later in the story. So far I really love the back story to striders history and how Twilight had apparently had a hoof in retro engineering them the mechas. All the new characters that were presented in the chapter were easy to recognize in both description and character, I will be looking forward to learn more of them.
So I take it Equestria was already fraying apart from the seems way before the end of the war and that it was accelerating Equestria'S decline. I wonder what happened to the Minotaur's or all the other races of equestria? It sounds like only the occasional griffin still existed in that time, I wonder if any of them had their own colonies of sorts? I wonder what a Changeling could have done with it'S own magic with their own striders?
By the I had originally planed to write my own pony mecha story and I had originally planed to call the mecha destrier for over a year now, I hope you won't be offended that I also use that name.
Kinda funny, I was getting A-Team vibes from the mission briefing scene here.
Man, it was a struggle getting this chapter out. I injured my leg pretty bad in March and needed 12 stitches, and then I had day shifts in the shipyard and had to work like a dog while it was still healing, lol. When it rains, it pours. Oh well. Gonna go home and make a JD and Coke. That oughta do it.
9477013
Of course! You can use the same terminology if you want to.
Is it wrong of me that i want to see The Empire of Man squish the cleo's
9583761
No, it's not weird. I deliberately made them as irritating as possible.
I was kind of hoping they were going to end up in the Twilight tower
nice chapter, maybe too much action in a row.
WHAT this story still have under 100 likes... something is wrong.
9603626
I'm starting to think that my story is as good at cloaking itself as Storm is, lol.
Wut.
Im really loving this story so far and I can't wait to see what happens in the future, really looking forward to see the Cleomanni get what they deserve!
On a side note though, I have a couple question that I hope you can answer my good sir, but of course, you don't have to.
For my first question, are the humans in this story Earthbound or are they a space faring civilization? I hope the answer isn't considered a big spoiler.
Second question, are the creature's of Equestria(the planet) the only beings in the galaxy capable of wielding magic? Or are there other beings in the galaxy that can also use magic?
Third question, is the galaxy that this story is located in Star wars like? To clarify, I mean as in are there hundreds of thousands of different species spread throughout the galaxy, or is it a galaxy that has a numerous amount of species but not to the point of being everywhere?
And for the final question, are we gonna have space battles? I really, really love ship to ship fights!
Thanks again for such an amazing story and I hope to see an amazing writer such as yourself be recognized for such a great story!
9632226
Haha, you and me both. They're pretty nasty, aren't they? Add a few tablespoons Ferengi greed, one cup Altmer smugness, two drops of essence of Martin Shkreli, and a dash of Go Nagai sideburns, and boom, Cleomanni. I engineered them to be very, very annoying.
Fair warning; all the spoilertext in this post contains some mild-to-moderate spoilers.
Most of the minor species in the galaxy are afraid of ponies because they fear that their mistreatment at the hands of the cleomanni will eventually lead to them becoming a threat to everyone. The cleomanni, for their part, are actively, deeply hostile; they propagandize against ponies constantly and generally forbid other races from trading with them, on pain of death. Most species would rather honor the FTU's embargo orders rather than risk going to war with the Confederacy, but Equestria still managed to get fairly rich exporting textiles and gemstones (among other things) on the down-low, as part of a healthy gray market trade with whichever species would dare to do business with them.
Almost anything I could say about the humans would be a spoiler. The short answer is, yes, they are spacefaring. The longer answer? Well:
All I can say with any certainty is that I intend for them to be a mysterious and antagonistic force, spoken of only in hushed murmurs. They have their own agenda, they're very dangerous when encountered, and they're not particularly chummy. They're more along the lines of tragic antagonists as opposed to the straight-up villainy of the cleomanni.
I wanted to do something a little bit different from the fandom's typical buddy-cop portrayal of humans and ponies working side by side, maybe something a bit like Nemesis the Warlock where humans are a threat and non-humans are the focus, but also not like TCB where it's a curbstomp and humans are incompetent. When you see a human dropship, that's your cue to run and hide, and pray you're not what they're looking for. The mood switches to survival-horror whenever they're around. Their tech level is way, way above everyone else's, they can't be reasoned with, and they're scary as hell.
There are other species that can use magic, but it's rare and unusual.
The nemrin - while capable of a form of magic on their own - have forsworn its use due to heretical cults using the dark arts to make flesh golems. The nemrin are actually very good at magic-canceling, and they're the manufacturers of the suppression rings the cleomanni use.
That's a good question. There are hundreds of different minor species in the galaxy, but the vast majority of them are uncontacted relative to the FTU. There are only a few dozen-ish sapient species known to the cleomanni. The Cleomanni Confederacy and their Free Trade Union are the dominant force in this particular region of the galaxy, but there are at least a half-dozen other major civilizations of equal or greater power, they're just too far away for the FTU to have any contact with; some are situated further coreward and consider the part of the galaxy with the FTU to be "out in the boonies", so to speak. Some don't even think there's any life out there, while others sent probes, saw the constant warfare and squabbles in the galactic equivalent of Darfur, and said to themselves ,"Yeah, no. We're not vacationing there. Turn the ship around, honey." To put it bluntly, the galaxy is big. Very big. There are large swaths of sparsely-populated nothing. It's not like SW, it's much emptier, colder, and lonelier than that.
A substantial number of the minor species are primitive and non-spacefaring. Damarkinds are one particularly nasty example; vicious, patriarchal, and psychotically aggressive space hillbillies, what few damarkinds have ships of their own are typically hired guns employed by the cleomanni or by crime bosses to do the dirtiest of their dirty work.
Linnaltans are exactly the opposite; civil and urbane, with advanced art and architecture, sleek spacecraft, and a few colony worlds of their own; plus, many of them are rumored to be Equestrian sympathizers, although the cleomanni have pressured them not to, quote unquote, "legitimize Twilight Sparkle's evil regime".
Basically, the part of the galaxy that ponies hail from is, unfortunately for them, a gallery of horrors.
There's a lot of stuff going on here, world-building-wise. I almost wish that Fimfiction didn't have a rule against off-site content, because really, the way I originally envisioned this story, it would be something of a multimedia hypertext novel with hyperlinks leading both to wiki articles and to hidden sub-chapters. Because I can't do that, the expospeak can get a little thick in places. I hope it doesn't ruin the pacing. I always wanted to experiment with multimedia or interactive-novel concepts. I'm actually in the process of composing a soundtrack for this series, too. I do synthetic orchestral arranging as a hobby. Sometime in the future, perhaps when this is all done, I'll come up with an alternate version with the extra stuff included and host it elsewhere.
There will definitely be more ship-to-ship combat in the future. The ELF don't have very many warships at their disposal, but when they do come out, shit gets real. Space combat in this series is of the Newtonian variety. Starships aren't like WWII fighter planes. Once they get going, they coast, and they can rotate and translate relative to their targets. The smallest serious combat craft are corvettes, and anything smaller is basically a missile or a decoy. There are "space fighters", but they're SSTO craft intended primarily for atmospheric combat; they're basically sitting ducks in space. Many of them are capable of interplanetary travel, and some shuttles can even warp, but other than ferrying themselves between planets, they're almost defenseless in space. Compared to things like expendable gun drones and high-velocity bundles of tungsten rods, they have no chance.
9633389
That description of the Cleomanni is incredibly accurate hehe and I bet that lot's of species are tired of their shit, pardon my language.
Makes sense and hope I don't ruin the fun and mystery of this story for other readers, but Im such a lore freak that lore in any series I love is like a drug for me! (I blame Destiny and Elder Scrolls for that...)
But back to the human stuff, that is very very interesting stuff and while I thought of it from time to time, I didn't think you would go that route with the humans (not that Im complaining of course, Im a little bit of a human supremacist, in the nice sort of way hehe)
And regarding the human's , I have two question regarding their tech(you can choose not to answer of course). First question, are they the most advanced specious in the galaxy? Or only in that their part of the galaxy?
Second question, Is the tech gap between them and the Cleomanni/Ponies like that of the Pre-Covenant war Humans compared to the Forerunners at their prime (where basically there is no hope to compete in any single way)? Or is it more akin to Pre-Covenant war Humans compared to the Covenant (where while the Cleomanni/Ponies are very clearly outclassed in almost everysingle field of tech, their still able to put up a fight and win certain battles)?
And for a final non-tech question, how far into the future are these human's? Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of years (I prefer thousands of years for powerful interstellar civilizations because being a galactic super power in only a couple hundreds of years after becoming space faring race personally doesn't make sense to me, unless there is a reason of course)?
That is very very cool and good to know that magic isn't Equestrian exclusive, hope to see these magic bearing races and how they interact with the Equestrians hehehehe...
Starswirl the Bearded: Im the better wizard!
Random alien wizard: No, Im the better wizard! *proceeds to have a magic dual with Starswirl*
Thats a good choice and definitely makes reading the story and lore easier by not flooding the story with thousands of species all in one place, and I can't wait to see the races of the galaxy!
And that is such a bummer man, I would have loved reading more lore from these hidden sub chapters and wiki's, but what can ya do...and I hope you succeed in making the alternate version of the story, I'll read and see it all!
The pacing is perfectly fine and I love the lore tidbits (since remember, Im a lore junkey), so keep doing what you feel is right for the story and pacing.
I cant wait to hear your soundtrack, I bet it will feel and sound great for this story and makes me even more hyped for it!
Oooooh man I cant wait to see how you handle the ship to ship fights, I eat those right up! And I also can't wait to see how you handle fleet battles (those are my favorite space battles) especially since these battles are gonna be Newtonian style.
Also, two questions about this stories FTL system, is it instantaneous travel but at the cost of having a small range like in Battlestar Galactica? Or is it that it takes time for ships to reach their destination, but it has good range like in Star Wars and Star Trek? if its the second option, how fast is their Warp/FTL?(at least for the Ponies and Cleomanni, since I'm guessing that the speed of their warp is based on how advanced a species is, right?)
And thanks again for answering my questions and I hope you have a great day, hope to see ya soon!
This chapter is a behemoth. And kind of... depressing. No, that big red ribbon of content warnings is not for show.
Hmm. It's been a while since I've read a good dark sci-fi themed fanfic, much less a MLP related one.
Can't really give any decent feedback unfortunately, just the usual many thanks for making a day or two great for me.
it's just a bit sad that various crap that in it's entirety isn't worthy compared with 2-3 senteces of this fic gets more recognition these days....
9685782
Thanks for turninging a particularly crappy day at work onto something good.
As for all those warnings... weren't they justified hundred times over through the whole fic? Doesn't really get much darker than it already is, at leasy imao.
I mean its the mature 'mature' story, not just an edgy wanna-be. And that's refreshingly good.
9686518
Well, honestly, there were a couple parts towards the beginning that were a bit softer than this particular chapter. This chapter was rough. I actually kinda teared up in a couple spots. I figured "Oh man, if I'm tearing up while writing this, think about someone who's unprepared for this kind of punch in the gut."
Having elements of black comedy and grimdarkness is a very tender balancing act. I actually redacted some parts on my editing pass that I thought were a bit too graphic, not because they exceeded my limits (I don't really have any), but because sometimes, being too explicit actually reduces the drama and horror. William F. Nolan in Stephen King's Danse Macabre put it best:
The more left to the audience's imagination, the more horrifying something can actually become.
I'm glad you enjoyed it, by the way.
9686529
\\sets a char to make 460+ bolts of linen cloth before writing
Wholly agree about leaving some details out for those reasons.
For me, as far as the "edginess" is concerned, the line is drawn if the description of a particular kill/mutilation is prolonged over a few paragraphs for the sake of it. There are surely other concerns, like the plot development, character representation and the readability, but those are usually much more obvious.
And it differs on people and circumstances quite significantly. I still remember one particular scene occasionally - I was DM'ing a small fantasy campaign and had a dialogue between a lizardman cleric (player character) and a lizardman Mage (NPC voiced by me). The subject quite quickly went to the degree of disgust that mage had for Humans, how he likes torturing them for fun and basically stopped there because the player said that he's feeling uncomfortable about it and had just to summarize things quickly before moving on. It honestly felt rather sudden to me, as he chose to play as a member of an openly xenophobic race, member of an even more xenophobic society with a big grudge towards humans and a follower of a deity which favors cruelty, raw strength and survival of the fittest. And before this very scene he supposedly didn't really understand how it would all fit together, keh.
As for my impressiom - well I read the story over 8 hours, or to be exact 2 hours of opportunity during worktime plus 2 hours during a way to home. Combined with my usual habits, I guess the bigger picture was dominating over individual scenes. Though tbh, I can't really focus on more than a few short-lived moments when a MC (and other cast) weren't struggling for survival itself, finding a meaning for it or both.
Darkest moments for me? The first time when the numbers of Ponies alive is mentioned in comparisson to how many there were not so long ago and the Karkadann once we learn more about them. There are many others, but these stand out for me...
*sees tags*
GDI Korn! Clean up after yourself when you invade other universes!
Well, you certainly aren't wasting any time, are you?
So is this language based on something? Is there an online translator somewhere for this?
While it's good to make the audience hate your bad guys, let's try to veer away from one dimensional psychopaths if at all possible.
Oh don't act like your hosts are innocent in all of this you condescending prick.
9716980
The Equestrian language in this is entirely made-up. Like English, it's an SVO language, so the word order is mostly the same. I also came up with Ardun, the Cleomanni language, and that one is more like OSV/SOV. Verbs tend to pile up at the ends of sentences in that one.
"Mesha asrii, aspare kuka," literally means "Eat me, you c***".
Mesha = Eat, gnash, gorge oneself on.
Asrii = "This little one" (a typical pronoun used by ponies in a diminutive sense, as in those who consider themselves as lacking a place of honor or a noble title; higher-ranking ponies would use "asrea" instead).
Aspare = You.
Kuka, Kuk = A very profane word for female genitalia.
In Equestrian, "ut" is the possessive particle, and it modifies pronouns into their possessive forms. "Aspare" means "you", and "Aspare ut" means "your". In the next chapter, when Storm shouts “Mela aspare ut giege!” at a cleomanni who's trying to raise an alarm, what she's saying is "Shut your mouth".
The term for the Equestrian Empire is the Tonnanen Harredo, which means something like Equestrian Great Herd/Khaganate/Empire.
Tonna = People
Nen = Heart
Tonnanen = "People of the Heart" or "The Most People-like People". The concept doesn't translate into English very well.
Har- = Great (prefix)
Redo = Herd
The lexicon is incomplete and I'm basically making it up as I go along, but contains something like over a couple hundred words at this point. When coming up with ideas for the phonetics of the Equestrian language, I wanted it to sound soft and pleasant but also paradoxically harsh and intimidating. Almost Scandinavian in sound. One of the central ideas of the story is ponies-as-combatants. Ponies taken seriously as fighters, by some of the galaxy's most dangerous super-predators. That sort of thing. Not just dabbling with warfare, not just dipping the tips of their hooves in, but actually going all-in. The sound of their language is calculated to sound proud and militaristic, but also effete and conciliatory. Elven, sort of.
Ardun is intentionally very Slavic or Hungarian-sounding and grating.
I'm engaging in a bit of sleight of hand as regards the villains. My intention was...
... to start off getting the audience and the protagonists primed to hate the cleomanni more and more as the depths and dimensions of their evil was revealed, only for that to be undermined later on when sympathetic cleomanni start to appear more often, and they're just as horrified to learn the truth as our "heroes".
Both sides are struggling with deep, prejudicial hatred against the other. Both ponies and cleomanni are xenophobic towards one another. There are no good guys in this story. Everyone is at least a little bit evil.
My inspiration for Revanchism, really, was playing GalCiv and Stellaris as ponies. I always thought the casual xenophobia in Stellaris was a little hilarious, if not just a bit creepy. There's a box you can tick that makes a conquered species into your chattels, and there's another one you can tick that makes them into food. It's so clinical and detached, because you're roaming over a star system map, managing everything with a bird's-eye view and you can't see the atrocities up close. It's like... "Do players even realize what they're clicking on?"
That said, frankly, I am a little bit tired of sympathetic villains. My benchmark is eighties movies. I'm intentionally going for pulpiness. If you're gonna have a baddie, why not have a bad guy who's as irredeemably bad as Clarence Boddicker from Robocop? So many villains these days have excuses for their evil, and that's treated as deep. Frankly, it gets a little irritating reading about some bad guy, and then, just before the hero can deal the final blow, while the villain is lying on the ground, he raises his hands and he's all like "Wait! Waaaait! I'm this way because my poor poochie died of cancer!"
Xenomorph attack?
Hi Twilight.
Speaking of demons from Hell where the Hell was Discord during all of this? Y'know, mr. alters-reality-how-he-pleases?
To quote a certain rap battle.
"You went too far Professor Tweed Pants, we don't need the backstory of every fucking tree branch!"
9717017
Somewhere else where I mirrored this fic, it has the tag "gratuitous expospeak". It's not an exaggeration.
Every bit of mechanical fluff is investigated and pored over in unnecessary, extravagant, Incredible Cross-Sections level detail.
9717013
Just be careful walking that tightrope buddy.
*looking at the cover picture and character tags* not that I'm calling you a liar or anything, buuuuut you may want a fire extinguisher for your pants.
Time to make some friends.
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.
I'm going to guess she's in some kind of simulation of some sort or other.
So which was it? Were you ready for it or weren't you?
Well I guess at least it was relatively painless if it was over that fast. Yikes.
Hey genius, the government's kaput, you're a rebellion living in a desert, and she's honestly the best possible pilot for the mech that's your biggest hope. At this point there's no such thing as a pay grade.
Nah, all you need is a drill and you're solid!
Time to sign your soul away.
....I'm not gonna remember a single syllable of that.
Sit your ass down, Storm. One Twilight Sparkle is worth an entire Equestrian Empire consisting of nothing but Chargers.
You know, I'm still wondering where Discord is during all of this. You can't just ignore him. I mean, physically you can just not write about him at all, but he's a seriously huge plot hole to just ignore all willy nilly. Dude actually kind of likes Twilight, you can't say he absolutely wouldn't just Thanos Snap his way through the enemy lines to help her.
...eh, I've shipped worse.
Yeah, because they won't reinforce security now that you've been spotted in the area.
Ah, the most cursed phrase in all of fiction.
Dude, your actions were the only thing keeping the two of you alive. You've got nothing to feel ashamed of!
At some point we're going to have to find out who's watching these transmissions, within story context.
This thing's getting worse by the chapter!
Is it that Storm's dying and they're tracking what happened through her memories as her brain starts to fade?
Isaac Asimov wasn't dealing with a genocidal alien invasion where your entire species was on the line. WW2 might have been close, but a situation like our ponies are in? Yeah, at that point violence is more than justified. It's required for the sake of continued survival.
When diplomacy works and a peaceful, friendly outcome can happen then yeah obviously it's the better solution, it's just that when dealing with foes that won't listen to reason that peace should go out the window in lieu of violence. Both have their place.
If only there was a magical tree that was the source of the greatest magic Equestria ever had or will ever have. That was also alive. And capable of enacting its own agency throughout Equestria. And knew everything that was happening all over the place. And could also be reproduced since the people who made the darned thing still existed for a while and could have passed that knowledge onto others.
Basically, I'm asking what happened to the omnipotent tree. The omnipotent snake guy too, but still.
Friendship is Magic!
The Ork Boys would like to recruit you for THE WAAAGH!
Hmmm
Honesty -
Loyalty - Storm
Magic - Twilight?
Kindness -
Laughter - Terror?
Generosity -
And lighting enemies on fire or poisoning them with gas doesn't? Look, I'm fully on your side here, this guy gives really psychotic creeper vibes, but standards should be evenly applied.
Probably because magpies collect shiny things?
Neither do your enemies, but they don't get a say in this, now do they? I'm expecting a Spec Ops: The Line moment at some point where they fuck up big time.
9718129
True. In this particular setting, Twi is pretty ruthless. One Twi alone may not be the equal of an entire battalion of chargers, but she's easily as destructive as a whole lance of them. It's not her raw combat potential that makes her such a threat, however. It's the fact that she's a Tony Stark-level wiz technologist who can MacGyver up anything, anywhere. Storm doesn't even realize how valuable of a resource she actually is. Most ponies think she's "just" their monarch. They don't know how deep into the trenches Twilight is willing to go for them.
I'll give you a (very spoilery!) hint. He probably would try and save Twilight, if he wasn't still encased in stone.
The reveal of their actual identity is a stinger that only shows up at the very tail-end.
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?