Epilogue - Strawberry Fields
Epilogue: Strawberry Fields
Peppermint Twist, Pound Cake, Pumpkin Cake
Peppermint Twist rushed into Sugarcane Corners just as the long needle on the wall clock over the counter reached two muffins.
“Hello Mithter and Mithus Cake. I’m here to pick up the twinth.”
“Just in time, Peppermint!” Mr. Cake winked to let her know he wasn’t upset. Behind him she heard the twins rush down the stairs in a clatter of hooves and giggles. They screeched to a halt in front of Peppermint.
“Hiya, Miss Twist!” they said in perfect unison, and then squealed in laughter as she rolled her eyes.
Mr. Cake chuckled in turn. “So what do you have planned for the afternoon, Peppermint?”
She pulled out a list from her hip-purse. “Oh, the uthual. Firtht, we’ll go play in the park, and then thereth a puppet-thow at the cathle. And after that we’ll be taking flying lethonth from Thcootaloo.”
Mrs. Cake arrived wearing her shopping saddlebags. “Flying lessons?” she asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Yeth, maam. Pumpkin and I will be wearing training wingth approved by Rainbow Dash herthelf. It’th all very thafe!”
“Hmm,” said Mr. Cake. “The stuff they’re doing with spell casters these days... At least the kids will be doing stuff together.” He shrugged on his own saddlebags. “Ready to go, sweetums?”
Mrs. Cake nodded. “Ayup! Come along, dear.” They left the store.
Pinkie Pie came in from the kitchen with several trays of pastries balanced on her back. “Goin’ flying?” she touched a task-caster stone and the pastries flew off in multiple directions, restocking the display shelves.
“Uh-huh!” replied Peppermint. “All the kidth are doing it now! Well, that and go-karting. But I like flying better.”
“What a coincidence, so do Rarity and I!” Pinkie winked. “We’ll have to go together sometime! Have fun now!”
“We will! Bye!” Peppermint gave chase as the laughing foals fled outside. It was going to be a great afternoon!
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Flight with spellcasters? Yess.
I hereby dub the ensuing culture: Alicorn Culture. Where everypony has all the magic kinds they want.
6936274
This is how spell caster culture differs from personal computer culture! Now, just think of what this means for immersive gaming and virtual online experiences...
6936765
Not as much as it means to have everyone able to literally fly.
Seriously, though. I was more like "It makes things easier for Unicorns, but it also means that the thing that made them 'special' was taken away uniquely." and now... it's busy taking everyone's specialness away.
Insert Syndicate (from The Incredibles) .gif here.
Except the idea that you just spread superscience (or, you know, spread unicorn or pegasi magic) to everyone is actually a really good idea. It wouldn't stop people from being heroes or being exceptional, it would just raise the bar for everyone. I'm sure there must be some kind of downside, but the "I was special before but now I am not" is not a good one.
6936811
This is where the personal spell caster revolution is strikingly similar to the personal computer revolution.
It used to be that only governments or the largest corporations could afford computing. That was the mainframe era. (BTW my first job after graduating from university was as a user services consultant for IBM 360/370 mainframe users at the computing centre of a major university.)
With the advent of PCs, computing became affordable for all. Now, with the www, cloud computing, and Software-as-a-service, any individual with a few bucks can set themselves up to use sophisticated applications (he same ones the big corporations use) and all the compute and storage space they need online.
Programming used to be a priesthood (and I was one!) You might say programmers are no longer that special, because huge numbers of people do programming now. In reality, the bar to being a "paid programmer" has just continually been raised higher. But "amateur" programming is everywhere now, and touching orders of magnitude more peoples' lives that it did when it was purely a mainframe based activity.
6936876
Yeah, I program for a living... it definitely has been raised.
A big deal, I understand, when you're not a small company consulting for a larger one at rather high speed (which is what we are doing at the company I'm at
) isn't just solving the problem anymore, but doing so in such a way that when something does go wrong, you or anyone else in the company can fix it.
With more power, the need for super efficient coding is reduced (although doing so is still very important for drivers, game programmers, anyone who needs to squeeze every bit of power out of their system). But clarity, agility, maintainability, extensibility are taking heavy importance nowadays. And by nowadays I mean "in the past decade."
I'm years of experienced now, and I still feel like I'm scratching the surface of what I should know.
... I feel like I digressed from the topic a little.
6936911
Disgression is the better part of... something or other.
7049444
Bingo! You got it!
The "wake" timeline is some ten years after Twilight's Ascension. I tell Firefly's story as a series of flashbacks to significant events in his life. This mechanism can be a bit disjointed, but I wrote most of the chapters of this story as submissions to a multi stage writing contest, the OC Slamjam.
As to Firefly's disease, one of the stories goes a bit more into the details. His life is an amalgam of several real-life pioneers of Silicon Valley, but it was meant as a reference to Steve Jobs.
7050982
You're right that the lecture was initially unplanned, and basically due to Gap planning a visit to Sweet Apple Acres.
Also, in the opening paragraphs Firefly complains about his busy workweek and precisely about not having verified what the lecture would be about. His assumption is that the lecture would be about magic itself, and is dismayed when it turns out to be about the economics of magic:
However, this chapter main objective was to bring in a bit more about Firefly's personality, his history and his motivation for wanting to do magic, as well as the circumstances leading him to Ponyville. The OC Slamjam contest's requirements was to have Firefly interact with Gap, a professor of Economics at Canterlot U. This is the scenario I came up with. Sure it's a stretch, but the circumstances were dictated by the contest. Also, each chapter has to be able to stand alone as a story, so I had to introduce the new OC (Gap), provide a rational for him and Firefly to meet, and a plausible interaction between them. All in 3500 words!
7052210
The time travel through petrification was part of character profile for Falcata submitted for the contest. For my entry I had to use what was in the profile - or at least not contradict it. Still, Falcata turned out to be my favorite OC of the contest because of the scope of the challenge of getting her and Firefly to have some meaningful interaction.
I researched the canon for references to Clover's gender and found it was completely ambiguous when Twilight or any other pony mentions the historical Clover. I've written Clover as male in another story of mine (Renaissance Pony), and the event of Clover petrifying Falcata to save her life is in Falacata's profile (although the romantic link between them is my own invention.)
7052434
Keep in mind that Firefly is really an amalgam, not meant to mirror Jobs in all particulars.
As to Trixie, well, there are more chapters coming.
And the end.
It's a good thing Firefly isn't a perfect Jobs parallel, else I wonder who he'd father a daughter with who he would deny the paternity of for several years,
7053801
I purposefully didn't want Firefly to be too similar to Jobs. First, as important as Jobs was, he wasn't the only person involved in the microcomputer revolution. Second, I couldn't help but imagine all the angst and flamecasts I'd be subjected to for having portrayed him OOC! As it is, it's the foundation for more stories I want to do drawing parallels between magic and the Information Age.
Thanks for commenting. I truly appreciate it when readers take the time to discuss my stories!
Regards,
Dafaddah
Is the title a pun on the Pirates of Silicon Valley?
Yes indeed! I originally called it Pirates of Everfree Valley, but none of my editors and pre-readers got the reference, so I changed it:
Mind you, there's a certain line from a great and powerful mare that would have way more awesome if she had said "We were the Pirates of Everfree Valley..."
Sigh.
7209410
With this chapter I wanted to contrast those beliefs about Alicorn immortality with the utter finality of a 'normal' pony's passing. I also wanted to set the stage for the wake, which provides the background for all the stories I wrote for the OC Slamjam. I look forward to your comments.
Image seriously super-good, but text was not very for me in my current moment. Still, I found it somewhat fitting how in this video (11:27) you can see idea of moving from personal (isolated) computer to networked (personal) computer .....
And of course I've read something like https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-101931.html -
reading those words from (relative, +30 years since 1988) future, sitting behind very powerful networked machine running collective-effort OS (Linux) and watching and reading stories from all over the world and finally realizing all this communication power just faded at most important moment when humans failed to act ...ughm. Quite painful.
7082104
I got the reference.
Well this was a very nice story!
10405463
Glad you liked it!