Twilight Sparkle is on the run. She's been accused of stealing the magic of Luna Invictus, Guardian of the Realm. If she and her friend Rainbow Dash cannot find a way to restore Luna back to health, her mind and life is forfeit.
On Earth, Sunset Shimmer plots to gain the power she believes that she deserves. To do that, she must trust the mysterious Starlight Glimmer to help her steal the Elements of Harmony from the long lost Dream Castle.
Caught up in-between these two sides, can our heroes find a way through to safety?
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Power Press, It's Writin' Time!
Kai Aveon Creech: Author!
Lost Marbles: Editor!
SpiderEmblemBrony: Critique!
Dinode: Pre-reader!
Berry Delight: Proofreader!
GO GO, MIGHTY WRITIN' POWER PRESS!
This chapter was created about halfway through writing the story. Originally, I opened with Diane's daydream of Ponyland (Which is also no longer here), but S.E.B rightly pointed out that it was a fairly boring opening. Hopefully, this was more ominous.
Some enchanted objects require a spoken component for activation, but normal spell casting shouldn't require a chant or an incantation.
Whenever I have Diane lie, I swap out my Pinkie Pie voice for a David Tennant voice.
I can't even begin to describe how much this chapter changed. This chapter was the first thing I wrote for this story, back before I even had a name for this story. Originally, this was a crossover with Kamen Rider, and Fluttershy was the main character. Diane was an orphan that was going to live with Fluttershy (her human name was Grace) and her wacky uncle Danny Hassett (Discord). Diane was the POV character, but wasn't intended to be the hero of the story. The only thing that stayed the same was this description here:
I'm really proud of how that one turned out.
In the first draft, the bad guys were Twilight, Rarity, and Applejack. Twilight wasn't being driven mad by magic, she was just a mad scientist.
Dark magic isn't a kind of magic, its a slang term for dangerous magic. Some kinds of magic are exclusively dark, but certain individuals are permitted to study certain kinds in the hopes of producing a positive result. A good example are the therapy spells that were originally derived from brainwashing spells.
The Mirror wasn't moved to Canterlot because 1) to anyone who isn't the most powerful Unicorn in the Realm, it was untouchable, and 2) keeping a large number of powerful magical artifacts in close proximity to one another can mess them up. Like the way you screw a computer up with a magnet, except instead of losing data something explodes when you try and use it.
Diane and Roxanne's house is a real house. I live a few blocks away from it. I wasn't even lying about the turret.
I really hope Diane reminiscing about her dad and the Power Rangers worked out; it didn't quite sit right with me.
As far as the Power Rangers continuity is concerned: Everything that happened in the shows up to Jungle Fury happened. I'm pretty sure that the new show's don't even have continuity anymore, and RPM was set in the future.
To be honest, I do like this more than the previous opening.
It sets the stage for what the future holds and how it needs to be prevented. When I see this, I think of X-Men: Days of Future Past the movie. In the first five minutes, you know what the stakes are. It gives you a huge intense action scene where... spoilers... The X-Men die. It shows instantly how bad the situation has gotten and how hopeless their future seems.
I think this is a good start for this. It shows how bad the future is and why Celestia is constantly afraid of whatever is coming. Because she sees the end result. And so do we. We see how bad things are going to be and why it's so important for the heroes to succeed in whatever they're doing.
My only real complaints are the lack of description on Celestia at the beginning. If you're going to point it out, you might want to expand upon it.
You could mention her beauty and how she looks, but unless the songs and poems add something to the scene or story, I would cut it out. That's me personally.
Other than that, it has a good start and is a vast improvement over the original opening. You can still keep that opening for chapter 1, but it works there, because you already know that things are going to get bad and I'm already drawn into the story going 'Holy shit! How is Equestria going to be destroyed?! What is Celestia going to do?! How is she going to prevent this horrible future?!'
Those are all good things. It means I want to be a part of this story. Again, good work.
7575669 Urgh, I still haven't got that opening paragraph the way I want it. I've revised four or five times now.
My Celestia is a little vain, so I want to specifically point out that she looks gorgeous.
Thank you so much for you kind words and helpful criticism. I really appreciate it.
Did you look at chapter two? I can't remember.
Celestia's Mark is mainly an abstract Mark, and represents he skill in leading. It also gives her an affinity for light based magic, but under normal circumstances it wouldn't be very useful. However, Celestia's rather absurdly high power levels compensate for that, which makes her above average for ponies.
Since Unicorn magic is more closely tied to Marks than other races, they make a much bigger deal about it compared to the other two tribes.
Originally, Diane was doing full Sherlock Scans of her everyone around her, but I dialed it back a lot since I apparently have an actual Sherlock pony cast here. Though I suppose Fluttershy is more like Micheal Weston than Sherlock Holmes.
Grace Bernadette is human!Fluttershy. She was mainly in the scene because I was really proud of the name Grace Bernadette.
Fluttershy's accent is done with whoohoo.co.uk.
Like in the Triptych Continuum, each pony race can a sixth sense that deals with their unique form of magic. How those sense's work is a little different here. Unicorn's are still limited to sensing spells. It is impossible to hide a spell entirely, but one can mask it with a different spell. Earth Ponies have a unique connection to the lives around them, which can make them excellent trackers and farmers. Pegasi have changed the most. In Triptych, Pegasi simply have expanded vision, allowing them to literally see temperature changing around them, water forming into clouds, stuff like that. You need to read the original description in the story to really get how beautiful it is. Here it's more like a radar sense, allowing them information on their entire surroundings in flight. One of the reasons Pegasi live in clouds is because it's cooler than on the ground, and that can make their Sky Sight less sensitive. Like exposing your ears to loud noises constantly can make you deaf, but less extreme.
Question for the week: How controversial would Watchman be in a world where Super heroes were already real, especially idealized ones like the Power Rangers?
This is the first chapter that I started after I changed this from a Kamen Rider story about Fluttershy and into a Power Rangers story about Pinkie Pie. The official 'out of the woods' part for me, which is ironic because this is where things start go wrong for everybody else.
This is also the first chapter with no deleted scenes. There were several things that were re-worked, but overall I finally knew where this was going and how to get there.
Sunset and Rainbow's fight were originally written from Rainbow's P.O.V. Sadly, it was lost to time, and this is all that remains.
If anyone is wondering what side Starlight is on... she's on the side of the Greater Good. As such, whatever tactics she decides to undertake in the name of the Greater Good are obviously justified, and anyone who disagrees is clearly the Greater Bad and must dealt with.
Actually, looking back, there is a crap ton of foreshadowing in this chapter. Yay!
This chapter is called Consequences for two reasons. The first is because this is where the consequences for several key decisions start to come into play. Starlight is learning something about being used, Twilight is slowly slipping away, Sunset's self-reliance isn't going to cut it when she isn't the biggest shark in the ocean, and Rainbow Dash is starting to see that whatever happens next, things will never be the same again. Abigail's choice to go after Diane is in a way a consequence of her own past, but that's a story for another day.
The sky outside the Dream Castle is based on this visual effects shot.
On a meta level, this was the first chapter I wrote after I set a deadline for myself, and I was suddenly realizing that having a deadline meant having things done by a certain time. I haven't raced to beat a deadline before, or even raced period. It's a little scary. Though it really improved my writing: I don’t even have Deleted Scenes for this chapter.
Starswirl the Bearded is a lot of fun to write. He ended being this 'Cave Johnson with Bob Kelso' egotistical jerk that was just hilarious. Which is, of course, counterbalanced by Abigail's emotionally scarring backstory. I was a little wary of Abigail opening up to Rainbow so quickly, but overall it worked. The idea for both Abigail's past and the test itself came from Dinode.
I re-wrote Twilight and Diane's scene a few times. I was worried that Twilight's mad scientist shtick was too funny and didn't highlight how dangerous she was enough. It's to bad I couldn't do a straight up comedy bit; Pinkie Pie being the straight mare to Twilight Sparkle has comedy potential.
The podium is the actual source of the scrying spell. The Crystal Ball is just a convenient thing to project it on.
The most horrifying cartoon monster in history, and it's named the Smooze.
Abigail didn't correct Rainbow when she said what happened to Twilight was all her fault, because it was perfectly obvious that it wasn't all her fault and that does not alter how Rainbow feels.
This was originally in two parts, but I re-combined them because honestly there wasn't a good reason not too.
Ah, poor Sunset. Things really aren't going to get better for a while. I actually had no idea what Sunset's backstory was going to be until I sat down to work on this. It took me ages, and of course Dinode was very helpful as always. I can't remember how much he suggested, but I'm sure it was up there.
Diane's discussion with her father was all me, and I'm a little worried it's too preachy. I re-wrote it several times.
Twilight's about to get screwed over in a bad way too, but she's represented in a positive light later, so don't worry. Things will get better.
Sunset didn't receive an Element largely because Honesty was taken. As the Dream Castle noted, they weren't in a real testing room. It kept trying to kill them anyway because it's not sapient; it's an A.I. (Actually, it's called an A.M, or Automation Matrix, in Equestria.) Celestia might have received Magic for showing Sunset unconditional love, except she didn't show Sunset that; she tried to teach her a lesson.
The Royal Guard are literally trained to trick villains into monologues.
I hope the Morphing Sequence went well; I feel pretty confident, but they aren't usually a good thing in other stories.
This is both the best and worst quality Sunset has. She can do basically anything she set her mind too, but she has a real problem learning from her mistakes. To teach her something you practically have to break her down. She'll come around by the end of the series. but it'll be a while. I'm also sad to say that she's pretty much out of the rest of the fight as well. Her part in story one is nearly done.
You won't believe how long it took me to figure out Ranger colors. I didn't settle on this until well after this chapter was written. Also, new Ranger color! *Achievement Unlocked*
The Monster design was tricky as well; since it wasn't going to be in the story as much, I needed something instantly memorable.
I'm happy with Abigail's scene; I always like heroes who fight intelligently rather than with overwhelming power.
I think this is the first time I've had ponies fight one another, and I like how it turned out. It was a little brief, but I feel confident that it how ponies would fight, as opposed to simply mapping out human combat over a quadrupeds body and ignoring the bits that don't make sense. I realize only really made up three moves (Rainbow stuns Starlight with wind, and then spins around to buck her sideways, and dislocating Starlight's forelegs) but I'm still happy with it. You'll also notice how Twilight keeps using the same Pegasus moves over and over again; that's because she learned them from watching Rainbow train, and very few of them can be learned visually.
I've always wondered why speedsters waste time running in a circle around whoever they're fighting instead of just punching them.
Tell me if alternating between proper names and Ranger designations is confusing.
What is this a crossover of?
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Power Rangers.
This seems like a really ambitious project... I will read it as soon as possible.
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Weird that summary sounds like Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief almost.