Choosing Sides (By Dafaddah)
Choosing Sides
by
Daffadah
Disclaimer: this story is the result of my opening my big trap, and a seriously nasty itch to do some world building. So don't expect any major character development. I hope others will take up the ideas presented and pursue them all the way to the post-singularity Mick Jagger.
***
It was called to be the war to end all wars. The war that changed how we define ourselves and what it means to be a thinking being. The war that created the three worlds and gave birth to our civilization.
Of course, I am talking about the Techno-Magic war.
Like most such conflicts, it started small. It grew faster than anyone could have imagined and left in its wake broken lives and broken families, and damage to society that would take decades, even centuries to heal. Its roots go back to the late 20th and early 21st centuries, to the early online communities and especially the gamers. They had no idea where their obsessions would lead them when the paired arrivals of the direct neural interface and Equestrian conversion potion provided two divergent paths to the granting of their every wish, two competing philosophies about being that grew from simple ideas to become dire examples of the extremes to which people will go to fullfill their desires.
- Opening paragraphs of the introduction of "From the other side: what came before the Singularity" by Sir Michael Philip "Mick" Jagger, PhD., Chair of the History Department of Oxford, Prof. of Philosophy Cambridge, and lead singer of "The Rolling Stones"
***
"Oh, come on Effie. We're gonna be late. Again." George was pissed at the delay. This was nothing new. Ever since he had chosen Diamond Dog as his "main morph" five years previous patience had not been his strong suit. His life-partner (they lived in one of those quaint former American states where marriage was defined as being 'between a man and a woman', so they could not call each other husband and wife as neither was primarily human any more,) had pretty much continually been a dragon since she had tried it out a year before they got marri... er 'partnered'.
"Coming George." Effie flew out of the French doors at the front of their little bungalow in suburban Charlotte. As soon as she was out George jumped onto her back and she gained a bit of altitude, high enough to clear the trees and rooftops, but still low enough not to require filing a flight plan. On the way out they passed the big black billboard that said only "In His image?" in stark white letters. Obviously added afterwards was the spray painted ouline of a human hand, with the letters HLF on its palm. It appeared two days after George, Effie and the kids moved in, and despite the anti-graffiti laws it still had not been removed after two months. This bothered Effie more than George, but still not enough for them to decide to move back into the city with its more 'modern' attitudes, or adopt human guises for social contacts only.
They liked the way they were. Their choices of body plan worked for them on so many levels it was hard to count them all. Wings made commuting to and from the suburbs easier, George was a geologist who could dig through solid rock, sometimes he brought back interesting samples for Effie to taste. Effie found dragon magic and flight quite handy indeed in her real-estate brokerage business. George could operate most machinery as well as when he was in human form. And the sex was, if either was asked (and some people did) inhumanly great!
In fact their biggest concern was the children, a son and a daughter, ten and twelve respectively. They had decided to keep the children human on purely practical grounds, essentially because in the suburbs it was still easier (and cheaper) to find human schooling, sports teams and provide other such 'kid social growth activities'. It did cause some friction for the kids when a dragon or dog showed up to ball-games, school picnics and parent-teacher nights. On the flip side, at family events the kids also got pretty jealous of cousins who were allowed to choose their main morphs on their own, showing off their flying or magical abilities to their 'stuck as boring humans' relatives.
Perhaps the biggest problem was technology, or rather the difficulty of using it around magic users. It drove the kids up the wall when their games crashed or their Internet connection died whenever mom or dad entered the room. Effie was concerned that the kids were now purposely avoiding them. She was reading every book she could get her claws on that discussed interspecies families and how to make them work. She was thinking exactly about this when the missile hit.
Whoever had launched the missile had probably not considered a few general facts about dragons, and one particular fact about Effie. The former was that dragons have an extremely tough armour plate hide so if you're going to fire something at a dragon be sure it's really BIG, make sure it contains no electronics because of the degrading effect of magic, and keep in mind that dragons are to a very great extent fire-proof. The latter was that Effie felt happiest in dragon form due to certain character traits that endeared her to her life-partner, but often left others feeling quite the opposite.
The missile hit her squarely in the belly, which gave her a major shock and knocked George off her back. He plumetting to earth screaming "Eefffiiieeeeeee!" on the way down. Luckily for George they weren't that high and he managed to land in a tree. Unluckily for the guy who launched the missile, it was the yard next to the one where he was standing, with the missile launcher still on his shoulder. In clear sight of Effie.
Effie roared. Not like a lion. She roared like a dragon. The neighborhood shook with the magnitude of it. People a mile away looked to the skies and feared for their lives. But not as much as the guy with the missile launcher.
"Holy shit!" he said, dropped his weapon and ran for the house. What he thought this might accomplish is unclear, unlike what Effie thought and did which was well documented in the court case afterwards. Thinking her husband killed, she attacked, dragon style.
First she dove into the house's roof at full speed, essentially ending up in the remains of the ground floor living room. She bellowed again as she saw her attacker crawling into the kitchen, where he found a shotgun and began firing at Effie. At that point, for the first time since taking dragon form, Effie breathed fire, all over her attacker and his kitchen.
He was instantly killed, and his house set aflame. Effie finally heard George's shouts from the neighbor's tree. She propelled herself out of the burning wreckage to go rescue him from the within the massive oak tree. By the time she managed to extract him she had seriously messed up the tree, and the firmen and the police had arrived.
"YOU, THE DRAGON!" the police called from their squad car, "RELEASE THE DOG, PUT YOUR CLAWS ON YOUR HEAD AND YOUR BELLY TO THE GROUND!" Several more squad cars arrived, disgorging officers who took out the largest ordnance they had and pointed it all at Effie.
"Hey you idiots, don't point those things at my wife!" shouted George. He hadn't seen the guy with the missile launcher, but figured if Effie trashed a house and put it on fire she must have done it for a good reason. The police were not impressed with George's loyalty one bit. Going for a softer appraoch, George yelled out "I meant life-partner."
"YOU THE DOG, PUT YOUR PAWS ON YOUR HEAD AND YOUR BELLY TO THE GROUND! NOW!" blared the police.
George and Effie had been law abiding citizens their entire lives, and so after looking at each other a moment they nodded (agreeing silently in the way that genuine life-partners have) and complied. They only found out the next day in jail. Their lawyer told them about the missile guy's wife who had also perished when Effie crashed into the house. They also had two children who had left for school just ten minutes earlier and were being looked after by an aunt. Effie cried constantly most of the next three days, devastated that she she killed half of a whole family, and had nightmares about the incident for decades afterwards. That week she only smiled once when she was told that the charges against George had been dropped.
The court case made all sorts of news and took over a year to reach a verdict, but in the end Effie was exonerated. Those "Stand my Ground" laws were still on the books, and as she was fired upon first the judge ruled that she was in her rights to persue her attacker until the danger was illiminated, and him with it. She was even found not guilty of the manslaughter charge for the death of her attacker's wife, as she was deemed still under attack at the time.
The local community did not see things the same way. Effie and George and their kids were no longer welcome and pretty much outcasts from the day of the attack onwards. They moved back downtown, and after the trial she and George moved the family to northern Quebec in Canada where there were entire towns of mostly Diamond Dogs and Dragons running mines and operating founderies. Their son chose to become a Dragon as well, but their daughter rebelled against all things magical and became a key figure in the Techno movement.
But that, as Sir Mick would say, is a song for a later album.
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och,that incident destroyed their family.....
This needs more clop... mainly the one with tenticals and seaponies.
866461
Krass keeps hinting at sea ponies, but has yet to deliver. We must be patient, grasshopper. Very patient.
A good idea, but the execution seems a bit skinny to me, just recounting the facts, not getting the reader immersed enough with emotions and the little details. In other words, I'd have enjoyed more tidbits about the two, but anyway, this is an ok chapter
Good work!
866974
Yer absolutely right. I did add a disclaimer to warn readers that this was a world building story and rather scant on the character developement side (and fixed some misspellings), but I guess Krass hasn't had the opportunity to update the posted version yet.
But I have to admit that as brief as was my intrusion into their lives, I have grown quite fond of Effie and George. Damn! I've already got two fics running in parallel, I can't do a third. I really hope somepony else will grab the ball on this. HINT!
866690 or I could cut Krass out of the picture and write the chapter myself and then call him a fag because he has no super powers that provent him from ever getting sober.
869456
Go for it!
"Their lawyer told them about the missile guy's wife who had also perished when Effie crashed into the house. They also had two children who had left for school just ten minutes earlier and were being looked after by an aunt."
"The court case made all sorts of news and took over a year to reach a verdict, but in the end Effie was exonerated."
DOES NOT COMPUTE! Allow me to rage at this freaking retarded ending. The dragon should be reverted back to human and thrown the hell into prison. Basically Effie gets off free with murder. She had the right to defend herself against the human (though no court system in the world would excuse crashing through the house and killing him when he no longer poses a threat) but she also killed his wife who didn't attack her and orphaned their children.
Also why are there no laws limiting what dragons can and can't do? I mean you have a giant, heavily armored fire-breathing flying lizard that gets to wander around anywhere she wants?
No mention is made where the dude got a FREAKING ROCKET LAUNCHER and we're told to just except that.
Basically skips rather important details, character gets away with murder with the only negative was she cried a few days. She doesn't even get hurt from the shock wave caused by the explosion. God I hate god-mode creatures. Here's a hint. Rocket launchers cause almost no damage va flame and more via the killing shock wave that should have pulverize her soft insides against her own armored hide. So lack of research as well.
870548
These are all valid arguments, but keep in mind that I started out by making Mick Jagger the chair of the history department at Oxford university. Perhaps I wasn't necessarily going for major realism here.
But if I were, I might indicate that:
1) Maybe this was a MANPADS from dubious sources. How could a guy living in suburbia get such a weapon? Maybe he was a member of the HLF. Maybe they had played a poor sap who was just pissed off at "the wrong kind of people moving into the neighborhood".
2) Maybe it went off prematurely as its electronics became scrambled in proximity to Effie's magic field (hmm, I recall actually including a strong hint about that in the story).
3) just maybe the law makes some allowances for a less than rational response when someone sees their spouse killed in front of them (which is exactly what Effie thought.) Oh wait, actually it does.
4) Maybe the defense brought up the argument that Effie feared that the missile launching man was going to get another weapon to try to finish the job. He certainly didn't stop to explain to Effie that this was a one-off and so let's all go home, no harm done except the death of George (which is what Effie believed at the time.)
5) Maybe the law would consider the unintended (and unknown to Effie) death of the missile guy's wife as manslaughter (which is was, not murder: there were neither premeditation nor any intent to kill the unfortunate woman,) and that even that might be considered unfortunate collateral effects in the legitimate defense of Effie's person from a continuation of the attack on her person.
6) Maybe the law was written when only humans were considered subject to the law and so there hadn't been new laws enacted yet to cover "citizens in dangerous body forms." Mind you that this would be highly unlikely as such laws could be considered discriminatory and not likely to get through the legislative process. It would take an incident such as Effie's "killing in self defense" of the missile launching man to goad politicians into enacting such laws. And maybe that enactment would cause additional friction between the "Magicals" and the "Technos" (check the hint from Sir Mick in the intro) and maybe that was part of my plan for further installments of this fic, should I decide to do more stories in that setting. (869456 seems interested in doing some - maybe I should just leave all of this in his capable, sticky hooves!)
OK, anything more and I'm giving away too many POTENTIAL spoilers. As you can see I didn't give this any serious thought aforehand from a facts perspective. But I do apologize for the rather telegraphic style which may have led to some of the points you raised. I was going for something more like a textbook, leaving a lot of details unmentioned for other authors to expand upon. After all, this is Krass's party, not mine, and I would prefer to play nice as I am a guest here.
871347 My hooves aren't that sticky... are they?
*me looks at his hooves*
871477
Made you look!
871528 Well then, it seems we have a draw then.
Bitch why U no macro moar?
denver.mylittlefacewhen.com/media/f/img/mlfw2343-5cf09d57f9c02c6a4012635455c73508.jpg
881808
Bitch, I was last to macro.
>she was in her rights to persue her attacker until the danger was illiminated
I think you mean "eliminated," but I guess if he was flammable he'd be (briefly) illuminated as well.
893900
But weather teams.
If I write a chapter, can you add it?
Please, Drunky Griphy.
1083890
yeah, I would
denver.mylittlefacewhen.com/media/f/rsz/mlfw7545_small.jpg
1223223
denver.mylittlefacewhen.com/media/f/img/mlfw7756-Holy_fuck.PNG
Now this, I like.
I’ll admit this story has been sitting around on my ‘to read’ list for a while but I’m glad I got around to reading it.
The concept is certainly attractive even if only for kicks and giggles. Though thinking about it seriously I think I would find myself going through the different potions like crazy, especially the Changeling and dragon.
Either way a fun read.