There's Always Time

by Stella Huntress

Our Town Infiltration

I felt a pain in my stomach, my legs were made of rubber, and light-headed exiting the portal. It felt like I had fought a rampaging minotaur. Looking around I notice that we were in a darkening cave. The only source of light seemed to be the diminishing portal we had just come through. As the portal closed my brother and I were left in complete darkness.

“Sea,” I said, an echo rebounding my voice. “Now what do we do since we can’t see anything?”

“isn’t it obvious,” said a voice that sounded twenty feet in front of me. ‘that jerk never waits for me.’ “We need to leave, and we don’t need to see. We’ve walked through these caves enough times to know where the entrance is.”

I ran to catch up, but only managed to run into a stalagmite.

“Ow,” a pained yelp came from me as I fell on my haunches, rubbing my now sore head. “Why can’t we use that illumination spell?”

I heard the clip-clop of hooves near me, pulling me back onto my hooves. “Because we don’t know if anything inhabits these caves and light would draw them to us. I don’t feel like fighting them off alone.”

I harrumphed in indignation. “So, I guess my contribution in any upcoming fight doesn’t count.”

He started laughing lightly, “My heavens no. You’re still a foal and haven’t even passed through Ms. Doo’s first-year class.” He said putting a hoof on my shoulder. Although I couldn’t see in the dark I knew he was leaning downward to look me in the eyes. “You barely have the skills needed to fight. Now come along.”

“Hey, I got into the same group as you, you know,” I stated in strong annoyance following the sound of his hoof steps. “Starburst even told me that everyone was chosen to be a part of the group. He even gave me a pendant of frozen fire.”

“You do know that the Headmaster tells that to everyone right. That any foal, mare, and stallion that hasn’t pledged allegiance to that bug, is more than welcome to fight among us, given enough training.”

Is that how we're going to start the first day here, fine. “Then teach me.”

He stopped for a second seemingly out of shock. “excuse me?”

“You want to think that I’m not trained enough to fight. then- “was all I was able to get out because of a hoof now covering my mouth. It wasn’t until then that I noticed an eerie blue glow coming from the next section of the cave. Ever since the day that the backstabbing Princesses gave up their thrones to the Queen, we ponies have become very cautious of anything with the colors blue or gold.

Upon sneaking closer to the light, we notice that there were no ponies in the next room. What was there, was beyond my understanding? There was a giant wall full of Cutie Marks. Why would they ever put Cutie Marks up like this? How would they? Don’t they belong on pony backsides? There were probably well over a hundred Cutie Marks on display behind the glass.

“Hey Liz, get over here.” A voiced called from behind me. Looking behind me I saw that my brother was already at the cave mouth looking out into the starry night.

“What is it?” I came up right beside him and looked out. Although it had been many a year since I last saw anything outside, it was the most glorious night ever. The stars looked radiant shining like diamonds upon a dark cloak. A stray tear ran down my face. I had almost forgotten how beautiful the night could be.

Looking around I saw that at the foot of this mountain was a group of lights. Stationary lights, slight reflection on the ground beneath. windows perhaps. Windows belong on houses. Many houses together. It must be a village.

“The village? What do you want me to do?” I questioned incredulously.

“You asked me to train you. What better way than by experience? Since I don’t know what level you’re at. We will start with Lesson one, Infiltration. What I want you to do is sneak into the village and count every head you see.”

“And what will you be doing while I’m gone?” You better not do what I think you’re gonna do.

“You’re not going alone. I’m keeping to the shadows and watching over you. I will tell you what you did wrong in an after action report. ”

“Fine,” I grumbled as we started heading down the road towards the unnamed town.

---

I crept upon the last building and so far I had learned that there was one house per pony. There were ponies from all three tribes here. They all wore this very horrifyingly wide smile. A smile that means, you’d better watch out I’m completely insane. Why were they even smiling like that they were alone by themselves? Is everypony in this town crazy? What was even more creepy was that they all seemed to have the same Cutie Mark.

I looked the barely transparent window, there appeared to be steam on the glass. Inside the room looked like two ponies were wrestling. A white stallion with slightly darker mane was thrown onto the bed by a mare with a fuchsia colored coat. Her purple and teal mane hung loosely over her right shoulder as she approached the downed stallion.

Before I knew it a dirty seafoam colored hoof blocked my sight. I knew almost immediately that it was Sea, by that distinguishing scar on the fetlock of his hoof.

“Why are you sneaking up on me,” I ask as I turn to look him in the eyes. On his back was a pair of old worn saddlebags, a slight tear along the bottom front of the right-side bag.

“Because you were taking too long and we have to get back to the cave before the sun hits the horizon.” He replied leading us back towards the cave.

“So how’d I do?” I questioned to see how my very first solo mission went.

“You need a lot of work. You-“

“What did I do wrong?”

“If you will let me finish you’d find out. For starters, you need to work on your footing, a few times ponies came to their windows, after you were gone. Secondly how many ponies are in the town, and anything noteworthy you noticed.”

“Well there are around twenty ponies living in the village. Each of them having these very awkward smiles. They all have the same Cutie Mark. The feel of the town just feels off. Which leads to a few questions, like where are the foals, why do they have the same Cutie Marks, and if we can assume the Cutie Marks we saw earlier are the ones that belong to those in town, what happened to the other one hundred and ten ponies?”

“Respectable job on getting all of that information on your first time out. Just work on your silent hoof step technique and you should be able to do better.” He stated as we started the upwards ascent.

“Why do you think those two were fighting?” As those words left my mouth, Sea seemed frozen in place. It seemed as if he were broken and would never move again. He blinked once, twice. His mouth started moving again.

“I’ll tell you when you’re older kid. The night is over, now let’s get to bed,” Was his only response as we neared the caves. The sun was just starting to peak over the horizon, bathing the sky in its beautiful glow. I let the conversation end there as I knew my brother would never say anything more about it.

Inside the caves, it seemed lighter, as there appeared to be small holes in the roof causing small bits of light to trickle in. It wasn’t a lot mind you, but just enough to brighten up the cave. As I entered the cavern the portal sent us to. As I went to lie down, I felt something hit me in the face. Feeling it, it felt like a decent sized quilted blanket. where did he get this, I thought as I quickly got the blanket spread out.

“I found this when we were down in the village.” He said opening the other side of the saddlebags, and pulling out an identical blanket.

“You got this for me? What do you want in return?” I asked in astonishment that my brother was being nice to me for once.

“I don't want anything in return. You’re my little sister, and the only family I have left.” He sat on his haunches holding out his hooves in an invitation for a hug, which I all but leapt into and freely gave, before crawling underneath my blanket once more. I closed my eyes.

Author's Note:

Now onto the search for a Pre-Reader.
If you liked please leave a comment, and thumbs up.
If you didn't like please leave a comment.
I appreciate any and all kinds of comments, whether they be good or bad, they assist me in becoming a better writer.

Comments

[Alzrius]

Having read the first two chapters, I feel like there's a good idea here, but it needs quite a bit of polishing.

The most obvious issue is the grammatical errors, of which there are many. Problems of capitalization, punctuation, spacing, tense, when to use italics, and more are regularly coming up throughout the work so far. I'll echo a comment that someone else made previously and strongly suggest a pre-reader or editor to help you smooth these out. Fixing those will go a long way to improving what's here, which is a good thing; if your initial problems are mostly technical errors, then that means that the underlying idea is solid.

And to be clear, the premise that this story is working off of isn't a bad one. I'm going to assume that this is an isolated pocket of resistance from the "Chrysalis conquers Equestria" alternate future shown in The Cutie Re-Mark (i.e. the season five finale). Presenting that timeline as something that's going to be changed by its inhabitants - rather than something that was created by Starlight's messing with time, and avoided when Twilight stopped her - is a nice twist on the idea (a la the X-Men Days of Future Past storyline). That you're tying in Starlight's history (by having the main characters arrive in Our Town during her rule) gives you a lot of latitude to play with, in terms of messing around with how that universe came to be. So you've laid down a good foundation to build upon.

With regards to the story's actual presentation - that is, the presentation of information, pacing, plot structure, etc. - what you have here isn't bad, but there's room for improvement. You're doing a credible job of making the plot advance in a manner that feels logical, given what we're told; this is no idle feat, as a lot of new writers have a hard time with this. By having the characters act in a manner that seems plausible for the situations they're in, you're making a good start.

The flipside to this is the characterization, which is coming off as rather flat. The characters have essentially just escaped from a war zone, thrown back in time with very little guidance or direction, and yet they're incredibly competent, with no issues of disorientation or confusion or even planning as to what they should do now. They're apparently reacting how they are because that's what they're supposed to do; I understand that we're intended to think of them as soldiers who are reacting the way soldiers would, but we're not being shown enough of the decision-making process, and that's a very important part of understanding who they are and why they're doing what they do.

Another issue is Liza's internal dialogue, which sounds stilted. Things like:

“So how’d I do?” I questioned to see how my very first solo mission went.

...sound horribly wooden. First person narration, when used to talk about themselves, should make it about what they're thinking and/or feeling. I'd change that sentence to something like:

"So? How'd I do?" I tried not to grin as I asked him, sure that he'd say I'd been flawless.

As it stands right now, this problem is probably the biggest one (after grammatical issues) that the story is laboring under. There's a lot of narration that either doesn't need to be there, since it's not helping to establish the world as seen through Liza's eyes, or needs to be more directly colored by her perceptions. Your expository dialogue isn't bad, but for more active scenes this problem tends to rear its head quite often.

Overall, I'd say that you still have a ways to go with this, but you definitely have the potential to get there. For now, find a pre-reader and keep polishing your technique. I'd recommend the old trick of - once you've written a chapter - read it out loud to yourself. That will help you compare what you think you've written to what's actually on the page (and trust me, those are often not the same thing) and more importantly will help you hear how your writing, both spoken dialogue and narration, sounds to everyone reading it.

Good luck, and keep on writing!