Sol 283
AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 287
ARES III SOL 283
“… and that’s the end of the chapter,” Starlight Glimmer said, pushing away the computer. The others began stretching where they sat, reluctant to put their spacesuits back on to leave the cave, now that the daily routine was complete. She didn’t want to get up either, but for better reasons than ordinary dislike of being in a pressure suit.
“What was that big long poem about?” Fireball asked. “We gonna read about Earen-whozit?”
“The author spent his life making a huge mythology,” Mark said from his seat, nearest as always to the cocoon. “From the creation of the world up to Frodo’s adventure. He even created whole languages and writing systems for it. It’s the background for the story. Earendil, as it happens, is Elrond’s dad, and the poem tells about how he goes to the gods to beg for help to defeat the great evil of the world. And afterwards he became the morning star- what we call Venus, the second planet, today.”
“And do we meet him?” Fireball asked.
“Nope,” Mark said. “Tolkien was showing off a bit. The only relevance is this: Earendil’s grandparents were an elf and a man. He and his descendants were given the ability to, well, stop being elves and become human. But once an elf becomes human, they become mortal. They die and pass out of the universe. Elves remain, even if they get killed. So it’s a one-way decision. And Elrond is Earendil’s son. And Arwen is Elrond’s daughter. Elrond has made his decision, but Arwen hasn’t yet.”
“Nothing about Frodo,” Fireball grumbled. “Then not important. Waste of time.”
“What about Bilbo?” Spitfire paused a few seconds, and everyone knew it was to line up the English words in her head. “Remember the part with the Ring? What happened to him?”
“Pretty obvious,” Cherry Berry said. “The Ring was working on him. Working on Frodo, too. It made him see Bilbo different.”
“But why would it do that?” Spitfire asked.
“Make enemies,” Fireball said. “Ring don’t want to go back to Bilbo. Also, Ring wants Frodo alone, no friends, no help, when Black Riders come back.”
“Maybe it’s not on purpose,” Cherry suggested. “The Ring makes everyone want it, right?”
“Gandalf said the Ring has mind of its own,” Fireball insisted. “It doing it on purpose, for sure.”
“But why now?” Spitfire asked. “Why in Rivendell, in safe place?”
“So that nowhere is safe,” Fireball replied. “Teach Frodo to hate everybody, suspect everybody. Make everybody fight, weaken party, take Ring from them left.”
“Huh.” Spitfire considered this a moment. “Mark, is Fireball right?”
“Spoilers.”
“So he IS right!”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Ugh.” Spitfire looked at Starlight. “What do you think?”
Starlight took a deep breath. “I think we should read something else,” she said.
“What? But the book only half over!” Fireball insisted. “And two books after!”
“Why do you think we should read something else?” Cherry Berry asked.
“Because,” Starlight said, “I don’t want to encourage comparisons between the One Ring and Dragonfly.” There. She’d said it. And, of course, now that she’d said it, comparisons were guaranteed.
And, right on cue, Cherry Berry began them. “Oh, come on!” she insisted. “Chrysalis is a bad person, but she’s not a Dark Lord. Dark Lords don’t get embarrassed or flustered. Dark Lords don’t spend weeks as a paperweight because they got sucker-punched.”
“Irrelevant,” Starlight said. “We all know Dragonfly tried to manipulate us. Not like the One Ring- she tried to bring us together, or at least to keep us from attacking each other. But remember when Chrysalis suggested we were angry at each other because of her?”
“And she was wrong,” Cherry said. “She was testing us to see.”
“Mmmm, maybe, maybe,” Spitfire began, struggling for words, “maybe Dragonfly like horcrux more than Ring.”
“The horcruxes were definitely intelligent,” Starlight said. “That’s not a good argument.”
Mark pushed himself to his feet. “I think I’ll spoil you a little,” he said. “One of the key messages of the Lord of the Rings story is that all evil has its beginning within ourselves. You’re going to see examples of that in later chapters. And by the end, I’m pretty sure you won’t be comparing Dragonfly to the One Ring.” He took a deep breath and added, “For one thing, nobody is going to use Dragonfly as a wedding prop.”
Starlight’s train of thought derailed spectacularly. From the looks on everypony else’s faces, the same thing happened to them. “Um, what?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Mark said, grinning. “When I was a kid these really big, expensive movies came out based on these books. And for a while there was this fad where geeks got married using reproductions of the One Ring.”
Starlight felt facial muscles struggling to find their positions, as her emotional coach had just called an audible not in the playbook. “You let people get married with the One Ring?” she asked.
“Not the real one, obviously,” Mark said. “It’s just a story.”
“People get married,” Cherry Berry said in the same tone as Starlight, “with an evil, evil magic ring? Even if is fake? And people knew it was evil?”
“Um… yeah. But when you put it like that-“
“What is wrong with your species??” Starlight shrieked.
Mark pondered this. “Would you like me to write out a list?”
Starlight grunted, getting up and moving for her suit. “Never mind,” she said. “Dragonfly isn’t the evil influence. Mark is.”
“Well, of course I am,” Mark admitted. “I’m the bard, after all.”
“Maybe we take vote,” Fireball rumbled, a smirk on his muzzle. “Once Dragonfly is out, we put Mark in instead. And every day we visit we stuff three potatoes each in.”
Starlight sighed. “First we have to get her out,” she said. “Three days until we try it. And if the next bit doesn’t work, I don’t know what else to do.”
“Besides get a stick,” Spitfire muttered.
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I once marathoned the extended edition Blu-Rays of the Hobbit trilogy and the LotR trilogy; took me nearly 24 hours of continual watching, pausing only for bathroom breaks, food, and changing the discs.
Oh I really liked this chapter. Nice character development for Fireball. Good way of showing, despite draconic instincts and pride, he is a very intelligent individual. He connected the dots before anyone else.
Edit:
As an afterthought, I would point out ponies use effigies of Nightmare Moon to have fun on Nightmare Night, despite her having been Evil. Bit hypocritical don't you think?
Always fun to see pony reactions to Tolkein.
I am a bit worried about Dragonfly at this point.
Have we had an inkling of what they'll be reading after The Hobbit? I can't recall. Probably something else magical-ish. Or maybe they could go the complete opposite direction and read something cyberpunkish. It would actually be pretty interesting to my mind how they might react to a world with cyborgs and digital uploads and AIs.
I just wanted to say, I never got the love for the One Ring reproductions either.
I think getting married with the One Ring is reclaiming it from evil?
8983879
They're reading the Lord of the Rings now.
8983891
The elven rings are still evil. At least if my tolkien lore is op to the task.
For a while there almost every wedding featured the song "I will always love you" which is about a mistress leaving the guy she was sleeping with so he could be with his wife.
8983895
From what I recall only the One Ring and maybe the rings it corrupted were evil. The elven rings and I think some of the dwarven rings never fell under its influence.
8983895 8983903 The three Elven rings were not corrupted, but they could still be controlled by Sauron- they and their wearers, which is why Celebrimbor yanked his ring off the instant he felt Sauron complete the One Ring.
The reason the Elvish rings were not corrupted is that Celebrimbor wrought them himself, with no involvement of Sauron's. The self-named "Master of Gifts" had at least assisted in the making of all the Seven and the Nine, and thus they were corrupted. (Dwarves didn't fade as Men did, nor could Sauron directly control them, because their substance rejected all domination, but their rings did make them more greedy for gold.)
8983870 It's more BECAUSE of draconic instincts. "Trust nobody" is very much classic draconic thinking.
For fun, and for other reasons, I recorded Fireball's lines from this chapter: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/453307228087123978/456617156457529344/Sol_283_Fireball.mp3
8983993
Thank you so much! I'll take that as a compliment. :D
This is the voice I'll be using for Fireball in the projects I'm working on with a few other readers. No idea when we'll be done though, sorry. If you'd like more information, you can PM me.
8983895
The elven rings were pure of Sauron's influence, but they were still vulnerable to the direct commands of the One. The elven rings can only be used when Sauron does not posses the One, as when he does, anyone wearing an elven ring will fall under his control. The "defiance" that cased the destruction of Eregion was the elves immediately sensing Sauron when he wore the One for the first time, and in defiance taking off their rings and hiding them.
Great, now Im getting confused between The One Ring,, Dragonfly, and Time Bandits.
Dont touch that dad, its Pure Weeville.
Hey, you ponies use effigies of nightmare moon for fun during Nightmare Night, stop being so hypocritical.
And Chryssie is much prettier than Sauron.
8984006 I was asked in PM, but I'd like to share this with you all. It's about the mentality behind the ponies' grasp of English.
Early on, of course, everyone had trouble.
Starlight Glimmer and Dragonfly, for different but similar reasons, threw themselves into learning English. By the time Dragonfly has her collapse, both are for all practical purposes fluent. Dragonfly is stronger in speaking English, and Starlight in writing it, because that's where their focuses were when learning: Starlight was focused on writing documents that Mark's people could understand, while Dragonfly was focused on communicating with Mark on a personal level.
Cherry Berry is (as of Sol 283) not fluent but almost there. She had much less motivation at first, but that changed as she accepted her leadership role. It changed even more once the MDV had been converted into a flight-sim that required English. She's determined to pilot the MAV, and she needs to be fluent when the time comes. She stumbles sometimes- either getting a verb tense wrong without noticing or getting hung up for a second on a word before finding a workaround.
Fireball still speaks caveman talk because he doesn't much care. Can he make himself understood well enough? Yes. Good. That's all he needs. Although the English he speaks is pretty badly broken, he doesn't hesitate or hang up on word choice. He only pauses or talks slowly on the rare occasions he really wants a specific word that he doesn't have. He speaks at normal conversational pace and with normal conversational emphasis and cadences otherwise. He writes much better than he talks.
Spitfire wants to learn proper English, but her mind simply isn't wired to learn new languages easily. She's not fluent or even close, and the odds are good she never will be. Any sentence will come out haltingly and awkward, as Spitfire pieces every word together with significant effort on her part. The exceptions are sentences that are learned by rote as phrases or which Spitfire has had ample time and attention to plan in advance.
All of them understand English better than they speak it, just as Mark can pick up quite a lot of Equestrian simply from prolonged exposure and context.
8984063 Oh: and yes, reading time is torture when it's Spitfire's turn to read aloud. Even Fireball can read from text more or less correctly, but Spitfire's still sounding out half the words. She generally has the shortest turns with the books.
“First we have to get her out,” she said. “Three days until we try it. And if the next bit doesn’t work, I don’t know what else to do.”
time to get a BFS.
8984063
Thank you for that information. I've passed this along to my group in the Discord server we're in, so they'll be sure to see it. I'm going to keep going with the Fireball voice I have unless you have more specific direction for it. I'll try to keep his poor grasp of English in mind, but that aspect is more said and not shown in the words written for him.
Just for shits and giggles i want the stick thing to be what actually works
8983294 I wouldn't risk it. Cyanogenic glycosides just shouldn't be toyed with. Many people have poisoned themselves with overconfidence.
8984111 Cherry leaf tea is a fairly common product, apparently. And if any pony knows how to take care to make cherry tea safely, it's Cherry Berry.
Really? I propose we ask her, and see what she says.
Yeah, go ahead and ask Chyrslias if she does either of those things. She might just show you how much of a Dark Lord she is.
I think I'd like to see them tackle the issue of divinity and religion. Mark outright refused to explain when Starlight originally asked him what the word 'god' meant. And it's come up several times since then. The power of an "evil god" in the alicorn amulet. The Valar, now that they're reading the Lord of the Rings. Starlight playing a cleric, and apparently nobody had to explain to her what a god is. Etc.
At the same time, throughout the story the ponies have been making all the usual casual references to Celestia as a deity. "Praise Celestia" "Sweet Celestia" "Celestia damned" etc. And Starlight at one point mentioned knowing Chaos personally. JPL said they'd follow up on that, but they never did.
Maybe the pony conception of divinity isn't quite the same as the human conception. If Mark were to directly ask if they have "gods" in their world, maybe they'd say yes or maybe they'd say no. Their concept of divinity might not be the same. It would be interesting to see this addressed.
It would also be interesting to see the human perspective on the pony perspective. What is a god to humans has a certain degree of artistic license involved. Thor and Odin are thought of as gods because of their mythological origins, but Dr. Manhattan and Q generally aren't thought of that way, even though they're clearly both more powerful and more knowing.
Celestia clearly fits the bill of a classical sun goddess. Discord clearly fits as the god of chaos. But for example, if you were to ask a human to describe what makes a god a god, you might get an answer that described Q pretty closely. Ask that same person if Q is a god, and they might insist that he isn't, even though he fits the description they just gave.
Ponies might have a similar view of some of their real life personifications of primal forces, like the sun, the moon, chaos, etc. So maybe they do, or maybe they don't think of these beings as deities. Or maybe some do, and some of them don't.
But what will the humans think when they come to terms with the reality of their existence?
It would be interesting to see this addressed.
8984194 If you know exactly what you're doing, then it's ok. The leaves must be harvested fresh and undamaged, then quickly heat-dried to deactivate the enzymes which form the glycosides.
Wilted or damaged cherry leaves must never be used, as they already have produced cyanide.
8983294
Yeah, if they ate 3 or 4 leaves each they would definitely start to feel the effects.
I do not recommend eating them.
However, as HCN boils at 25 C, a few minutes at 100 C will remove all but a trace of it.
Hm. I do wonder why that comparison occurred to Starlight... It doesn't seem that natural to me. I don't think that's likely a flaw in the writing (it doesn't seem to be a sensible-seeming idea to Cherry Berry either, for instance), but that leaves me curious about the particulars of the perspective difference.
So cherry leaves are sort of the fugu of the plant kingdom.
It's all in the preparation and selection.
Provides something very precious, a new flavor!
8984198
Generally, we tend to think of gods as beings who are beyond the normal rules of the world, so it depends on the setting.
The gods of Ancient Greece are less powerful than the Q if you force the setting to be compatible with our contemporary view by throwing out things like "Atlas holds up the sky", but we accept them as such "because 'suspension of disbelief' and 'setting'" in the same way that we accept a good crackfic (or something crackfic-like such as Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). Our sense of "baseline normal" varies depending on the story. (That's why you need Arthur Dent as a straight man. To pin down "normal" so the setting can be absurd in an effective manner.)
In the Star Trek setting, everything is so fundamentally rational and scientific that gods effectively cannot exist. If it can interact with reality, it can be measured. If it can be measured, science can investigate and define it. If science can investigate and define it in a setting with physics that present themselves as a variation on the real world, then it cannot be a god. Therefore, it cannot satisfy the intuitive "isn't constrained to the limits of reality as we know them and can overrule them in some way" rule we use to define "god". Q isn't supernatural, he's just evidence that "natural" encompasses more than we thought. (Which is also why, as soon as you cross Star Trek or something like Stargate SG-1 with a fantasy setting, the mind starts reaching for rational explanations for the fantasy setting's gods. The real world is hundreds of billions of stars in hundreds of billions of galaxies within a galactic horizon which is hypothesized to be maybe 1% of the total size of the universe based on observed measurements. That kind of scale has a lot of power to enforce viewpoints built on it as the most correct view of the nature of the universe.)
In the Discworld, it's not hard for small gods to exist, because the setting's physics are so fundamentally and explicitly disjoint from ours that it forces us to accept that it's a different universe with different physics. If forced, we draw a distinction between Discworld's gods and the conception of "god" that Friedrich Nietzsche metaphorically claimed we killed. (ie. As far as we're concerned, the existence of gods is a facet of Discworld's physics disjoint from our own, just like the morning light pouring over mountains like honey due to the intense ambient magic field.)
Oh Mark, never underestimate how bizarre themed weddings can get.
In fact, it would be completely unsurprising if someone wanted a 'stranded on mars' theme for their wedding.
With potato and alfalfa dishes featured prominently in the catering.
8984382
The temporary insanity was mostly caused by lying to others because she was raised in a secretive society and thus starving herself. But I've been over this, and there's no reason to really bring this back up, other than to give you the context missing from my point of view. That done, I'm dropping this.
8984052
Wow, good point.
The question of what various cultures from Equis think about religion, divinity and gods is fascinating, but I understand if Kris is unwilling to explore it too much. It may take up a lot of time and attention while not meaningfully progressing the story (presumably if Equestrians could just ask the Almighty Faust to rescue the castaways, they would have already).
I've certainly seen a lot of different takes on it in FimFiction: some "default" options (ponies have a god or multiple, but aren't really sure if they exist), some where everyone scoffs at even the thought of religion, some where Celestia and Luna are physical goddesses and hang out in the afterlife when they feel like it, and other variations as well
8984063
8983870
8984550
Speaking of wedding props, did the ponies ever take that offer to merchandize their likeness? Or are all pony toys fan-made? Because I can totally picture a pony-themed wedding.
Also, it'd be cute if a few trick-or-treaters dressed as a cocooned Dragonfly (or the Mars pathfinder) for Halloween.
If the One Ring could fly a spaceship and produce useful organic compounds, Frodo might have succumbed earlier.
8983901
To say nothing of "Every Breath You Take," which is transparently about a stalker. Or allusions to Romeo and Juliet, because every romance should end in a miscommunication-induced double suicide.
8984879
Actually, that was answered just after the midpoint of Sol 267.
https://www.twitch.tv/nasa
NASA is streaming a spacewalk right now.
8984616 Ripe tomatoes don't contain saponin in sufficient quantities to cause any harm... saponin itself being a toxic glycoside. The plants are a different story.
Now, raw potatoes DO contain enough to make one ill, and if they were exposed to the sun while growing and they turn green, then they have enough to become quite toxic even to the point where cooking isn't necessarily enough to break it down.
And yet, in New Jersey, the accursed white-tailed deer have mutated into horrible forms which can gorge on your potato and tomato plants with impunity. They must die...
8985028 Then there's Alan Parson's Project's "Eye in the Sky". Absolutely crazy stalker material who also believes he's psychic.
"Break My Stride" from Matthew Wilder was a happy, cheerful break-up song.
And then there's "Jump" fromVan Halen... which one should never play in a suicide ward.
8983897
What ring did Gandalf have?
8987843
From the wiki:
"The first ring, Narya (Ring of Fire), was adorned with a red gemstone.....In the Third Age, Círdan (of the Grey Havens), recognizing Gandalf's true nature as one of the Maiar from Valinor, gave him the ring to aid him in his labours. It is described as having the power to inspire others to resist tyranny, domination, and despair (in other words, evoking hope in others around the wielder), as well as giving resistance to the weariness of time."
Thank you. You made my day.
Damn this chapters crack me up
Brilliant humor
I thought it had it's beginning within Big Evil Guy
(or within god who made big evil guy, but normally we don't go there)
8987843
Also, took the One Ring from Bilbo. (He wanted to give it up but couldn't quite do it.)
G put it on the mantle over the fire to wait for Bilbo. He was still technically the owner for about a minute. It shook him.
Lord of the Rings... Nice way to explain away a bad Marriage life
I prefer Neckless and silver Rings. Easyer on the eyes.
Correction: MOST evil in Ea comes from selfishness. The Ring's, like a significant amount of it, comes from Mairon being a slut.