This story is a sequel to Tales Of The Canterlot Deportation Agency: Bree
It's part of the CDA's mission statement: every human has to ultimately be sent back to their place of origin -- and no other. To simply evacuate all of the incursions to a single receiving world could do as much damage to that place as the intruders are doing to Equestria. But even with some of those realms currently unreachable to ponies, there was always a world on the other side of the Barrier.
One of those worlds is now gone.
Seven billion are dead.
Four survive.
And Bree Daniels, once the CDA's lone agent in the world known to ponies as the abattoir, has nowhere left to go.
(Part of the Canterlot Deportation Agency series, which has its own TVTropes page. Now with author Patreon and Ko-Fi pages.)
As this story is a direct sequel to the original, I strongly recommend reading that one first.
Hey, it's someone I can recognize!
And I get to see him strangled! Best day ever.
Is there a page where I can read more about the death of Bree's universe?
Every good story should end with a heartrending dance.
This is a really poignant story. Well written indeed. I don't say this often enough, but Estee always does great work, even if I don't always agree 100% with Estee's portrayal of Equestria.
Reading between the lines, and being the first to admit I neither know much about the Old World of Darkness nor take much of an interest... it seems that, in a great irony, Bree failed to rescue any humans at all; the little girls she recovered are a Bastet (a fera - werebeast - with a cat alternate form) and a Nocker (a changeling - a faerie soul incarnated in a human body - with both a knack for machinery and a hot temper that manifests itself in an instinctive foul mouth).
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Actually, a nocker and a pooka.
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Like I said, I don't know the World of Darkness all that well. I preferred the Chronicles of Darkness, for the most part. But Joanne makes me curious; where is she from? She reminds me of the denizens of Columbia from Bioshock: Infinite...
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Baring a sudden outbreak of ideas, the next CDA one-shot story will directly focus on Joanna.
My only real complaint is the touch of hypocrisy that Celestia and less from Luna seem to have of a being that has killed bigger bads to keep their world safe. This could be from unfamiliarity of the source material about the mage type Bree is and how her own descriptions to the diarchy about herself have affected their judgement.
I never really understood why Celestia is portrayed as a uber pacifist that hates any forms of violence. Her as the voice of reason to temper Luna's more aggressive tendency's yes I can see but you cant Abor violence and then create a military/peacekeeping force and never expect them to not fight in need. Nor can you rule for over 1000 years and always find the diplomatic answer. Admittedly she sucks at building a force that can protect the country as seen by the reliance on super weapons and specialized individuals to save the day. Considering she is not as militant as Luna even after centuries of practice it might just be a personal blindspot/flaw in her personality.
Were those shadows a direct manifestation of the Wyrm?
I think the shadows were the Antediluvian of the Lasombra clan. Bloodsucking undead shadows.
Given the old WoD, her odds of anyone she rescued being a human were probably south of 50%.
A wonderfully incomplete ending for characters coming from a broken world. The story doesn’t end, it continues, because struggling for life was what the world of darkness was in many ways.
A poignant ending for Bree. I’m glad she at least has the chance to try to find some peace.
Out of curiosity, the comment about the world being reborn and potentially being worse, was that character ruminating, or a subtle jab at second edition? (I admit I have a bias towards the lore and setting of the original WoD, as it seemed more focused on hope in the night, than wallowing in a dying world, the technocracy was also a great vehicle for setting and story)
Another great story. I read most of your work, and comment on little of it, but I find that’s more an aspect of my own nature than commentary on your works, which I find exceptional, and many times though provoking.
Thank you again for this work, it truely was appreciated.
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Possible, though the scariest thing about Gehenna is that the Antediluvians are at best second-tier threats if all the crap hits the fan.
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Mage: the ascension.
Bree's history! So sad, and presented so well!
A requiem for a universe, with several billion endings sandwiched between two beginnings. Devastating work from start to finish, and I mean that in the best way. Thank you for this.
(I'm keeping the more irreverent comments to myself out of respect for the tone, but there is one question I must ask: Do I even want to know how Dr. House ended up in Equestria?)
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Irreverence away. Any dip into the old WoD requires post-traumatic decompression.
Someone finally hit him that hard.
(You can safely presume he deserved it.)
That happy/sad ending! Soo awesome!
More happy, because there are survivors at least!
Jake could probably help bring Equestrian tech levels forward... If no one else is better placed to improve things...
And Bree, being an engineer for New Cynosure! Aww! Yeah!
Those chapter titles... Arete, Avatar, and Mage: The Awakening! Whoo!
--
Midori Days, I assume?
I wonder how they got to Equestria... That part of their stories is usually interesting!
--
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"Directly focus on Johanna" Lol, how that could mean its about her, but not her POV.
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Nope.
i.pinimg.com/originals/9a/78/6e/9a786e4a5baec603d87b8aae0d7e12ba.jpg
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In fact, the chapter names are all terms from Mage: The Ascension itself; Arete is the Mage "power stat", Avatar is the Higher Soul which allows a mage to perform magic, and Awakening is the phenomena whereby a mage unlocks their Avatar in the first place - despite what you'd assume, Ascension is the end-game "transformation".
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As a matter of fact, the irony is that she didn't rescue any humans at all. She rescued changelings, fairy spirits incarnated inside of mortal vessels; that's why they're both flourishing in Equestria, as it lacks the Banality of their homeworld.
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That was my first guess. The fact that there are multiple series where something like that happens to a Japanese youth's right hand says something. I'm not sure what, but something is definitely being said.
On an almost completely different subject, the talk of sending Bree to a superhero world made me imagine her trying to work with John Constantine. Don't know terribly much about the character, so I'm not sure how big of a blast radius I'm proposing.
Wow this series and it’s crossovers have been an amazing read.
9016749
For three seconds, I thought it was going to be Ahnk. I think the most stressful part of this franchise is "hey, I know him!" followed by "No, I don't." And also the moral grey quandaries or something.
If the DC franchise wasn't already represented by Earth-3 here, I'd have thought that Constantine was already in the CDA somewhere. He fits the tone pretty well. Maybe Harry Dresden will be around somewhere. Anyway. here's the comic series following the DC Rebirth. With any luck, he'll be on the new Justice League Dark roster too.
*Alodro belches* Doesn't matter... there's an infinite number of universes... countless copies of all of us... *urp* Half the time we end up dead before we're even born! Nothing matters, nobody's special. Well, except me of course. Excuse me, I need to pay a visit to the Council of Alondros.
(Alondro was Rick before there was Rick!)
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I didn't buy the books myself, but my understanding is that each of the three major books (for Vampire, Mage, and Werewolf) had multiple end of the world scenarios for the gamemaster to choose from. I suspect that in the next chapters Estee will show us a bit more about which ones actually did Bree's version in.
Is that a Three Investigators reference I spy? Man, you really are old.
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I flipped when I heard her reference Mcgurk.
Wow, I think this is even grimmer than the _actual_ Word of Darkness, which IIRC had an apocalypse but a cyclical, "something survives to carry on" one, but admittedly I only have a superficial level of knowledge of the franchise. Also didn't know the Red Star in WoD was so chatty, thought it more of a Wormwood/sign of end times thing rather than an active player in its own right. Did it blow up the world at the end, or was that someone/something else?
(BTW, minor quibble: I'm not sure the skin of a half Irish/Vietnamese/some admixture of Polynesian could be called "yellow": light brown or olive complexion seems more likely, and even for pale north Asians such as Chinese or Japanese, describing their skin as "yellow" is a bit iffy. Some may take it as a racist insult [1])
[1] Of course Asian Americans sometimes refer to themselves as "yellow", but it's generally the sense of ethnic mobilization, as in "yellow power." And, to confuse the issue further, yellow is of course something of a Chinese national color going back to the Yellow Emperor. Of course, if you're SE Asian yourself and want to self-identify as yellow, more power to you!
Heavy but good, as the CDA stories always are.
something about this made me think of the Death Gate books, and the very nasty place known as The Labyrinth. it's so bad the people who are forced to survive there actually have a language where one of their words for "Death" is the same as a word for "Friend"!
Huh, my first thought was Vampire Hunter D but Parasyte is a great choice too.
Is this Bree character a PC Estee created for a game session? It sure feels that way.
Lately, I haven't been replying to comments as much as I should have: combination of 'writing now!' and a schedule which keeps trying to upend itself. Let's see if I can get caught up a little...
9012351
There are WoD wikis, but I'm not going to link to them for one reason: there is no single canon ending. Just about every branch was offered a multiple-choice apocalypse.
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In this case, it's also Celestia having a very real problem with the idea of using an assassin -- which, given the turmoil of this Equestria's founding years, may be something like asking Bruce Wayne to consider the practicality of carrying a gun.
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Paulon's answer is the right one.
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*snickering*
Splatbook populations add up fast, don't they? Every faction is only a rarity onto themselves, but when you start putting the numbers together...
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Truthfully? A little of both. Bree isn't exactly in a good emotional place when it comes to thinking about any possible Round Two, and there have been times when Second Edition needed some jabbing.
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And apparently, just living with ponies around -- and all the myriad expressions of humanity to be found in New Cynosure -- has lowered Jake's own Banality to the point where Kithain can approach him without pain. That's an amazing accomplishment for a Tech.
As long as I'm typing: Bree cut her hand on a chimerical sword. (Having it look like a long roll of bread was mandatory.) In the last hours, some of the rules began to break down.
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They might actually get along pretty well if he could get past his natural instinct to insult her every three seconds.
(So basically never.)
However, I can safely say that if you dropped Bree into, just for example, the DCU, Arkham's population would become somewhat smaller. In her way, she's still an engineer of sorts, and when you start looking at the presence of certain supervillains as, shall we say, practical problems...
9017857
More towards her library being deliberately understocked and mostly sticking to older titles. (Also, the last in that series was U.S.-published in 1990, so this isn't too much of a stretch forward. My local main library has a dozen or so.)
9018033
The McGurk series, however, is a terminally-underrated classic. (For those who want to look, you're searching for E. W. Hildick.)
9018053
This was a fairly literal interpretation of the red star as the 'Eye of the Wyrm.' (It's also bringing in the idea that with the true force of destruction/renewal corrupted, the entire Euthanatos tradition came about as a means to try and fill the gap.) So yes, Bree survived a hundredth of a second in mental contact with some tiny fragment of that. But don't ask what might have happened if it had gone to 0.02.
9019902
Everyone on the site is entitled to one self-insert.
Just don't ask about my count.
I didn't recognize the doctor at first until his name got brought up then it clicked. I'm surprised he allowed his leg to be healed enough to not need the cane. Maybe he wasn't given a choice.
Very apt description of OWoD; killing itself, killing the people trying to save it and telling them they should have been stronger.
So, one girl is a Qualmi Bastet, don't know what the other is though.
And silly Bree, the girls are human, just not only human. It was a very important fact, having humanity, that the lack of it is a core drive or all the various games.
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My guess, all of them. Because why have any less?
So, did the philosophy teacher have Faith? Such a rare and powerful thing. But it was there, people had it and things couldn't stand it.
What's up with the bread? I wasn't playing at the time so I missed out on the end of the world fun. Why couldn't the bread be touched?
What was it that got into Allyse? I never got into Wraith but I know enough to recognize "the shadowlands" and a few other bits.
I see what you did there.
9020515
First, from the other comment: the girls (siblings, BTW) are both Kithain: a nocker and a pooka. Not the first time a pooka's been confused for a shifter.
As said above in the bulk comment, the bread was the cover appearance of a chimerical sword. The world was buckling, and so its true aspect registered to the touch. Painfully.
Allyse was killed by a master Puppeteer wraith using the Obliterate The Soul arcanoi: attunement, numerous 'rides' to get ready, and then permanent removal of the original occupant. This allows the wraith to occupy the body full-time, but also renders that body unusable after a couple of weeks. It's also murder, and the Shadow feasts.
Above all else I am happy that Bree was able to bring herself to dance. I am tempted to make some song references but, no, not this time.
It is so easy to give up, to let the weight crush you. Saying "No" and moving on is so much harder. Bree isn't the sort to go easy, so she dances.
Johanna is the sort of person that needs a reminder that the right to free speech is not the same as immunity to the consequences of the things you say.
I do love that she is so bad even the pony wants her to shut up.
So I was wrong about one of the girls, Changeling was also one of the ones I never got into. At least they won't have to worry about life being too Bland from now on though.
I'm curious as to what the ones with the emerald were trying to do, and what they wound up actually doing in the end.
Was the count on the wind the number of people still alive or something else?
What was that fire in the end?
So many questions, so few answers.
Looking forward to more, as always.
(Kinda wanna bitch slap this version of Celestia and tell her to pull her horn out of her cake fattened rear.)
9020579
Yeah, didn't read the comments before the story. Bread got brought up twice by that point so I had thought it was something more important. But, no, just fae weirdness.
Until now, I always thought Triptych was your greatest work, and although I enjoyed your side-stories, I always wondered when the next Triptych piece would appear. The months were divided between waiting for the next chapter, then dismally waiting for the end of the month so the next wait could begin. I'd always avoided the CDA stories because I just didn't think I'd be interested in that kind of thing, until I didn't.
This was brilliant, and terrible, in all the right ways. I went to bed troubled by the things you have painted with your words, the story that was told here, and this, this...now I see what powerful things you can write, it felt, it almost felt like, the ponies were holding you back. This is a story that could be shared with anybody, not knowing what ponies are, and derive great enjoyment.
Reading this was a beautiful agony, a bar set so high, I scarce believe it could be crossed again. Your world is challenging, confrontational, and all the more poignant because it is not so far from our own. We can easily see the imagined wrongs you describe and wish that we had the power to undo them, yet I wondered if I had not walked past a dozen of your characters and never known. Never done anything.
I felt disempowered, frustrated, and useless. I don't think I've ever felt this way about a story, fan-fiction or otherwise, in my life.
Thank you. I truly enjoyed reading your work.
Kudos to doing a damn good interpretation of the world of darkness end times. I just got finished reading all your CDA fics because I had skipped them for some reason, and I was pleasantly surprised at how well you managed to breath a lot of emotion and feeling into an otherwise goofy multiverse idea.
I'm always looking forward to your stories, keep up the good work.
"and know you have to go out into the cold. It was below freezing, and it was just me and this old woman at the bus stop. And... I don't know if ponies do this, because you're not as much for clothing. But with some humans, fashion is just about everything. It's more important than food or paying your bills or health. There"
"and know you have to go out into the cold. It was below freezing, and it was just me and this old woman at the bus stop. And... I don't know if ponies do this, because you're not as much for clothing. But with some humans, fashion is just about everything. It's more important than food or paying your bills or health. There"?
And this is why Nergal Jahad is a bastard.
I'd probably be more tempted to complain about the obvious Trump reference if it were less subtle, but three years in and so many ridiculously stupidly overt "dark lord drumpf" characters, I'm just glad you kept it subtle. Admittedly, the lack of saying his name stands out a little, but fuck it, it works fine.
Damn. A fitting end, but damn. This one was an emotional roller coaster and a prime example of why you shouldn't read too much of Estee in a dark mood in a single sitting
Still loved it though, but didn't want to see WoD die... at least not like that.
9020515
Seconding the question about bread. Loving this. It's bleak and kinda depressing but goddamnit it's good.