Pinkie groaned, because everything was sore. But then she smiled wickedly because everything was sore. Twilight slept beside her. She didn’t snore, just a soft rise-and-fall of her chest. The corset was strewn about on the floor, but she’d fallen asleep with the skirt on.
Pinkie rolled out of bed, careful not to wake her. She stretched, rolling her neck, working her jaw. Wow, that was especially sore. She grinned again, letting the bone click as it settled back into place. Yeah, that was a really fun one.
Fluids. Salt and sugar. She needed those stat before she could crawl back into bed, or she’d wake up like a zombified lich mummy. With cottonmouth. She’d learned her lessons about sleeping dehydrated after her second cider season.
She had learned nothing from her first.
It took her a few steps down the stone hall, following the grooved path from Twilight’s room to the library and towards the kitchen, before she wondered why her hoofsteps weren’t ringing in her ears.
Oh yeah. She was still wearing the socks. Hee hee. What were originally meant to be sexy powers were sneaky powers now. Truly, socks were a force to be reckoned with.
Past where the groove ended at the library, down the stairs on tippy-hooves to the kitchen. Applejack had been cooking. Ooh. That was right: That wasn’t entirely on her every morning. She had a helper now.
Dining room then, and see if there was -- sniff sniff, breakfast apple strudel? -- some still left for her.
Everypony else was in the dining room when she got to the door, and she could hear them all. The doors were open, so she could see them all by looking at them through a mirror hanging on the wall. She paused. She was still sneaky-sneaky right now, and it felt like a waste to announce herself.
“Pinkie knew I was joking when I said I was giving them time off so they could hook up, right?” Applejack said in the next room, “I ain’t even mad. Just... unimpressed, I should say, is the word.”
Pinkie felt the blood rush out of her face and into her cheeks at the same time, caught halfway between the cold embarrassment of getting caught doing something you weren’t supposed to be doing, and the hot embarrassment that comes from being proud of having done it.
Then Cadance laughed. Pinkie pressed her ear to the wall as she watched their reflections. “Just be happy they gave you the courtesy. Did you see the way Twilight was looking at that sweet girl?”
“Ah, not much. Maybe a little? Didn’t see them together much.”
“My special talent is recognizing the love ponies have for each other, but even you should be able to see that Twilight looks at her like she’s the last ray of sunshine in the whole wide world.”
“It’s weird.” Rainbow Dash admitted, dipping some bread soldiers into an egg, “Before all this, Pinkie was just annoying. I mean, she was great to be around in small doses, but you couldn’t take more than that. Actually, you know what the difference is? You know how some ponies don’t think before they speak? Pinkie didn’t listen before she spoke. Now she does and every, like, fifth sentence starts with; 'Twilight said-'"
That totally wasn’t how her voice sounded. Also, hey! Also, she did kind of do that, didn’t she? She couldn’t really help it...
“You want to see something really cute?” Cadance leaned forward and stage whispered. Fluttershy tried hard not to look like she was leaning in closer to listen, as she leaned in closer to listen. “Every time Pinkie does that in front of her, Twilight goes from staring at her, to completely unable to look at her. She looks down like she got caught with the cookie jar. It’s the sweetest thing.”
Applejack grunted. “Wonder why?”
Cadance was in full gossip mode now. She was leaning forward, resting her chin in her hooves and her elbows on the middle of the table. “Because I taught her modesty, and Pinkie talks about her like she’s the smartest pony that ever lived.”
Fluttershy sipped at her orange juice through a straw, her eyes focused on nothing in particular. “They really respect each other, don’t they?”
Cadance nodded enthusiastically, overflowing.
Rainbow snorted. “So why didn’t they just, you know, doink already?”
Shining stopped mid-bite of his strudel, thumped his chest and put it back down on the plate. “Can we not say it like that...? But, knowing my baby sister, because ‘the fate of the whole world was on the line’. Every second she spent not saving the world was another second of freedom she was taking from everyone else. Her brain works like that.”
Applejack rolled her eyes. “Yeah, they couldn’t have waited even a second longer...?”
Cadance snorted. “Please, are you kidding me? You’re lucky Twilight didn’t just drag her by the mane, neanderthal-style, as soon as she got some responsibility taken off her. Little ladybug was pent. Up. I bet she felt too guilty to take care of herself without permission, poor thing.”
Ooh, she was good.
“Cadance!” Shining choked on something, maybe even nothing. “My baby sister.”
“Shining, I love you and I know it’s weird to think of your sister as a sexual creature, but tell me I’m wrong.”
“You’re not, and that’s why I’m so upset right now.”
“Aww! That’s sweet of you to think about her so innocently. Just think how she feels about her big brother and her favourite babysitter, then.”
“Oh, geeze. I did not think that one through...”
Cadance’s smile dropped, and she looked at Applejack levelly. “Trust me, it’s much better to work with than the alternative. So don’t get annoyed when they make some transparent excuse and run off for an hour, or else you’re going to have to work with stressed-out, grumpy Twilight. We don’t want that.”
Rainbow shrugged, left with more soldiers than egg and wondering if she really wanted to eat the plain toast or not. “I mean, it’s been two years with these two locked in a broom closet together. It’d be weirder to think this wasn’t going to happen.”
“What, you reckon we would have?” Applejack said.
“Yeah, probably.”
Applejack looked her up and down, and shrugged. “Maybe.”
“I probably would have, with Rarity.” Fluttershy whispered. Everyone stared at her, and she hid behind her mane. “Well, I wouldn’t have let her be evil. I mean.”
“Huh.” Applejack rapped her strudel thoughtfully against the table, “Don’t that beat all.”
Cadance giggled. “You should see what’d happen if you locked me in a castle with the cute pink one for two years...”
“Honey!”
“I love you!”
“... I love you too.”
Pinkie’s breath had caught in her throat at that, and she exhaled slowly. Her first instinct to gasp air back in would have given her away. Quiet, slow breath back in. Cadance was giggling evilly under her breath.
Fluttershy was whispering again. “Two years of that... and she didn’t let herself...?”
Applejack raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, we just talked about how hard it’d be not to... fall into a... get smoochy?” Fluttershy tapped her hooves together and looked at the floor, letting her hair cover her face again. “But she thought that made her a bad pony, because she thought it was selfish to put that over the whole world.”
“Well, yeah. I guess we’ve gone over that. So what?”
“Do you think she might hate us?”
Rainbow lowered the soldier she’d given in to eating, just before she bit on it. “Woah, now. Hate us? Why hate us? What’d we do?”
“Twilight gave up so much to be here. And she kept giving it up. Don’t you think we might seem a little... ungrateful? Like, she did it all for everyone else, and we just talked down to her...”
Rainbow and Applejack held their breath. Applejack’s face twisted up.
“Yeah, but that was her choice. It ain’t like... I mean, she can’t... Dangit.”
“She’s not saying she does,” Rainbow murmured, “She’s just saying that, if I were her, I’d hate my guts right now.”
Fluttershy didn’t raise her head, not even a little. “I don’t know about that...”
“Dang it!”
“You’re here for her now,” Shining pointed out. “If you want to help, when it seems like she’s working too hard and needs to take a break, don’t tell her that. Offer to take over what she’s doing, on the condition she does something else. Probably tell her to talk to Pinkie, it seems like she’s had the most experience at this point in figuring out what my sister needs.”
Rainbow snickered. “I bet she has.”
Shining stared directly at her. Rainbow shrank behind the table a little, and crammed her mouth full of bread so she couldn’t speak.
Pinkie took that as her cue to burst in. “Good morning, everybody!”
They all stared at her. She looked down. She was still wearing the socks. There was an obvious bite mark taken out of her back right one. “Oh, you all knew.”
Applejack’s eyes never left the teeth marks as Pinkie took her seat at the table. “Twilight likes it rough, huh?”
Shining’s face fell to the table and he groaned. “Please. Please, do we have to do this?”
“It’s always the quiet ones,” Cadance said to herself wistfully. Everyone looked towards Fluttershy, whose blushing face receding below the tableline reminded Pinkie of a setting sun.
Pinkie took a big helping of mushrooms from the table. Mushrooms grew just the same as they ever did, and they made a really good, protein-heavy breakfast, which she needed. “Would you believe me if I said I was just expecting to quietly read together, and maybe some snuggling?”
Rainbow Dash burst out laughing, breathing in some toast crumbs and hacking on them in the process. Applejack and Shining actually considered her though, and Applejack nodded with her arms folded in front of her.
“Reckon I do. Nice to know you weren’t just being coy or taking advantage of me then. Not that I thought you were, mind, just... nice to know.”
Shining looked almost as incredulous as he had when Cadance had admitted to not reading Sandman. “You’re telling me that my sister did anything like that without a plan?”
“Oh! Yeah! She planned on me saying ‘no’. So when I said ‘yes’ she got way-ahead-of-herself enthusiastic. Then she had a panic attack the second she stopped to think about what she was doing.”
Shining massaged the bridge of his nose, just between his eyes, by holding his hoof still and nodding his head into it. “That is definitely Twily, yes.”
“So I phrased it like a problem to be solved instead, and told her to present her solution as a list. Then I gave her some alone time to think, but not enough to overthink.”
Shining Armor still looked like a man having a crisis, but he smiled even through the balled-up-scrunchy-face. “I understand why she likes you so much.”
Cadance head snapped up. “That’s why you were in the hall after you disappeared from the library! I knew--” Then she clamped her mouth shut and went to hide under the table with Fluttershy.
“Dearest, sweet wife of mine... were you snooping?”
“There was a big burst of love in the library, and then it just disappeared! I needed to check!” Cadance’s voice rang through the table. Pinkie ate the mushrooms and they were good. Spicy, actually. Definitely had to get the recipe for this, they’d make a great burger...
Huh? Rainbow was watching her, leaning forward, waiting for her to do something. “What?”
“Aren’t you going to get mad or something?”
“Why? She was being nice.”
Applejack tipped her hat back, making sure her smirk disappeared whenever Shining looked in her direction. “Some folks would care about modesty, privacy, that sort of thing.”
“Not me though. Just ask Fluttershy, right?”
Fluttershy squeaked, and Cadance made the noise children make when they meet a puppy for the first time. “She’s acting all flustered, while hiding under the table! Ah! Oh, sorry, this isn’t helping, is it?”
Rainbow stuck her head under the table, down periscope. “Fluttershy?”
“Pinkie wiggled her eyebrows at me, a lot, on the way to Twilight’s room. In the socks... she was very pleased with herself...”
“I was!” Pinkie said. Rainbow grinned, and Cadance bumped her hoof under the table. “I think Cadance is more hiding from her husband, cause of the whole... peeping on his little sister thing? Secret wingmare stuff?”
“I love you!” Cadance sang out under the table.
Shining’s expression was as impassive and unmoving as a cliff face. “Not coming out, yet?”
“Looove you.”
Applejack and Rainbow made the hummed ‘ah’ of understanding, and Pinkie continued to appreciate the mushrooms.
It was Applejack that seemed to consider that. “Would Twilight be okay with it. Heck, with you being so honest about it?”
“I think so. I don’t know. It’s less that she likes honesty than I don’t think she understands being dishonest.”
“Morning, everypony,” Twilight’s tone was absolutely professional as she walked into the kitchen. She’d showered, her hair was brushed to precision, and her posture was perfection. Pinkie hadn’t seen her like this since she first came to Ponyville. She looked... normal, which really wasn’t normal for her.
Twilight smiled. Everyone stared back at her silently. Cadance and Fluttershy’s heads popped out from under the table to join. Silence. Twilight’s smile clattered to the floor.
“You know?”
“We heard.” Applejack confirmed. “Before Pinkie showed up, I mean.”
Pinkie expected Twilight to blush, or get nervous. Twinge in her heart even worried she’d deny it, pretend it didn’t happen. Do the teenager getting caught with their first crush routine.
She didn’t expect Twilight to sigh, “Can’t be helped,” and kiss her on the cheek before sitting down for breakfast. It didn’t seem like anyone else did either, especially not Shining. Cadance seemed to take that as absolution, and took her seat back beside him.
Twilight took a piece of toast from the table and chewed on it. “Any questions?” She whipped around on Rainbow, whose face had lit up. “Respectful ones.”
Rainbow folded her arms across her chest, slid down in her chair, and sulked.
Pinkie raised her hoof. Her girlfriend looked at her like she’d tried to fit the whole thing in her mouth. “You can just ask, Pinkie, you don’t need permission.”
“Oh! I was just going to ask where Spike is?”
Twilight bent over and looked under the table. “He wasn’t with Cadance and Fluttershy? Hello, Fluttershy, by the way.”
“Hello, Twilight. It’s lovely to see you.”
Cadance fielded the question. “He’s in the library with some ice cream. Moondancer has been sending him notes all morning, poor thing.”
Twilight grabbed the toast, held it in her teeth, gave the room a perfunctory nod, and ran out. Pinkie had a private smile at everyone’s confusion, and even Applejack being a little offended. Shining was smiling the same way. Twilight could get used to having friends around her for the first time in two years after the important work was done.
Then Shining noticed she was smiling the same way, and he seemed to think really hard about that. He was so overprotective, it was great.
Pinkie grabbed a big pot of coffee and ran after her, waving goodbye as she did.
She followed Twilight to the library. It was super easy if you didn’t know, or if you couldn’t see because your face was full of coffee pot: all you had to do was trace the grooves in the floor back up.
The door was still open. Spike was sulking on the floor with his entire head inside an ice cream bucket. Dozens of scrolls were piled on a reading table behind him, and Twilight pored over the notes.
Spike lifted his head out of the bucket. “When she gets like this, it’s best to leave her alone and let her figure it out for herself. Trust me.”
That was... what? No. What? “The entire time you’ve known her, you didn’t get her to just... talk to you before she did something?”
Spike shrugged. “I mostly just try to be a supportive listener.”
“How many things blew up?”
“A metric butt-ton, but when Twilight gets something in her head-”
“That’s why you need to know what she’s thinking before you start getting worried. Or else it’s just going to be too late, and everything’s already on fire. Why did I think you were good at this?!”
Spike pulled himself off the floor with a shrug and dragged himself to the door, ice cream bucket pressed to his chest. “See if you do any better. I got real bad heartburn anyway... euugh.”
Then it was just Pinkie in the room with Twilight, and her pile of papers. Pinkie wasn’t quiet about coming up behind Twilight at her library desk, but Twilight didn’t even turn her head to acknowledge her.
“Wow.” Pinkie looked over the pile as she put the coffee next to Twilight. How did you stack scrolls that high without the tubes sliding around...? Practice, probably. “This is a lot of stuff.”
Twilight began drinking from the pot like it was a mug. “Most of it’s the work I sent Moondancer to look over. I’m just looking at her notes to see if she came to the same conclusions I did.”
Pinkie stuck her nose over Twilight’s shoulder trying to read whatever was on the scrolls. It was all maths and formulas and marking pen and stuff. So even when she could see it, she still couldn’t read it. “What conclusions did you come to?”
“The Tree of Harmony in the Everfree was the original source of the Elements. It’s something I kept running into in my research, it’s full of so much of Equestria’s Harmony magic. But on its own, without the Elements to channel it...”
“So, the Crystal Heart would... act like kind of a battery?”
Twilight did a teetery-wobble gesture with her hoof. “More like a capacitor. Which is sort of like a battery. The point is,” she said, tapping a part of the scroll that Pinkie assumed meant something, “Moondancer checked off on it too. The Crystal Heart is supposed to be a conduit to convert the love of the Crystal Empire into refined magic. We should be able to...”
“Able to what?”
Twilight stopped, and gave Pinkie a look of fierce and grim determination. "Pinkie, do you trust me?"
"Oh, Twilight," Pinkie sighed as she squeezed her in a tight hug, "Absolutely not. No."
Twilight flinched, but Pinkie kept hugging her tight. “How could you not trust me?”
“Because I know you, and love you to itty-bitty bits, and you were totally just thinking something like,” and Pinkie did her best Grumpy Twilight voice, “It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission, right?” She leaned back from the hug enough to watch Twilight hang her head in... strong-negative-emotion. Pinkie kissed her cheek. “And you wouldn’t ask me like that unless it was something you knew I was going to have a hard time forgiving you.”
Twilight managed to squeeze her arm out of the hug to rub her eyes against. “You know me way too well.”
“What would I have needed to forgive you for?”
“A capacitor is just a kind of battery where you release all the energy in it at once. So... a bomb. A really big bomb. Without the Elements to turn it into a ray, the next best thing we could manage would be... indiscriminate in its targeting. I wanted to make sure with Moondancer that it’d still be harmony magic and only affect evil targets but... no such luck.”
“Harmony magic in, harmony magic out though, right?” Pinkie wasn’t a scientist, but she was an optimist. Which is to say, she definitely wasn’t a scientist.
“In the quantities we’re talking about? Total molecular harmonization in a two kilometer radius. Which is bad. You don’t want all of your body to be averaged out with itself, and then with the surrounding air.”
Pinkie tried to imagine it, then tried to stop imagining it, then tried very hard to stop imagining it, and failed to stop imagining it. “Wow. What were you going to do with it. Lure her to the castle and blow yourself up?!”
You could see the realization happening in real-time behind Twilight’s eyes, from the way her pupils darted back and forth, her ears went high and still, her jaw went slack but her lips rapidly mimed words too fast to say. Then, she dry heaved, and Pinkie pushed out of the hug.
“Twilight!”
“That is... much... better than what I was going to do.”
“How?!”
“I was going to hide it under her throne, to be absolutely sure. Moondancer found some tunnels through the crystal caverns-”
“You would have destroyed all of Canterlot!”
“I know!” Twilight was somehow taking the news worse than Pinkie was, “I know, but... Years of work, of being under constant threat of annihilation, and I had a plan. With exactly one shot. I was just thinking of odds of success. I didn’t even think-”
“You would have been worse than Nightmare Moon if you did that!”
“You can remake Canterlot. And only a few thousand live in the blast radius, but the whole world is without a sun, is living under a total dictatorship. The loss of one city would have been... fine.”
“Everyone, everyone would have hated you forever and ever! You could never come out of hiding.”
Twilight was lying on the floor with her hooves over her eyes, like a scared foal. Not the kind that’s scared by monsters, but of their parents when they see the bottle’s empty. “That’s what it’s already like!”
“Except you have me, don’t you?” Pinkie panic-shouted, half angry, half confused, half trying not to make Twilight feel worse than she already did, only able to deal with two of those things at a time, “Do you think I would stay after you destroyed Canterlot?”
Twilight’s voice was weak and fragile, barely rising up from the floor without breaking. “Would you?”
“If you thought I would, you’d have told me first, instead of trying to ask around it.”
Twilight was quiet at that.
“Were you really going to do it, if I’d said I trusted you?”
“You were the only one who stayed with me for everything else. I didn’t want to lose you, but I just want all of this to be over. I need this to be over. If this was all for nothing...”
Pinkie sat down next to Twilight and rubbed the back of her head. Calming skritches, the kind that feel good when you do it to yourself but a hundred times better when someone does it for you. “We can still beat her. We’ll just find another way. Because what’s the point of winning if you don’t get to be happy after, too?”
Twilight leaned her neck back to rest it on Pinkie’s lap. She buried her face against Pinkie’s stomach and trembled.
“New rule, okay?” Pinkie said as she stroked Twilight neck, “You don’t get to do it if it doesn’t mean you get a happily ever after, too. Even if you don’t care about you, I care about you, and you care about me. So you have to care that I care.”
“Okay.”
“I promise not to tell everyone else, too.”
“Thanks.”
This, this right here, is why Twilight needs Pinkie. Whoof. So we have a plan Z. Lets work on plan A now okay?
Personally, I'd have Total Harmonization have every sentient creature in the radius melt into a unified gestalt mind made of tang, ala Evangelion. Or transform everything into a perfect conceptual simulacrum that's actually all 'clockwork' and chat-bots. But acting like a nuclear bomb works too.
And now, in lighter news, loved everyone gossiping about them the morning after.
Dash has toast cut into soldiers, with egg. She's young Sam Vimes
Twilight likes it rough enough she almost dislocated Pinkie's jaw? Pinkie likes it rough enough that was one of her favorite parts? Eesh, are these ponies or klingons?
Your Cadence is great, I love how she and Shining have such good chemistry too.
And Fluttershy, FINALLY getting some perspective on things. Well, better late than never.
Not helping the whole "no, really, NMM is the villain here" argument.
9185712
What, you've never had a bad day and just wanted to blow up the world? No? Just me?
"As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of resolving approaches zero. And that would be wrong."
More seriously, more people would probably die in an actual war to reclaim the country from Nightmare Moon. Which still doesn't make it okay unless there really is no better option, but you ARE weighing it against eternal tyranny by a monarch with absurd magical power...
9185766
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, except she has a different color scheme and doesn't bother with the velvet glove over the iron
fisthoof. Instead of using middlemares, encouraging the spread of the Equestrian religion of Friendship/Harmony, and holding an annual ceremony to remind all the mortals that she controls the sun, NMM just ushers in eternal night and goes off to feed Sombra his horn through his plothole all on her own, no magical artifacts required.9185802
Except if we take any look at Starlight's other timelines, we can see Celestia doing the same thing for Sombra. And most likely, there are soldiers being sent out there like in that timeline. Just because it isn't mentioned doesn't mean we can't use the information.
And we can't assume NMM doesn't hold celebrations in honor of herself. Plus, you kind of forgot eternal night and how it's affecting ponies. It seems great from an outsider look, but once you look at the cracks, and try digging, you see ponies are suffering more under here.
9185937
NMM wasn't still fighting Sombra by S5. Celestia was.
9185943
Two years have canonically passed in this story, however. We can't argue about show canon, because we actually have no idea how the other solutions were handled. (For all we know, NMM in canon didn't bother fighting Sombra.)
Darn it now I'm being like Pinkie and can't stop imagining the effects of a Harmony Bomb. So to get this out of my system then.
At low levels, Harmonic magic will take everything exposed to it towards a more ideal state. Wounds will heal, magical transformations will be undone, people's bodies will be warped towards the 'platonic ideal' of themselves. A similar effect will happen to structures.
This effect intensifies as the Harmonic Surge builds. Harmony is not Order, so everything is not homogenized. However the rapidly increasing perfection becomes deeply uncanny. Streets reshuffle themselves to a more perfect, sensible pattern. Cobblestones and tiles become perfectly aligned, things are spontaneously recolored into matching tones, the landscape resembles bad computer graphics done by an obsessive urban planner. Everyone and everything is rearranged to where they SHOULD have been.
The first effect of critical overexposure is every atom spontaneously DE-ionizing, as the atoms are restored to harmony by having their electron shells filled. Because this is Harmony magic, it is an orderly non-destructive process: neighboring atoms pass on electrons in a radial sequential queue. You don't even notice the effect until you get to the edge, where it breaks down and the enormous electron deficit manifests as a sphere of lightning.
Additionally, there is a brilliant pulse of light as every electron falls to it's least energy state.
These effects, by themselves, will instantly kill everyone in the blast radius by cleanly shutting down all biological function. It is completely painless.
Because rotting corpses posed like mannequins would not be Harmonious, and neither would the bodies falling apart to dust as a number of important chemical bonds dissolve, everything is placed under a powerful preservation effect. The idealization process continues.
If the Harmonic field is intense enough, the idealization process continues until everything is transformed into an abstraction, unable to interact with or be affected by the imperfect world surrounding it.
The end result is a deeply uncanny, over-perfected dollhouse of posed corpses that cannot, under any circumstances, be moved or changed by outside forces until the Harmonic power is dispelled.
Farther away from the epicenter, the effects gradually become milder until you reach the 'blessing doughnut' where, instead of dying, exposed people will be blessed with incredible health and healing that, since it extends to the genetic level, will have it's effects seen for generations to come. There will also be an outbreak of similarly perfected diseases, which are perfectly optimized for symbiosis with their enhanced hosts but deadly to ordinary people.
The mental effects will be an increased level of unity, culminating in a Hive Mind radius. Depending on the propagation of physical vs mental effects, the entire resulting gestalt may be wiped out instantly by the blast. Alternatively, if the Hive Mind radius includes survivors, the dead may live on as part of the Gestalt, though the individual identity of the most strongly affected may be utterly erased.
If the Hive Mind radius extends further than the Death radius, the result is a hive mind of physically perfected plague carriers.
Beyond the hive mind radius, you will see a spontaneous outbreak of massive heartsong. The subject, given the current death and destruction, will likely be very disturbing.
Anyone strongly exposed to the Harmony wave who survives as an individual will be far more strongly affected by their destiny. In the case of ponies, this will manifest as compulsively finding ways to manifest their Talent to the exclusion of the rest of their life. You will also see an outbreak of Chosen Ones, coincidence, and narrative driven events over a wide reaching area.
Okay, I've gotten all that out. I hope you're happy, what you made me think of I'm certainly not.
9185957
One thing we do know: while Celestia had to go to full wartime mobilization to deal with Sombra, NMM has not:
She's demobilizing the military and sending them on routine patrols, rather than calling them up to fight Sombra.
Additionally, consider Celestia's imprisonment. It isn't like NMM's was: she was locked in there securely for 1000 years, no early release. In canon, Celestia was released immediately after NMM's defeat, and (given Twi's "nuke Canterlot and the sun will rise again" plan) we're assuming the same here, so NMM is doing all this while somehow personally maintaining Celestia's imprisonment. Impressive work. Celestia plus a full wartime mobilization backed by a wartime economy can barely hold their own against Sombra, while NMM is taking him on and reinforcing Celestia's prison while demobilizing her much smaller military force.
9183916
Got to admit, this story has really soft-pedaled Nightmare Moon and her rule. Once somebody asked Lauren Faust what would have happened if Nightmare Moon had won, and she replied that there would have been a "reign of terror". I doubt if she ever put much thought into the specifics, because of course that's not what happens anyhow. But yeah, it kind of seems like the obvious thing. Fear is what Nightmare Moon is all about. It's right in her name. Nightmare.
And yet, we are not seeing any reign of terror taking place in this story. All we've really got is the surprisingly benign endless night and an ongoing effort to suppress the resistance, which is about the bare minimum that anyone could expect Nightmare Moon to do when consolidating her rule over the land. And even at that, NMM isn't personally hunting down the dissidents, she isn't coming after them in their dreams, she isn't sending hordes of monsters after them. Things could be so much worse.
And of course, we haven't even seen any personal appearance of NMM. Some time back I wrote a story with NMM as the protagonist, which required a balancing act. To work as a protagonist she had to be relatable, but she also had to be deeply flawed and do some nasty things, because that's kind of baked into the character. I think the balance I struck was not too bad, but this story has really dodged the whole question as far as possible.
9186077
What we're missing is actually seeing how the police state affects ordinary ponies, because we're focusing on members of the resistance who would be hunted anyway. Remember though, Applejack is so afraid of them that she won't even associate with Pinkie anymore if she can help it. And Shadowbolts are why dissidents disappear without a trace, where 'dissidents' is 'anyone who complains about anything, or misses the sunlight'.
9186077
Hello, Applejack
9186077
We don't need to see the whole "reign of terror", though. We're two years into her reign. Ponies are starting to just accept that it's the way things are. We saw it in earlier chapters when we got glimpses of Ponyville. Not to mention Applejack and Fluttershy not wanting to get involved with the resistance.
9186170
Why is this missing? This author is obviously capable of painting that picture for us, in any number of ways, and it wouldn't take a lot of time or word count. Is it an oversight, or is the situation made deliberately vague, I wonder?
I mean… We got one brief reference to the Shadowbolts "disappearing" ponies, but that's all. We don't know who was taken, or how many were taken, or why, or under what circumstances, or what their actual fate was. It's an abstraction. It's like we've been given the bare minimum token gesture of tyranny.
9186302
When you responded to my first comment with "Hi, Rarity", I figured, fair enough, silly response to a half-silly comment. The answers to my questions must be coming up Real Soon Now in the story itself, so there's no need to get into things.
Just dropping a "Hello, Applejack" at 9186077, on the other hand, makes me think you're uninterested in engaging with good faith criticisms of the story, and would rather hint that the commenters raising the issues are Bad People, and can safely be ignored.
A unicorn stallion bowed low, groveled before the throne. “My Queen! Many ponies who opposed you have been locked away in the dungeons. A few still elude us, though.”
The dark queen sat upon her silver throne, clad in polished silver armor, her starry mane and tail flowing in the etherial breeze. Coldly she gazed down upon the stallion and replied, “It matters not, Lord Numbskull. After all, the traitors will have to sleep sometime.”
“Ah. Of course. Very good, Your Majesty.” The pony looked as if he wanted to say more, but merely fidgeted.
Nightmare narrowed her eyes. “What is it?”
“It’s just that… Well, many of your loyal subjects—who acknowledge your supremacy and who adore you and your beautiful night, of course—it’s just that they were wondering if we might possibly get to see the sun again somed… I mean, eventually. Briefly. Just for old time’s sake.”
Nightmare Moon leaned forward, glaring at him. “Go on.”
Lord Numbskull sweated openly. “It’s just that your, um… predecessor… controlled both the sun and moon, and it might give your ponies more confidence if you were seen doing the same.”
“We see. Thy point is well taken. Tell us, dost thou think our little ponies will petition us to raise the sun? Will they entreat us? Will they beg us?”
“Oh yes, Your Majesty! Most certainly!” He bowed again as if to demonstrate.
“If they do, then perhaps we shall…” She paused, letting him wonder for a moment. “…give this proposal the consideration it deserves.”
“Oh thank you, Majesty! Thank you!”
Nightmare Moon waggled a hoof at him. “That is all.” Lord Numbskull scooted backward, head held low, for turning his back on the monarch would be disrespectful. As soon as he’d retreated from the throne room, Nightmare turned to her viceroy, Spell Nexus, and ordered: “Throw him in the Fiery Pit!”
“It shall be done, Majesty!”
Nightmare Moon’s laughter echoed through the great chamber.
Well, I'm finally caught up. Loving this story to bits!
9186581
You don’t need to be an overall bad person to rationalize tyranny and be part of the problem, that’s the point with Applejack’s and Fluttershy’s bit.
And for that matter the tyranny doesn’t need to be overwhelmingly awful for everyone, or even most people, to be worth fighting. To quote Steelheart, “We cannot let them convince us this is normal!”
9185989
Got me there. But I can't say I agree totally, because personally I do not see safety as a means to sacrifice other things. But
9186077 Zobeid has a point in saying since we don't really see many bad affects currently, and only inclined to imagine it, that we're not really getting the whole picture story-wise. If we got that stuff, then I'd say your argument wouldn't hold water butttt, yeah, point taken for that part.
9186766
Nor do I as a general rule, though all things involve trade-offs: "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch". That said, Celestia fighting a war absent the Crystal Heart blasting Sombra before he can reincorporate himself (which is what we'd have at this point in this timeline too, if things magically returned to the status quo) caused her ponies to sacrifice more than NMM is now:
Here, NMM (potentially with some military support, but not much) is handling Sombra, while the rest of Equestria is adapting to Eternal Night.
Non-exhaustive list of possibilities:
9186581
Sorry, to clarify: It's because I genuinely don't interpret it as criticism when the arguments you're raising up were explicitly planned and intended to read that way.
When I answered "Hi Rarity" it's because your answers perfectly explained the rationale, in this setting, of why a 'reasonable' person would try to seek great personal benefit under this "not that evil, really" dictatorship.
9186598, on the other hand, perfectly broke down why someone would think it's not worth the fight, really. Nobody would need to be punished if everyone followed the rules, which weren't that bad. Apparently.
Despotic rules can often seem benign, when you forget that it was ever even important to have a sun in the first place. That I'm seeing these comments isn't criticism to me because it means that I'm writing the metanarrative well enough that those questions are genuinely being asked by the audience, even with the 'outside, objective' view. I don't want NMM to be transparently evil.
I want Nightmare Moon to represent modern empire. A world where everyone finds themselves having to work harder, for longer, for less. Where the questions of what evils are being committed outside the borders is somebody else's problem.
We've already starved at least 50,000 people to death in Yemen this year, expected casualties to reach up to 18 million by some estimates, off the top of your head tell me why we're allowing this. Why aren't you out in the streets?
Real median wages haven't meaningfully changed since 2003, except for the top 1%, who experience an annual increase in wealth of about 6% a year, every year. Australia won't even implement an inheritence tax anymore, aristocracy unimpeded! Why aren't we breaking out the guillitone and demanding a more equitable share of the wealth?
Nightmare Moon represents, to me, the evil of our current world. The one where everyone is working harder, and longer, for less. The one where it's obviously wrong, but not bad enough for people to take the risks needed for meaningful change. The one where individuals can still flourish or succeed, and resent anyone who complains about the system for 'not trying hard enough'. The ones where people who fail look at those who succeed as proof that their failures are personal, and not systemic.
EDIT: In response to Zobeid's wonderful short there: My Nightmare Moon's response would be more along the lines of: "Of course, we shall raise the sun again... as soon as the threats outside Equestria have been defeated. But the night protects us, and is devestating to our enemies. Just a few more years, then the sun can return. Just a few more years, and everything can be normal again."
9186932
Because this is the expected result when you're in the middle of catabolic collapse. The modern world has exceeded both the level of inputs a steady-state system can reliably supply, and the level of complexity modern society can afford to maintain. Absent a new frontier to expand to, we're eating our civilizational seed corn, and will inevitably contract to a sustainable level. This doesn't happen all at once, but rather in a series of slides and plateaus.
I don't have the relevant papers in front of me, but (iirc) if we leveled everything out and gave each human on Earth an even share of a sustainable lifestyle, it'd be significantly less than 1% of an average modern Western lifestyle's energy, wealth, etc. As this clearly is an unacceptable result for those in charge (or much of anyone else, for that matter),
In the long run, it doesn't matter much; we either make several improbable breakthroughs in basic physics and materials science, deus ex machina up Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism or AI uploading, and achieve utopian immortality for all by the efforts of a few, or we go back to being jumped-up naked apes, and go extinct right on schedule within the next few million years.
9186975
Literary criticism aside -- Twilight was raised by Celestia, and NMM toppled her down; leaving aside the question of if NMM is a bad guy or not (I think she is, but people love to discuss this kinda stuff so whatever), I think it makes perfect sense for Twilight to be this gung-ho about hte resistance. Her mother figure got defeated, she wants revenge -- this fact here's a bit BS, I think?
Like, I've been looking it up because after reading it I went 'aye that ain't right'. Credit Suisse has some really in-depth Global Wealth reports every year, here's a very easy-to-read, really tl;dr breakdown of one of them that I found in like 2 minutes; I don't know if that website is legit or what, never heard of it, but a quick skim of the article and a comparison of it with its sources (which I do know, and I do trust) says it's legit at the point we're arguing anyway.
And, yeah, if we distribute wealth equally among all living humans, we all get the purchasing power of 56k USD, and we'd be making 21k USD a year.
Either I'm a huge fucking outlier here, or that's really not 1% of the average modern western person's lifestyle.
Now, politics and economics aside -- god please make it so this doesn't start an argument on that 'cause those are terrible -- I think that this:
is not quite what he did? I read his replies less as 'WOW YOU'RE BAD PEOPLE YOU'RE FUCKING TERRIBLE STOP CRITICISING MY STORY' and more a cheeky 'yeah, I know that's a point that can be raised; in-story, I literally have a character say that exact same thing, and the characters react to her'.
He's not dismissing ya, he's just saying you gotta keep reading because he was perfectly aware of those arguments while writing the story. As in. That is literally the entire point of the characters of Rarity and Applejack. The story deals with compliance and with how tyrannical rules like this one affect people; the entire point of the fic is that NMM's rule is not her whipping and mauling every pony in sight, but rather, she's doing shit on the side and the average pony goes AIGHT WELL AT LEAST WE'RE NOT ON FIRE. BACK TO THE FARMS. HEY HO.
In layman's terms: it ain't a bug, it's a feature.
9185980
Well, that was horrifying.
9187158
Key word: sustainable. The above has us drawing down both renewable and non-renewable (on human time-frames, rather than geological or ecological ones) resources at an alarming rate, and (unless we get implausibly many people into space Real Soon Now) we've run out of new frontiers to expand to in order to get more. We keep that up, spread out evenly or not, and we hit a wall within a few generations. Unsustainable lifestyles will not be sustained, by choice or by necessity.
9187165
Yeah, why I had to get it out of my head. Ugh.
All too soon I've run out of chapters to read. This story has flowed beautifully and been a great read.
This has been a most gripping read. The action was well written in a way that really helped put me in the spaced with the ponies themselves. The banter has been brilliant and although I don't usually go for TwiPie, I have enjoyed many parts of their build up.
Pinkie and her socks and getting caught twice in the hallways were funny. Hearing the chatter while she hid ready to enter for breakfast was also for the most part brilliant and in several places, I stopped reading for a few moments because I was laughing.
As a Flutterdash shipper I'm not personally keen on seeing RD or shy go with other ponies and so the hints between RD and AJ were not well received by me. But I did like how Dash saved Fluttershy and then they all had to make a run for it. I honestly expected Dash to have saved the side switch for like a big fight or something.
I am eagerly awaiting more. Keep up the excellent work
I think we need several more chapters of Pinkie and Twilight just reading and discussing poetry with eachother.
...No? That's just me? Alright.
Edit: I put this comment on the wrong chapter. Oops.
I should also add that I'm looking forward to the rest of this story, regardless of content
This came out of nowhere.
Twilight didn't even use lethal force against Rarity and the lunar mooks but she's suddenly willing to detonate a fantasy nuke under Canterlot?!
Such a shame, the character portrayal felt so natural until this point.
9189162
EDIT:
Let me rephrase in a not-stupid way, now that I'm not being miserable in a hotel bar:
The guards were a symptom of the larger problem, but Nightmare Moon was the cause. And Twilight's logic there would make it so that killing these guards when she doesn't have to is a moral bad, but the casualties incurred in solving the root problem would probably be a net win.
So even though that's awful and she hates it, it's definitely something she would seriously consider, over a long enough timeline. She'd just hate herself a lot but I'm exploring that a lot in the next chapter.
9188837
9190161
I have a horrible problem where the only love scenes I actually enjoy are the ones where I like the characters almost too much to intrude. Exactly like this story. Ye gods.
AAAAAAAAAAAAILOVETHISSOMUCH!!!
You write so fricking well, Twilight is acting so in-character and it's just all brilliant!
I seriously cannot wait for more.
9185712
Was it meant to? I read it as a reminder that Twilight isn't fully stable and needs ponies around her to keep her from becoming unbalanced, not a response to the comment section.
9186577
Well, how bad was daily life actually in the Nazi regime? I mean, as long as you weren't Jewish or homosexual or communist or making fun of the Fuhrer too much. Or, later on, drafted. Just because this story doesn't have stromtroopers all over Ponyville all night every night doesn't mean I'm unsatisfied that the mood has been set. Ponies are living in a world of fear and tyranny. But people can get used to almost anything.
9219489
Yep! Which is also part of the problem of course.
He's like, twelve-ish. Be nice.