Something tells me Aurora isn’t fine. That’s gonna be a lot of psychological trauma. At least she’s among the closest thing she has to friends.

Well that was... that was something else. The good kind of something else. As always, the environments and descriptions are on point, characterisations are solid, just... yeah.

i.imgur.com/MNpGOg2.gif

This in particular I liked:

the solid designs bordering the walls while leaving a core of patterns in the center of the room.

You have a mastery over the skill of describing things that I can only ever hope to achieve. I'd be bogging myself down trying to describe the actual patterns, if I even thought to describe the damn floor in the first place.

Also:

Night Mares: Vol. 6

derpicdn.net/img/view/2013/3/23/277024.gif

So now Aurora's got her first combat XP, her first kill, and it's technically in the "unarmed" skill! I wonder what perk she'll get on levelling up? Oh, and there's the mystery of how she's gonna handle all that, too, I suppose. I also wonder how Ginger's going to react on finding out that Aurora's just killed somebody on her property. That's gonna be a fun conversation, I'm sure.

Anyway, in summary:

i.imgur.com/SJYNvnl.gif

Oof. I had a feeling that was coming, but at least it went fairly well. Get outhouse'd, Cider. Of course, this could go very bad in the future if F&F holds a grudge and is a heavy hitter in these parts.

In other regards...

Her focus needed to be on fixing her world before it died the same death as this one.

Short-term maybe, long-term kinda a silly viewpoint. A highly closed system like a Stable can only survive for so long, and suffers the same issue that brought this discussion about: that they have no real manufacturing capacity. Eventually, if it hasn't happened already, things other than the reactor will break down and be irreparable, and quality of life will slowly fall until they're forced to leave or die anyway.

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I actually like your perspective on the short term vs. long term view of how Aurora perceives Stable life. I'll be keeping that in mind when later events unfold. Fallout as a franchise has done so little with Vaults reaching the expected end of their usefulness (excluding Vault City and Vault 76) that I honestly didn't give it much thought on my end. I'll pick around my notes and see if there's a place to incorporate that somewhere into the story!

What a fantastic chapter, even though the subject matter is a bit dark. I enjoyed the world building with the house and the Outhouse. I swear I could smell that outhouse and feel the nastiness surrounding it, which made the ending all the more intense. The fight scene gives the feeling of Aurora being a scrapper. That makes a ton of sense for her character. I'm also super hyped that Aurora isn't a gun nut already. Too often do these characters come out of Vaults with crazy gun skills. Learning to use a gun as a driving objective really brings this story life. Even knowing where to point a gun does not come naturally. I look forward to the next chapter!

My only wish so far, I'd love to have more in the fight scene. I speed up reading sooo much while reading high action scenes. I really feel the addrenaline and having more detail would enhance that feeling, but maybe that's just me.

Anywho, as AJ would say to other readers... i.imgur.com/PgAP2Xk.png

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Howdy! ;)

I'm glad you enjoyed it! This chapter was a challenge to write, mostly insofar as I didn't want Aurora's fight with Cider to feel unrealistic in how it resolved. I wanted to pit her against a unicorn right out of the gate because it would truly challenge her while she's inexperienced, which I'm happy you ended up enjoying! Aurora is absolutely a scrapper. And yes, I very much want to avoid her becoming a "bullet for every problem" character. ;)

Fingers crossed, I want to wrap up Ch. 7 by the weekend! If y'all want it faster, you're welcome to come to the house and help me dig up a 9ft lilac bush! :D

Fuck me, I forgot how brief and brutal this particular fight was.

I liked that the prose got particularly bare-bones and spare once Aurora killed him. It's a nice touch.

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Thank you :) I remember getting suggestions to draw it out more, but I wanted to keep details spare given it was less of a skilled fight and more of a brawl to keep from being violated further. It was a hard scene to write for several reasons, and I still like how it turned out!

god damn that was brutal in every way... good job

This chapter does well, but it felt a little off to me.

Firstly, a few nitpicks with Ginger and Aurora's little argument. I like that Ginger pushes back on Aurora's naivete, but the way she explains the way of the world seems off to me. It's a little too smooth and a little too high-concept. At this point, it feels strange to see a frustrated Ginger use words like 'infrastructure', 'manufacturing', and 'industries'. It's like Ginger had some economic analyst familiar with post-collapse societies speaking out of her mouth for a few paragraphs. It's just not how I would see the specialized seamstress, mechanic, and (and, in her own words) pony born ten generations into a world without standardized schooling and higher education would describe it. Wouldn't she more plausibly describe it in terms she knows, and concepts she's familiar with, rather than what would give the best overview of the state of things? It seems out of place for the character that we know so far to be so familiar with these concepts that she can poetically list the plight of the world mid-argument. What I'm trying to say is the phrasing feels off, is all.

Additionally, it feels weird to me that Aurora would be so surprised by nothing being new. She's lived in a self-sufficient, sealed-off society her entire life. Wouldn't she be intimately familiar with the concept of eternal reuse? An earlier chapter even describes how they repair tools too valuable to be recycled. The sense of nothing being new would be surprising to a pre-war pony, but I'd think a Stable-dweller would recognize the similarities.

The fight scene is written beautifully - desperate, messy, and partially confusing reflecting the nature of the fight, and the shift in narrative tone afterward is well done too. My issue is with the scene's narrative purpose. The violent loss of innocence due to an attempted rape/murder by a mean stranger with the protag forced to take a life (but the life isn't too valuable, the stranger was mean) isn't inherently bad. It introduces the character to killing without getting any real blood on her hands (hooves) so to speak - it's in self-defense, after all, so that leaves plenty of moral ground left to lose in future sins. Here it's written quite serviceably, but I've certainly seen it done many times before. It strikes me as sadly cliche. This story started out with unique ideas, so it's disappointing to see this particular method of innocence destruction be reused.

Still, the world begins to sink its hooks into Aurora. Very good. Verrrry good. Will her character endure, or will she pave her road with good intentions?

All in all, solid chapter. I really should not have started reading this during work, I'm getting too invested.

I wish her reaction to having to defend herself this way was more pronounced, like her vomiting and then having to spend the next day with her newfound friends trying to help her come to terms with it

Or even better, to have her watch on as he suffocated rather than finishing him off, as her initial reaction was in defence but perhaps not intending original to be lethal. That could segway into her having to come to terms with it alongside her newfound friends and they could confort her and remind her that her virtue isn't lost because of this etc etc

Aurora knew the hallmarks of a rush job and there was none of that here. Every rod, spring and pin of the rifle lay organized in the rough shape of the weapon she arrived with. A stack of rags lay on the floor next to her, several coated in grime from her crawl beneath Foal Mountain. Aurora scanned the polished and oiled innards of the rifle and couldn’t help but appreciate the attention Ginger had paid them

If only I could get my coworkers to do repair work with the same care and professionalism >.> Like what are we, hobbyists?

I have a ton of respect for Ginger's character for this alone lol

Radiation storms in fallout never really made huge sense. Realistically you would have contaminated water rain but not like lightning bursts of radiation. Then again I just video game.logic.
I am glad in this interpretation, some foliage actually does exist because if we take Chernobyl, for example greenery can still exist