Fifty minutes later, Sunset stood in front of Canterlot High School's horse statue.
Though it was Saturday, the school remained open for sports team practice and other weekend extracurriculars. Sunset knew this in part due to the students walking around, and because she'd just turned down Rainbow Dash's invitations to watch the soccer team's scrimmages three times in as many minutes. In the end, she'd only managed to appease Rainbow with a promise to attend the next three home games.
With that out of the way, Sunset turned her attention back to the base of the statue, where the portal between worlds was contained. She used to worry about how much of a problem that would present, having a gateway between dimensions hiding in plain sight. Fortunately, this world's Twilight Sparkle, in the spirit of friendship—and a ravenous hunger for exclusive knowledge—had volunteered to put Sunset's fears to rest by running an extensive battery of tests. Using several detectors and measuring gadgets of Twilight's own design, in conjunction with Juniper Montage's arsenal of film studio-grade video cameras, they were able to deduce the reasons why no one had noticed said portal, even now.
First: As near as any of them could conclude, the portal was able to "sense" someone's desire to engage with it. Which meant they had to know the portal was even there in the first place, be fully aware of its purpose, and then, after both those criteria were met, expressly want to use it. Only then would it activate.
Second: Without that desire in play, it was impossible for people to see travelers coming into or out of the portal. To the untrained eye, if someone went through the portal, they were there one moment, gone the next—and vice versa.
In other words, the portal worked much like the magical two-way journal currently powering it, both in terms of usage and how words appeared on its pages. It was a little shaky, but it checked out—Sunset saw students leaning against the base of the statue all of the time, yet none of them had ever fallen in.
She still remembered the meeting she'd had with both Twilights regarding the phenomenon. Princess Twilight said that most connection-based magic, especially the Elements of Harmony, worked in a similar fashion, therefore seeing something like this at play wasn't surprising. Needless to say, none of that had flown with the human, scientific Twilight, trained since she was little to trust in verifiable evidence based on a completely different universe's set of physics laws. A back-and-forth lecture-off regarding the sapience potential of magic—and science!—promptly ensued between the two girls... until the both of them caught Sunset staring.
And she would have gotten away with it, too, if not for the slack-jawed expression. The drool likely hadn't helped, either. Even thinking back on it now, though, Sunset still had no regrets. The whole thing had been ador(k)able beyond words. Still, even with Twilight's misgivings, the aforementioned conclusions had held true for over a year now, which was a huge weight off of Sunset's shoulders.
And it meant that right now, the only portal-related entity Sunset had to worry about was still five minutes off.
Isn't the chapter title a bit misleading?
I dig the headcanon you've got going with the portal.
Also, I'd love to see Princess Twilight and Sci-Twi have a scientific back and forth. Doesn't matter to me if I don't understand a damn word of it. XD
Also, my imagination:
Sunset: *Stares at both Twilights* "Sweet Celestia, I have never found both science and magic to be so hot..." *shudder of glee*
Makes sense to me.
Sunset may be mostly recovered from her madness, but she still thinks with parentheses. She'd better watch for a relapse :p
Twi² is always gonna be adorkable
Makes as much sense as anything portal-related.
To start with, my apologies to Bookish Delight for the initial phrasing in my earlier comment - I still stand by my argument, but I knew even before I posted it the phrasing was too negative (as I readily admitted in said comment) - yet I couldn't think of anything better at the time, and simply had to say something.
It was only 40 minutes later I realized what I could've said instead to make it seem less confrontational. Ah. Woops.
Looking at your recent stories, I can see this isn't the first story with its ratings disabled, and I suspect it wouldn't be the last.
I implore you not to disable your ratings, this encourages other people to also disable their ratings, which is something we don't want, because then where would we be, if everybody did that?
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@PhycoKrusk:
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with you there. Without ratings, all the good stories would just get lost in thousands of bad ones.
Fimfiction.net is actually the most well-organized fanfiction site I know; for contrast, I've tried to branch out into other fandoms, but the way archiveofourown.org and fanfiction.net are structured I've never been able to find anything there. I know good stories exist on those sites only, because I've been linked to them from outside sources.
Granted, fanfiction.net's rating system (and lack of proper ability to sort stories by a unified "rating" rather than separate options to sort by "kudos", "views", "favorites" or "follows") isn't the only problem present on those sites, but it makes it pretty clear just how important a well-functioning rating system actually is to be able to actually find the good stories.
Yes, and that's a serious problem, I agree with you there.
But disabling ratings isn't a viable solution - as I said before, if everybody did that, this site would become a mess.
Weighing up the pros and cons, I am more anxious than anticipatory of the day when Knighty & Co introduce their long-since-hinted-at "general fiction" multi-fandom site - because if they aren't careful in how exactly they set that up, it'll definitely spawn conflict between pony- and non-pony communities, and we'll have haters shooting "pony" out of the featured box the moment it shows up there. Then we'll have people turning off ratings just to protect themselves, because they've already seen enough other people turn ratings off before, and the only stories left in the featured box will be clopfics and whatnot.
What I'm trying to say is this:
Please don't do this, it'll only encourage others to disable their ratings as well, and we'll all be worse of for it in the long run.
Just look at deviantArt: People who left the site just used to let their accounts be, left to discover for any who came across them even a decade later. And just because they stopped caring about their art, doesn't mean others did.
There are so many galleries I only discovered well after their artists had left. Heck, in one case an art piece on an abandoned account inspired a (not yet published) story.
But nowadays, you see people deleting their accounts left and right, with no regard for their fans, both past and potential future ones. It's become "normal" to do that, everybody else is doing it, and the option is right there in the settings. It's easy.
But it shouldn't be. It really, really shouldn't. I shudder to see what happens to all those art galleries when pony ends, and all those pony-artists "lose interest".
So here, now, I feel like I should speak up, and implore people please not to do this thing that'll pave the way for a worse future.
Thank you.
Maybe you think this isn't important enough to warrant such a reaction, maybe this makes me seem petty. But at least this is a problem small enough I can still do something about it.
....Err, as an aside: I wasn't the one who downvoted your comment. I know I'd seem like the most likely culprit, but no, I haven't downvoted anyone's comment here, be it "temporarily" or otherwise.
...You're telling me there's no spell to erase ink? What about deliberately spilling ink on the page? At least then Twilight can't find out what Starlight wrote..... though I suppose then she'd get mad for Starlight's treatment of books.
Also, Twilight getting into a lecture-off with Twilight sounds hilarious and worthy of more detail.
And has anyone ever put thought into what it means that magic can interpret intentions? Do magical spells and items have some form of sapience? Or is it magic as a whole? Can you talk to it? Does it have a personality? Could you befriend persuade it to maybe not allow an evil sorcerer to cast their spell of doom?
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The site’s Heat function is independent from ratings, working instead with an arcane combination of number of comments, views per hour, and Pinkie dust. You could still find “good” stories through a combination of sorting by Heat and applying the tags you’re interested in.
As for the general fan fiction segment, my understanding of the plan was that FiM and general fan fiction would have each have separate web portals.
Lastly, ratings are largely meaningless: I have a story with more downvotes than upvotes, and I know this is because of the content, rather than the story itself, because Soulsborne crossovers are still hot properties here. All the rating tells you is the number of users who bothered to vote who didn’t like the story; it tells you nothing about the quality of the story. (Case in point, every Fall of Equestria story where the antagonists lose handily; they always get large numbers of upvotes, even when the story itself isn’t any good, hiding the actual good stories under a curtain of mediocrity)
In any case, that’s all I’m going to say about this here; I’m distracting the conversation from what it should be about: This story!
GlimGlam bam!
Interesting take on the portal mechanics. Having an on/off switch on the Equestrian side seems like it would cover a lot of this, but I do appreciate the added security... even if it does reduce the odds of accdiental stumbling into Horseland. (Of course, intentional stumbling into Horseland is entirely possible goven this student body. Where is human Trixie?)
And, of course, I appreciate Sunset drooling over her nerdy purple girlfriend(s).
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Yeah, Mirror Magic makes things weird since as of that special there are likely four books in play (at least three) and one of them has to power the mirror portal. It felt like genius at the time but the more one thinks about it the more one realizes that the way the portal got reopened in RR really was a whole bunch of narrative sleight of hand. An on/off switch could handle most accidents, but not all, notably in Mirror Magic itself when no one is shown to be around to caretake after Sunset and Starlight leave. This was the closest I could come to splitting the difference.
(And this isn't even even trying to account for the Spring Breakdown portal. )
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You have no idea how happy I am that someone got the Celaeno thing.
For Sunset, two Twis is better than one, clearly.
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I'm personally of the opinion that a comment is required to upvote or downvote a story, and that said comment has to have a minimum wordcount of some sort. I don't mind people giving me downvotes, but I'd rather those downvotes come with an explanation. You can't improve as an author if you don't get (and acknowledge) constructive criticism.
Whether you'd get constructive criticism with such a system is still debatable, but a system like that would at least discourage people from just downvoting you and going off on their merry way.
You tease.
Sunset Shimmer, ladies and gentlemen: She is aroused by scientific debate at a level essentially incomprehensible to anyone below genius level. Twilight Sparkle (both of them) didn't know whether to feel shocked, embarrassed, pleased or slightly guilty.
Huh, that's a pretty decent explanation for the weird properties of the portal.