Celestia is missing. Without her, four unicorns' magic must be sacrificed each day to raise and lower the sun and moon. Her only heir travels to Ponyville and the Everfree to mount a rescue expedition into the horrifying depths—of the Ponest Dungeon.
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Interesting hints of the past with the slaughter of Our Town. I suppose it would have taken something that drastic to break Starlight out of Equalist petty tyranny.
I do love seeing stories use Snails's surprising wisdom. One of the better developments to come of the later seasons.
There's an argument to spare Starlight... but not a very good one. She may have minimized casualties, but that's cold comfort indeed.
I mean, she's not wrong.
Ponyville's survived, to a degree. Canterlot may not be so lucky...
Okay... so Zecora had to die because her discoveries related to the 'Blood' would likely have resulted in a dire situation. Starlight's 'betrayal' to Sour Puss was likely related to the fact that Sour was going to do this bullshit anyway and she wanted to actively limit the amount of harm that he and his mercs actually did to Ponyville. I've already discussed her plans for Ametrine and we're already seeing the results of that.
That just leaves the blood being sent to Canterlot. Now, on the one hand... I can't help but suspect that safe disposal of the Vintage is insanely difficult to do; This doesn't seem like the kind of stuff you can just dump on the ground or in a toilet without there being some major consequences. I also suspect that dumping the bottles onto a bonfire and burning them wouldn't work out either so the only way to... well, get rid of them in a manner limits the amount of damage to come is to feed enough of it to enough different ponies and have the monsters created rip each other to pieces then clean up the survivors.
As for why send it to the Gala... well, I suspect there aren't enough hard working, 'good' nobility like Fancy Pants and Blueblood around to make up for the sloth, hedonistic leeches making up the majority. Thinning the ranks of one of the most useless social classes likely isn't going to hurt much.
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In the end, she delivered. Both for Our Town and Ponyville, though nopony will probably recognize her contributions for the latter.
I have always been a fan of the theory that Snails is some manner of idiot-savant. His social manner and actions may appear simple or foolish, but he has remarkable telekinetic dexterity, and is obviously an introspective individual who comes up with seemingly random yet poignant wisdom.
There is no argument that would work, really. Considering how many event strings I had tying everything together, it would take several chapters just to describe why she acted certain ways, or chose certain outcomes over others. It took forever to make sure the lines connected.
It is simply to die for. I had to cut so many ironic statements from that letter. I believe Coffee told me that I’d passed the safety threshold of ironies and puns per square paragraph at some point.
100 crates of wine is a lot of wine. Good thing the Canterlot nobility is so decadent.
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So, now that Arc 2 is complete, I can give you a rundown of several of the spoilery reasons why Zecora had to die:
- Zecora was taking up the 4th spot in the Shining Armor party roster. If she lived, Rarity wouldn’t have joined Shining’s team to fight Magnus. And Shining would never have been freed from the siren’s control, and would have killed everyone else, as they would not be willing to kill him.
- Zecora’s mortal wounding causes Shining to recklessly charge the spearmare, resulting in his shoulder injury, and her death drives him to burn out his connection to Harmony and damage his horn. If he was not injured, and had full horn strength, he would have cut Rainbow’s face in half when they were fighting the Siren.
- Zecora’s death drives Rainbow into a binge-drinking session that results in Trixie consoling her and then helping create Mr. Stabooty for her, which prevents her from sustaining injuries on the way in to fight the siren, and again, prevents her face from being turned into a taco shell.
- Zecora was on the verge of a breakthrough with analyzing the wine. This would have prompted her to have Blueblood recall the crates and try to dispose of it (with fantastically poor results, as you’ve predicted). Also, she would have told Blueblood exactly what was in the vial after finding out about it going missing.
- Zecora was the only fleshform that was formed enough to quickly sneak up to and kill Solmare. Otherwise the other four would have just poured into the foyer and butchered everyone.
Now, those are just some of the direct reasons, but other things spiral off that add to other events as well, such as the discovery of the warrens entrance which would have been delayed had she not died right in front of it.
I’ll answer your wine questions, but out of order:
Why the Gala? Fire. Infection is like a fire. If left unchecked, it will spread, and consume everything.
Now, what is easier to contain?
A: A raging dumpster fire which is, by definition, contained.
B: A series of small fires set in every building for 2 blocks around aforementioned dumpster.
The Gala is the only excuse to get that much wine together in one place at the same time.
As for safe disposal down a toilet: I’ll go ahead and assume everyone has seen Dogma and understands the concept of an “excremental.”
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Congratulations on getting part 2 out! I regret my contributions that led to it taking over a year. Nevertheless, I think it turned out really well. If anything, it only got better in part 2 from the already strong part 1. I’m looking forward to helping finish this absolutely sprawling oeuvre.
That’s as may be, but I loved the letter. I think my biggest objection was more about the place where you originally sequenced it in this section. Adding the short bit a few chapters ago with Coloratura getting the wine but declining to drink it—so that this could be your ending stinger—was perfect. But then I’m generally a fan of cliffhanger or stinger endings.
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One could almost say that you get a feghoot out of them, even.
I love this story
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Thank you very much. It’s been few years of work so far, but now everything is starting to come together faster. Hope to have the next Arc in much shorter order.
Oh boy, the Grand Galloping Gala is going to be the epicenter of the Crimson Curse outbreak. This is going to be amazing
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Best. Night. Ever.
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Or more likely Bloodiest. Night. Ever!
If you don't mind me asking, when is this going to be continued?
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I am still working on Arc 3. About 30k-40k words written so far, so it is in the works. Unsure how long it will take though. I release the chapters to an arc all at once, so that the story doesn’t stop in the middle of a major story arc.
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That sounds like a good idea, and I'm very glad to hear that this story is still being worked on. I have enjoyed it immensely so far (since I am a huge DD fan with almost 1000 hours in the game), and I hope to see it continued in the same grim tone as it has been so far.
Who'd have thought Snips's death would actually lead to such a bittersweet moment..? I didn't. Fool that I am.
People assume Snips and Snails must be brainless idiots, mostly for the Ursa thing, but at least THEY never poisoned anyone with a love potion, now did they?
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I seem to remember another pony who tangled with an Ursa when they were young. It turned out much worse for them.
Moral of the story: we all did dumb stuff when we were kids. And then (hopefully) learned about the concept of “judgment,” and how to exercise it.
There's one thing still bothering me about The Blood. Namely, in the original, the Ancestor drank from the blood of a vampire. He only got a tiny bit of it, but it was enough to give him a vision of the Thing. The other nobles, who didn't suspect what he was offering up to them, drank their fill and were completely lost to vampirism.
Here, Zecora's notes suggest The Blood contains traces of all pony types and Blueblood deduces it must mean it was Celestia's. But there's no real sense why it would lead to a similarly insectile mutation for the vampires—that would make sense if it was Chrysalis's blood, who actually IS a quasi-insectile vampire/succubus thing.
Now, the most logical explanation would be that Celestia overpowered Chrysalis when the latter attacked her and then bled her, much like the Ancestor did to the Countess. But that's not very likely, as Tempest Shadow believes she has already beaten Chrysalis to death. Of coure, any Changeling could disguise themselves as Chrysalis to get Tempest off the queen's trail, including a seasoned fighter like Pharynx... I don't think that's what happened, though that's down to gut feeling more than anything. We shall have to see.
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Regarding the blood: The Ancestor got one drop of that blood-wine. It’s tough to draw a parallel with Blueblood because he doesn’t even really compare. He’s been infected 10 ways from Sunday, whether it be from fleshform Neighsay, the Color that went into his eye, the Celestia thing being inside him, or the rat.
Regarding Zecora’s notes: I’ll just say that the characters are making an awful lot of assumptions. Omniscient, or so lucky on guesses as to be effectively omniscient, characters are things I’m not fond of writing. Funny enough , these characters have been wrong so many times that the spreadsheet document I use to track everything needed an entire sheet dedicated to what misconceptions gets who killed or mangled, or infected, etc. Funny how head Celestia neither confirmed nor denied that leap of logic.
It’s true that the changelings had decent potential as an analogue for the Crimson Court, but I decided against using them due to the very nature of the Crimson Court. It all boiled down to this: changelings are not decadent nobles destined to be felled by by their own base urges.
I’ve always believed that changelings were like the classical werewolf, in that they return to their natural form upon death. And the only reason Tempest and company was able to so readily defeat the changelings during the Badlands Campaign was due to Tempest’s utter ruthlessness and complete disregard for the well-being of the troops under her command. Also, a changeling can’t feed off of, and thus empower themselves off of cold calculation and utter disdain.
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Oh, no doubt. Though, that implies Blueblood is the parallel to the Ancestor rather than the Heir, which would... change a lot of things. And perhaps explain some more things.
As a veteran GM of several different RPG systems with a particular fondness for mystery adventures, I am indeed deathly envious not to be able to see those spreadsheets, to square what the characters know versus they think they know. That was always one of my favourite things when playing game master, watching the players try to solve the riddle. Not even because I enjoy them being wrong, not at all, I just love watching people speculate and ponder and theorise!
Valid interpretation for the Changelings. And it's not like Chrysalis wasn't a raging egomaniac thoroughly convinced of her own superiority, leaving herself open to attack. That's something Tirek and Cozy (being Tirek's protégé) were much better at. In fact, I would say Tirek was easily the smartest out of them. Still, it leaves me wondering where, if, the connection to the show's established canon is... Hm. I have Meadowbrook pegged for the Hag, but that mask and her link to the swamps aren't entirely off base...
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Blueblood is the heir. Working the Court the way I am is due to a lack of in-universe characters from a previous generation.
I like to leave enough crumbs for my own RP groups to try and put everything together. Same is true with this story. It’s why I am more than willing to remind about events and what characters have said / done, thought I will put those behind spoiler walls, just in case someone actually wanted to go back through to investigate on their own.
Mayyyyyybe.
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Are yoi going to continues this story someday?
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I am still writing Arc 3.
The trouble is that I'm kinda without an active editor at the moment, which is slowing things tremendously.
But I honestly cannot drop this project, as I have too much invested.
It WILL happen, though not as quickly as I (or anyone waiting on it, I'm sure) would have hoped.
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Ok and thanks for responding, all I can say is that don’t rush it out and to put your físicas and mental healt first
This arc as a whole is much better than the previous, but I do have to express frustration at the scale getting too large. There are simply so many characters to consider that it's easy to forget half of them at any given time, which makes it hard to really be invested in many, especially once they start dropping like flies. Even for the deaths that turned out not to be, they seemed like real deaths in the moment, and by the time they're shown to be fake, the damage is already done, but now showing the death to be fake makes the death feel cheaper.
As well, that large number of actual deaths makes it feel like Starlight didn't try very hard. Specifically, I think that only Zecora, Vinyl, Big Mac, and Sugar Belle had to die, while Night Glider and Party Favor could've easily been critically injured in a way leaving them unlikely to ever venture out again, and some hint in the midst of things that Tempest was still alive (like the connection being detectable, but faint) would help.
To harp on Starlight's friends specifically, I think they as a whole don't work. The problem is all we have that connects any of them to other characters is Starlight's friends being her friends (but that's not much when she is basically uncaring and inhuman), and SugarMac, which not everyone cares about. This puts them on par with the group of 4 from arc 1 (Moondancer being Blueblood's friend, really? Twilight not seeming to know them really made them disconnected), but what then brings them down is their demise is telegraphed to the point I'd call it faxed in triplicate, and they're all totally down with that, while arc 1's group felt like real people who cared about themselves and each other, and they died too close to characters that are easy to care more about.
Some of this could be fixed with minor revisions, but I'd advise for arc 3 being really careful about adding any near-isolated groups like this to begin with.
Speaking of the group of 4 from arc 1, it's not great to see them return as mere surface-level copies. It just...doesn't do anything. You could've had Zecora and Moondancer fleshforms alone for the exact same effect.
Furthermore, while what happened to Shining certainly was impactful, it seems a bit too...isolated. Ponies when they don't die keep getting disfigured in ways that make them not really lose anything, leading to things varying wildly between darkness-induced apathy (too many deaths) and just not caring about injuries. There really needs to be more permanent effects from a bad encounter that don't remove a character from the story entirely or give them horrific superpowers.
Finally, I think making the villainous mooks that die have some known names and seem somewhat like real people (as opposed to the moronic unnamed brigands and cultists common in arc 1 even in fights in town, who acted more like murderous androids) helped things out, but frankly, they end up seeming utterly deserving of death, and have very little character, and that I think is a wasted opportunity. You've got a pretty clear theme going that Blueblood's pragmatism has horrible consequences, but it keeps being the case he's only doing minorly-immoral things (at least on purpose) to his own mercenaries who understand it's for the greater good. Having a bit of brutality directed at ponies who were just in bad circumstances (be they enemy soldiers who just wanted a paycheck to feed their kids, or civilians who were in the way during a battle) and couldn't be left alright due to greater concerns would I think be very good storywise.
I hope this helps a bit with arc 3, even if I'm a bit late to the party on that.