Twilight discovers that, even with the collective research, intellect and intuition of the entire Equestrian archaeological community at her back, nothing beats the source material when it comes to archaeology.
Smoulder is more than happy to oblige.
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Asking someone who was actually there is not cheating. Anyone who says otherwise is just trying to justify the real-life status quo in a setting that should have destroyed it, and being Equestria makes that even more futile than it usually is.
I love the idea that that's why Yakyakistan was so hostile to Equestria. "Tall White Pony declare war on yaks every summer. Yaks not take lying down!"
Well there's a story.
Fantastic work, especially the assorted draconic artifacts. Tools exist to perform tasks that can't be peformed without them, and there isn't much that dragons can't do. But they do have a few blind spots, and these cover them nicely. Abd the character work was outstanding as well.
Thank you for this. Best of luck in the contest.
Cute, well done, and amusing!
Ha! I loved this. I actually just love the idea of dragon floaties in general, that's hilarious.
She can say it because she's a hippogriff, but that's their term. Although Gallus might have H-word privileges due to also being a griff.
Coincidentally, this may enter into my own story.
At first I was thinking this was a different kind of 'toy', so I had to go check the tags again! Phew :)
I love this story. Dragon floaties. Hee!
Fascinating! I thought this was going to be some kind of Hobbit reference or something, but what we got was a lot better. Poor pony "anthropologists" can't even rely on our knowledge of universal human nature...
Very nice story! I love Twilight's little brain breakage there.
Smolder is awesome and I love the implied Smocellus. This was really funny and very enjoyable. Best of luck!
10050259
Why wouldn't ponies be allowed to say it? That's what the "hippo" in "hippogriff" is there for!
This was super cute! I really liked how the story started by showing Smolder knew something about this lake no one else did. When I was reading through the character moments like the Gallstream hints, the Gallus-Sandbar bet, and Smolder’s dog-ification, the foreshadowing that Smolder would reveal something was always at the front of my mind so I had an idea of where the story was going. The revelation itself is clever and demonstrated in an adorable way, and I liked how Smolder acknowledged that the rings might have gotten repurposed after they were initially made. Twilight’s mini-breakdown is very in-character for her, and the ending discovery was fun. Great, fun story!
One little typo I wanted to point out: “Dig Site” should be capitalized in the line, “And apparently, neither did Professor dig site or any of his associates.”
Ceremonial purposes : archaeology :: acts of God : insurance, QED
Gotta love how Smolder knew what the place & those things were, also the mini-brain break by Twilight was tops!
Hmmm I smell another possible story here?
Thanks for sharing!
10050469
There's a bit of a difference between "we've given up on trying to figure out what this is" and "haha, you thought anybody would stay in business by giving away money?"
If there were a story like this for every shipping, HiE, or displaced fic, I would be so happy.
10050161
Twilight just needs time to wrap her head around the fact that academicians were dead wrong in this case.
10050201
Yakyakistan has been declaring war on Equestria annually for over a thousand years. Their runners just never make it to Canterlot before autumn, at which point they declare victory ("Ha, ponies scared before war herald even arrive!") and go home.
Unfortunately, Twilight eventually builds a railway connection directly to Yakyakistan.
10050259
What 10050380 said. Yona and Ocellus might be the only ones who don't qualify, but given that changelings are shapeshifters...
10050384
Fixed. Thanks for spotting that!
10050288
Eh heh... I'd originally planned for the second item she identified to be of the 'Bad Dragon' variety, but decided to change it to something more innocuous in order to avoid a tonal clash with the rest of the story.
10050314
After this little incident, I imagine that Twilight's gonna be pushing them to hire consultants from other species to fact-check their work.
10050469
Hmm, I don't know about that... One could say that they are equal in terms of intellectual laziness, but the intentions behind them are very different, I think.
10050524 10050337
Twilight getting a mini (or major) brain-break is practically a genre in itself.
And the yaks clearly survived to have the chance to be made enemies again, so that says something about that.
Obviously it's a little different in the real world (less intelligent species to consider), but this is always a good thing to remember in the fields of history, or even in other fields of science for that matter. It can be easy to get locked onto a particular way of viewing things, but the reality may prove to be something quite different altogether, and it's always better to keep an open mind to the other possibilities too in instances such as this.
Oh, and that sometimes the actual explanation is waaaay more mundane than you might think.
This was a nice, casual, fic, light on the shipping (not that I have a problem with it, but we could use a few more fics in the Discovery contest that's not just flat-out shipping) and very slice of life. Can hardly ever complain to a fic like that.
kinda wish this was higher in maturity to get some dirty jokes out it but I'll take a giant dragon q tip
Something I forgot to add is that Spike really missed out here, both in learning about dragon culture & seeing Twilight flip out a bit!
10050909 Eldest, that's what Alondro is! He was here before Facebook, and saw the Tumblrites arriving. He saw the first website and the first flamewar on /b/, when the dark web wasn't scary, before the SJWs came from the Outside and ruined everything.
This...was...perfect
A fun story with a great lesson. Fit for an episode.
10050722 "Professor Dig Site was wr.... was w.... I can't say it. He was ever so slightly mistaken in the assumptions he made, so he was mostly right, but only a little wro... No, I'm not going to say it."
Nicely done, with a broadly applicable lesson for real world researchers, too. We may not share our world with other sapients, but there are other species that leave traces analogous to human artifacts nonetheless.
"Silverstream was having a party in her head" made me chuckle.
Just got to the bit where Twilight reveals the pile of differently-sized rings, and I'm calling it now -- they were dragon-sized pumice scrubs.
Eh, never mind, close enough in spirit.
In any case, this was a perfectly reasonable mistake for Twilight and the other scholars to make. Asking dragons about this would've solved everything early, but until just now they would also have had no reason to assume the dragons, specifically, would have known more about this than anyone else.
Ego-centrism results in all kinds of misunderstandings.
Such a nice slice of life. Worldbuilding is great.
10051917
Irrevelant in this situation.
How were they supposed to guess it was dragons, when there were no evidence of them?
They knew there were ponies and zebras there, and as such made the logical assumption that it was related to them instead of doing the equivalent of screaming ¨Aliens!¨
Very nice. Though you do mention Gallus’s ears drooping near the beginning.
10050722
10050288
I was thinking the 'Bad Dragon' variety for the first toy.
Then, when it turned out so innocent, I fully expected it again for the second. 
...Well, that was boring. I was expecting this to be great since your writing is normally fantastic, but all I'm left with is the feeling that reading this was a waste of time.
10052390
Well, there was the fact that many of them were appropriately dragon sized...and the fact that surely there was enough geological evidence to suggest the floaties predated the settlement, back when that caldera was still in full swing...
But you're right, given the evidence available and with consideration that there's clearly still much about dragons the ponies don't yet know or understand, it wasn't unreasonable for the ponies to assume it related to the ponies and zebras that had later inhabited the area.
Still. Even though the available evidence seemed to support the ponies theories rather than the reality, the fact they still didn't know definitively for sure meant they still should've been open to possible alternatives (which you always should when studying fields such as this) that could explain it too, just in case something comes along (like a young dragoness who happens to know better) to present new evidence suggesting otherwise. And to that end, the argument can still be made that it didn't seem like the ponies stopped to do that, at least not as much as they should've.
I'd certainly not call it egocentrism either though. More just getting caught off guard by a possibility that was, understandably, failed to be considered. And, you know, I can forgive them for that, it was an honest mistake.
Though it did amuse me that, upon failing to come up with other explanations, they just assumed the floaties were for some religious purpose. Seems like that's always the assumption for artifacts the purpose for can't be immediately explained, that there was "some religious purpose" to it. Though at least it wasn't the other most common assumption and that the purpose was sexual in some manner.
This was such a delightful read, everything felt natural. The dialogue was so well done, the pacing is just right, plus all the story elements was so endearing.
Well done author.
10053945
All of the Student 6 felt like they had their place. Yona was brief, but we still got her threatening someone.
10054302
That someone being Celestia
None messes with best yak!
10050722
Tonal clash? Maybe, but extremely fitting for archeology.
On the other claw, this was a place dragons took their hatchlings. For them to leave that kind of toy around in such a place would tell of a radically different society than usually expected, and while that would be interesting it'd be an story all of its own. And obviously not E rated.
All in all the booger catcher was oh so fitting and hilarious, kudos for the idea.
10055989
Hmm, maybe less tonal and more of content. I didn't think the joke was worth a bump up in the rating.
10051784
That's really cool.
10051293
I think I had my hands full worrying about giving the rest of the student six their own little moments.
Hmm, that's true. It never really entered my mind, though.
Dragons also invented wi-fi.
What does ANM stands for?
10071410
After Nightmare Moon.
10071558
So like, after Celestia banished her to the moon with Elements, like that?
10072333
Yup!
10072362
I bet they also use Pony BE, the one mentioned in “Trivial Pursuit”.
I don’t know if BE stands for Before Equestria or something like that.
Ah okay then
I like it! Good characterizations, good writing quality, all that jazz.
Where you shine is the worldbuilding. There's enough of it here that I feel like you could craft a much larger story than this. The wizard tower, the ancient settlement, the volcano, the dragons use of this land, all of that is really neat stuff!
However, I don't really feel like there's much of a story going on here. The basic plot is that Smolder tells Twilight that an archaeological hypothesis is incorrect. That's it. That's the whole story. There's nothing that builds tension, nothing that particularly draws the readers in and makes them invested in the events happening. There's no particular emphasis on comedy or interpersonal conflict. Nothing is threatened or challenged aside from a research paper or two. Compared to the rich world it's built in, the plot itself is very milquetoast.
I do like what you've done here, but I wish it tried to do more with the materials that make it up.
10087215
Hmm, I'm not quite sure I can agree that the story really needs to be more than that. At least, as far as the plot is concerned.
It's a low-key exploration of one of the more mundane aspects of their world, with Twilight and the students learning a small lesson about making assumptions in history and archaeology.
Admittedly, though, if I could go back and do it again, I'd probably put a little more effort into showing how Twilight's initial assumptions are unraveled as Smoulder reveals more and more of what she knows about the lake.
Thanks for the feedback!
Reminds me of a few similar incidents that happened to real life archeologists.
(This is a rough recollection of one such incident)
Archeologists digging through the remains of an ancient village were puzzled by a small ring of stones that were present on the floor of most of houses in the settlement. The ring was loosely set on top of floor, was only about a brick high, and about the width of a bucket.
Eventually, one of them got the idea of asking one of the locals. In response, the local took him into their house, and showed them the same ring, made from modern bricks.
The ring was for rearing chicks indoors, and the ring was just high enough that the chicks couldn't climb out the nest, and short enough for the mother hen to easily hop in.
10132746
That's cool. It's funny how some mundane things can look totally puzzling to outsiders.
loved this you could make a small series about other stuff the students cultres made
Contest over! Here's the review you requested.
So I have to say, I very much agree with 10087215, to be entirely honest. The biggest issue this story had for me was by far that there's no real story to it, it's just a bit of worldbuilding without any kind of conflict, or tension, or... Anything, really?
Like, the story's well written, the writing is extremely good. Sentences flow well into paragraphs which flow well into scenes; characters sound like themselves. Technically speaking I have nothing to say here, you're a good writer and it shows. This was a breeze to read.
But storytelling-wise, nothing really happens in the story. I understand that this story portrays a simple event that's somehwat common in archeology, and it's fun that way, but it's still -- most of the fic is simply Twilight talking about some ruins where nothing particular happened other than "creatures used to live here", which isn't exactly exciting as far as ruins go. And then we're pointed out some rings with unknown uses, but we already know from the title and description that Smolder knows what they're for.
So then we're told, and oh they're floaties, nice. The end.
Like, there's not much meat to this? It feels like a reasonable setup for something, but the way the story is constructed, you legitimately know everything that's going to happen from the description and first paragraph alone.
And that is an issue, because that translates into a lack of impact, of memorability. There's definitely artistic merit inthe writing by itself, and this is a good enough exercise in character writing, I suppose -- but the scene portrayed doesn't reveal anything about the characters, about the setting, about the dragons. One of the easiest mistakes to make when reviewing a story is criticising it for what it doesn't do, rather than for what it does? But I couldn't help but think that the reveal of what the dragon rings are genuinely hurts the story.
Because there's no point to it? If it were something that told us about dragons as a species, something that added some kind of information, or clarity, or gave them depth, then it'd be different, the story could be an exploration of a race or a culture. But they're just floaties, because dragons swim in lava -- which we already knew. Doesn't tell us anything about Smolder either, which I suppose wouldbe another opportunity.
I guess I struggle to find the point in the story. I come out of it not having learned anything new of any significance -- looking at previous comments, I see one of the ideas was to have the other fossils be sexual toys, which ironically enough I think would've helped a bit, beacuse then the fic is recontextualized as the setup to a punchline. Way too long a setup for way too short a punchline, but at least it's something?
So yeah, that was the big issue I had with this story -- definitely well-written, but it's not a story, it's a thing that happened once. Reframing the story into a mystery fic, or maybe adding an additional twist that isn't immediately guessed by the description would help, but as it is, the story came off as... underambitious? To give it a name.
Which is a shame, because, as I said -- the writing was really good. A bit more work into the storytelling itself, and I do think this could've been spectacular. As it sits, though, it's not a story, it's a setup.
Still, damn good writing, god dang, take solace in that. Thanks for joining the contest, and best of luck next time!
10162579
Oh man, I'm getting some major déjà vu here. These points sound similar to what you said about my other story that I submitted to your Celestia contest...
Just my luck that the second one you've read also happens to have the same issue with the story's direction—or lack thereof.
I get what you mean, though I often find it hard to convince myself that a one-shot story needs more purpose than that when I'm actually in the process of writing it. Gah. Gonna have to raise my standards in that area.
Thanks for the feedback. I'm gonna have to work harder on this particular aspect of my writing.