Over the ages, many a wizard has considered the potential for the existence of parallel universes. Often, they've also contemplated what might happen if someone were to cross the line into such a parallel universe- even, how they might do that.
Not one, however, expected that others might come to their world... nor anything that happened after. The first sign they had... was silence in the Owlry.
A rewrite/reimagining of the once popular and now cancelled The Gate, this time with an outline... and a more balanced magic system. And, a different perspective. Should be fun...
Written with the editing assistance of both Gerandakis and Skittlebug.
As always, tags may be updated as the story progresses.
Updates weekly on Tuesdays, or immediately on Patreon... when I have chapters available. Which, in theory, is more often than not.
Yes!!!!!!!!!!!!
May the child of the gate live a long and exciting Life- Zena, Zebra Warrior
637 Rejections huh? Getting that many is likely new for them, I doubt more than a half a dozen wizards a year ever said no. It makes sense, Equestria has plenty of its own Magic Schools so plenty of ponies have a school in mind already or are finished with school and have no interest in starting another from scratch.
My complaint is the common "Lack of detail" a lot of fics have. You should described locations, objects, expressions and appearances when apporiate. I realize for most fan fic you assume the reader knows the characters and locations, has a picture of them in their head. You need to write as if they don't, write as if the audience doesn't know those things implicitly before reading, it will up your word count with out resorting to padding and help establish a atmosphere in scenes. It would help establish when in MLP everything is going on too, what season is this during?
10103042
They based this scene on the precursor of this story.
The first Blade pierces the void to open the gate...
The spear of Luck forms the first part of the GATE
Spike not knowing he got mail is a funny way to look at that. And I really snerked at the "Pedestria" bit. That was awesome...
Yay! It'sbackit'sbackit'sbackit'sbackit'sback!
10103042
That's the thing- this world, like its predecessor, is somewhat fluid, and has no solid timeline position for MLP... and the whole point of the story is to show it from the British POV. The point of this entire first chapter was to set the stage for shenanigans to happen at Hogwarts, not Equestria- so admittedly, a lot more of my, ahh, "level design" has focused on Hogwarts instead. A descriptive tone, especially here, would set the wrong stage... and could bore readers way fast.
Alright, so far so good, but I have one minor thing that bugged me: Lyra's portal/gate project did not get the reaction it deserved. Like, I feel like Twilight should have at least asked her some questions, maybe have Bon-bon make a comment about Lyra's "human obsession", you know, things like that. As it is, it feels like all of that just got brushed over and Twilight had no reaction to "I made a portal to another world in my backyard."
Just to be sure pedestria is the EG univers, right?
10103224
Yep. I saw it called that once, forget where, and liked the name.
Just out of curiosity, two things, how many characters are we going to try to follow, and haven't I seen this before? Pretty sure I saw something like it and the idea of a flood of Equestrians streaming into Hogwards just struck me as too much to try to keep track of.
This seems highky intriguing
I was on board for the last one, and I’m on board for this one. So far I feel a little more grounded in this one (enough extra description in just the right places).
10103345
Two things...
2. Yes, you've seen something like this before- in The Gate, which this story is a rewrite of.
1. This story will be focusing on the British side of things... though yes, there may be a lot of characters to follow. I'm not clear on exactly how many just yet, but I will be trying to keep the numbers down- and one thing you can be sure of, is that there will be fairly few main characters that the story focuses on (Like Silversong), likely no more than ten, and a fairly small 'supporting cast' of some ten or twenty other infrequently recurring but largely unimportant characters. All the rest, including most of the thousands of Equestrians, will be "background characters"... or tertiary, once-off characters that play a part and disappear back into the woodwork.
In short, I plan to keep this story fairly focused and coherent, even at the cost of breaking chronological order (There will be clues when I do that). The Gate was a mess, plain and simple.
Hmm, I have to agree that this re-write seems to have a better pace than the original. Keep it up.
It also nice to mention the Gate in the first chapter. Having it a private project of Lyra instead of an official one even make it better. Actually, it even make more sense explaining why Celestia did not suspect the letters came from the other side - because she didn't know the existence of the Gate yet.
Ah more curious as why they invite an earth pony like meh to magic school. Why did ya upset?
You think it is from when you disagreed with the professors at Fillydelphia University that one time?
I don't think that was the case, Spike. Because they sent me one too.
Where did these ponies come from? Under the rock?
So will this story actually focus on how the ponies react to the wizarding (and greater Britain) world? I always felt the biggest shortcoming of the last story was that it ignored all the ponies experiencing this world of magic (not to mention ponies actually getting to experience spell casting) in favour of a bunch of op characters doing stuff then watching the wizards react to it. Which while funny completely wastes such an interesting premise. I mean why bring over hundreds of ponies if their only purpose is to serve as a plot device?
And so we begin again. Lovely job of weaving in the snippets from the book, that was quite well done.
10103191
Yup.
Twilight: "What do you mean, you made an interdimensional portal in your backyard? Do you have any idea how difficult it was for Starswirl to make the Pedestrian mirror? Did Starswirl help you on this? Why didn't you get me to help, or even talk to me? You realize that this is a major, significant piece of magic, and now international diplomacy -- you really should have come to us princesses as soon as you realized what was over there. ... (continues on for another half page before drawing a breath)
297 + 637 = 934
...
Does not compute.
Equestria has waaaaay more inhabitants than that. And then the whole planet of Equis... That number should be somewhere in the millions now.
Also, only such a small number wanted to learn magic then. No... It just breaks my suspension of disbelief that only so few would be interested now.
10103861
I don't think ALL the letters were returned at the SAME time. It is pretty normal for someone to take their time answering their mail.
10103814
This is just my speculation. Since they know each other, I suspect Twilight made note not to look into Lyra's mad project a long time ago.
10103861
They only had so many owls... that’s only the first wave. Plus, there were those pony families that received two or more letters, and sent all of their replies on only one letter... such as the Crusaders, Lyra/Bonbon, and Spike/Twilight, for example.
Consider me intrested
But then they make contact with ALL THE PARALLEL PONY UNIVERSES!! INCLUDING THAT ONE WITH THE GUY IN THE DARTH VADER MASK WHO KILLED EVERYPONY... LIKELY BECAUSE HE CAN'T GET LAID!!! Quadrillions of ponies poured in through every crack and doorway and physiological orifice! It was like that WTF episode of "Berserk", but even worse!
10103191
10103814
I'm not sure that's right. I think it got exactly the reaction it deserved. Between the casual way Lyra talked about "Pedestria" which the author says is the name of the EQG universe (which no one outside the princesses really knows much about in canon), and the practiced segue into describing the differences between it and this new universe, along with the off the cuff bit about first contact, it sounds like this AU is far more knowledgable about dimensional travel than canon. And thus it got exactly the "oh, another new universe? Okay let's set up to investigate" that it warranted.
Also, glad to see this get realized. Though I did enjoy the original version, it'll be interesting to see where some extra experience and an outline can take this story.
10104511
"THE GUY IN THE DARTH VADER MASK WHO KILLED EVERYPONY"
Hey! Ted did not kill everypony. The only one he tried to kill was Leo. And that's because Leo almost killed him. He didn't even kill Pinkie when she mostly blasted his face off with her party canon.
10104511
I'm sorry to say, I don't get the reference?
10105340 A couple of really awful Displaced fics had a jackass in a Darth Vader mask show up with all manner of OC Villain Stu plot armor and crap like that. You know, the typical self-insert wankery, scaled up to 11.
I still hate Displaced fics. But I love my 'Displeased Minific' mocking the heck out of them: https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/600294/a-displeased-minific-d
10105930
Personally, it depends, there can be really good displaced fics... However, I agree, most of 'em are trash. It's a genre with a lot of very heavily-abused tropes, and when avoiding those, most writers seem to simply reef on another set until next week...
And personally, a good self-insert is not a simple "How would I behave" (like most self-inserts, the "typical wankery"), but a character of their own, who may learn and grow independent of the author, who was simply originally created based on the author. Kinda like, if you've read my Just Like Magic of Old, I've noted on the story that the character Shooting Star is an OC provided/authorized/etc by another user... I saw potential in the skit he had for Star, wrote a different skit (that he loved, despite a different focus) about the character I saw... and ended up absorbing him into the story when I needed a character with integrity for Flight to call in, which he happened to fit the bill for. Did you know, Shooting Star actually started life- before I got to him- as a self-insert OC, with a (very strong) romantic interest in Twilight?
10103861
Remember, that's the first day responses. Hogwarts only has so many owls.
Rubbing my hands with glee over this.
You know, Hogwards is Not the only school out there, we have like 12 official ones, Beauxbatons, Durmstang, Castlebruxo, ilvermorny, mahoukotoro, Uagadou, koldovstorex, the rest Rowling hasn't given us the names or info, so with so many students, Dumbledore could just say they can't accept too many students, they could just send applications to other schools for help as options, is actually a waste not to use the other schools in this concept.
10108303
You forgot to add Hogwarts and the all girls Salem School for Withcraft to that list.
Speaking of Salem... I once read a Harry Potter fic where Harry, to get out of some bad trouble, took a gender changing potion and went to Salem. Got US citizenship, and renounced his ties to Britain. ... Lost the URL. Pity... It was a good fic.
And don't forget the little schools that aren't big fancy magic schools like Hogwarts is.
1010831This fic is about Hogward, so i thouhg it wasn't neccesary, i only mentioned the OFFICIAL wizarding school that the International Confederation of Wizard have accepted, it is well known in cannon that there are hundredrs of other school, but they are mostly rural o minor, so the confederation does not approve of them, only 11 are recognised, and the Salem School of Witchcraft is not among them, additionally, i am not sure if the ponies would like to go to a school for only girls, but who knows, the thing is that i only suggested the international approved shcools.
10108443
Good suggestion... but as you say, the story is about Hogwarts. I couldn’t exactly have a good story if I scattered it across 30 locations, each with their own set of 5-10 important characters, could I?
... Yeah, I know, the proper way to handle scattering like that is to make an extended universe out of it, like the Optimalverse. But, this is a story about an overwhelmed Hogwarts, not an HP-style PoE...
10108316
Try a Google search... You’d be surprised what it can find.
10108590
You don't need to present each school an create an entire universe of tons of characters, I suggested that perhaps the Ponies get scattered across the world, but only present hogwards main pony story, the others can come to England later, or you could present additional data through mail, or make chapters where mmm..., I don't know, make the princesses make ocasional visits to the other schools, or the main six, etc. etc. I suggested the schools because the amount of students that there will be is so desorvirand it isn't funny, completely illogical, and that is what made the previous fic too complicated and uninteresting, so unless you reduce the new student count to 100, the other schools should get involved, anyway, it's your story, so do as you will XD
10108676
... It was lack of plot and bad world design, not character court, that killed The Gate.
Is this a sequel to something? You've said it's a rewrite of another story, but the existence of the Gate feels like it really needs its own chapter for exposition, at the very least.
10109002
Nope, not a sequel, no. Unfortunately, there will always be those parts that feel like they might like just a little more exposition... and if I give them that additional exposition, there will be more such parts. Thus, to make everything "properly" exposited, I'd have to write a story of exposition... before getting started on the exposition of this story.
... Sorry about that.
10109121
Fair enough? I can understand not wanting to spent ages on exposition. I'm kind of worried about exactly how much the settings have diverged now though, if you think this is going to be a persistent problem - so far the only thing that really needs justification is the Gate.
On the one hand, I'm upset that a story I liked caught a case of re-write.
On the other hand, this re-write seems to have fixed quite a lot of the pacing issues (*) the original's first chapter had, so you've got my support.
* The original was a blitzkreig, getting to the "point" so fast it was hard to visualize even with the aid of having both read the first Harry Potter and seen the movies.
10109535
Agreed, definitely. The Gate had problems all throughout.
Hagrid must be confused as fuck right now.
I laughed way too hard at this.
Definitely in more detail
The second Blade pierces the void to open the gate...
The spear of Power forms the second part of the GATE
PONE.PONE.PONE
I feel bad for Hagrid. These strange girls are eleven and can do magic and are speaking in words he doesn't understand.
Poor Hagrid, this is well outside his wheelhouse.
Hagrid, a man who thinks murder dogs are pets, finds himself with creatures he can't comprehend.