Birth of a New Generation
Genealogy - (or The Mating Habits of Nocturnes Pegasi)
Birth of a New Generation
Fate and Destiny looked over their gaming table, each deep in thought as they examined the various playing pieces scattered about in what looked to be a chaotic mess covered in chocolate milk and cotton candy.
“It’s your fault, you know,” groused Destiny, trying to wipe chocolate milk off the purple wings of a new game piece. “There’s a reason I don’t like to have food at our games. I haven’t even gotten to play this one yet. Why did you move those little fillies on your last turn?”
Fate did not immediately reply, being busy trying to dig a few loose milk duds off the bottom of the board with a paper towel. Finally, with a soggy ‘splurp,’ the last bit of sticky candy was dumped into the trash. “Well, I’m not the one who let those three mobile disaster areas run loose either. Lock up one evil god of chaos for a few centuries and they can be so spiteful when they get out. I mean, what were the odds against that again?”
“I don’t believe in odds,” came a third voice, soft and rich with potential as their gaming table became slightly more occupied. Fate and Destiny looked away in an attempt not to become ensnared by those haunting green eyes as Luck picked up three of their small playing pieces and examined them, before placing them carefully to one side to save for later. “I understand you two are having a disagreement about… griffons and ponies.”
“Not a disagreement,” said Destiny. “Conflict.”
“It is too a disagreement,” disagreed Fate. “I say it’s impossible for them to coexist.”
“It’s quite possible.” Destiny cleaned off another playing piece and placed it inside a large castle on a mountain next to a smaller piece. “Look at that. Right where they both belong.”
“Perhaps you two are lacking in scope.” The playing surface twisted, a crystalline city rising up to one side as the playing pieces scattered around the remaining table. On the revealed sparkling playing surface, dozens of new pieces glittered in the light.
“Oooh, pretty,” said Fate, the chocolate milk soaked towel in her grasp falling unnoticed to knock over a small rock formation in the Badlands that nopony would visit for years.
“Hey, wait a cotton-harvesting minute.” Destiny pulled out a well-worn rulebook and flipped a few pages forward. “Here we go. Section 104.7a ‘Revealing a previously concealed portion of the map requires the player to sacrifice a piece.’ You’re not a player, and you don’t have any pieces.”
“I’ve always been a player, and it doesn’t specify the sacrificed piece has to be one of mine. I’ll choose…this one.” A very small piece was selected and placed on the mountain fortress, and both other players gasped.
“That’s just… vile,” said Fate, looking a little green.
“You can’t do that. It has to say you can’t do that somewhere in here,” muttered Destiny with a serious amount of flipping through the rulebook.
“My move is over,” said the green-eyed player, sitting down after sweeping some popcorn out of her chair. “Your turn.”
“Pass,” said Fate almost instantly, looking over the board with a bitter expression.
“I think…” Destiny hesitated before reaching out to touch a pair of figures and move them slightly onto a different path. “Your sacrifice should not be in vain.”
“Are you sure you want to do that?” asked Fate, looking over a shoulder while chewing on an antacid pill. “Could get messy.”
“It’s already messy,” grumbled Destiny. “I just hope it’s worth it.”
Luck merely leaned forward and watched as their moves began to take effect.
“Likewise.”
The game continues in Diplomacy by Other Means where Pumpernickel and Laminia go on a diplomatic mission to a northern griffon tribe which is threatening war, only to find something in the mountains far worse than they could imagine, and their only chance for survival becomes a race to escape in a battle to the death.
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lol, even fate and destiny are wary of the CMC
Wait, aren't Fate and Destiny roughly the same thing?
3373885
The words are usually used synonymously, but they have slightly different meanings. As I understand it, destiny is an inevitable conclusion to certain events, as in "predistination". (Example: "Twilight was destined to become a princess.") Fate is when all events are inevitable, in a more general sense. (Example: "Rainbow Dash breaking her wing was fate.")
3374854
Yeah, that counts as 'roughly', imo. They're close enough that I wouldn't expect them to be on opposite sides of a Metaphorical Chess Game, is what I'm saying.
3375465 So who says they're on sides? They each move pieces around and watch what happens for fun. Luck just prefers to throw firecrackers out into the playing field. (FYI: Destiny = Predestination, where Fate can be fought, beaten, tempted, and changed. Luck just is, although if Pumpernickel's real name was Luck, his first name would be Bad.)
3375465
Eh. I don't even know what this is all about, since I haven't read the story yet. I just saw your question out of context and decided to answer it. *shrug*
3375745
Eh, I guess they don't seem like distinct enough concepts to each warrant their own hippomorphic representations. The astral plane must be crammed full of those things!
Well, that was a fun read.
3390631 Read 'em up, I've got more.
3390730
So I see. I will see what I can do amid trying to finish my own writings.
If I may hazard a guess, are you also an avid reader of Terry Pratchett? There are moments when your style seems very Discworld-esque, which is an exceedingly GOOD thing.
Read it, loved it, went on to read the sequel and forgot to leave a review until now. I loved Pumpernickle putting Lamina's bastard of a father into the wall in chapter 8, hearing about that was what motivated me to read the whole story. His attack on Luna when she was sneaking into the boutique was also awesome.
3370847 Yeah, I'm not to surprised about that.
D'awww!
Wonderful read. I've lost two days of productivity thanks to you, going on three, and from the looks of things, that trend isn't stopping. I wonder if there will be anything left of my social life after this.
I'm blaming you.
Well, I have to be honest, Georg. I truly love this little universe you've built with these stories... but this one kinda fell flat. I agree with Masked Ferret a few chapters back: the whole "tsundere" thing was cute back in the day, but these days it takes great care to pull off. Yes, you are a fantastic author, but you kinda slipped with this. This wasn't "tsundere." It was abusive, callous, and out-of-nowhere.
Still, however they got together, Pumpernickel and Laminia are together, and I can't wait to read on to their darker adventure. Onward!
I read this as a noob to the fandom (2013) and I'm just now re-reading this and it is a great thing to be revisiting
I find it odd how often Pumpernickel is referred to as stupid. He consistently thinks up ideas that later prove to be very nearly exactly what is necessary—the only fault of the night guard oath-breaking/fealty to luna thing was the scope of it, and where it occurred. She did need to step away from her sisters shadow for some short time.
And he was the only one to see why Luna was staying away from the Families, and why this was hurting both of them.
Frankly, the only way I see him as stupid is in word choice at times—and even that’s not stupid, it’s just a lack of proper training—and letting Laminia get away with kicking him in the head so often.
Which was seriously not alright. I really don’t get why he falls in love with her. It’s my only real major problem with this story—that just seems to come out of nowhere, along with Laminia’s intense tsundere-ness. The way she treated him early on, while understandable considering her own severe issues, just doesn’t strike me as the kind of thing that would lead him to fall in love with her, especially so out of nowhere. I mean she was truly just nasty to him, and considering his obvious self esteem issues, it seems more like he’d withdraw into the “Guard” persona even more like he did after she decked him after the nightmare. It seems more like the constant concussions caused some issues there.
Further, the fact that no one says anything just isn’t right. She knocked him out with a kick to the head—that should have warranted some sort of chewing out or at least a “What the hell?!” from Rainbow or one of the others, and that’s without going into how Raindrops got off seemingly scot free to going all out, near-lethal force in what was supposed to be a game/training exercise.
If you were ever going to revisit this story, that’d be the thing I’d recommend fixing the most. Shifting his love realization up a few chapters, once she stops being quite so horrible to him.
As a side note, a running theme in a lot of your pieces is stallions being almost offhandedly insulted quite often with no retaliation, reciprocation, or anyone even mentioning it, making it seem like it’s supposed to be normal, which stopped sitting quite right with me after I read through this story. It shows up in a lot of your pieces—while in one or two it’s not so jarring, to see if show up so often that it becomes almost a running gag or theme without any response from the stallions in question or those around them is...eh. Not a fan.
Still, overall you are a great author. The characters are phenomenally well written, and you have a great eye for world building with how you build up the Thestral Families and their Tradition and such.
7578192 Let me oversimplify. Lumpy's got a masochistic stripe that goes along with Late Onset Symbol Trauma (LOST), while Laminia uses sadist behavior to drive away other ponies. So how is she supposed to react to somepony who has been *ordered* to stay with her, and that she just can't *hurt* by kicking in the head because of his enchanted armor and his extremely forced passive behavior? She's been hurt by her past, while his whole destiny (by gaining his cutie mark so late in life) is to protect others from being hurt.
Marriages are made in heaven, but so are thunder and lightning (and tornadoes and hail and...).
That being said, this is not my best odd-couple romance. This is my first odd-couple romance. I wrote a far more conventional (um... does it count if Twilight is involved) and successful romance with The Traveling Tutor and the Librarian, and two changeling romances, Changelings, Love and Lollipops (with Pinkie Pie) and Buggy and the Beast, which let me work with both male and female changelings, as well as my most popular story, The One Who Got Away, in which I got to use seaponies.
And I'm not done. I've got at least a years worth of heartbreaking to do in my 'In Process' box. Here's a little snippet from The One Who Got Away's sequel, Drifting Down the Lazy River.
Turpentine looked up from his sketchbook and his heart stopped. Almost within nuzzling distance, the darkness of the star-strewn night flowed over Princess Luna’s crown, coiling down her neck in little whorls and streams sparkling with the glittering gems of tiny stars that almost matched exactly with the glitters of mischief he could see in her pale teal eyes. The smallest of smiles touched the corners of her narrow lips and brought the shadows over her tall cheekbones into a perfect contrast. The grace and beauty of the young batpony nurse suddenly looked crude and awkward by comparison, and Turpentine fumbled with his sketchpad to turn a page while lamenting his current state of un-wellness, as well as a lack of the specific tint of Luna’s eyeshadow in his painting supplies.
“You’re beautiful,” he blurted out. “Can I draw you?”
7578358
Oh, I've read a lot of your work. "Traveling Tutor" was actually your first piece I read, and "The One Who Got Away" is one of my favorite stories on the site (So I might have made some squee-like noises when I saw there was going to be a sequel, and more reading that little excerpt). "Buggy & The Beast" was a lot of fun, though I haven't read your other changeling story yet.
I definitely get that this is one of your earliest works, especially in the genre, and you've improved a great deal. This is actually the second time I've read this piece, and I found some aspects troubling.
The explanation you give for their interactions definitely makes sense, and it's one I can appreciate in retrospect a great deal, especially having just finished "Diplomacy" (Expect a comment on that shortly, thought short version is, "I loved it!"). You have an exceptional way with character and character development. (Still think Rainbow shoulda said something when Laminia knocked him out that time tho)
Just to be clear, I do understand why Laminia acts the way she does in the early to middle-ish bits of this story, and can sympathize. I can even, to a degree, understand Pumpernickels reactions to her, and can see him falling in love with her--just not as quickly as is depicted here. It's mostly the reactions of those around them that I find troubling.
On slight tangent, but to be a bit of a fanboy, you are honestly one of my favorite authors on the site. Top five at minimum, probably higher if I ever got around to actually making a list. It's interesting looking at your older works while reading some later ones, like "Traveling Tutor & The Royal Exam" and "The One Who Got Away", and seeing the way your writing his improved. A bit inspiring even, considering the hang-ups I have about my own writing. You are truly an exceptional writer, and I love seeing the way you grow as one.
(I seriously made un-manly noises reading that little snippet. Cannot wait to read the rest! )
7950579 In the other story Night Light mentions that Velvet showed up at his door with her uncle Shining Sword and the family sword, prompting him to propose.