Elizabeth, a rather unremarkable mare. Except for the fact outside appearances sorta lie.
Normal until the not-so-normal librarian decides to take them underneath their metaphorical wing. With a guiding hoof, they will surely help them into a reasonable apprentice. Because what can go wrong in a cross-dimensional library.
With a few helpful friends she made along the way, maybe she can turn this disaster waiting to happen around. Or die trying. More likely the latter.
{Written for this contest. https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/970771/science-fiction-contest-11-nov-2021-06-jan-2022 }
Chapters (11)
there were distracting grammatical issues here, with tenses switching around within paragraphs and issues with dialogue tags, which was something i had to figure out myself, starting out! and it's hard for me to get a grasp of this Librarian character. from their position in the story of having secret knowledge, belonging to a secret organization, and having an outwardly professional job, i would expect them to have a lot more gravitas and mystery in their interactions with the protagonist. but we'll see where this goes!
there are a lot of interesting worldbuilding elements here that i can tell you were really excited to put on the page! but it's hard for it to feel like anything more than just a series of events without giving each element time and space to breathe. as the narration tells us, it is overwhelming to Elizabeth, but not only that. it's overwhelming to the reader also, and does not feel like a natural pacing of things. it's a shame since i can tell that the trans elements here were meant to be emotionally impactful, but they come and go so fast that they are hardly registered, much less felt.
ah, very important to get the difference between they're, there, and their right here. the setup at the beginning with the relationship between Frazzle and Li3 has potential, and the same with her sister, but then it feels like they suddenly overreact to things and don't really act like adults would, so it's hard to follow what they're doing or why. ending scene feels more coherent, getting into the skin of the bookworm character getting into a book.
i couldn't really think of comments for the intervening chapters, since they would have been more of the same.
it seems like you have an entire world and setting and backstory in your head, and you want to depict it "naturalistically" by having characters make references to things and having elements show up without explanation, but that just makes everyone's motivations and "what's going on" impossible to follow. and even in-universe, given that these are characters that are getting to know each other for the first time, there should be more explanation of things between characters for things to make sense.
i recommend writing much shorter pieces based around a single idea or character interaction at a time, and work your way up to something as ambitious as this. ideally, stories based off of canon, with canon characters and extending canon settings, since that way references can be made to a world and backstories without having to build them from scratch. we're writing fanfiction, let's take advantage of it!