The Gilderoy Expedition

by PaulAsaran

Author's Notes (Spoilers Ahead!)

Hello everyone and (if you're reading this on the day of release) Happy Halloween! I wasn't originally going to write one of these, but seeing the commentary during the ten-day release period I figured I might as well.

So a few months back I was looking around for creepy material to share with my cousins over the spooky season when I came across the YouTube channel HorrorBabble. HorrorBabble is mostly readings of horror and Weird stories. While there I discovered they had a 22+-hour long video of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos-related works. I listened to the entire thing over the course of a week, and it is to that we owe the existence of this story. I note several people mentioned At The Mountains of Madness, which is not surprising: it was while listening to that story in particular that I got this idea. Be warned that from here on I'll be explaining things directly, so those of you who prefer to keep things theoretical might want to stop reading now.

I wanted to make up something that was Lovecraftian but also had a certain pony element to it. My ultimate conclusion is that, yes, this is an Eldritch God type of being. But unlike so many cosmic horrors one might come across, this one isn't outright malevolent. It's entire motive?

Dude wants to enjoy it's nap in peace. Gilderoy's team, and later the crew of the Aurora Dawn, are just a bunch of annoying ants crawling on it and it's trying to swat them away. It even tried being nice about it; the bolts coming undone, the aggravating whistling, something gently pushing the airship away, even its directly contacting Decadent Design and Rusty, it was all the entity's attempts to gently shoo away the pests. Some people just don't know when to leave well enough alone.

A few other notes:

• Gilderoy's mysterious acid mixture was, in fact, a recipe for creating a shoggoth. The one we see at the end, which also destroyed Gilderoy's crew, was in fact unwittingly created by him. Note that the shoggoth was not being controlled by the entity; it was just an animal doing its own thing.
• The fatal hallucination Gilderoy's crew underwent was the moment the creature actually woke up. On that note: yes, it's been sleeping with its eye open.
• The fact that the crystal ponies hear the whistling instead as ringing was meant to be an indicator that the entity had encountered crystal ponies before and had communicated with them once. But that was a long time ago and it doesn't quite remember the proper communication frequency right at the start. The mention of the sound "looking for the right frequency" was more accurate than Decadent realized. The moment that the creature appeared to him as a 2-D cutout was the moment it finally figured it out.
• After the ponies failed to leave, even after the entity outright spoke to Decadent and told him to get off its lawn, it decided the time for niceties was over. That's when it used its power (transmitted via the "ringing") to transform the crystal ponies. But even this was little more than a warning, letting the non-crystals know that it was ready to do something worse if they didn't get going ASAP. That's why none of the transformed crystal ponies attacked right away; it was holding them back.
• So why did the crystal ponies attack when the Aurora Dawn left? Well, when the ship went back into the storm, the entity realized they were leaving. At that point it didn't give a shit about them anymore and decided to try to get back to sleep. In so doing, however, it also stopped trying to control the crystal ponies. Unfortunately, its tampering with them also fucked up their brains, so they're now little more than feral, aggressive monsters.
• The epilogue we have now is not the one I originally wrote. The original had Eastern Leaves arrive at the Crystal City at precisely the same time that the two new airships are leaving it to find the Aurora Dawn. Cadance didn't even make an appearance. Fundamentally, it would have been the same as the epilogue we have now, but JawJoe felt the coincidence of timing was just too contrived and convinced me to change tack a little, so I switched it so she arrives well after the airships have left.
• I wanted to capture at least a little of Lovecraft's writing style, but felt it wouldn't make sense from the perspective we typically see of the show. Setting the story on an airship belonging to the Crystal Empire was a big part of my solution. The idea was to have the captain be a pre-Sombra crystal, and thus his writing style would be more dated. Other journal entries by Gilderoy and Coxswain would, in turn, be modernized to further reflect this element.
• To further the above concept into the idea of different cultures, I also decided to change units based on origins. Thus do the ponies bring up metric units while Gilderoy speaks in Imperial units.

• I really wanted to emphasize Eastern Leaves as not a native-English (or Equish as I like to ponify it) speaker and writer. I thus adapted some rules for her writing, which are based on some assumptions about her made-up-on-the-spot culture.

  • In her native language, pronouns other than "I" or "we" or "us" aren't a thing, so she struggled to remember to use them.
  • Another aspect of the culture I came up with was for her people to always refer to others by a certain relationship hierarchy. Most of the other crew are just strangers or coworkers, so she refers to them by their race before their name ("griffon Grackle", "zebra Zemmikka", etc). Gilderoy, however, she sees as a friend, so instead she calls him that ("friend Gilderoy"). The next step up would have been familial.
  • I greatly simplified Eastern Leaves' writing to the mostly strict format of Subject>Verb. A proper translation of her thoughts would have more complexity, but I wanted to use the simplification to indicate that she was still a novice in writing outside her own language. JawJoe noted the great coincidence (and generosity) of her to write everything in Equish even in the emotional moments, but we agreed that it was either that, come up with some convoluted reason that Decadent could read her language (Coxswain translating?), or omitting her entirely. I decided it wasn't worth the effort to fix at the time, but looking back I think a Coxswain-assisted translation would have been the better route.
• Lovecraft's works tend to have a scientific slant to them, where some learned member of the scientific community goes through the trouble of explaining in detail the hows and whys of a given situation. I decided to do away with that element, specifically because I wanted to maintain a certain mystery for the reader rather than just telling them what's up outright. I included Coxswain and Cloudstone as the obligatory scientist characters but without letting them know too much, and Rusty was the obligatory "noble dabbling in the occult" character.

And that's all I've got! Feel free to ask questions, I might have neglected something. Thanks for reading and I'll see you all in the next one.

Comments

[Jade Dawn]

I reiterate: well done. A wonderful piece of pony/Lovecraftian horror, and some of the most engaged I've been with a ponyfic on this site for a long time.

I somewhat suspected that our mystery entity was more just wanting to be left alone than having any sort of universe shattering goals in mind, though my theory for the shoggoth thing was that it was part of its immune system somehow, a kind of anti-body deployed when the acid hit the thing beneath the ice. Still, it's a nice spin on making it a genuine incomprehensible threat while not being flat-out evil. Sympathetic yet menacing.

All in all, very happy to have found and read this. Wonderful bit of eldritch spook for the season.

[PonyJosiah13]

As a fellow Lovecraftian author, I have to give this one my highest applause. You, my good sir, have created a story that is very much in the vein of the master of horror himself while also fitting it into the world of Equestria and doing some phenomenal worldbuilding!

I especially enjoyed the slow buildup to the horror, with every sign that things went bad coming gradually, then quicker and quicker. The part where it turned from the captain as the narrator to Coxswain was particularly well-done, in that you made it clear that something terrible had happened just from the shift in narration, but didn't give us all the details.

My one real stumbling point was that I felt you gave away a bit too much with the author's notes. While I appreciate you giving an insight into what you were thinking and trying to say, as Lovecraft himself said, the oldest and strongest of fears is fear of the unknown. One must never pull the curtain back all the way, because they will almost inevitably disappoint the reader. Nonetheless, I was impressed by the depth of your worldbuilding and the design of the creature and what it did to the crystal ponies.

My applause again, my friend, this has been a much-needed jolt of invigoration from the fandom. As someone writing a Lovecraftian horror series myself, I might have to ask your permission to borrow some of your characters and ideas in the future!

[PaulAsaran]

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In other words, "I did it better, let me prove it!"?

Sure, I'll read yours. Might take a while due to my schedule being what it is, but maybe by then I'll have this out of my head.

[PaulAsaran]

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Glad to hear it! Your commentary was nice to catch throughout the release process.

My original thought for the shoggoth was that Gilderoy made it and the entity took it over as a means of pest control. It wasn't until the 11th hour that I decided that it was its own thing separate from any will of the entity.

[PaulAsaran]

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Many thanks, my ego enjoys the commentary.

As far as the Author's Notes go, it's a mixed bag. Some people don't want the truth revealed. Others do. As a reviewer I can appreciate both sides of that coin; sometimes I'll read whatever notes are available just because I feel clarification is needed, but in most cases I'll ignore them entirely for fear that they'll ruin the experience. That's why I included a note that there's a time to stop reading if you don't want to know the details. It's not my responsibility if someone chooses to read beyond that.

As someone writing a Lovecraftian horror series myself, I might have to ask your permission to borrow some of your characters and ideas in the future!

As long as credit is given for said characters/ideas, I won't mind at all!

[reeboiiiii]

this story was absolutely exquisite. the writing, the pace, the characters (even if there WERE only a few) and even the big reveal.

you NEED to do either a prequal or a sequel of this story, flesh out the world even more.

tho this is just my personal opinion. but anyway, this story was VERY VERY good.

[Steel_Ranger]

This impressive! Is the best pony horror I ever read!