(Update: Complete!)
Chester is on a routine recruitment mission for the Holy Mother when he becomes a witness to attempted murder. And that quickly becomes the least remarkable part of his day.
Suddenly, in every possible sense, he’s caught between two worlds – between Equestria and the human realm; civilization and wilderness; heroes and villains; and most importantly, between two versions of the most remarkable woman he’s ever met, embroiled in a lethal magically-augmented feud.
Armed with nothing but the power to see emotions, Chester’s going to need to learn how to navigate them. And fast.
There is a prequel short story, Fang and Flame, which introduces two of the three main characters — but this was written to be accessible without it. I recommend reading it as well, but this blog post has everything you need to know.
hawthornbunny has written a fanmade guide to Chester's color sight!
Cover art by Evelili!
A huge thank-you to my prereaders: Skywriter, BlazzingInferno, Caliaponia
Rated PG-13 for action-movie violence, occasional swear words, and brief sexual situations/light discussion of sex.
First comment reserved for spoiler-free author's notes!
I've discussed the motivation for the novel already, introduced its protagonist, and introduced the Embers. Tl;dr: This is, first and foremost, a story about being something other than what people see you as, and about finding yourself as you find other people who understand. Of course, sometimes you've got to save the world along the way.
At 120K words, this is by no small margin the longest thing I've ever written, and I'm excited to finally bring it to the world. It's the capstone novel of the Other Me short stories — "Administrative Angel," "Devil May Care," and "Fang and Flame" — and a direct followup to "Fang and Flame", with Chester running face-first into the fallout from that story's climactic confrontation. (The other two just set up some cameos and Easter eggs.) I do recommend you read F&F first, or at least skim the Cliff's notes, but the novel was written to stand alone.
If you'd like to binge it all at once, the dead-tree version of the series, The Other Me, will be available starting in late August 2024, debuting at the Everfree NW fanfic bookstore!
EDIT, Sept 2024: The Other Me is now available for online order via Ponyfeather Publishing!
Hoho I shall be watching this one with interest. I love it when a fic is fully completed before being posted.
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Oh, absolutely! It's heartbreaking to read a great longfic, get deeply into it, and then suddenly slam into the place the author stopped. For a story of this size, I wanted to make the promise of completion to readers up front.
The other benefit is to the author. Unless you rigidly outline the whole thing start to finish and then stick rigidly to your plan, early chapters can become a straitjacket as you realize where the story always needed to go. I made major edits to the first few chapters near the very end of the process to bring the whole thing in line with the grand vision, and I'm glad I left myself that freedom.
Chester.
Chester.
As opposed to Thorax.
You son of a sub-mariner, you got me in the long description. Though it does present the question of what Esau's analogue might be named. Seta?
This isn't necessarily a good thing.
Ah, masking as shapeshifting. And the first glimpse of human Ember! I'm going to enjoy this story. I already knew I was, but this will have many layers to sink my teeth into. Eagerly looking forward to more.
Oh my fucking god it's Chester because it's like. Thorax. God dammit I only got it now.
Anyway! To reply to the earlier comments first -- I agree that writing a longfic in one go before posting anything is the way to go, because that way you get to both write it and edit it and make sure it works without tripping yourself up in the long run, and also you make sure that there's enough meat in your own bones to get to the finish line. The one big drawback of this system, though, is that it tends to produce stories that work very well as a whole, which means a lot of readers will not check it out until it's all finished.
That last part is possibly the biggest irony in all of this, isn't it? It produces better stories, it's better for both readers and writers, and thus, it only gets good results in the long run. Genuinely nightmarish that all the authorial effort is rewarded with diminishing returns until the whole thing is up. It's why I often just post the entire story in one go and forget about it; i do not have the mental fortitude to put up with that.
All this to say, dear god, this is already very good and I am going to fight in the fucking trenches to make sure this fic gets the recognition it deserves, dammit. I'm going to annoy so many people until they read this, swear to god. I don't even particularly care for Thorax or Ember -- they're great characters, i just never really minded much -- and I still got hooked just on the start! Admittedly I knew I would, cause I like your writing, and the best way to learn to give a shit about a character is to have a good writer write it. But, yknow. Still.
So! Dear God at the absolute start I made a point of going in blind, and I wasn't sure if we were meant to find what Chester was doing was good or bad. I assumed bad! He very clearly fishes for emotional weaknesses and then takes advantage of them, lying to earn a position of power over poor Anton over there. But, still, the pacing of the scene is just right at making you both get Chester, and want him to succeed, and also be extremely uncomfortable with what he's doing.
In a good way, I mean. I was uncomfortable in that "I gotta keep reading" way, y'know. The way it builds up makes a good job of drawing Chester's personality by contrast -- here's what he hates doing, here's why and how he's good at it, figure it out. I am ashamed to admit I didn't instantly get who the Holy Mother is until I stopped to think about it for a second; I take that as a testament of the story's construction being good enough to work as original fiction. The fact that there are established characters it can fall back on can be, yknow, forgotten. Story works as it is already.
That's a weird praise to give? But it is unmistakably praise: sometimes a fic is so good it doesn't feel like a fic. When I'm reading something like this, and I think "Oh I would just check this out if it were a book", that's when you know you've struck gold.
I'm not usually one to follow stories weekly! I'm bad at keeping up with stuff. But god dammit I'm going to try with this one. The start is promising enough I'm confident it'll be worth it.
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Having assisted with some pre-reading in the final editorial pass, it is of horizon quality for sure. You will want to keep up with this one even if you are busy going JUDGE JUDGE JUDGE
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On the other hand I've read the entire book and JUST NOW got that thanks to you. Then again there's a lot of puns in this I missed until horizon pointed them out~! Suffice to say, basically everything in this is intentional. Have fun guessing :)
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motherfucker.
I spent weeks copyediting the novel and laying out the book and every so often I'd think "hmm wonder why 'Chester'? how'd he pick that, I'll have to ask him next time we talk" and kept forgetting to ask.
motherfucker.
Anyway yes Blues is very good you will all enjoy it!
Re "Chester":
This is always why I wanted to post the online version a little at a time — give readers time to unpack things in the comments, speculate, point out little Easter eggs, and add to the overall experience!
I'm tickled that I'm hitting people between the eyes before they even start the story. I'm even more tickled that I managed to sneak it by some readers and get to hit them with it in hindsight.
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I suspect it will hit as his role in the story becomes clear. His first major appearance is in Chapter 7, though there will be further teasers before then!
Re Esau:
I will hold my tongue on this one for now
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The vote of confidence is very much appreciated! I hope you enjoy getting to watch the discussions unfold.
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Don't get me wrong, sending readers my way is amazing, but you going out of your way to reserve a bit of brainspace for Blues is the real sign I rate!
Knowing what you're going through with your judge studies, you making an effort to fit reading this into your schedule is the most fantastic compliment I could receive.
(Have I thanked you yet for hooking me up with Evelili for the cover art?)
I can't tell you how nice this is to hear, because having your protagonist do bad things in Chapter 1 is definitely a high-wire act.
At least one of my prereaders said that the religious recruitment scene was actively uncomfortable to read. I'm sure some readers are going to bounce off there, despite my efforts to get that balance right and keep Chester sympathetic. (It gets better quickly.) But it's so crucial for establishing who Chester is, and who his environment has forced him to be — and what it means to be a changeling in a Pedestria where a certain leader still rules with an iron fist.
There's so much scaffolding to build. (And as you noted, it's not optional: since I'm taking a niche character and then going further niche on the other side of the mirror portal, I'm trying to fundamentally approach this like original fiction, meaning I can't just use the "Thorax walked into a building" shorthand, I need to paint a full picture so readers can compare and contrast with the canon character they know.)
In a way, the chapter is a reflection not just of the changeling experience but of the author's job. I've got a foot in the door and I've got to pull out every trick in the book to build rapport and convince you of the rewards for committing. The techniques of salesmanship are inherently a bit dark-pattern; the line between a mutually beneficial deal and a flashy con job basically come down to intentions and follow-through.
So the other thing I'm trying to do early is show my hand a bit — and signal that this will reward your time. A risky opening, well-executed, is a sign that the performer's putting their whole damn back into the show. I have to trust the audience to see the subtle signs of finesse here, picking up on things I never explain (like the stealth pun of Chester, and on the entire dang conceit of his color-sight, which is calibrated so carefully that the paper book has an appendix with the color key), and visibly throw a whole bunch of balls in the air that I'm promising will land later.
(Seriously, it's hard to hold my tongue on the number of things I just established with this chapter that later become not just relevant but crucial.)
Which is all mostly to say that it's a good feeling to see you talking about the details, and that I get exactly what you're saying with the weird praise, and I'm taking it very much in its intended spirit. If what you're seeing is convincing you of the craft, then I've done the job I set out to do!
OR--"If Thorax was a religious missionary...and also human."
That's immediately what I first thought of when first meeting Chester, at least.
All right, I'll bite, see where this goes for a bit.
I mean, running away from the obvious protagonists is probably a good life choice.
Sorry to disappoint anyone who might be hoping otherwise, but the undoubtedly clever reasoning behind "Swamini-ji" escapes me.
The fact that Celestia's hair colors line up with an accurate emotional summary of her past is a fascinating wrinkle.
Tambelon being a nation in this world raises some fascinating (and variably concerning) questions.
Oh boy. Don't let her hear you say that...
The jungles of Elytra. I imagine they have a truly formidable number of beetles.
Her pursuit of power, meanwhile, is purely a side effect of her quest for greater enlightenment and please stop asking questions about that, thank you.
Ah. Foolish of me to think that was a name and not a title.
"Twilight" being as generic a name as "Mary" (and, given this world, possibly for similar reasons) is a fascinating detail. (Also, I suspected this wasn't this world's usual Celestia given her outburst at learning of Chryssa, but the smartphone sealed it. Though I have to wonder why she's at this airport. I suppose this could be after her abdication...)
Ah, delicious irony.
"Telepathic Werewolf Mafia" is an outstanding band name. I'm sure the chapter will match. (Poor, poor Chester. You can't layer that many out-of-context problems on such a gentle soul without making it break. Or it making a break, as the case may be.)
Poor Chester, too paranoid for his own good. Then again, Twilight is a name associated with spies these days.
I second the amusement in learning that, contextually speaking, "Twilight" is a common name in this world. There's something whimsical about the normalization of magical stuff, isn't it?
I did clock Celestia as the pony one from the get-go -- it was obvious enough because, like, I mean. Enlightenment! But I do know Administrative Angel exists -- though I haven't read it because i'm a bastard -- so as I was reading on I was like, oh, maybe I'm missing a reference. Oh, well. It works way too well without it to really mind it much, y'get me.
Anyway! As usual, your pacing and your structuring are top-notch -- just yesterday I was actually discussing this with some friends; part of why your stories are so easy to read and so easy to get into is that you have a very very strong grasp on fundamentals. Structure, pacing, dialogue, right? It sounds like such a small thing, and yet it makes such a big difference. Writing can be defined as the crystallization of an abstract idea so that others can experience it as well; the better you communicate yourself, the better the story flows, the easier it is to keep reading.
I'm getting really pedantic here but basically what I'm going for is that the escalation from ariport, to Celestia, to conversation with Celestia, to suspicions about Celestia, was so natural you cannot see the seams, only the full piece. After the fact I see that there was a clear direction everything was heading towards, but as one's reading it, it just feels like natural conversation that couldn't go anywhere else.
On a slightly different note, I quite like the spyfeel aside! Emotions are abstract and we have names for them, but they're more generic approximations than real descriptors. If you can actually see emotions physically, it makes sense there would be some that we don't really have a name for. "That feel when X", at best. Spyfeel is a really catchy name! And I immediately got what it meant; in my personal life I always define it as "seeing the Matrix", seeing the green lines of code going down, and realizing, metaphorically, you know kung fu. Celestia hearing about Chrysalis and instantly knowing kung-fu felt satisfying by proxy, in that regard.
Regarding Chester -- I like him! I like that he's nice and dorky. On top of that, I like that he's smart, and I also like that he's specifically smart in that way where you go "oh yeah a smart person wrote this". Celestia is bad at smartphones, but also, she is so bad at smartphones to the point of it being bizarre, and does not realize that ain't normal. That's a really good observation; that's actual people skills at work. Dude has a cheat sheet for navigating conversations, but the deductions come from the heart. Competence is appreciated in fiction, especially when it is active competence, rather than the mere lack of incompetence. So that was a good bit.
Chrysalis is of course eminently hateable, but it takes effort to make someone hateable in a way that's consistent. In my head I've always thought that a fun-to-hate villain needs to both be obviously evil and continuously, egregiously, get away with it. When you see a character have to bite back a glib remark, and you desperately want them to tell the villain to fuck off, and they want to do it too, but they can't, and so they won't? Oh that's when nightmares are born. Hell fuck yeah.
So yeah! Overall, great chapter. Having someone proselytize at you at an airport is one of the most insufferable of human experiences; since, famously, that kind of work is meant to isolate the preachers rather than to attract new believers, it feels fitting for Chrysalis to just toss Chester at the airport. Fuck it, go suffer at the shit mines.
(Incredibly fucking funny that Chrysalis is into tantric stuff, by the way -- very classy way to make a extremely striking joke.)
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In this world"s context, I'm pretty sure Chester is the one with a weird, hippie name
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Very much intended! My challenge was: what do Chrysalis' changelings look like in a world without magic? What does a group look like which is obsessed with harvesting love, when love isn't a tangible thing? A group centralized around a single dominating leader, which interacts regularly with society and yet holds itself apart from it? Things kind of took shape from there...
Thank you for reading!
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I mean, I never said it wasn't a good idea, so you keep right on doing it.
You really shouldn't--human cult leader she may be, but she's still Chryssi 100%, through and through. Pretty much from her first line of dialogue I was nodding my head and going "Yup, that's Chryssi all right."
Plus even Chryssi would be smart enough to meet with him in an environment where few weapons would be handy, improvised or otherwise.
Oof, three guesses as to why and the first two don't count.
Props to Chryssi though, because that DOES suggest she's been successfully stayed in operation for a good while now, unless I miss my guess on the time frame this would be set in relative to our own (not that I'm expecting a perfect parallel there of course, but it's a nice world-building detail regardless).
Well...now that you mention it...
Now that's just too on the nose.
That sums up Sunset's design so perfectly--the "bad girl" angle of it always was a bit cliche in its execution, and really is basically a show-maker's stereotypical assumption of what a "bad girl" ought to look like.
I know it makes more sense in-universe...but I just want to point out how absurd this line seems out of context anyway.
O h. It's that Celestia
Oh. This is gonna be a fun story
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I feel like if you're villain-coded and you have substantially interacted with the protagonists, by the time you start running you're too late. You're in their story now.
(Fortunately, Chester's got some protagonist energy of his own.)
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On one hand: Yep! Chester is an overthinker and prone to fantasy. There was no chance he was going to take something this wild calmly.
On the other hand, is it really paranoia when you've just been punched by three outside context problems in a row?
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I love this observation. Consider it canon.
Speaking of canon, it's worth noting that the idea of "Twilight as generic EqG name" didn't come completely from left field! Fandom's been joking for years about the "Eveningname Lightadjective" effect afflicting Equestria's protagonists (Twilight Sparkle, Sunset Shimmer, Starlight Glimmer, etc). I basically just ascended the meme into story background. (Sunset's name would be similarly generic, but she got press from the Fall Formal incident so she's recognizable.)
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She is indeed!
I had fun writing it, and I'm glad that's coming through!
WHEEEE!
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It's funny what people will and won't focus in on. Every single one of my prereaders had something to say about "that unpleasant business in Manehattan" implying pony 9/11 and yet you're the first person to even quote it out in the wild.
(Canonically, the incident which led to Pedestrian airport lockdowns involved an unfortunate accident after a passenger waiting at a gate in the Manehattan airport ordered a rush cuttlefish delivery.)
Not gonna lie, a younger me would have done a lot of soul-searching about trying to keep up the MLP genre aesthetic and write nuanced and redeemable villains. But with Chrysalis (and Cozy Glow) in the show and with a cartoon villain running for American president out in the real world, at some point I just threw up my hands and said "Yeah, evil gonna evil."
So this is who she is. I'm not going to try to deep-dive into her character here the way I do everyone with nuance. What I did try to do is show what it's like living with/under her. She's a force of nature.
And yeah, Chryssy is extremely entrenched despite the endless reasons she should have lost all support by now. Another case where I just gave up trying to justify it because reality had already lapped me 34 times. Cults gonna cult.
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As you later note, it's a title; the chapter does explain it, although a bit out of order. So instead I want to take a moment to digress into religion, because it's one of those areas where it's difficult to get the full nuance into the text itself.
Chryssy, fundamentally, was required by the structure of the story to be a religious cult leader. As an American author, the "default" religion here is some flavor of Christianity, but there were many factors pushing the structure of the cult in different directions. (A few: her focus on sex and love, which is pretty universally considered sinful and shameful in Christian thought; her explicit claims to magic powers, and a religious framework where the idea of magic is taken as a baseline; and, to a lesser extent, the aesthetics of the saffron robe for Chester's character design.) And I did double down on that for the story itself.
Much of the vocabulary and structure (ashrams, swamis, siddhis, etc) of Chester's religious life is taken from Hindu yogic traditions, and I did my best to keep what I borrowed reasonably faithful to the original context. ("Swami" is an enlightened teacher; "Swami-ji" is a variant used as a form of direct address; "Swamini" is the feminine version of the term. There's no deeper pony pun there, because it's unique to the structure of the Pedestrian group.) That said, the original context I'm drawing from isn't traditional Hinduism, but the Westernized pop version of it as filtered through groups like the Hare Krishnas. Basically what I'm trying to do is represent a cult leader who has herself liberated "exotic" religious principles and bent them to her own ends, rather than represent the authentic expression of that religion.
We've already seen the story get as deep into the religious weeds as it's going to get, but it will continue to be a background element throughout, so it was worth noting at some point.
I wasn't able to make that line up for every single character, because the emotional rainbow wasn't written primarily to do so. But in the places where those do align, it's great.
It won't come up again, so I'm happy to drop some headcanon on the reference: it is, as usual, Star Swirl's fault. He banished it through the mirror portal. But once it got yeeted into a world with near-zero native magic, the things that made it so evil and ominous destabilized, and it became just a generic bad place, swept up in the river of human history and normalized over time.
I, for one, am a huge fan of their cover of No One Lives Forever.
(Side note: Puss In Boots: The Last Wish absolutely destroyed me. One of the best adult movies disguised as kid's animations of my lifetime.)
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You've said a lot of kind things and I really appreciate it!
Regarding fundamentals, that's an interesting observation. I think I'm going to credit what skill you do see to two things: one, having worked professionally as a newspaper copy editor for over a decade, getting paid to make certain that the small-scale stuff was buffed to a fine polish; and two, to digging into poetry much more than the average prose author, really considering the rhythm and feel of words and thinking about the way to fit them within arbitrary, rigid structures. In my head, I write to have stories read aloud. When it sounds good at the sentence level the small-scale structures have a way of working themselves out; and when you approach text by thinking about structures you naturally tend to iron the larger ones into place as well.
Re spyfeel, I'm glad that hit well because that was admittedly one of the more self-indulgent bits of the chapter. It steps out of the story flow for a moment just to luxuriate in a bit of spare synaesthetic worldbuilding. Not to say that caramel doesn't come up crucially later on, but the idea of stopping cold for a moment to explain it was a luxury added in during editing.
A lot of what you say, honestly, is hitting exactly like I was hoping it would, which is a really, really good feeling when doing a cold release with the rest of the story already written.
Thank you again for taking the time!
Of course the car's a Bronco...
An entirely logical conclusion based on sadly mistaken assumptions. But then, so is "telepathic werewolf mafia." Well, maybe not entirely logical.
Not this early in the narrative, anyway.
It's not hard to believe in something that's directly happening to you. But dragons and opsec often go together like peanut butter and antimatter. (No offense.
)
At first, I looked at this from the Biblical angle. The older, stronger, more brutish brother, the one who never received the birthright of rulership that went to his more clever sibling. Then someone on Aragón's Discord server pointed out that it's the first two syllables of "esophagus," just beneath the pharynx.
And so the cover story that Chester has swallowed hook, line, and sinker has inadvertently had him side with Chryssa's greatest enemies... assuming she hasn't actually achieved enlightenment. But as Sunset demonstrated, mental magic does funny things to Chester's sight, and that gold may not be as good as he assumes. We'll see how this develops. Especially if Anton's brother shows up...
As for that next chapter, something tells me they won't be home before dark.
Neither, actually, so I guess it doesn't help Chester any either way.
Man, you should see the world the "telepathic werewolf mafia" originally came from. This has got nothing on that.
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Fluttershy even talks to birds!
:ducks incoming vegetation:
Fun fact: you can say Telepathic Werewolf Mafia in the exact same cadence as Doofensmirtz Evil Incorporated
Well! This was satisfying. Dramatic irony of this kind -- characters don't know something the audience does know, and that drives the plot -- is very entertaining, and can genuinely hold an entire story on its shoulders if done well? But it also gears the audience towards wanting it to get solved, and lesser authors tend to cut away from the big revelation moment because A) it's characters giving each other information that the audience already knows, B) it's hard to write.
So they'll have the characters go "okay... there's something we need to talk about" and then instantly cut somewhere else, then next time we see them, they already know everything. This story here basically did what one has to do in this situation; we already know Chester's emotion sight, we know about Sunset's digital telepathy, so the revelation isn't about those, it's about how the characters react and navigate that new information. Use the info to explore character! Give depth to the story, not width! Good stuff! And now the chapter has ended and you can actually just jump to the next scene and skip the long "and so that's the story of all my life" recap; the important bit, the initial reaction, has been shot. That's the bit that's frustrating if skipped.
All this to say, I really liked that. I mentioned earlier I like that Chester is sharp enough to actually feel competent as he navigates weird situations, and avoids making things worse -- and in fact consistently makes things better -- and I maintain that that's what makes him a compelling main character. Actively pleasant to read, rather than just not-frustrating. Him calling Ember "Twilight" is, ironically, part of that! Perfectly natural deduction. I do enjoy his "Fact: something something" asides; they give the story a distinct structural flavor.
Also, fucking Anton being Scorpan. I kept wondering, like. Who the fuck is Anton. I saw he was a farmer, so my mind went to Applejack, so I was trying to find a connection there, and -- no, it's Scorpan. In my defense, I don't remember if I've watched the eps in which he's brought up, so I was playing with a handicap, but still, damn it. Missed that one.
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Alternatively...
I idly wonder how long it's going to take Chester to figure out Twilight*'s name.
Hmm...
Well, he's not wrong, per se.
Oh ho. Independent confirmation of the secret texts should definitely get Chryssa's wheels turning. The question is what she concludes. (Also who wrote them and how they knew anything on the matter, but those are deeper mysteries.)
Goddamn it,
Moon MoonCrackle.And it does seem like gold isn't the vaunted color of enlightenment Chester had assumed. This just isn't his day, to say nothing of what his honored teacher may think if he doesn't get home soon. Poor guy.
(As for Holds-the-Fire... Yeah, this is going to get awfully messy, especially given the apparent specter of the Crown haunting Chester's dreams.)
...yeah, that sounds accurate.
Well, that says a lot. Half of me expects the "god-weed" isn't even actually for their cult work, but rather just an excuse for Chryssi to...unwind...and just calls it that so to save face.
You saying you need a band-aid for that ego, Chryssi?
I suspect Chester isn't getting back to the ashram anytime soon, regardless of whether or not he wanted to at this point.
It's been a hot minute since I've loved a story so much that I anxiously await the next chapter like this. Thursdays and Mondays now marked in my calender.
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For better or for worse, Chester is an overthinker — and grew up on a steady diet of wild fiction. That means that when things get weird, he's able to roll with it and adapt on the fly. On the other hand, it also means that he's quick to follow his logic to entirely absurd conclusions before he can properly fact-check himself...
In Ember's defense, she learned it from Sunset, who Administrative Angel established as frequently cloaking her Equestrian origins by taking refuge in audacity.
I'm afraid I've got to admit that the origin of his name was, in fact, the baser of the explanations you cite. Though I was happy to find out that the loftier explanation held up to a surprising extent as well! Chester didn't steal Esau's title from him, though a lot of the rest does line up. And... well, we'll see, by the end of the story.
Mild clarification: Villain hunting actually is what the Equestrians are there for. Sunset's cover story was the thing about the traveling magician and her ventriloquist dog, but his color-sight let him dismiss that one out of hand.
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This is what happens when you take a half-remembered fact like "wolves can't climb" and filter it through a dude with catastrophically awful wilderness skills...
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The title was a tip of the hat to Tom Robbins (note: this is not a crossover and I didn't lift anything else of importance from that book). There are a couple others, including a Le Carre reference a few chapters away that I'm pretty pleased with.
Hey, if I'm going to steal titles, I'm swiping from the best.
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I'm going to make a confession here: I have a type.
I am more than a little obsessed with stories about people whose smarts get them both into and out of trouble. Over in big-boy media land, heist movies, detective fiction, and shows like Leverage are a semi-guilty pleasure. My most memorable tabletop RPG moments have come from playing characters who survive on wits alone. My previous pony novel, Time Enough For Love, was about Clover the Clever, and his inciting incident was cheating to beat young barbarian Celestia in a drinking contest to stop her from a coup.
So if you enjoy Chester for his authentic smarts, there's a good reason for that. As wide-ranging as my stories are, that particular niche is my fiction comfort food, and I've gotten plenty of practice writing it, and there will definitely be more of the same.
That fell out of my writing as I was finding Chester's unique voice, and I immediately fell in love with it as well. He is a protagonist very in touch with his inner Twilight Sparkle.
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Oh, I didn't mean Sunset's cover story. I meant Chryssa's. Chester perfectly reasoned how the person she claims to be would think of this situation and followed suit, much to the actual Chryssa's frustration (and some possible amount of fear.)
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>.> It wasn't Sondheim?
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Oh! Sorry for the confusion. Yes, "Into The Woods" is absolutely Sondheim. The story title is Robbins.
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LOL! I'm easily confused, don't worry. (It's the brain-damage, I can be pretty one-track sometimes...)
I did recognize the story title, though. I'm loving the references. ^^;
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I will avoid spoilers and just say that the mix-up serves a story purpose rather than being a throw-away gag.
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I wasn't going to leave Thick-Pelt hanging after last story's cameo!
(And some part of me still regrets not taking your suggestion.)
I will admit that that's an angle this particular story never really touches at a distance closer than implication. (I've got to leave some juicy threads dangling to keep the worldbuilding inspiring readers, after all.
) I'll be curious to see where people's headcanons go on the matter.
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Oh ye of little faith! Do you really believe Chrysalis' counterpart would ever abuse her position that way? I sentence you to three shifts at the airport, and to stop visiting the storage room to check
herthe stash, which everyone technically has access to but is banned from using.[spoilers redacted]
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Thank you for reading and commenting! Thrilled to hear it's got you so hyped up — I'm very happy with the finished product myself!
HA HAHAHAHA HAHAHAHA!
This is great, thanks.
Note: Emotions unachievable by most people aren't necessarily good things.
And it was this moment when I finally went looking for the Romance tag.
Fascinating to see the two compare notes on their respective empathic synesthesia. Now it's just a matter of finding the others and getting greater context to... well, basically everything.
Oh, and keeping the Embers from tearing one another apart, as per the cover image. That's also important.
I absolutely love that you've set this world's Chrissy up as A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada.
LOL. lmfao.
Right down to the recruitment methods.
Yeah, well, Chryssi's vain like that.
Well, you can't get much more pure Chester/Thorax than that sentiment right there.
They may have made some headway in the communicating department, but it's still gonna be quite awkward still getting the rest of the way there.
I thought that was an orangutan thing.
God, wolves do really lick the roof of your mouth. Whenever I hear of that I make a mental note not to befriend any wolves -- crazy, i know -- because I'm icked to hell and back. No shade to the people who kiss their dogs in the mouth but i would genuinely fucking rather die, y'know.
Anyway! I missed last chapter cause My Schedule Sucks but I did catch up, so woo. Woo hoo. Last chapter's cliffhanger was effective enough; this one though I feel was a more fulfilling chapter to read. It's nice to see them make head way! And discover each other's way of communicating and describing emotions! I'm even more curious as to what the utter fuck gold means, now, though, so yknow, that's a good hook.
Also dude really just went and did the "dog showing their belly" thing huh. I suppose once you truly believe someone is enlightened, and thus a complete and absolute leader and perfect being, why the fuck would you feel shame in showing adoration? Chester's been in a cult for a while; makes sense his perception of, like, boundaries and embarrassment, are a bit wonky. What a guy.
11972876
It might well be! There are ways in which Holds-the-Fire is writing her body language from scratch — since she's fundamentally in a human body but a wolf society, trying to mimic her people's ways in a form that wasn't built for them — and when you get into the territory of things that humans are capable of doing but wolves aren't, the patterns she instinctively falls into might well be evocative of lower primates.
It will be convergent evolution, though (kind of like how everything becomes a crab), and not something which she is doing to specifically invoke apekind.
11971998
There's a reason the story does, in fact, have it!
That said, there will be some fairly intense romantic themes, but no actual sex — it's a story about a changeling and his differing approach to emotions, and so all of the intimacy I explore is of the emotional kind. (I said something similar in the story description as I detailed what earned it its T.) If you've read Time Enough For Love, this doesn't even go that far; it's an adventure romance instead of an adventure romance.
Time to digress for a moment and talk about that! (Thank you for saying something vaguely within the ballpark, to give me the opportunity.)
At first glance, Holds-the-Fire having that emotional reading in common with Chester, in a different way from a different background, might seem like an odd choice in trying to write a story that is metacommentary on the Ember-Thorax relationship. Part of Embrax's appeal is the Odd Couple effect, where they have nothing in common but Spike and yet discover common ground. Why would I write a couple where the Ember half is emotionally defined by sharing a changeling's unique skill?
Part of this is that, as with the other stories in the Other Me series, what I'm going for is thematic parallels, not carbon copies. What makes Ember fundamentally herself has nothing to do with the specific nature of her connection with Thorax, but more so with the elements that have shaped her life. Being born at odds with her society, fundamentally unable to do the things that define her race. Getting the crutch of a Bloodstone, and using that to substitute for her weakness. Fervently, crucially wanting to be the thing she was born as but has always been denied. Fundamentally coming at her own identity from an outsider's perspective.
And what connects Ember and Thorax is exactly that.
Thorax, too, was born fundamentally at odds with his society. A creampuff in a society defined by greed and cruelty. He, too, grew up struggling to fit in. The show let us see him making a break from his past; this story, too, shows us a changeling on the cusp of realizing there's a different path. And when they met -- when they clicked -- it was as two people who had a shared experience of being an outsider. What linked them was something entirely unrelated to the people they were trying to be, and entirely related to the thing that defined them.
That topic also mixes in very deeply with the bloodstones, and how deep of a mark that left on both Embers.
I'll probably return to this discussion later, when I can talk in more depth about how this all informs Blues without spoilers, but the tl;dr is: part of my thesis is that the Ember-Thorax connection goes a lot deeper than people give it credit for.
11972886
Good! Because many pixels will be spilled on the subject.
As we will soon learn, literally his entire conscious life! Which also means that he's likely to have a less visceral reaction than most people to wolf-tongue-licking, because he's grown up coming into human life and human standards as an outsider himself. But, y'know, changelings gonna changel.
11972023
I have indeed!*
* This story is not intended as commentary on ISKCON; Chryssy is meant to be Chryssy, not a reflection of any real-world person, Prabhupada or otherwise. But it certainly borrows a lot of that context in order to tell its tale.
11971990
Just wait until Chester really goes into full blather mode...
11971994
Glad you appreciated it!