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ObabScribbler


Author and dramatic reader from YouTube. All your pony are belong to us.

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The festive season has come to Equestria once again! The time for celebrations, family, friends, food and decorations - and this year Pinkie Pie has found the best decoration for the holiday season. Maybe this new variant of mistletoe is a little strange but the glowing red berries help ponies find it in Sugarcube Corner so they can kiss underneath it. It's perfect! That is, until ponies who kiss beneath the mistletoe start developing strange, disturbing symptoms of an unknown sickness ...

Full cast audio drama version can be found here!

Chapters (1)
Comments ( 29 )

Fantastic job writing this grimdark/infection AU Scribbler!!

Keep up the awesome work and have a very Merry Christmas/Heartswarming Eve.

By the time a dozen ponies had been hospitalised, the connection was clear: every single one of them had visited Sugarcube Corner and kissed somepony under the mistletoe above the counter.

Well that was fast, but I guess it makes sense since it's been a week.

Twilight shook her head to dislodge the thought-spiral. There was nothing else for it. Safety precautions had to be taken.

Could make kissing illegal until this blows over.

And they were everywhere.

Well that removes that idea.

Hearth’s Warming Eve would never be the same ever again.

... It's not Halloween. Why is there more horror/tragedy stories being published all of a sudden?

Well I'm not gonna be able to sleep easy tonight, but I guess it's fine, I needed the extra hours anyways. I was actually hoping there was gonna be a happy ending but I guess not.

Edit: wait I just realized, where the heck is Discord?

Why isn’t there a horror tag?

THAT was certainly not what i was expecting.
it sort of reminds me of a segment of "Creepshow" where someone had some sort of alien Moss growing all over him...

Well, you just caused the end to Ponyville, Pinkie Pie. I hope you're happy. 😭

RIP

I won't lie, it's a good story, but I feel uncomfortable reading any of the Mane 6, especially Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy, being harmed in any way. And since Twilight explicitly said that she couldn't save her friends, there's a negative 1% chance that either survived.

I won't give a thumbs down, but I also won't fave the story. You're a great story writer, but it's just so unsettling to read, especially when the Mane 6 die. I still remember the time when Fluttershy almost died in She Talks To Angel...

Deadly Nose Worms

Grim as heck, but I couldn't stop reading until I'd reached the end. I have a weakness for apocalyptic fiction, and this was a hugely new take on it that I genuinely enjoyed. Impressive stuff, B.A.B.S.

12062772 Discord was plot-conveniently not available for insta-save. But Chrysalis DID spontaneously appear afterward and eat all the dead ponies like a zombie bug monster! :pinkiecrazy:

If there had been more thought put into it, Discord would have been seen as the solution, only to find him as the first victim, since we know canonically he can also be infected by magical infectious illness.

The disease needed more of a 'why'. Why had it never been seen before? Why was it so conveniently magically resistant? It's a heavy-handed plot device that lacks any subtlety.

Yeah, this kind of bleak horror is... lame. Replace the ponies with people no one knows and there's no impact to it at all. It's highly manipulative by targeting favorite characters with inescapable death, making the infection so OP it might as well be a psycho human in a Darth Vader mask.

You have to allow the POSSIBILITY of escape in good horror, otherwise the result is forced and predetermined. The progression is also so rapid there's no time for any tension to build up. That's one reason "Jaws" is still so effective.

This story boils down to just doing terrible things to ponies by the heavy, brutal hand of the Author. And therefore it lacks impact.

12063077
It does mention in the narrative that this variant of mistletoe is native to Yakyakistan and this is the first time is had been brought out of that country, since the Yaks were so insular before, therefore the impact of exposing it to bodies filled with magic on a cellular level, like ponies, would not have been seen before.

12063078
I respectfully disagree but you're entitled to your opinion and I thank you for writing a comment.

Okay I get the whole thing is “they’re already doomed”, but still… kinda a dick move on Applejack’s part. That whole scene felt so out of nowhere, and more of an excuse to let the infection spread - it felt more forced than harrowing.

Honestly kind of disappointed at how barren this fic feels. The source of the virus isn’t really explained all that well, the lack of any sort of cure feels remarkably convenient rather than tense, and all the horrible things that occur in this fic just seems more like shock value than genuine dread, and because of that there’s no actual weight to the horror of this story. Things happen because… it makes things worse for the characters, not because they make sense. I just find it sad because there are a lot of infection AU type stories that did try to have some kind of consistency. Hell, Cutie Mark Contagion showed that you’re completely capable of excelling with this genre. I feel the main issue with this fic is it just seems rushed, and the overall feel of this fic suffers because of that.

It’s a lacklustre addition to an impressive catalog of stories from a usually exceptional writer. I’m glad this fic has given some great voice actors and artists a chance to shine in the audio version though.

I do agree that the plot was launched from "everything seems fine" to "shit hit the fan" way too quickly, but I do like the progression of the story outside of that. Definitely could have benefited from being a tad longer, though.

The idea, though? Love it. Safe to say the story effectively sent a chill down my spine.

12063149
I was trying out a more creepypasta-esuqe writing style with this one, which seems to have been met with mixed results. Admittedly, I did write it in a much more compressed timeframe than I would have usually, owing to IRL work commitments and things, which is a nicer way of saying the first scene was written in August and the rest was written in the first two weeks of December, with no run past beta readers like I would usually do.

I agree with some others here that this story definitely could have benefited from being a bit longer, everything goes from "perfectly fine" to "completely and irreversibly bucked" very quickly, and a little more time to build up the infection spreading would have made it a bit easier to get immersed in. Also Applejack going for the kiss even though she seemingly knew it would infect twilight felt a bit out of character. As a whole the romance felt a bit shoehorned in, again, I think that could have been fixed if the fic were longer, and there was time to set up them being into each other beyond a few lines here and there.

All that said, I did enjoy this fic. As always, the reading was super well made. And I think tragic romance really works for christmas themed horror like this because there're so many love stories invloving christmas, it's a good subversion of normal expectation.

There's been some... rather unfair comments here. It's a little fast-paced, yes, but I kinda like that. I think it's a nice nod to the overwhelming speed with which an outbreak explodes into an epidemic, whether this was intentional or not.

As for the aforementioned sickness... making it Christmas-themed is equal parts clever and horrifying. A gut-punch feeling was achieved most successfully.

So mistletoe is actually parasitic so that's a neat thing. Not through spores but through the berries and such from birds mostly. Then the roots burrow under the bark and drain and strangle the tree out. Kinda cool to see it portrayed in a way that makes it 10000% worse for things tho.
.....
I like plants too much

Holy crap! No wonder it never did anything in Yakyakiastan! This definitely makes me glad we don't hang mistletoe for Christmas here. 😣
Nice job!

12063159
I'd say you pretty well nailed it.

Ooooo this was interesting. I've found myself strangely curious about the more bleak, but quietly bleak varieties of horror lately (or perhaps not so strangely, considering, well, everything?) and I quite enjoyed this. It's a rarer variety of horror, but I'm especially fascinated with the premise of the one wrong encounter, being noticed by just the wrong thing, and it being over just from that moment, long before the protagonists are able to realize it. It reminds me at least in that regard of older classic horrors, say "The Thing," "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," "Ju-On," and of course Lovecraft, focus on plants instead of tentacled beasties notwithstanding.

I do think there was room for a little more material, and I wish especially Applejack and Twilight's romance could have had a few light, tentative scenes at the start to bring the ending around that much more wickedly. I love the flora-horror aspect, and I almost sense a thread of it maybe augmenting or provoking affection among its victims even. It made me wonder if that was what would ultimately be driving Applejack, distorting her focus away from anything but her feelings to help propagate itself. And I love how you play it almost as an inversion of the windigos, feeding on warmth instead of bitterness. What a harsh world Equestria is in that eventuality -- if the cold doesn't get you, the love will. Yeesh. :rainbowlaugh:

In the end screw Hearth's Warming, something's going to kill everyone. Nicely done!

damn what a thrilling and depressing story

Tragic Twijack u-u

I kinda wish we could've seen Celestia's reaction. Good story though. :ajsleepy:

No. I don't buy it. I don't buy this thing that Applejack would risk infecting Twilight just to have someone in her dying moments. I also don't quite understand why people can't just burn the stuff. I understand it feeds on magic. Just BURN IT.

12063132 Simply look at classic horror that still stands strong to this day. In addition to "Jaws", you have "Alien", "The Thing", and several others. What do all of them have in common? Likeable 'everyman' protagonists in a situation over their heads, whom the audience is given enough time to know, and a 'monster' which, while terrifying and deadly on various levels, is NOT indestructible.

There are HUNDREDS of other shock and schlock horror flicks that are just dismal slogs from beginning to end, dragging the protagonists through one brutal scene to the next... and only hard-core film buffs remember ANY of them.

Wait, why does the mistletoe have both spores and berries? That seems like a duplication of function. Only a few plants have spores at all (Mostly mosses, ferns, and a few others), so its seems odd that mistletoe would have any.

Good Story though.

12065692
Maybe the berries are more of a lure to draw in creatures for the spores to infect? They do glow, after all. Given the harsh growing conditions in Yakyakistan, it might make more sense that it developed that way.

I'm a little more intrigued by the mention by Twilight that flora from Yakyakistan is known to have unusual magical properties, and not all of them good. What else have they found? What other less-apocalyptic botanical horrors have ponies found around Yakyakistan? How many ponies have lost their life, limbs, or sanity?

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