• Published 9th Dec 2012
  • 4,219 Views, 87 Comments

The Lotus Eaters - horizon



Ponies return from visits to a world without their greatest regret.

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Trixie

She steps out from the machine, blinking back sunlight.

"Welcome back!" one of the moustached unicorns says. "How was your new life?" adds the other.

"What new life?" the mare says dubiously. "Your machine did nothing."

They glance at each other, then back at her. "… Nothing?" they chorus.

"Do you doubt the word of the Great and Powerful Trixie?"

"No! No, of course not. It's just that …" The first one swallows.

"The machine activated," the second adds.

"You've been inside for five minutes." The first stallion holds up a length of paper tape from the monitor.

The second examines the paper. His eyes bug out. "Flim," he says, hushed, "look at these readings."

"Oh my," Flim says.

"There's only one reason it would work that long yet do nothing at all," says Not-Flim.

"She's already perfect," Flim whispers in awe.

The mare snorts. "Anypony who has met The Great and Powerful Trixie could have told you that."

Not-Flim throws himself to the ground, trembling, not daring to look in her mighty eyes. "Have my children."

"No, have mine," Flim says, likewise crawling.

"The Great and Powerful Trixie finds your groveling amusing," she magnanimously allows. "She will leave you your worthless machine, so that later you will be able to activate it and pretend you live in a world in which she said yes."

"Such genius," Flim says, and swoons.

"And generosity," Not-Flim adds, also fainting.

"Excuse me," a voice says from behind. She deigns to turn.

It is an angry goddess. "Who are you, and why have you broken these poor inventors' machine? You're a faker and nobody likes you." Celestia smiles smugly at the gathering crowd of ponies.

"You dare to doubt the Great and Powerful Trixie?" the showmare thunders. "Fortunately, she knows how to handle neighsayers. Trixie challenges you to a duel of magical skill!"

"I accept!" the arrogant white thing says. "Watch as I move the sun itself!"

Her horn flares. Nothing happens.

The audience laughs cruelly, hooting and hollering, booing. Tomatoes fly at the alicorn, who cringes as she gets hit.

"Now, now," Trixie says, holding up a hoof. The mob settles. "We must be kind in victory. Unfortunately for her, the sun has recognized the presence of greater power."

"It's true," the former goddess sobs. "I only mocked you because I was afraid you would expose me as a fraud. I'll never be able to forgive myself. I beg you, rule Equestria better than I ever did."

"I suppose," Trixie says with a reluctant sigh.

The crowd carries her to Canterlot on their backs. The coronation party lasts all day and all night. At dawn, she appears on the solar balcony in front of her elated subjects.

She raises her hooves and closes her eyes. With a shimmer of horn, the sun bursts forth from the horizon. The crowd erupts into a thunderous cheer.

Somepony grabs her.

She shrieks. Her eyes snap open.

Rough hooves haul her into painful daylight from some dark and grimy contraption. Her head is swimming. At first she thinks the crowd is still cheering, but it's just the background chatter of the carnival.

"Stars and gears, lady," Not-Flim says, "You've got issues."

"Subscriptions," Flim says.

"Compendiums."

"Which is to say, the instant we put you inside you overloaded the machine."

"We'll be hours fixing this."

"Now shoo."

"But —" Trixie protests.

They roughly shove her out onto the midway and slam their gate closed. "No refunds."

Comments ( 52 )

Dem short chapters.

1765179Wait, you didn't read the first chapters!

1765257Never mind, are we the first people to read this?

I'm sorry, I'm afraid you got that wrong. You see, The Great and Powerful Trixie is, indeed, perfect. The machine is just broken.

:pinkiehappy::rainbowlaugh:If I was at home, the cat would have jumped five feet into the air when hearing my laughter. Thank you.

OK, this is the chapter that made me love this extension of no regrets, or side story, or whatever this is...
But this chapter!

Augh, that'll teach me to submit a story and then leave for the day. There were supposed to be author's notes here before readers got to it.

1765179 It's true, man. You're everywhere. I begin to wonder if you have Flim and Flam's machine in your basement so that when too many fics come in at once, you can jump in, say "I regret not reading every single story as it's posted," and go back and fix that. :pinkiehappy:

1765581 Good catch! Do carefully note that each chapter is about life outside the machine -- clearly Trixie's story is truest of all, and when she was grabbed mid-ceremony, the marenappers merely staged a ruse to convince her otherwise. :trollestia:

1765785 Oh, those? The regrets? Just ignore them. You get used to 'em after a while.

1770245 Thanks! It was fun to write, too.

Thank you all for reading and commenting!

1770526 Oh, dammit. I told them to stay away from the children. Hang on while I let my younger self know so that he can stop them in advance, and —*

(transmission ends)

1775692 ... ... On later reflection, I can't believe that I blithely tossed a microfic into comments that's twice the size of the Scootaloo chapter, was written in a single pass in 20 minutes ... and yet it still takes me two months to post 3000 new words. :ajsleepy:

This is by far the best chapter yet. Reminds me of this old thing.

1813348 I am amused. :twilightsmile:

Ohooooo. Ouch.

2375837 The only problem I can see is that it calls into question the nature of the "regrets" the machine erases. Unless you're implying Scoots somehow made a decision that led to her flightlessness...

Hang on, that just made me think of something. Where the heck was Scootaloo on Tornado Day?

2375896
The way it works in my head is that, in order to handle edge cases, the machine doesn't require that you feel any responsibility for the thing you most regret. Its goal is to show you a life with a happier, better you. (What if someone was in a car accident with a drunk driver and got paralyzed, for example? Your biggest regret might very well be getting in your car that day, even though there was nothing you could have done to prevent the event.)

We can go with that explanation and assume an early childhood accident if you want, or extrapolate one step beyond that to say that the machine sees "I regret being born this way" as legitimate.

> Where the heck was Scootaloo on Tornado Day?

Most likely, hiding from the soul-crushing torment of watching every pegasus in Ponyville be praised for doing something she can't. :applecry:

Beautiful...Strange and touching and truly fitting of it's title.

This is really quite clever.

I demand more!

3856568
Thank you! I've been drawing a blank for a while on further stories in this format that pack the punch of the published ones, but if I get any ideas I'll come back to it. (You read No Regrets, right? That story is this plus best princesses.)

In the meantime, my current project Hard Reset 2 plays with the same what-if shenanigans in a slightly different context (time loops), and while the beginning of the story leaps straight into the thick of the action, it's going to be settling down into this sort of intense character focus. :twilightsmile:

Until Celestia showed up, I thought the machine had actually worked as desired, on the basis that while Trixie isn't perfect, she regrets nothing.

This was hilarious, though.

3856662

I've been drawing a blank for a while on further stories in this format that pack the punch of the published ones, but if I get any ideas I'll come back to it.

There's the potential for a Primer-level mindscrew with either Flim or Flam trying the machine. (Perhaps a flashback to when they invented it, which would be interesting to see regardless.)

I'd love to see Rarity use the machine, and regret not taking a different course of action with Spike. The nice thing about some regrets is that they're still fixable.

Depending on your headcanon for how Derpy/Ditzy got the way she is, and your comments about how the machine worked with Scootaloo, it'd be interesting to see if she regrets her vision or her accident-prone tendencies. Especially if she ends up not actually regretting it after she sees the result. (For instance, maybe Dinky might never have come to be without something that followed directly from those traits she thinks she regrets.)

I'd also suggest asking JMac if he wants to post a guest story featuring Quizzical Greystone. Mind-boggling levels of "oh dear", preceded by mind-boggling levels of mind-boggling.

There's a really obvious thing that Luna regrets doing, which would take about a millenium to live differently; you could let her experience it in compressed time, akin to The Inner Light. And there's a very strong conclusion at the end of it to counteract her regret: if not for the legend of Nightmare Moon, what of Twilight and her friends? If you want something that packs a punch, I don't think it gets much stronger than that.

3933775
Thank you for the praise and comments!

> There's a really obvious thing that Luna regrets doing …

Let me stop you there. I regretted not writing that so much that I hopped in the machine myself. Then I used my Hard Reset 2 time-looping skills to legitimately return to the past and post it. Voila! :trollestia:

3933763
> You really should submit this as a Machine of Death story for inclusion in the next volume
Are they still accepting submissions? Volume 2 was already published and I don't see anything about Volume 3 on their site …

I loved it! Too bad it's already over. :pinkiesad2:

4242614
Thanks! I may update it at some point in the nebulous future if further ideas hit me, but right now my muse is elsewhere.

The chapter with Trixie...
was her greatest regret:
1)Not being perfect and all-powerful?
2)Going into that machine in the first place?
or
3)That she even had regrets?(This almost falls into the perfect category, but not quite.)
I would like the author to answer this please.

4697900
Essentially, she regrets not being perfect (so your #1), but she's in such deep denial over her own flaws that the only way the machine can make her happier is to reinforce her delusions.

Notice that hers is the only open-ended one — it shows her a possible future instead of a hypothetical past. This is enough of a malfunction that Flim and Flam have to pull the abort switch. No Regrets centers around a similar problem: the machine's designed for short bursts.

4698403
Interesting indeed...

I feel like alexmagnet should definitely read this chapter.

Anywho, nice story. Really odd, but I enjoyed it. I'll probably look at No Regrets later this weekend for context and stuffs.

4890186
Thanks! I'm pretty consistently pleased and amused by the reception this has gotten — it's kinda what my muse demanded I do to clear the core premise of No Regrets out of my brain so that I could move on to other ideas, and the format (a set-length, themed short story collection) is rare for FIMFic. It's got my best upvote/downvote ratio of any story with downvotes, which always makes me feel a bit weird.

4861318
I have to say, the song was enjoyable, but the best part of that video was when the band told the audience they were gonna stop for a second to take a picture in front of the crowd. That totally humanizes the musicians for that brief moment. I bet they went home and posted the picture on Facebook.

How about a pony with no regrets? Pinkie might fit that. She's experienced things that others in the same situation might regret, but if Pinkie doesn't think of such events regretfully at all then the machine shouldn't catch it.

4899597
Ooh, interesting.

I don't see myself returning to this in the near future, with Hard Reset 2 on my plate as well as editing and posting a few stories from recent writeoffs, but that's a pretty cool idea and if you want (or anyone wants) to follow up on it, I'd love to see how it goes! :twilightsmile:

4899597 Maud Pie enters the machine. She comes out later and says with a single sigh, "I should have eaten that diamond a little slower. I would have appreciated the flavor more." She trots off to buy boulder some more Pet Rock Food.

*Dying of laughter* This is awesome!

I reviewed this story in Recommended Story Reviews #5. You can read my review here.

Incidentally:

"Stars and gears, lady," Not-Flim says, "You've got issues."

"Subscriptions," Flim says.

"Compendiums."

This is one of my favorite Flim Flam back-and-forths in any story ever.

PresentPerfect
Author Interviewer

I think I prefer No Regrets. It tells a much better story. At the very least, reading that first didn't prepare me for something that was mostly whimsical in nature. (And AJ's chapter is too nebulous to really get a solid grasp on.)

6718914
I find it somewhat odd that more people don't agree with you; this one seems to have gotten more critical acclaim. But that's totally legitimate. :twilightsmile:

PresentPerfect
Author Interviewer

6719908
What can I say, I'm a maverick. :B

There needs to be more of this story.

Four chapters doesn't seem like enough...

8231387
Thanks! I may update it at some point in the nebulous future if further ideas hit me -- but my muse has been elsewhere for quite some time, so I wouldn't hold your breath. 😛

Really glad I read both this and No Regrets, they really work well together. Still, No Regrets works much better as a proper story, even if I did enjoy the vignettes here. Too bad you never managed to return to this theme, I'd like to read some more variations on this.

8363861
Thanks for the praise! I'm personally with you on liking No Regrets better, though we seem to be in the minority.

Are there any ponies in particular that you'd like to see? (Or any that this concept is making you want to write?) No promises, but these are pretty short, and if my own muse is inspired too …

8367896
I wouldn't say any particular ponies (even if something with starlight glimmer might be interesting) but more about possible concepts. Like ponies who don't realize their biggest regret led to good things on their life, or who would get addicted to the experience, until what they see is their life without knowing the machine. More than anything, I'm interested on seeing where something like this can be taken.

I liked No Regrets and I love the Applejack chapter. However, I feel like it sets a sort of tone or atmosphere that you deviated from in the following chapters. They were good, but there’s a part of me that’s disappointed that there aren’t more “normal” cases - Scootaloo’s a child, how impactful is biggest regret? Not many ponies can use this along with time travel like Whooves. Trixie broke the damn machine!

I feel like I’d either want far more “unique” scenarios in true Machine of Death-esque anthology style, or just a focus on some particularly significant or impactful cases.

That said, I really love the idea.

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