Epilogue
Twilight Sparkle eventually completed three editions of the "Book of Everything" before deciding to abandon the project. Reviewers complained that, while exhaustive in its detail, the book was simply too large to carry and cumbersome to use as a reference product. Twilight also became frustrated in the entry on the Book itself, which would require progressively more and more detail the more the book was completed. The Book of Everything would take the world record for both "Longest Book (in pages and words)" and "Most Unpleasant Thing to Have Dropped On You".
Derpy, despite receiving only a brief cameo, was nonetheless delighted to find out she received a mention in the epilogue.
Princess Cadence never did quite come to accept changelings, and initially attempted to veto the Crystal Senate's attempts to allow full citizenship rights to changelings within the Empire's boundaries. To her chagrin, the senators cobbled together the three-fourth's majority necessary to override the Princess's veto, and changelings were acceded full recognition under the law.
Charlie the Crystal Pony never did get his jar of honey. Fortunately, he never knew he was going to get one, and therefore was not upset.
Due to his tireless efforts, Shining Armor managed to convince Princess Cadence to recognize, and negotiate with, the Dusty Dries hive. The negotiations were brief, but fair and forthright. Relations would not be normalized between the two for some time, but historians widely agree that Shining Armor played a pivotal role.
Queen Chrysalis declared the changelings and ponies to no longer be at war, and opened up the hive to outsiders on certain conditions. In addition, any changeling who wished to leave was free to do so, any many of the workers took the opportunity. Still, some changelings kept to the old ways, and Chrysalis provided Nectar for free to those who chose to stay in the hive, as well as those in Equestria and beyond who still had need of it.
Tegula convinced Chrissy to stop being so paranoid and to just relax and spend time with her friends. It had little effect on the Queen's demeanor, but, in light of the revelations about friendship, was a necessary step in the transition to a more open life.
Princess Celestia sent out, by royal decree, a full guarantee of amnesty for all changelings operating within Equestria. Despite some initial distrust, many ponies quickly accepted the changelings in their midst when they found that most of them knew at least one or two in disguise. Not all was well, but over time, the distrust healed and the two societies found friendship.
Vinyl Scratch hosted a concert whose initial attendance estimates had been at six-thousand, but eventually the total ballooned to nine-thousand. The concert went beautifully, despite complaints by the city's sanitation commission that the jumping of the dancers was shaking the pavement and could risk a collapse.
After the concert, intoxicated patrons began a customary riot, and Canterlot guardsponies began a vicious close-quarters battle that lasted until five a.m. Vinyl Scratch managed to avoid all the negative consequences of her actions.
Final tally: 517 noise complaints, 65,000 bits of property damage (estimate), 64 arrests, 15 ponies hospitalized. A.C. would comment that it was, "A good night".
Rainbow Dash was never compensated for nearly killing Octavia with the bungee cord. She forgot about it within a day.
Octavia's quartet finally saw some success after a dry spell of three months. They currently tour once per year, visiting every city and town except Canterlot. When asked if they were interested in auditioning for the Canterlot Symphony Orchestra, all four politely declined.
Thorax received a promotion to Vats Overseer after voluntarily rescinding his position as Infiltrator. He spent several months touring Equestria with Octavia, and now maintains a relatively small Nectar-brewing facility in Ponyville for any changeling who requires it. He has been disallowed from acquiring the ingredients himself.
Nurse Redheart and Nurse Tenderheart would become world-famous experts on changeling anatomy and society after their paper, "Examinations of Changeling Physiology", was published in the respected journal Nature. Despite their accolades, the two continued to practice in Ponyville General, mostly because of the reprehensible misuse of their names and nicknames everywhere else.
Pinkie Pie had major difficulty adjusting to having changeling friends, since some of them would put on disguises and confuse her. She eventually came up with elaborate greeting ceremonies that only specific changelings knew about, to better differentiate them.
Lyra ripped the newspaper in half before she got the chance to read it. She was not happy about it.
Spiracle would go on to start a relationship with Nurse Redheart, whose fascination with changelings blossomed into something that could be fed on. Spiracle continued to criss-cross the world as Sasha Gio, delivering packages and Nectar wherever a client could pay her to go.
Commander Tarsus, due to the new nature of Equestria-Dusty Dries politics, retired shortly after a peace treaty was signed. He became the first changeling in the intelligence division to publish his memoirs, recounting the many exciting and dangerous missions he had been on and sent agents on, as well as the less-exciting ones. He is said to still have a soft spot for money, and can often be found devouring cinnamon-swirl ice-cream in the Dusty Dries Hotel after dark.
Spike continued to be Twilight Sparkle's scribe and confidante for some time. When interviewed, he said he "Didn't mind it" as long as she "kept the gems flowing". It is believed he was being sarcastic.
Owlowiscious made the same "Who?" joke that everyone is no-doubt sick of by this point. Five hundred more times. It didn't get any funnier than it wasn't the first time.
The Ponyville Cookie Bandit was never caught. The Cutie Mark Crusaders maintained a careful vigil over the town, and fortunately, the Bandit never struck again. However, because he/she remains at large, it is advised to keep your cookies safely within their jar until it is time to eat them, especially if you are within the greater Ponyville area. This has been a public safety message from the Cutie Mark Crusaders.
(Cutie Mark Crusader Vigilantes! Yay!)
Octavia and Thorax would eventually marry, and move into their own house on the southern edge of Ponyville. They would frequently abscond to Ponyville's windmill/watermill hybrid at night, and, well, that much is obvious. Other than all the times when Vinyl was blasting dubstep at three in the morning, or when various supervillains appeared to attack the town, or when giant monsters invaded, or when metallic aliens invaded, or when creatures from the center of the earth attacked, or the many natural disasters which struck Ponyville, not to mention periodic assaults by Parasprites, Timberwolves, deranged hermits, travelling salesponies, and many, many other things, the two lived happily ever after.
The End.
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:applaud: BRAVO!
Pure win. Who would have guessed that torture could be both dark, as well as completely stupid at the same time? And I like the epilogue. It was like watching Animal House all over again.
This has been a really fun story. Thorax's misadventures were constantly hilarious, and the intrigue of the larger story going on in the background mostly unknown to him kept things interesting. I'm almost sorry to see it end, but these last few chapters really wrapped everything up very neatly.
Well that was fun, odd but a lot of fun. There are a few things that I think need brushing up. In particular a little more detail on what exactly the whole hive riot thing would be especially nice as I'm still not entirely sure what was going on there. Thinking about it the overall ending seemed a little abrupt.
Still, overall a nicely done story and one I think I might read again some time.
A nice, fun story and a good ending, methinks. Well done.
Ah, it's always satisfying to see an author finish his works~
As for the overall story? I'd say it started off strong but somewhere around 2/3rds of the way in I got the impression that you wanted to story to be done, ASAP. Especially Cadence...what the hell? I thought you were just playing her being unreasonable for comedic affect. But, "If you're siding with her, I'll be sure to write you a nice eulogy"? Did she just threaten to kill Celestia? What?!
Mostly though, I really liked this story, especially your sense of humor. I think you're a pretty strong comedy writer.
See I knew it
Epic
3374242
I'm a programmer too. I know exactly what you mean.
My eyes do skip over the spacing after the periods (more on that in a moment). It's the lack of space between paragraphs that brings it a little too close to one giant block of text for comfort.
Denoting paragraphs purely by leading indent only really works when you've limited the width of the text to roughly the same width as a pocketbook novel page. When the user is already devoting their unconscious effort to effort to making sure their eyes do exactly one linefeed while carriage-returning, it gets really irritating to not have horizontal bars of whitespace to use as points of reference while their eyes are blurring their way back to the left side of the screen.
As for the spaces after periods, here's why I care when I can ignore them:
1. As you said, English already has enough stupid conventions. Double-spacing is another pointless thing that needs to be taught while collapsing something smaller than 4 spaces into a single space when writing non-code is the obvious behaviour.
2. Single-spacing was what everyone had agreed upon before typewriters came on the scene. Now that typewriters have proven themselves a technological blip, let's retire the hack cooked up to work around their shortcomings and go back to agreeing upon a convention.
(Maybe it's significant that my favorite programming language is Python... a language whose design and community tries to embrace the concept of "there should be only best way to do it, don't enshrine it in the language until the design is mature enough to avoid accreting hacks later, work to deprecate and eventually retire hacks which do creep in, and it's everyone's responsibility to try to advance these principles.")
3. I have a personal vendetta against double-spacing as part of a larger loathing for how much code I have to write to prevent contentEditable=True DOM nodes from abusing HTML into acting WYSIWYG rather than WYSIWYM with entities and empty P elements. (I much prefer how LyX does it. When users try to double-space or hit Enter twice, it ignores the second keystroke and the status bar points them to an explanation of the concept of separating content and presentation.)
3381770
Only way I survived my ex
*raises hand for a high-5*
Anyone? Don't leave me hangin'
Ok, I'm glad I stuck to with this to the end. And by the time parties were springing up in the hive, I began seeing and accepting where you were going and found that I had been too hasty with complaining about tone in the earlier chapters, when I realized that you were setting the readers up for this. Though I kinda expected it to have been Pinkie, winning over the entire Changeling race with parties, perhaps at Celestia's orders.
I still think the tone is inconsistent at times, just at different times, for several reasons. First: did the unhappy changelings kill their superiors to party? Because that's how it comes across to me and it is still jarring compared to the slapstick romance. So is Cadence's behavior towards the end. Dislike of changelings makes sense for her, but she is too murderous and unreasonable for my taste. I call OOC on the poor, pink alicorn.
The biggest issues I end up with concern Vinyl and Octavia. They are both unstable and need therapy! Their bouts of violence are horrifying, not funny (OK, Vinyl's were mildly, but only very mildly funny) and made me lose a lot of respect for them. Particularly Octavia's sudden raging breakdown is really hard to take for me, not to mention completely unexpected. It is incredibly jarring to go from Thorax being an idiot and Vinyl finding him weird, to sudden, horrible violence that would not be out of place in Kickass. And the way it is glossed over is, frankly, off-putting. It looks almost like an "abuse is OK when it's female on male", which also seems evident in it being OK for Vinyl to just punch Thorax whenever she likes. It's not. But forget Vinyl for now, Octavia deserves soooo much more crap for her assault on Thorax than she gets and an event like that deserves much more attention in the narrative.
You write that she is "sheepish" when reminded about crippling and almost killing another being, in the throes of a mental breakdown that apparently included vivid hallucinations. She should be absolutely crushed at every fucking mention and seek help at some point. Thorax and she do not need to apologize evenly. True, infiltrating like Thorax did is terrible, but he seems too stupid to properly appreciate that if he had had an actual mission, his success would have actually hurt these nice ponies. Octavia is much more thoughtful and aware of stuff (except for Thorax' true nature, which seems to be everyone's major blind spot) and therefor she should be agonizing about it, a lot!
Also, Thorax when talking about love in the hospital and when he suddenly finds his focus and wants to go to save Octavia sound completely unlike the bumbling moron we've gotten to know and love. I see what those scenes want to do, but they just don't sound like him at all.
The speech he gives at the end is explained as one he has worked on since he was young. That makes little sense, considering almost all of it relates to his most recent life. Is that intentional? Because as it just looks like the narrative is wrong about what he says.
Ok, time to take the edge of:
The reason I even rant like this is that I generally like your story. As I said before, I find your writing solid, most of the time, and each individual scene is good, even Octavia's breakdown. It's just when you put them all together, I find some issues, as I have mentioned above. The fact that you managed to write a "stupid character bumbles through romance and life with success" that I enjoyed is a testament to your skill, I usually take one look at stupid main characters and write if off as, well, stupid and not worth my time. Vinyl and Octavia, whenever they are not involved in violence, are both a joy to read about and so are all the other characters. All in all, as long as you write romance, humor, world-building and slice of life, then I love your writing and this story. You just suffer from the same things a lot of humorous fiction does, that they sometimes want drama and make it too heavy and then gloss over it afterwards.
As a final note I will express my thanks and respect for making it to the end. It is too rare that I find a fanfic worth reading that actually ends up completed. Even rarer is it to experience one from just a few chapters to a full, completed length of 28 chapters. Well done.
I hope you'll continue to nurture your writing skills and possibly show some of it to us.
Happy writing.
3412128
Because my response is long and loaded with spoilers/behind-the-scenes stuff, I put it in a gdoc.
Don't click this link if you haven't finished the story!
3417130
I know it's slapstick with Vinyl. I'm just reaching the point where I sort of zoom in on slapstick where it's female on male, because I dislike the trend (which definitely exists) that female on male is funny, while male on female is horrible. Most slapstick violence with someone being actively violent is female on male, where the situation would always be seen as horrible were the genders reversed. That's why I'm beginning to have a knee-jerk reaction to that sort of thing and I don't recall this story containing any sympathetic character, certainly no male, being purposefully violent towards a female character where it was seen as comedic, though I admit, it is a long time since I read the earlier chapters.
I get that Octavia is acting out because of issues she had already and I saw that she was moping a whole day, but that is not enough. Doing something so horrible, and particularly to someone you actually love dearly, should leave scars that last years. Again, I don't think a male would be so easily forgiven. If a male did exactly the same to a female, he'd have lost all sympathy forever, unless a genius writer took a lot of time and effort to work it out.
Also, the foreshadowing was not heavy enough for my taste, so it came almost out of nowhere. Almost, there were a few hints, but the breakdown gave me a "wow, where did that come from?" not "wow, that was heavy, but not entirely unexpected.
I'm sorry that I sit here and pull the gender card, it feels very odd from this side of the gender line (or blurry haze or whatever it is), but Octavia seems to get away too easily with what would get serious jail time, mandatory therapy and horrified reactions from people in real life. And I know this is fiction, but you are realistic enough that comparison with real life seems reasonable.
And I have to say that the reason I say what I do about Cadence is that I just dislike painting such bigotry on the canvas that is Cadence, which canonically only has love, responsibility, determination and pleasantness, even if I will admit that she is not completely fleshed out. And I'm not even a huge fan of her, and though I can see why she would be wary of changelings, she is practically love and acceptance incarnated in canon and therefor it makes no sense to me to see her so thoroughly unpleasant. The character you give when she deals with changelings oddly seems more akin to fake Cadence than anything the real one seems capable of in canon.
The same goes, in the opposite way, with Chrysalis, who in canon shows nothing but cruelty, arrogance and lust for power. She shows no inkling of being a reasonable leader. I have nothing against fleshing her out and making her somewhat sympathetic, but when it is put up against the fanatic hate you give Cadence, it looks like Leather Pants for Chrysalis and the opposite for Cadence and that's why I dislike what you did with them.
All in all, after this lengthy rant which probably accomplishes nothing but my catharsis, though I hope it provokes a little thought (that sounds more arrogant than I intend), I say that overall, I still think you, next time, should try to stick to one thing, either drama or humor, because the extremes are too much here. Mostly with Cadence and Octavia's violence.
Also, I think I forgot last time, the time when Spiracle disguises herself as Octavia, it would make for a better, misleading narrative if you used "she" and "her" in the beginning, when she seats herself with Vinyl, going through some conversation that shows that Vinyl thinks it's Octavia, and then dropping the name Spiracle for a full revelation to the reader and then STICKING with Spiracle. In situations like this, you should either go with full omniscient narrator and go with only her, she and the proper names, or go with one viewpoint and what names that viewpoint would use. Don't use both the disguise name and the real name in the same part. For full confusion, you could instead have used "she" and "her" in both this scene and in the arrest of the real Octavia, so we weren't completely sure.
Reading some of the comments, I've decided to postpone reading this until I've forgotten what was said... That being said, the story sounds interesting, I look forward to it.
3700093
That looks fine in a physical paper book, I prefer it even, but on a screen it looks terrible.
Huh... Woulda been better with a sequel in my opinion, but good overall. Not sure if I'm to write a review
Awesom epilogue...
Thorax has probably the best characterization I've ever seen on this site, and despite the tone changes some other have pointed out which lost it point to them, I actually thought it worked well...
Not a clue how I forgot to comment on this story when I read it in November... because it's honestly one of the best, if not the best fanfic I've read, I mean I've read almost 30 stories since it and they are all over like the 40k word mark and on average probably 80k, yet I can still remember this one completely. The ending is great too, really fits in with this universe that's been created, and it's nice to see another take on it, because normally in changeling fics they all try to explain to the ponies how they aren't evil etc but this one has the ponies thinking completely differently which is pretty nice to see.
3801045
I think everyone is misunderstanding this story. Vinyl was the main character, while everyone spends all their time talking about Thorax and Octavia!
Maybe I really did mess up that head-hopping stuff...
3805170 Maybe Thorax was just too well done... if I'm honest I cannot remember Vinyl at all in this story, however I've read pretty much only Tavi + Vinyl fanfiction since so that's probably not helping...
But if Vinyl was the main character then why isn't she mentioned in the description... not to mention she doesn't play a large role?
3806853
When I posted that, I was worried people might not understand it was a joke.
Such a amazing and hilarious story and ending xD. Definitely something in the water for all the weirdness in ponyville clearly.... x3
3807504
Omg I must have been tired or something how did I not see that
This was an amazing story, with maybe some of the best characterization I've ever seen.
Especially Thorax, who was quite frankly painful to watch much of the time, but in the end I'm calling that evidence of the quality of it.
Overall it was a thoroughly enjoyable read. Well done.
Epic story!
Lol just ran into this http://www.mlponline.net/ and found you :P
So sad that this story hasn't been featured every time I see it I'm like omg...
As one writer to another, all I can say about this is that it is FREAKING AWESOME!
I seriously couldn't fall asleep until I had finished it. Liked and faved. have a watch while I'm at it.
Sadly he's not
Haha, that was awesome. Great characters, humor, and happy endings for changelings and Chryssie.
For some reason I imagine Chryssie lazing about on a beach somewhere.
Cya
Raziel-chan
This was a very odd, but fulfilling read.
Thank you sir.
Sequel?
The latest episode reminded me of this fic maybe I should re-read it
huh...somehow i got the idea that Tenderheart was actually Cadence in disguise...then again, she's not that good at disguises...
One of the funniest stories I've read in a while. Great job.
8306494 It's funny how this also fits the official Thorax to a t.
I'm confused. That ending didnt explain a few things for me. The whole story Chrysilis is paranoid then all of a sudden shes friendly.
Were any other changelings harmed in the production?
Why is Cadance a psycho?
What happened to all those abandoned hives?
And i guess i would have to actually listen to Thorax sing to know why it was so aweful.
I feel so betrayed you bastard. That bombastic cover art and the big damn build up for the most part, stupid little me thinking this wasn't gonna be a pure romcom despite the rom and com tags not being accompanied by drama or something else like that. You sir are an evil little dingle berry. I curse you even though this stupid fic made me laugh so hard way to much.