Chapters Conventions Shmonventions
Nothing is ever quite what it seems. Remember that and you might not fail completely.
Even a simple equation. A very well known one,
2+2=4
for example, depends on and implies a lot.
Any number plus itself is even.
The base used here is at least base 5. It could be base 35896 even.
The language the person writes in is most likely English, but no guarantees.
Assuming the lower ASCII characters are being used, if one were to write pi in base 128 that sequence could be found eventually.
And then of course that might not even be an equation.
Given a simple character replacement code that could actually be "tutor".
Anyone may be more than what you would think.
Anyone may be less.
And some are a bit of both.
Hammer-ons and pull-offs are what I eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And sometimes midnight snacks. While I may not play an actual instrument, at least I play a fake one like a boss. Demonstrating my decent skills in front of others gives quite a rush. Playing with friends is definitely my favorite part of the whole thing though. Speaking of friends, my friends were trying to get me to go to this convention thing. I had plans to stay at home and do more important stuff, like watch more ponies or something.
Yes, I am a brony. Big deal. A lot of people are. A lot of people aren't. Meh. Anyhow, then my friends mentioned the video game tournament that would be held there. Because, you know, I like video games. Good plan.
This plan was great in theory but not so great in practice. Usually at public tournaments they play first person shooters. Like CoD. Or Halo. Or UT. Or Quake. Or CS. Or TF2. Or possibly even Ghost Recon. Is there even a multiplayer for that? Reluctance turned into solid determination not to go. FPS games are not my strong suit. They're so not my strong suit it’s more like a petrified log from Yellowstone than a nice 200$ suit that even comes with a tux. And that's barely remotely related to any of the spades, clubs, diamonds and/or hearts that so many are familiar with. It's odd then that I happen to know so many titles off the top of my head. It may be wondered then why I've played MW3 for 5 hours straight. It's simple. The campaign is awesome. My skills are not.
After unsuccessfully attempting to convince me that going there would be more fun than listening to a looped version of Smile Smile Smile, they finally rolled a 20 for their diplomacy check. They mentioned that there would be a Rockband/Guitar Hero category. They only got as far as “Rockba-” before I barrelled out the door and out to the car with my wallet. Then they dragged me back and explained that I needed a costume and it wasn’t going to be for about two weeks. Then it took a good deal of more convincing that no, I could not travel in time and/or use cryogenics on myself. I had to have a costume, and I had to be available to help with the costume.
Sorry, Pinkie Pie, but you don’t need to be friends with EVERYone, just the right ones. With good friends come good get-ups. Being a Halo fan (even though my skill at the game is rather minimal as has been discussed in probably too great detail above), I created a sweet Spartan suit with my friend. It was green with some black and brown highlights. The faceplate was gold with an off-color marking shaped in the troll face. My friend is AWESOME. My friend is AWESOME. Did I mention they were awesome? I think I forgot to mention that.
When she finished off the last bits by herself and summoned me to her house, she was wearing the helmet and asked “Hey Evan, u mad bro?” Oh. That reminds me. My name is Evan Porter. In addition to the suit itself, it came with the assault rifle, a needle rifle, the pistol, one plasma grenade, and two boxes, one labeled “Active Camouflage” and the other "Sprint". They even had the icons printed out. Did I mention my friend is so awesome that they don’t just drink awesome sauce, they could raise the sea level more than even Al Gore's take on global warming ever could? Yeah.
Slowly, agonizingly, and gloriously the day finally came. After settling carpools and such we headed off. At the convention itself, we stuck together for roughly an hour before breaking apart like, well, teenagers at a generic anime-cosplay-who-knows-what convention. Having never been to one of these before, the various costumes bedazzled my eyes. Everyone had all sorts of costumes from The Terminator to Mario and even Derpy and look at that one over there! They’re... oh wait they aren’t wearing a costume. Never mind. They look vaguely famous for some reason.
Anyhow, after wandering aimlessly for a few minutes something caught my eye, besides another incredible costume. It was a TV screen. A widescreen TV, to be exact. On this screen was an active video game. Instantly my mind identified it as pro bass, guitar, pro drums and harmony vocals playing Smoke on the Water via Rockband 3. Now THAT'S my kind of party! After a short walk and a far too long wait in line for the ordinary guitar (must have been a whopping 45 seconds until the song ended), it was my turn.
A short discussion settled us on Free Bird. I asked the pro stringed instrument player which line they wanted, and they said "Oh, you can have the guitar." Some people are nice like that. A brief internal conflict ensued in which I tried to decide if I wanted to do Hard and quite possibly get 98-100% or Expert and wind up around my usual 95%. I thought to myself "Expert is more fun anyways. Besides, nobody's going to be judging you, right? Right? At least not excessively." Little did I know...
The exact details are irrelevant, but here are some highlights. I finally stopped biffing up the first hammer-on string, kept my rhythm straight on the descending 4's and did perfect on the cross-descending 3's. Of course, as always happens whenever I do well on the other parts, I lost my rhythm on the build-up orange with yellow hammerons streak. Nonetheless, I was VERY excited because I broke my record. I stood there, fist in the air and eyes closed, with the afterimage of a 97% burning in the back of my mind. Not perfect, nowhere near, but at least okay.
Someone walked up behind me and said "You did pretty good."
"Thanks."
"But not quite good enough."
He paused and I winced.
He continued with "... BRONY." and pushed me. Hard. The sort of hard push that Arnold Schwarzenegger would give. I stumbled, opened my eyes and turned around to yell at the man. There was no person there. Indeed, there was nobody around. Just a bunch of trees, plants and dirt. I don't know about you, but suddenly being not in a building is rather frightening. I held the guitar which was in my hands in what I hoped was a threatening pose, with my hands on the neck and the body pointed away.
After taking a fourth look at the guitar, it then struck me that I still had it. I said "Uh oh. I should probably give this back." Or at least I tried to. I didn't hear anything. A few further futile attempts to speak resulted in me twisting and pulling off my helmet. This proved to be HIGHLY disorienting as my vision swung and continued facing in the same direction as my helmet. Dizzy, I dropped the helmet. Naturally, the helmet faced me. Unnaturally, I looked at my headless body.
Most people would probably scream if they saw their head missing. I could not scream, and I'm not most people. So, I just stood there thinking "Huh. Where did my head go? Heh. I don't have a head! Apparently I don't need one. Looks like Bob was right. Oh wait, no, the slime was talking about brains. Good movie anyways. Wait. Is my head INSIDE my helmet somehow? This is SO COOL!" I walked my body forwards and bent down to grab my helmet. Poking around inside my helmet revealed no hidden head. It did feel weird however. It felt like I was touching the inside of my skull. For that matter, HOLDING my helmet felt like I was holding my head. Some experimentation soon revealed that for some reason my sense of touch was through my costume.
Of course, you can only poke the inside of your head for so long before finally starting to get weirded out. The internal monologue continued, "Okay, this is officially moving right on down to freaky town. I swear if these trees start turning into people I'll-GAH!" As usual, just thinking about certain things will cause them to occur. In this case, a tree turned into a man who walked towards me. A man with a face I knew. A man with a face many know. A man who, if this really was him, would explain A LOT. Jack Black is a pretty crazy but funny guy, after all. At this point I decided that I had spontaneously developed epilepsy and had played too many video games. Perfectly reasonable, right?
"Hah. Epilepsy? Really? Listen, I'll answer some of your questions, and not answer some of your questions. Yes, I am the man that shoved you into Equestria. Yes, I just said Equestria. Yes, you are now a walking suit of armor. No, not a costume, a suit of armor. No, I am not going to explain. You're going to have to figure that one out yourself. Yes, this is real in the sense that you are real. No, again, I'm not going to explain. Yes, I am cooler than you. That's the first thing you must learn about interdimensional trolling, young cricket."
Still stunned at all the stuff he said, I did nothing as the man walked away. He pulled a door out of nowhere and put it onto the ground. He grabbed the doorknob then turned to me and said "Okay, a few final things. First, have fun. Or at least try to. Second, don't insult games. Even you admit the reason you don't like most games is because you suck at them. Third, remember who you are. A stupid nerdy kid with only a few skills. And some vague kind of morals system." He opened the door, walked into what looked like some part of the convention I had very recently been a part of, and shut the door. After a moment the door fell over. And melted. Seriously. It melted like it was made of ice and tried to take a vacation on Venus or something.
After watching the molten wood slowly seep into the ground for a while, I took my bearings. It looked like there was a hill off in the distance. Maybe the height advantage would help me to figure out just where the heck in Equestria I was. I stopped walking. Equestria? I was in EQUESTRIA? BEST! DAY! EVER!!! I smiled and skipped instead of walking. Today was going to be a great day. Then I heard a roar right behind me and turned around just in time to get full body slammed quite forcefully. Emphasis on WAS going to be a great day.
I know what you're thinking. Or at least I like to pretend like I do. "You're made of metal. You're practically invincible!" is my guess. That's partially true. I'm probably pretty hard to kill. That doesn't mean that getting smacked a good thirty feet and crashing into the ground does not hurt like getting smacked said good thirty feet and crashing into aforementioned ground. True, it didn't hurt as much as it should normally, but it still hurt. Rolling over and scrambling up, I see a typical denzien of magical forests. Bat wings, scorpion tail and lion head all add up to your run-of-the-mill garden variety manticore. Is it just me or most of the time when someone pops up in Equestria somehow a manticore is involved? When the beast charged again, I used whatever small athletic skills I had and dodged to the side. I screamed inside my mind, "HELP!!!" as if someone would happen to read my mind and come to my assistance.
Quite unexpectedly, a GUI popped up in the left third of my vision that said "MJOLNIR Custom Edition HELP". Before I could read more, the manticore had charged again and tackled me. I flailed my arms about ineffectively as the ferocious beast bit me. If I could scream, I would have. Those teeth were sharp. And they were hard. And they were trying to find out what I looked like on the inside. With one bite unsuccessful the beast released and it bit again. Friggin manticore. Then next it did something that surprised me. Instead of biting me, it sniffed me. Then it licked me. It seemed rather confused and ran off. I guess that's one advantage to being made of metal. There isn't much that likes to eat you, besides dragons. And probably a few other things.
Realizing that being made of metal and who knows what all does not imply that you're invincible is rather unsettling. Thankfully, I had a friend here. A friend apparently named "MJOLNIR Custom Edition HELP". Below the title, it had a numbered list of help topics. The first one was "Read me first. Hint: OPEN TOPIC ZERO" Guessing that I was supposed to think that, I thought "Open topic zero." No effect. "Open topic zero." Nada. "OPEN TOPIC ZERO." Finally topic zero opened. Apparently thoughts are now case sensitive. Weird. How does it detect that...? Moving on before mind implodes/explodes.
The title changed to "Read me first" and the text now read as follows:
Good job kid. You found the help menu. And basic menu navigation. Yes, I'm back.
No, I didn't write this help system. It generated itself. Except for this part of course.
I just wanted to say that you SUCK AT LIFE. And probably at combat as well if you found this already.
Welcome to your MJOLNIR Custom Edition armor.
It is highly recommended that you run the command "SHOW GUI MAIN" before we proceed.
Remember, your suit is connected to your mind.
Just think in capital letters and move the suit as your body.
Any command can be found quickly with "FIND"
And most languages will be interpreted.
Being a bit of a rebel, I finished reading off the page of instructions and then ran "SHOW GUI MAIN". What appeared before me was what looked like the "Halo Reach" GUI. There were some subtle grey circles moving around on my motion detector, but that was to be expected in a forest. I noticed my shields were down. And they weren't going on. I tried "ACTIVATE SHIELDS". There was a beeping sound and a few seconds later my shields charged up. Okay so now I had some protection. Looking around the view, my focus changed to the top right corner.
What I saw there made me smile. Heck, it would probably make a bunch of people stranded in a far away place smile. At least if I didn't have the infamous Spartan poker face I would have. There was an icon for the assault rifle, fully loaded with 128 extra, and an icon for the needle rifle. Again fully loaded but with only 28 needles to spare. Oddly there was a third icon. It was for the pistol. Again 7 out of 7 bullets with 35 extra. Not exactly enough to last for a lifetime, but should be enough to last for... okay maybe 15 minutes of a solid firefight with the way I shoot? Given that I actually had these guns though, there was a funny feeling like I could somehow get more. That idea was very comforting after having been half mauled by a evil terrifying hungry manticore.
Feeling prepped and loaded, I pulled out the pistol and started shooting random stuff. The ground. More ground. That tree stump. That stump again. The ground again. That rockband guita-wait what? I saw my rockband guitar. My precious rockband guitar that I almost just shot. Not really mine but who was going to take it back? Moral of micro-story: Trigger happiness might not always be happiness. I SPRINTed over and then almost fell over myself at the sudden burst of speed. So that's what they meant by move the suit as my body. I picked up my precious then realized it wasn't even mine. For good old times and Jack Black's sake, I did the combination of frets and strums that was the GRYBO interpretation of the guitar line for The Metal. Good song. Then I realized that I could actually hear the guitar line emanating from the guitar.
ONE HOUR LATER
A certain meme very well describes this part. It's the one with the dog and "I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I'M DOING". It turns out that I didn't even have to play an actual song. I could just make it up as I went. There were some restrictions that I learned the hard way. Because it was powered by my mind, it could only make sound when I played. And what I played with my fingers had to match up with the sounds in my head. And the only sounds that could play would be the guitar line. No drums, vocals, background hiss or anything. Apparently I could switch to bass but that was it. Not that that wasn't fun, mind you. After playing through Another One Bites the Dust for about the 6th time, I decided it was time to see just what all the suit had.
(AN)
Blocks of suit command-response input will now use a console-type display.
Input is italicized with a preceding > and be all caps.
That may change depending on how much that hurts your/my eyes.
In all cases, it will be green. Like this computer.
And as you may have noticed earlier, AN's are RED.
Color coded text for your convenience.
And colour coded text for British convenience.
(/AN)
FIND
Not enough parameters
FIND COMMAND
Error : output too large.
FIND COMMAND HELP
HELP
FIND COMMAND ALTERNATE HELP
Nothing found.
... FINE
... TUNED?
HELP
The help window from earlier showed up again. I decided to peruse this and learn as much about my new body as I could while walking towards the nearest hill. There were other random messages from Jack Black throughout the guide. At first I thought the coolest thing I read was how besides sprint I also had active camo. Then I read that both had been lengthened. Unfortunately there was still the underlying issue of sucking at fighting regardless of shields or pseudo-invisibility, because honestly the biggest thing I ever killed was probably me accidentally killing my sister's pet gerbil. I was six, okay? How was I supposed to know that holding it like that would break its neck?
About an hour later suddenly the terrain started sloping upwards. Momentarily pulling my eyes away from obscure details such as electro-reforming plates embedded almost everywhere in the suit, the trek up said mountain started. Apparently being a suit means that I don't really get tired. Even though I still feel pain. Carefully avoiding any caves, ten minutes later the top now had an awesome looking metallic statue on it. The mountain wasn't really that big. And sprinting with the suit makes quick work of it. Looking around doesn't reveal much. Except for that thing on that mountain over there. It's rather shiny. ZOOM VIEW reveals that the shiny thing over there is none other than Canterlot. It looks... different than expected but it was still probably Canterlot.
Whether or not my life suddenly turned into a video game is irrelevant. There's Canterlot and Ponyville and who knows what all to be seen. Anything is possible. Counter-trolling Celestia. Baking, if not eating, cupcakes with Pinkie Pie. The possibilities have been DOUBLED! Nay, the possibilities are FOUR-EVER!!! HUZZAH!!! The imaginary smile is wiped off my imaginary face about half way down the mountain when a misstep and not paying attention to the ground because of recent meme generations result in falling into a cave. A cave occupied by several somethings that do not want metallic visitors.
Timber wolves are indeed a cross between a tree and a wolf. They look like living bundles of sticks somehow connected together and flexing and interwoven. Like normal wolves, they were very territorial. I probably just fell into their house equivalent. And they hadn't invited me to dinner. Standing and reorienting myself gave the four of them time to surround me. Less favorite. Well, it was time to apply the small amount of skill gained from skeet shooting, playing paintball and being a BB range director. Drawing out the assault rifle, I took aim and waited for them to attack. Which they did. One leaped at me, jaws wide.
I managed to get off a whole 3 shots before the wolf bounced off my shields, the savage strike smashing them to a mere 87% instead of 100%. Okay, so that wasn't really smashing them. It still looked like it would have. If my intestines weren't having existence difficulties I probably would have crapped my suit. So instead the "You're going to DIE so do something" section of my mind did the closest thing which was to release a few bullets. Some of the said bullets soon made extremely bad friends with the aforementioned timber wolf. The thing yelped so I tried to put it out of its misery and run for it before the others lost their confusion from the nice and loud gunshots.
Thank groodness for Dead Space. There was only enough time to smash its head with my metal boot (when I get scared I get serious), which at least stopped the whining, then 3 of them jumped me from behind at once. Probably the first smart thing I had done for a long time was duck and ignore that weird "+18m" gold text that had popped up. All three flew overhead and crashed into the opposite cave wall in a tangled woody mess. So I did the smart thing versus a group of enemies. I pulled the plasma grenade from my pocket and pushed the little button and chucked it at them. It stuck to the middle one, and I realized what I just did. I just chucked a plasma grenade in a small enclosed space while in said small enclosed space.
A very short SPRINT resulted in me not blowing myself to pieces with a plasma grenade for the umpteenth time if you include Halo on the Xbox 360 at my friend's house. Like with the first timber wolf, "+16m", "+13m", and "+21m" appeared and then faded away. That text ticked me off. What, was this supposed to be CoD or something? This suit gave life a very video-game-ish feel but this was going too far. Besides, what was with the 'm'? Are we saying that the wolves were worth millions of points? Even a freaking low-rank helicopter was 650ish. And those were probably a lot more lethal than a mere timber wolf.
Not having much better to do other than try to get away from the now collapsed-in cave with probably 1 mostly intact wooden body and 3 piles of ashes, it was time to figure out what that text meant. Clearly it was some sort of points system or something regardless of how weird the scale was. HELP POINTS popped up a very small box that said "Try SHOW GUI TARDIS". SHOW GUI TARDIS unfortunately did not make a a picture of a certain very useful blue box appear. No timey-wimey for me. SHOW GUI TARDIS nevertheless yielded very interesting results. TARDIS may also stand for "Transdimensional Accessible Radical Dispensing Item Store".
The GUI for this suit function was very simple. Just a search bar, a box with my current points and a few buttons in various places. A little magnifying lens, a graph, a wrench and a question mark. An imaginary question mark formed above my head. If I only have a mental keyboard, how do I click buttons? To whoever is seeing this, because at this point this monologue has gone on far too long to not to be read by anyone, no that question shouldn't have been asked. A mental keyboard can also easily be friends with a mental mouse. How much herp would a herp-derp derp if a herp-derp could derp herp?
Anyhow, with 1731m I should be able to buy something, right? Maybe another plasma grenade? Searching for it resulted in 23b results. Billions, maybe? The 'recommended' one was the type I just used. Thank groodness. And I could buy one for a mere HOLY CRAP 1600m??? Okay then. Well, it's probably worth it. The buy button gleamed at me. It said "click me. click me. click me." like a broken record. Like a broken record. Like a broken rec-moving on. Submitting to temptation, I clicked the button. Another box with a bunch of delivery options popped up. I picked "cardboard box".
Before I could wonder just what would happen there was a strange noise, almost like a blowdart, and a cardboard box appeared in the air. Then it fell to the ground. I picked it up, opened it, clipped the expected grenade on and mentally smiled. I was satisfied with my purchase. Then the significance of what just happened struck. A box just came out of nowhere and delivered a weapon of decent destruction and then dissapeared shortly afterwards. Internet shopping just got taken up to, well, forget about 11. It's now over 9000. OP much?
Anyhow, the help button didn't tell much. What it did tell though was quite valuable. Everything you do affects your points. Any given action has it's base score depending on what you did, with what, how well you did, etc. It also has a score multiplier which comes from the context. Singing a song well in front of a large group of people would have a bigger multiplier than singing said song well to yourself. Simple enough. Then it got not so simple. Apparently everyone and everything has their own score whether or not they participate in or even know the existence of the system. The number system was easy enough. 'k' meant 1000's, 'm' meant 1000000's, 'b' meant billions, and then apparently there were 't', 'q', 'p', 's', 'v', 'o', 'n', and 'd'.
How you could actually get to that many points was past my own comprehension. The significant thing was that the last line said "If the user can't think of what to buy, search 'recommended' to maximize usage of our intuitive purchase feature". The list of recommended items was topped by something that immediately caught my interest. "Portal to your house, in a jar!" was the first item on the list. It cost 3q. 3141592653589793 to be exact. I had a way home! It just cost a metrick fetlockton. A metric fetlocton. Gaah. A LOT.
After calculating the approximate number of timber wolves that would need to be slain in order to go back home, which happens to be about 200 million, I decided that that would take not only an obscenely long amount of time but it probably would not be very socially acceptable and my karma would drop (whether or not timber wolves are evil) to the point where spontaneous critical existence failure was actually rather likely.
With nothing better to do, I began the long march off to Canterlot. Supposedly the view is great. And an audience with the Princess and/or a map could be 'acquired'. Ehh, maybe skip Celly. I doubt that the guards would let a killing machine in regardless of how crappy they may or may not be at fighting. In any case visiting Canterlot was a simple enough goal. It wasn't that far, was it? Shouldn't take that long.
THREE HOURS OF TREES AND DIRT AND OCCASIONAL RUSTLING LATER
The obscured sky started to change color. The temperature dropped noticeably. A few nocturnal creatures began to stir. And so the sun set. The moon comes out. Night falls. And with night fallen completely down, the other side of the world wakes up. Here however we are still concerned about THIS side of the world. The side of the world where one lone pseudo-Spartan is starting to lose it. Hey, if you're in a magical forest that's dangerous enough during the DAY...
Ever played Amnesia? The Dark Descent? That game. If you don't know, don't ask. I was something in between the severe streaked vision and red tint. Seriously. Let's look at the checklist. After being through two fights, suffering guilt at having killed 4 may-or-may-not-be-innocent timber wolves and already being a scaredypants AND now being in the middle of nowhere at night time in a place that is well known to be rather dangerous, what does that equal? Totally optimal conditions for completely clear thought. Yeah. *cough*.
Every noise is something plotting to kill me. Every shadow a beast. Every tree. The stars are watching. They are listening. Ceiling gigantic spheres of nuclear fusion are watching you HIE. Along with that chicken. Why's there a chicken in a bush? I should probably take it home or something. I walked towards it and tried to figure out just where to take it to. Stealth check: 17. Perception check: 4. Another Stealth check: 3. I snuck up on the chicken, failing to notice that first of all that's just a chicken's head. There's something else underneath. Second, there's a twig where my right boot is about to go. OH SNAP. Literally. The head turned around at the snap and stared at me.
Unfortunately it was not merely imagination that the eyes were red. A weird tingling sensation crawled over my armor. Far too late, I realized that it was a cockatrice. Upon realizing my mistake, I facepalmed. Then facepalmed again with the other hand. 2x combo! Then it was noted by the cockatrice and myself that no stoning had occurred. Aww HECK YEAH. Knowing that I needed more points, and being rather ticked off at an attempt to turn me into merely so much granite, I steeled myself and put the creature's head in the sights of the M6c. BANG BANG click. Click click click. Click click click click WHACK WHACK click. Momentarily distracted by the alarming fact that the pistol refused to discharge anymore, I did not see that the cockatrice had actually died on the first shot. +83m.
How do you reload one of these things? After looking at the gun for a while, I gave up and tried RELOAD CURRENT WEAPON. Having your limbs move without voluntary direction is a funny sensation but it got the job done. Now what to do with the body? The sentimental mentality said that the noble and now mostly headless cockatrice must be buried. A quick visit to TARDIS will come in handy. I think they need a wider variety of shovels. 8t is clearly not enough. Specifying search terms of color, size, shape and abilities narrows things down a little.
Finally, the desired shovel. A nice green handle, black blade, almost indestructible with Minecraft-level digging abilities. Just one slight problem : it cost 2560m. And I only had 131m. Or 132m. It just changed. Weird. A quick check to the graph button revealed a whole bunch of data and graphs and text and other weird stuff. Scanning over the dizzying array of information, my imaginary eyes saw "Background gain: +19/min". So apparently just by existing I get 19 points per minute. What the hay do you even buy for 19 points? Must have just tipped over the edge of 131999999 into 132000000.
There was no buy button. Probably because 2560m was slightly more than 132m. Instead there was an "Alt. Pay" button. That's a very nice feature. Alternate payment methods include everything from "Attempt interpretive dance" to "Zealot's sacrifice". After reading the descriptions for a few, I chose "Generic Quest". Disclaimers, notices, transdimensional legal signatures, and a good 15 minutes ended with me going on the quest, installing Internet Explorer 4 and Generic Quest Manager into my suit, being required to name my 87th son Nigel Nixon and doing the hokey pokey for three hours. Then the actual quest started.
After installing and attempting to and failing to uninstall IE4, keeping Generic Quest Manager, pointing out I did not have an 87th son (at least I didn't think I did) and also invalidating the hokey pokey for lack of singing ability, my next objective was to bring the cockatrice to the Altar of Urtan. Below that it said "Downloading coordinates... 0%". In a few moments a location marker appeared on-screen. Picking up the slightly disgusting corpse, I marched off to the little blue triangle.
Having seen a "downloading coordinates" and a few other various oddities, there was one command that had to be tried. One command that could change the way technology was viewed by me forever. IPCONFIG. The results were incredible. Among other things it explained how the TARDIS worked, and possibly how 4th wall breaking worked. And a bunch of other weird stuff. And it was just really cool.
IPCONFIG
Device: TARDIS coms gateway model 1337-N
Full Address: gpc91.ceq77.w53.0.0.1.1.68.4
Service Provider: Golden Potatoes TDC
Realm: CEQ77
Realm Owner: Faust
Current Timestamp: ceq77(-295308495872576612)
Irregardless of having an actual explanation for the internet I still felt like I was in one of those crappy fanfics. It would even be a self-insert! Eww. Those rarely turn out good. A few do though. Clearly the only way to resolve this situation is to not use it for anything other than the actual TARDIS service. The only excuse for being cliche is the Rule of Awesome or puns. Being a hipster is okay in private. Wouldn't want to cause a pundemonium. Ha. That one almost gave me a puncture wound.
Valiantly resisting tempation to further pun etrate the silence over the course of the night, eventually the moon climbed to the top of the sky. It was a little brighter now through all the branches. Not that that mattered much. The wonders of having not monoscopic or stereoscopic but infinite-scopic vision with a receptor roughly the size of your face. Ahead there was something shiny. It was a stone structure in a clearing. I had finally reached the Altar of Urtan. Whoever that is.
The whole stone table thing put me in a reverent-ish mood. Placing the cockatrice on the slab updated my objective. "Gather 3 different mushrooms of any kind, 5 leaves of poison joke, and at least 10kg of wood". Great. Now it's a fetch quest. Generic quest indeed. That's probably the most common quest besides go to point A and kill monster B. Trudging off into the forest, I kept my eye out for the signature orange and blue spotted plant. Probably a jar to keep it in would be good. Wouldn't want to be made out of rubber for a day or something. A quick pocket search turned up no viable containers. It did turn out the Spartan Knife. "If I can't find a friendship problem, I'll MAKE a friendship problem!"
Tree huggers beware : sharp knife is sharp. And trees are fun to cut down. No live trees were harmed, however. An old fallen tree sufficed. BSA is best pony for the current 5 minute period. Having fashioned a few rough jars and lids, the underside was searched. A scorpion of some sort jumped out and tried to sting me to no effect. I smashed it to considerable effect. I sat there for a few seconds then realized that there was no +? coming. Not even a +1. Thinking back to the massive amount of notices about the quest, I remembered that you do not gain points during the quest because the TARDIS is inaccessible during the quest. No cheating.
Most of the tree was covered in various colors of mold and such, but there were a few mushrooms. A red and white one was placed in jar '1', a generic brown one in '2' and a purpleish one in '3'. So far the fetch quest was coming along very nicely. The jars easily fit inside the various pockets/compartments of my suit. This fallen down tree would be perfect, but I didn't want to lug around an entire old rotting tree. Saving that for later, I left to find some poison joke. More mucking about ended at a cliff. No, I did not fall off the cliff. Below the cliff was a river, and on the other side of the river was a nice large patch of poison joke.
Taking a few steps back and then SPRINTing, I jumped. And crashed into the ground. Son of a motherfetlocker that hurt! I know I should be grateful that no limbs were broken, but still. Checking myself, my items, and checking that I didn't land in the poison joke all returned positive. I walked over to the poison joke and gingerly used the knife to cut and shovel the plants into jar '4'. Standing up, satisfied, I realized that there was now a river between me and the Altar. Not to mention that cliff. Looking along the banks showed that there was a slope next to the bank on the other side, so I could get back up, but how to get across?
Another attempted SPRINTjump landed me right in the middle of the river. I sank to the bottom quite rapidly. Only I didn't die or drown. After getting bored of looking at all the weird looking fish down there, I walked along the bottom to the other side. Crawling out of the mud, I returned to the tree. I decided that lugging around an entire old rotting tree would actually be pretty cool, so I dragged it all the way back to the Altar of Urtan.
After bringing all the materials to the Altar, the objective updated again. Now it said "Adorn the cockatrice with the ingredients". I placed the mushrooms and poison joke on the cockatrice. Next objective: "Place the wood in a circle on the table around the cockatrice." I cut the tree into pieces and placed them so. "Summon Urtan". I had no idea how to do this. I stomped on the ground. I let off a few shots from the assault rifle. I played guitar. I punched the table. The last one made a low rumbling noise and then a glowing light appeared over the altar.
A voice said "Your sacrifice has been accepted," as flames shot out and completely incinerated all the random crap placed on the table. Then, almost as an afterthought, the voice said "It's dangerous to go alone. Take this with you," and a shovel bashed into my face and knocked me over. There was a victorious-sounding noise and "Quest completed" replaced the Objectives. +83m. Yay. Now I could finally bury that cockatrice... that just got burnt to nothing... crap.
After mentally laughing a little at myself a little, and wincing that I still couldn't actually speak or make any real sounds, I reoriented myself towards Canterlot and began the long march again. We're off to see the alicorn! The wonderful alicorn of Canterlot... with nothing but the moon to guide my way. I looked at the moon. It shone so brightly. Then something weird happened. There was a weird glow on the moon and then a dark face appeared. It was the head of a unicorn. No, an alicorn. Luna. Luna just got put on the moon.
I'm 1000 years early.
AN:
*hipster glasses* My fic took place in Equestria before the 99%.
The only other one that did that that I can think of off the top of my head is I Rock .
Which just for the record is a FANTASTIC fic.
So no, no claiming of 'first' is occurring. Quell thineself.
And just for the record this is not a self insert.
Evan is a mix of a few people I know and myself.
So just partial self insert.
AN:
Enough of first person Evan. Time for some perspective.
"Another package to Hoofington? Again? I just got back two days ago!"
A very familiar gray pegasus mare nodded in response.
A rather unfamiliar green pegasus mare facehooved, but with a knowing smile said "If this is another muffin bomb..."
"Fylnx, it's not a muffin bomb, silly. Who would want to blow up muffins?"
Again, Fylnx facehooved. "Alright. I'll take it."
It was her job. She was the courier after all.
She loved flying. The wind in her feathers and rippling along her fur, the heights and speed. For a distance flight like this she had to hold off a little. Just a little. The package wasn't particularly heavy. If she were told what the contents were, she probably would have blinked and mumbled something about "Twilight...", for that is who sent the package. If she were told what would happen to her because of the package, you would have found out the hard way why her cutie mark is a thunderbolt. Not a rainbow colored one. A black cloud with a white streak shooting down to a feather.
Flying high, so far above the ground, she contemplated life, the universe, and everything. She decided that she didn't really care about all of that as long as the universe left her alone. Of course, it's pretty obvious that the universe is about to so completely overwrite her plans that the planner she uses every day just got redacted and the sentence that says that th[REDACTED]. To answer the question that is pleading and screaming to be answered, the package is a prototype time machine that Twilight had been working on after the time travelling incident. She was sending it to a earth pony claiming to be an expert with such things.
In reality, the pony had a rather unusual set of mental disorders. The first one was Multiple Pony Disorder. And each different pony had their own disorders and triggers. All you really need to know is that he's an impressive liar when writing, but under any other circumstances he's worse than Applejack. Oh, and that whatever you do, do not stand on one hoof/foot/various other limbs while eating a pear. If he sees you then you will not survive. Nopony ever saw that unicorn again. Even those managing the gates of Death aren't quite sure what happened. He refused to speak of it.
And so we have an unnecessary package being delivered to a maniac. Just how that maniac knew that Twilight had tried to build such a thing, unfortunately, SPOILERS!!! That's timey wimey for you. Speaking of timey wimey, an altogether different TARDIS was having minor difficulties. That's what the Doctor would say. And we all know the Doctor lies. The sheer improbability of the next significant event is the best argument that it had to happen. The TARDIS and Twilight's contraption collided.
Not exactly in the normal way. The contraption had a good amount of latent time energy inside it. The TARDIS's path in imaginary-but-still-existing-space-that-includes-more-than-just-spatial-dimensions intersected exactly with the contraption. The Doctor didn't notice particularly much. It fit in very well with all the other shaking and crashing about. Fylnx, on the other hoof, DID notice. The Perception DC for noticing that something crashes into you at the speed of light in sort-of-real space is so negative that it's one of the numbers they use for testing whether infinite-capacity unsigned integer implementations work.
Being thrown about like that will definitely leave you feeling rather wibbly wobbly, if it doesn't outright knock you out or in severe cases simply kill you. Fylnx involuntarily chose the second option. She didn't have much choice. Generally speaking your free will gets gagged and bound and stuffed into the trunk of a nearby unmarked white van in situations like this. Eventually she stopped flying through time when the contraption shut down. The original spell could handle a week of travel. The only reason the machine made it this far was because it had a physical representation and the TARDIS gave it a good shove.
Her unconscious body flew through the air, having the exact same trajectory and position as it did before. Off by a few micrometers but that's quite impressive. She was rather unable to flap her wings while unconscious and thus went into free fall. A minute later (she started quite high) she landed package first on a tree branch, broke through it and landed in a river. After momentarily sinking almost to the bottom, her inherent low density as a Pegasus floated her to the top where she drifted.
Much further downstream, the current lightly pushed her ashore. No, she did not wake up immediately. It was actually a day and a half until she woke up. Which happened very slowly and somewhat pleasantly. The sun shown down through the leaves. It was a bright day, and the rivers are almost always less shaded. Things came into focus, and she noticed that there was a strange thing above her head. It was made of metal and something that looked like stained glass. It vaguely resembled a face. Then she realized it WAS a face of some sort.
She screamed and pulled a pretty fast and fancy move. She simultaneously did a barrel roll, jumped to the side and charged and fired a bolt of lightning at none other than Evan using her wings. All in less than a second. No, she's not an ex-Royal/Lunar Guard. She just practices trying to be a ninja in between deliveries. Or sometimes during deliveries. Parcel thieves in Trottingham now have a phobia of green pegasi. Seriously. With some, merely showing a picture will cause them to hyperventilate.
Evan partially dodged the lightning, but still got hit pretty hard. Luckily for him, none got through his shields. Then he did something that once upon a time was impossible for him. He yelled "OY! Quell thineself! Friendly! I wish thee no harm!"
Fylnx cautiously halted but kept a bolt primed in her wings. "Why are you talking like that?"
"Talking like what?"
"Like th-. Nevermind."
"What dost thou mean by we art speaking strangely? You mean like that? ... I'm guessing you're not really from around here."
"Sorry, I didn't know that the Everfree had an official dialect of old fancy speak."
"Listen, I have a very important question for you. It could mean nothing. It could mean everything. When were you born?"
"I was born in the glorious year of 23 BLR."
"BLR?"
"... Before Luna's Return. I use the newer date system."
"Oh. Ohhh. OH!"
"What?"
"I have good news and bad news. First, you're stuck with me."
"And the good news?"
"Ha. That was the good news. The bad news is WELCOME TO 854 BLR, my little pony!"
"854- wha? I- you- hrr-" and at that point Fylnx passed out. She's a rather emotional pony, and still a little wiped out from the out-of-nice-protective-box time travel.
AN:
How's that for perspective? Okay, I know, not much perspective.
And yes, some time has passed since last chapter.
No, the chapters are not necessarily in chronological order.
Chapters may skip around a bit.
Timey wimey wibbly wobbly.
Have fun reading.
And no, Fylnx != Hadjii.
I just like the color GREEEEEEEN!!
They're kind of different genders, and have different cutie marks.
Fylnx has a black and white thunderbolt.
Hadjii has a circuit board with rootbeer spilled on it. And it's ON FIRE.
It's funny though, because both Fylnx and Evan are cool or are going to be.
So now I'm jealous of my own characters.
AN:
Of course the 156 years are going to have their status set to at least "vaguely defined".
It's doubtful that you'd want to hear about every little thing Evan did.
There's no way I could write the style of this fic anywhere near as good as that one is.
And I promise to put in less AN's. There's a lot of them, sorry.
It's just a really nice way to put in tidbits that can't be part of the actual story OR in the story description.
If you have a better idea, please tell me. Seriously.
Rain.
More rain.
And yet more rain.
The clouds block out the sun and moon.
The pegasi don't control the weather out here.
There's thunder and lightning.
Such phenomena so familiar.
And yet they look different.
Evan could look directly at the powerful streams of energy.
You may think they look cool.
You have no idea.
Imagine that they didn't leave afterimages.
Imagine your eyes could see the stunning difference between the light and the dark.
Imagine your ears could hear the thundering roar with the harmonic frequencies far beyond a pitiful 20khz.
Imagine all the water dripping down over you.
Finally, imagine that there's nobody to tell you to go inside or stop lazing about.
Nobody.
Bittersweet solitude.
Evan sat there on a hill. It had been a month since he first came to Equestria. Quite a few more monsters had met their match in him. He was glad he kept the shovel. It made a highly effective melee weapon, which was good because otherwise he'd use far too much of his precious, expensive ammo. His mind was not currently on the subject of ammunition or even the fact that the prices on the TARDIS slowly changed over time, somewhat like a stock market. His mind was on Canterlot.
Oh, Canterlot. The current location of the dear and rather distraught Celestia. He assumed she was distraught anyways. Anyone (Anypony in this case) should be so after sending their sister to the moon. While there was no direct contact, there was plenty of indirect evidence. Such as the fact that the sun and moon both moved very erratically and a little bit too fast and jumpy.
Something had to be done, and yet Evan didn't really feel like answering questions about bananas. He was proverbially stuck on a fence. He had to come to a decision. A decision that could change his life and possibly the whole world. He had to choose the right one, consequences be double-hoof bucked by AJ and BM simultaneously.
He chose to sit there on the cliff and think positive thoughts at Celestia.
Ten seconds later with a loud CRACK and BOOM and a very loud but mental yelp, Evan got struck by lightning and fell off the cliff. About three seconds later he tried to eat the grass but found that his helmet did not have a mouthpiece. Evan was quite glad that he had shields, though they functioned rather oddly in what they did and did not block. He thought furiously "OWW! Okay okay okay I'm going! Whoever just hit me... oww. My shields are down again."
===A few inches to the up-right-diagonal-ish direction of reality===
"Sorry. I was getting bored. The poetic thoughts are nice and all, but Mr. Black promised me entertainment. Wait. Why am I talking to you? You can't even hear me..." said a pink pony. No, not that one. This one has a trollface cutie mark and a knife. And a fancy computer. VERY. FANCY. COMPUTER.
===Back to reality===
Still smoking slightly, Evan marched off to Canterlot to talk to the wonderful Alicorn of Canterlot. No, no yellow brick road. A brown dirt road with plenty of mud at the moment. While he walked, he checked the TARDIS prices again. As usual, there were little tiny changes in the prices of everything except the one thing he needed to get home. Of course. He flashbacked to the moment when he got to feel the fun way what thousands of volts across your entire body feels like. Specifically the fact that he still couldn't talk.
After a few minutes of thinking once more for solutions, he remembered that he forgot to close his TARDIS window. He was about to do so when he stopped. He could buy anything in the freaking multiverse. Time to feel the rush of being blatantly OP. After searching he found what he desired. A headset. This glorious hopefully voice granting piece of hardware cost 870m. A significant chunk of his now 7392m but definitely worth it. Generic Quests were useful but strange. He didn't like doing them, but the results were incredible. He was now a whole two millionths of the way there!
yay!
He purchased and carefully installed the device. Carefully switching to his upgraded guitar (extended psychic touch field sensors now instead of psychic buttons. Who knew?), he prepared a certain chord. What was heard next by the spartan, a few trees, an owl currently attempting to digest a mouse and a lone friendly Vashta Nerada, though none of them cared, was...
(•_•)
( •_•)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)
Music to their ears.
"Sir, why are you levitating a tree branch?"
"I already told you! I'm invisible and holding the tree branch so ponies can see me."
"Listen, sir, you may not see the Princess. And you do not want to."
"What's the worst she'll do to me, send me to the moon?"
That one got an angry glare.
"Oh. Yeah. Right. Umm, look. I really want to talk to her anyways."
"I will not permit some crazy unicorn through."
"I'm not a unicorn. Do you see a TK field around the branch?"
"I do see the blur."
"Blur? What? Oh. Those are my invisible hands!"
"Egad! One of those human cultists! Begone!"
"Okay, now you've just made me mad. Forgive me, princess."
The branch was dropped and the Royal Guard was clobbered once solidly with Evan's trusty shovel. The guard's partner returned around the corner from his coltsroom break. He saw the unconscious stallion and the tree branch adjacent, and guessed a branch must have been blown by an unusually strong wind. He rolled his eyes and stood at attention while he waited for his compatriot to awaken. Little did he know the shenanigans that had and were about to occur.
If you've read through the entire fic to this chapter, I am amazed that you actually put up with it. Thanks.
If you just skipped to this chapter to learn why it was cancelled, I hope you can take the lesson here and apply it to yourself.
There are a few reasons why this fic has been cancelled, but the essential reason is:
This fic is too difficult and complex for me to write.
I am not a good enough writer for it. I'm amazed I actually came up with something like this. It could easily hit 200k words. There's an absurd amount of possibility to this, especially if you incorporate the Doctor (which was in the plan) and especially if Evan goes home without remembering to get his body back. Or you could just say that the portal did that as well. And then of course with improved (though rather expensive) internet shopping you could buy almost anything.
This might actually make an interesting game... a much more action-oriented Scribblenauts.
If you want to have a go at this plotline, message me and I'll tell you the rest of the plotline that I've come up with.
Oh and one final note, the reason I stopped here and finally realized this is because I can't write Celestia to save my life.
Or anyone else's for that matter. Or even a penny probably.
I'll go get a few more fics under my belt and if nobody writes this themselves then I'll take a crack at it again.
Goodbye.