Spiderman: Far From Home appears to be completely ignoring it's premise

[This has been massively expanded upon, but the basic idea was originally posted on Twitter.]
[Nota bene: the movie isn't out yet right now, and the Twitter thread upon which it is based was written a week and a half ago when the movie definitely wasn't out.  It's about what seems to be true based on pre-release info.]

Summary:

So, the short, short version my my Spider-Man: Far From Home commentary is:

This movie wants to tell a story that's impossible in the post-Endgame world, but it insists it exists in exactly that world.  Why?

I just saw an ad for Spider-Man: Far From Home, and it looks like it's ignoring the premise.  Hard.

The premise, remember, is that the population of the universe in general, and earth in particular, just doubled* without warning.

*Caveats aplenty, we'll link to them. footnote them.[↓]

-

We have a universe that's only five years removed from the greatest disaster in the history of the universe,[] and it just got slammed with a new one.

For Spider-Man, we're concerned with earth.  That's good because we understand earth.

There have not been five years of preparation for, "Ok, about 3.75 billion people are going to pop into existence out of nowhere, so we need to make sure we have food, shelter, infrastructure, and employment for all of them waiting."

Now, obviously, we're going to see a lot of killing and whatnot over other things, but food is what I want to concentrate on.

Carrying capacity isn't a set thing.  It changes.  Notably, it drops to match a reduced population.  Five years is more than enough time for that drop.

(Abigail Nussbaum adds:)

‏Also, note that said carrying capacity was already stressed to the breaking point by the disappearance of 3.75B people, with their labor and role in the supply chains. Those five years were spent restoring a broken system, which is now going to be broken again.

When the carrying capacity is lower than the population, you get famine.

Usually this happens because something happened to the food supply (crop failures, for example), but suddenly doubling the number of mouths to feed will very definitely do the job.  It'll do the job like nothing ever has, in fact.

Given time, the extra people can do extra work on extra agriculture to make extra food.

In the immediate aftermath, however, we're talking about the worst famine in recorded history.  (Immediate, here, is going to be measured in years.)

One reason that famine sucks so much, by the way, is that no amount of pulling together or cooperation can compensate for there not being enough calories to go around.  If you're eating the minimum necessary for survival and using all the food, there's nothing more you can do.

Until there's a harvest large enough to feed everyone left alive, you're kind of screwed.

-

There's a major threat to that harvest that we need to consider.

Those seeds you need to plant to make that harvest?  They're food you could use to keep your family alive.  Do that, and you have nothing to plant.  You need twice as many of those seeds as you thought, and now you're strongly considering making it so there are fewer.

There are shades of the 'tragedy of the commons' here.  If one person uses seed stock as food to keep themselves and/or their loved ones alive, that's not going to be noticeable on a global scale.  Sure, it'll suck locally when the crops that those seeds would have produced never arrive, but maybe the next town over lucked out and had a bumper crop.

It's never just one person.  Everyone counts on someone else being responsible, and the result is catastrophic.

Also, with a famine of this magnitude (and on a global scale no less), it's not actually that unreasonable, from a self-interest perspective, to eat the seed crops thus ensuring that things get worse come next harvest time.

There's a very good chance you, generic you, are going to die anyway.  Ditto for those around you.  If that's who you care about, you might as well stay fed as long as you can and forget about the future.  Sure, it'll screw over the world as a whole, but the world as a whole is basically trying to kill you at this point.

So that's a problem.  Things are a hellish famine-scape until there's a large enough harvest, people will be actively doing things to make it so that harvest doesn't come soon.

And, remember, even if no one ate the seed stock, there wasn't enough to begin with.

To get to the famine ending harvest, this is what needs to happen:

• Field space needs to double.  It's not like the fields from before the first snap have been sitting fallow all this time and merely need to be sown.  They're five years gone.  What that means depends on where the fields are, but even those left untouched and relatively intact need to be cleared and tilled (many will need to be fertilized too.)
• The capacity to grow, harvest, process, and distribute food needs to double.  This is mostly industrial shit, I know it not.
• A large enough number of seeds to produce a population-feeding global harvest need to be set aside instead of eaten.  This is double what people had been setting aside, and given that people have been eating that, more than double what was set aside after the famine started.
• Those seeds need to be planted, cared for, and brought to harvest.
• There's an element of luck in this.  Just because everything on the human side is finally set up and working doesn't mean that nature will cooperate.
• Now we're into the processing and distribution, which needs to survive "Hungry people want food now" and "Hungry people want food here."  (This is entirely apart from "Grudges, from the famine and before, mean that some people actively want other people to starve, and will work to see it happen.")

And --Woo!-- done, provided that the next harvest hasn't been sabotaged by anything leading up to this point.

One might wonder why I'm focusing on food and not animals.  We'll get to that.

-

To get us back on track with the original tweet thread, a recap: the population has suddenly and unexpectedly doubled.  There will not be enough food.

Yes, this includes if all crops were just on the verge of being harvested pre-snap so that, since they were alive, they snapped back, and since they were ready for harvest, they're quickly edible.  The system that converts "plants in certain fields in certain places" to "global food" isn't set up to operate on the necessary level anymore.  (Entirely apart from the other disruptions caused by doubling the global population.)

Depending on how you look at it, there is either too little food for the people supply, or too many people for the food supply.  While cutting back to the point of "starving, but not to death" and sharing as much as possible will stretch the food supply, there comes a point where it can go no further.  There aren't enough calories to keep all of the people alive.

Recap over, let's get back into the original flow of things.

-

One solution to more mouths to feed than the food can support is the Thanos solution: fewer mouths to feed.

Genocide is a very real possibility, but there's also less sinister things.  People will refuse to eat (and thus starve to death) so that there's more food for others.  Not "people may", "people will".  There has never been a famine like the one we're talking about, but there have been a lot of famines, and we know how people respond to them.

(Part of how we know that people will eat seed stock, even though it makes things worse in the long run.)

Random note back on the evil side: 'Hansel and Gretle'ing will be happening too.  It's not just that some people value their own lives over their children's lives, though there is that.  The thing about abandonment instead of murder is that it leaves the hope of "Someone else, someone who can feed them, will take them in" which makes it seem a lot less horrific in the eyes of the abandoners.

Quick note before we leave this point, I don't want to dwell on things like genocide, but do note that wars fall into the "things like" category in this case.  Sometimes it's the exact same thing, in the case of wars of extermination, but if you're fighting to take away what allows others to survive (food in this case) your success will kill them every bit as much as an extermination campaign.

Anyway, that's a quick rundown of the "fewer mouths to feed" angle.

-

There are, of course, other ways to approach the problem.  One is expanding what one considers food.  We've already mentioned that, to a degree, in the form of people eating seed stock.  That's only one part of it.

As I said above, the point at which there's nothing more you can do in the face of "not enough calories to go around" is when you're eating the minimum necessary for survival and using all the food.  I do mean all the food.

Long before we reach the point of cannibalism, we get people eating every non-human in sight.  This is why I've been focusing on harvests as famine enders to the exclusion of livestock, by the way.

At first, livestock is going to seem like salvation.  After all, half of all living things from five years ago just popped back into existence, that means half of the animal supply did.  Once they're all rounded up, they can be sent to slaughter to help offset the insufficient crops.

That's not the only reason they're going to be sent to slaughter.  With five years adapted to half population, there won't be sufficient animal food or grazing land, and the last thing you want right now is for the livestock to overgraze or otherwise run out of food.

Obligatory note that the slaughterhouses, and everything after, also aren't prepared to deal with this much supply.  That's industrial, I'm not getting into it.

Something like a cow is a way to convert not-food (grass, for example) into food (hamburgers, for example) and thus really valuable.  Couple that with the human-side food shortage, and eating the excess livestock to prevent a livestock food shortage is a good idea.

But it only lasts so long.  The first problem we're going to hit is that people who are eating meat at "snapped back and sent to slaughter" levels aren't going to instantly stop once the excess is gone (especially given that, you know, fucking famine.)

Once the excess runs out, we're right back to the "half as much food as needed" problem, except we overshoot.

It doesn't end there, it gets worse for farm animals.

-

First off, a lot of animals eat things that people can eat.

Know what chickens eat?  Mostly cereal grains.  Things like wheat and corn.  Things that people eat.  The rest of their diet?  Protein.  Either animal or plant protein.  Looking specific protein sources used in chicken feed, that's also human edible.

Does this mean that chicken feed is edible?

I have no fucking clue, actually.  I tried to look it up, couldn't find an answer.  That's not really the point though.

If you've got corn, as an example, would you rather it save people from starving to death, or be turned into chicken pellets?  Remember: the people probably pay better than the chickens do.

Why do the people probably pay better when chicken food would be in equally short supply?

Picture yourself as a chicken farmer (but not my sister, because that would be weird) and imagine that you had the option to starve to death (or let your loved ones starve to death) or feed your chickens.  Which would you do?

And remember:

• Male chickens can be utter assholes who will leap into the air and attack you (or your children) with their giant scaly Jurassic Park feet, which happen to be tipped in vicious fucking claws.
• If you decide not to feed the chickens, then it's time to kill and cook (starving the chickens would be cruel), which:
• Means you have meat that you and yours can eat
• Means you also have meat that you can sell.

That second half of the second point is important.  Meat prices will have gone up, you can sell at a premium.  You can sell at a premium and still be selling at below the market rate.  Your customer gets a deal, you get money with which you can buy food other than chicken, everyone but the chicken wins.

(Probably worth pointing out that immediately after the unsnap, what happens to the price of meat will be complex and difficult.  Once the unsnap surplus animals are gone, though, meat's going to be like any other food: expensive.)

As to the first point: yes, they will attack babies that have only just learned to walk.  Do not leave children (any age) alone with roosters unless they have been verified as rooster combat capable.  (When dealing with roosters yourself, be aware that they may wait util your back is turned to attack.)

Hens seem to be safe.

Back on track, if chicken farmers merely put off buying chicken food in favor of feeding themselves, that's going to drive prices down.  If they actually start killing and eating/selling the chickens, that's going to drive prices down more.  Meanwhile human beings are going to be paying ever higher prices for food, of which there isn't enough.

If chickens had access to money and could buy their own food, chicken feed prices would climb in the same manner as person feed prices, since chicken food is brought by people who themselves need to eat, that's not going to happen.

A second reason that things get worse for farm animals is simply that they're edible.

Just like people eat seed stock, people will eat animals that are needed for breeding to maintain herd size.  They'll also eat them early.  The fact that a cow will have twice as much meat in 6 to 12 months doesn't mean much if you won't be alive to see it.

And people will eat milk cows and things like them.  Egg hens are another example.  If I've got things right, it only takes a month for egg hens to lay enough eggs to equal the calories you'd get from eating them, but that assumes there's adequate food for the hens and that you can wait a month.

Keep your animals and they're a drain on your resources, kill them and they're a source of meat, money, or both.  When faced with starvation, a lot of people are going to be very interested in meat, money which might be used to buy food, or both.

-

The one spot of good news for Peter Parker in this livestock nightmare is that the plants he eats are probably produced by humans and machines, so people eating work animals isn't going to touch him.

The bad news is that pets will be on the menu.

There are going to be tough questions for students at Peter's high school.

Questions like, "Would I rather eat Fluffy, or Spot?" and, "Do I have it in me to butcher them myself, or will I need to get someone else --who would take some of the meat as payment-- to do it?"

It's not like pets are the only thing, of course.  Given where he lives, you can bet that Peter's diet is going to include rats and pigeons for a while.

They'll run low, of course.  They're in the middle of a famine too, and humans outnumber them.  But, for a while . . .

It really is the case that any animal is potentially on the menu, so we can imagine a scene where Spider-Man races to the scene of a major disturbance and discovers that it's neither normal criminals nor supervillains; it's just a crowd of hungry people who have decided that the NYPD horses and dogs are a viable food source.

We can imagine it because it's the kind of scene that has to happen in Spider-Man: Far From Home if it's actually part of the post-Endgame MCU.

We can also say, with a fair degree of certainty, that nothing like it will appear.  We aren't likely to see Peter and friends facing food riots or the government response.  We aren't likely to see the effect of the political instability that would necessarily exist even if this weren't happening a mere five years after the worst disaster in history.

Remember, there has never in history been a situation where there were twice as many people as the food supply could support.  Like the snap, this is superlative.  This is the worst famine ever.  It's the first worldwide one, too.

Peter and Pals are in New York City.  That gives them front row seating.

Even if they were somewhere less globally connected, since it's global, no matter how hard they try, there is no possible way that they can avoid being completely swept up in this disaster.

Until the food supply and population reach equilibrium this will be their lives, and they will be forever changed by it.

We aren't likely to see that.

-

Nothing in what's been released about the movie even attempts to address anything that happened in Endgame other than, "Hey, we're fresh out of Iron Man."  An Iron Man shortage is not the major problem left in the wake of Endgame.  (I'd also point out that Iron Man isn't the only hero they're out of.)

We know beyond all doubt that the world is falling apart in the worst possible way; Peter Parker goes on vacation.

Which, in the end, is sort of the problem with the MCU.

They wanted a connected universe.  They refused to connect it.

Every damned movie they set up things that must necessarily happen, or be true, or have consequences, and every time they ignored it as completely as possible in everything that followed.‏

I don't particularly want a "Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends have all their joy and optimism crushed in the famine-ridden Hellscape that necessarily follows Endgame" movie.  I understand why they're not doing it.  But that's the only Spider-Man movie that can follow Endgame.

So, instead, we're getting a movie that doesn't follow Endgame.  And that's fine.  But why, then, are we being told that it does?  Why not just say, "This is a different continuity"?  You don't need continuity to have the same actors show up as the same characters, after all.

What's the last MCU movie that actually benefited from being in a shared universe?

If they'd just said, "Yes, we're (mostly) using the same familiar face for each character, but don't expect everything to line up," what would have been lost?

I ask because I don't remember the last time it felt like being part of the MCU continuity was lifting a film up instead of weighing it down.

⁂

And wow is that fucking uneven.  Sorry about that.  The plan was to have simple editing of the Twitter thread for readability and typos, then I massively expanded on some stuff, then I ran out of steam after the chickens.

Anyway, here's a massive footnote on why we don't know whether the population doubled.  This will be a straight cut and paste of the Twitter thread covering it:

-

[↑] So, I was writing a thread on Spiderman: Far From Home and how it seems to be ignoring its own premise, and I realized that I needed a separate thread on the caveats to the statement that the premise is "The population just doubled without warning."

So, caveats here.

Some of the people popping into existence are doing it less than idea places.  Think "a bowl of petunias and a very surprised looking whale" places.

Well over three hundred thousand would have appeared at airplane cruising altitudes sans plane, for example.

A more pressing concern is probably those who appeared in the middle of roads.  Over nine million would have done this in the US alone.  That's going to lead to secondary die off, in the form of everyone who gets offed in the traffic accidents.

We could obviously go on at great length, but it's important to note that for all of the people who suddenly find themselves off belay in mid air, or in the middle of the ocean with no boat, there are more who appear in places where they're safe and sound, physically at least.

Which brings us to the psychological toll.

A lot of people are going to be visiting their own (empty) graves and wondering if that's how it was meant to be, and (whether they do that or not) not everyone is going to survive thinking along those lines.

Kicking someone five years into the future would be a strain normally, but this isn't just any future.

Five years ago something happened, and the snapped back people are going to be hit with the full reality of that all at once and it's going to hurt.

Five years ago, no caveats, half the population of the universe disappeared.

We're primarily concerned with earth, and even then we limit ourselves to humans instead of talking about ecosystem collapse or intestinal bacteria, so for us it's really more that ~3.75 billion humans.

Those people who would later appear in the middle of the road?  They were on the road.  It probably doesn't matter whether they're driver or passenger, since a passenger going dust is going to distract the driver.

So on, so forth.

But, again, for every person in an inopportune place, more weren't.

They, of course, had to then deal with the biggest disruption in human history.

Most visions of the Rapture are lighter and fluffier.  In real history, the Black Death wasn't nearly so terrible.

It doesn't actually take that much to collapse a civilization; what Thanos did was more than enough to collapse every civilization. In fact, if that had been his goal, we would be well justified in calling what he did massive, absurdly over the top, overkill.

Which brings us to the wars and riots and so forth.

This is when you begin to understand precisely why the filmmakers curled up into a ball, whimpered, and finally gave the fuck up --instead opting to push it off screen with a time-skip-- in the face of what they'd created.

Every recorded war pales in comparison to the inevitable after-snap conflict.  All wars combined wouldn't measure up.

Before, alongside, and after that is the political maneuvering and restructuring.

When the bodies are buried and borders settled, earth will be unrecognizable.

The people who burst back into being are going to have to be faced with the fact that the world as they knew it ended, and there's this new thing in its place that they don't understand, don't fit into, and are ill equipped to cope with.

That's before we get to the people.

A lot of the non-snapped people they knew will be dead because of the aftermath.  Be it the immediate disaster or the riots or the wars or --and this one is brutal-- because they stopped receiving the care a snapped individual had been providing, a lot of the nonsnapped are dead.

Those who returned have to face that.  They also have to face the fact that everyone they knew who lived through it is fundamentally changed.

Other than the ones snapped and unsnapped with them, the people they once knew are gone.  Some died, the rest are different people now.

Certainly reconnection is possible, but in the face of people who have lived (and grown) five years through Hell in what was, to them, the blink of an eye, the unsnapped are going to have a hard time relating.

Which brings us back to the suicides.

The world they knew is gone, the new world doesn't have a place for them, they don't know the first thing about making a place, some of the people they care about are dead, others are so very different.

The psychological strain is high.

This also, by the way, is Flight of the Navigator.

David couldn't fit into a world where eight years had passed while he remained the same.

David, of course, had it comparatively easy.  He was the only one to disappear, so there was no major disruption to life on earth.

Anyway, all of that is why it's difficult to say whether "doubled" is accurate.

Half of the population disappears.  A bunch more die.  Time passes.  The population is now [something].  The people who disappeared reappear.  Many die.  Is the population now approximately two times [something]?

We can't really answer that.  We don't know how many died in the disruption.  We don't know if people have been breeding like rabbits.

It's almost certainly the case that the population doubled or more than doubled with the unsnap, but which of those it did is harder to say.

Stumbling Toward Redemption -- Chapter 2 (Equestria Girls)

[Chapter 1 of this story is here.]
[Originally posted at Fimficiton.]
[I'm using "~ ~ ~" to indicate changing perspectives without changing scenes.]

When awareness first returned to her, Sunset felt pretty good, all things considered.  That changed very fast when she realized the ground beneath her was moving and deforming under her weight.

She resisted the urge to bolt upright, and instead started to take an inventory of her body while pretending to still be asleep.

Her fingers and toes were still intact, though her toes protested a bit because she was still wearing her boots.  She had various aches and pains, but nothing unexpected.  Actually, considering she'd been blasted by one of the most powerful magical artifacts in the history of Equestria, she would have expected to have rather more discomfort than usual.

It wasn't hard to figure out why the ground was so disturbingly not-solid.  She was in a bed of some sort.  Not just any bed either. A warm bed with actual sheets on it.  If she had come here, wherever here was, to go to sleep, all of that would be great.  When it came to waking up, though, it was concerning.  Why would she be in a bed?

She didn't exactly have an overabundance of people who would let her crash at their places.  Also, if some mysterious bed-giver had appeared out of nowhere, Sunset would have taken off her boots before going to sleep.

It wasn't that she was unaccustomed to sleeping in them, it was just that --since she rarely had the opportunity to take them off-- taking them off would have been almost immediate if she'd been given a warm place to stay.

The alternative to a mysterious benefactor, however, didn't make sense any either.  If someone with ill intent had taken her, they'd have dumped her on the floor.  Probably inside a closet.  Likely with the door locked.

People did not, so far as Sunset knew, keep beds in closets.

Since this was going nowhere, Sunset opened her eyes.  She was alone for the moment.  No reason not to take a look at her surroundings.

There was nothing familiar, but also nothing that stood out as threatening.  As she allowed herself to examine the room more, she actually found it to be incredibly generic.

After getting out of the bed as quietly as she could, Sunset looked for anything she could use to defend herself.

Soon after, she was walking down a hallway while armed only with a lamp.  The hallway had more character --it was painted sky blue with accents in every color-- but it didn't tell her much.  Anyone who liked clear skies and rainbows, which was sort of an odd combination when you thought about it, could live here.

The hall ended in an open plan kitchen/dining room/living room.  At first she thought this area was empty too, but a closer look revealed familiar rainbow hair peaking over the back of the couch in the living room section.

“Rainbow Dash?” Sunset asked in confusion as she let her arms drop to her sides.

~ ~ ~

Rainbow Dash gave a startled yelp, and her whole body jolted involuntarily.  It wasn't the best introduction ever, so she took a moment to compose herself and make sure she'd look cool and calm before she greeted Sunset.

In a single smooth and, she hoped, casual-seeming motion she transitioned from the jumble she'd been in to a sort of kneeling position, with her left arm draped over the back of the couch, that allowed to look in Sunset's direction. As she did that, she said,

“Hey you're--” and the rest of the sentence was forgotten, because now that she could see Sunset, she had an entirely unrelated topic on her mind, “Why're you holding a lamp?”

“I woke up in a strange place,” Sunset said as though that explained everything; “I didn't know where I was or who I might be facing.”

“And your first thought was to pick up a desk lamp?” Rainbow asked.

“Yes, because your guest room is absolutely brimming with defensive weapons,” Sunset said.  If her tone hadn't conveyed her extreme annoyance, the exasperated gesture she made with her non-lamp hand would have gotten the point across on its own.

Rainbow attempted not to laugh.  She utterly failed.  What ended up coming out started with a snort and ended with a snicker.  It wasn't the smoothest transition in the history of laughter, and neither was it quick.

“Are you finished?” Sunset asked.

“Not sure,” Rainbow said.

In a quick movement that was part flip and part roll, she deposited herself behind the couch, so that she was standing facing Sunset with nothing between them.

In other circumstances she probably would have made a bigger deal out of what went into that roll-flip.  Right now, however, there was a lamp-wielding Sunset Shimmer asking her whether or not she was done laughing, and that took precedence.

Rainbow said, “I'll have to check what's on the agenda,” and instantly regretted it.  If there had been a laughter-related agenda, that comment wouldn't be on it.

Sunset seemed to agree. “Truly, you are a comedic genius.”

Rainbow said, “Thank you,” as though Sunset had been sincere, because she didn't know what else to do.

After that, it seemed that Sunset didn't have anything to say.  Rainbow didn't either.  Well, that wasn't quite true.  She had questions, but they weren't things you started a conversation with.

A few seconds passed in silence.  Maybe having the couch hiding most of her body had been a good thing.  Rainbow was in danger of becoming fidgety, and that was most definitely not awesome.

Sunset seemed to have taken up an interest in ceiling tiles.  Possibly the number or arrangement of ceiling tiles rather than the tiles themselves.  Definitely something ceiling-related.  Given that that wasn't an ordinary thing for Sunset to do, Rainbow figured that she wasn't the only one finding this whole thing awkward.

The silence had to be broken somehow, so Rainbow asked, “If you weren't expecting to see me when you woke up . ? .” and realized that it probably would have helped if she had actually had a before asking.  With that in mind, Rainbow settled on, “Well, what do you remember?”

~ ~ ~

Figuring it was best to just get it over with, Sunset said, “You mouthed off when I was about to surrender, I decided that I'd get the crown just to spite you, it turns out that twisting an Element of Harmony to your whims when you're pissed off is a bad idea, things went pear shaped, there were rainbows, I was reduced to tears, Rarity wants an apology for the Spring Fling, Pinkie Pie apparently thinks that running face first into solid stone is a good idea, and I took up bricklaying as a hobby.”

“And after that?” Rainbow asked.

Sunset closed her eyes and attempted to call up any additional memories.  None came.  She was laying bricks, then . . .

“Not a thing,” she said.

“I think that Luna was making you stay and work so that she could keep an eye on you,” Rainbow said.  “It's not a bad idea in theory but she's only one person and I saw kids holing up in places she wouldn't notice them.”

That was just silly.  Sunset said as much.  She didn't actually say those words, but she did say, “Kids were holing up?  Is there a war or natural disaster, of which I was unaware, presently ongoing?” which meant the same thing.

“They were waiting for you,” Rainbow said.  “You didn't think everyone would be satisfied with just a tearful apology, did you?”

“Of course not,” Sunset said, then walked in a small semicircle so she was looking at the wall instead of Rainbow.  Things weren't going to go well, that much was obvious.

Sunset sighed.  “That doesn't explain why I'm at your house.”

“Escort duty.”

“Assigned by whom?”

“Kinda gave myself the job.”

Ok, that was definitely believable, except for one thing.  “I would have said, 'No.'”

“I uh,” Rainbow started, “I didn't give you a choice.”

That got Sunset's attention.  The idea was so absurd that she nearly laughed as she turned around to face Rainbow again.  When she was looking the other girl in the eyes, Sunset asked, “You kidnapped me?” in disbelief.

“No,” Rainbow said.  “I threatened to kidnap you, then we hammered out an arrangement whereby you'd let me take you to your home if I bought you dinner.”

That brought things back to not making sense.  It wasn't that what Rainbow was saying seemed unreasonable, but, much like before, there was one tiny detail that threw the whole thing into doubt.

“This is not where I live.”

“Good,” Rainbow cracked smile, an impish little thing, before continuing with, “because if you'd been living here all this time, and I never noticed, I would be very disturbed.”

“So . . .” Sunset said.  That was all she said, because it should have been enough. It wasn't.

“So what?” Rainbow asked with the kind of 'innocent' look that is only ever employed by people who know exactly what they're guilty of and are proud of it.

“How did I get here?” Sunset asked.  She had to make an effort not to growl.  Apparently, not being an asshole was more difficult than it appeared from the outside.

“When we were stopped at a red light, you ran off through the woods. so you could eat pizza out of a dumpster.”

Sunset nodded.  That made sense, especially because, “That does sound like me.”

There was a beat of silence, then Rainbow asked, “What do you have against pepperoni?” as though it were the most serious and important topic in the world.

How Sunset answered really depended on what Rainbow already knew, so she asked, “Did Twilight Sparkle tell you where we come from?”

“Pony Princess land?” Rainbow said in a way that was clearly more question than answer.

That made things easier.  If Rainbow knew 'pony' instead of 'human', then she was probably ready to accept that things might be vastly different on the other side.

“Equestria has animals that look like the ones you have here,” Sunset explained, “but when it comes to cognition they couldn't be more different.”

Sunset took a breath, decided to massively oversimplify things --Rainbow was asking about pepperoni not neuroscience, after all-- and said, “Short version: you might as well be eating people if you eat meat other than fish.”

What followed was the first time Sunset had ever seen Rainbow utterly horrified. Her 'we're all gonna die' face actually looked serene in comparison.

That was not what Sunset wanted to do.  It wasn't just that Rainbow had been reasonably nice so far, in spite of having so very many reasons not to be.  It was also . . . everything.  It was warmth.  It was a bed.  It was how they weren't talking about what Sunset had done, and tried to do, before the bricklaying last night.

Because of all those things and more, breaking Rainbow Dash's brain was not on the agenda for the day.

Rainbow started to ask, “But here they're not--”

“No, they're not,” Sunset answered, “but that doesn't mean I suddenly want to eat things I spent my entire childhood thinking of as . . . that.”

“Ok,” Rainbow said quickly. “Good.”

Rainbow nodded to herself.  When she said, “I was worried there for a second,” it looked and sounded like she had completely recovered from her Soylent Green moment.

That was good.  Now Sunset could leave without anything new to feel guilty about, and leaving sounded really good right now.  There hadn't been all that much to say, they' said most of it, and she was still holding a damned lamp.  There was, she was pretty sure, only one question left to ask, “What happened after the peperoni?”

“You started to give an impromptu lecture on magic,” Rainbow said, “and then you fell asleep.”

Sunset tilted her head to the side as she said, “Oh.”

A few moments later she added, “That does explain why I'm here, I guess.”

Sunset was reasonably sure that that covered everything.  She looked around, though she wasn't entirely sure why she did.  She didn't think of anything else.

She lifted the lamp a bit and looked it over.

“Thanks for not leaving me in the parking lot,” she said to Rainbow.  “I'll . . . put this lamp back, now.”

Sunset turned around and headed back to the guest room.

~ ~ ~

Rainbow hadn't realized she'd been expecting anything, and still didn't know what she'd been expecting, but she must have been expecting something, because she was absolutely sure that this was so very much not the unknown thing that she'd been expecting.

As she started to follow Sunset, Rainbow said the first thing that came to mind, “That's it?”

Sunset kept walking down the hall, she didn't look back or break her stride when she answered with, “All of my questions are answered, everything makes sense,” she reached the guest room door and went in, “so yeah: that's it.”

When Rainbow entered the guest room the lamp was already in place and Sunset was performing the contortions necessary to actually plug it in.  Rainbow wasn't sure whether it was the outlet or the desk, but something was placed in just the wrong way, which is why the outlet in question was generally considered a lost cause.

That wasn't important at the moment, though.  It was just easier to think about than the fact that Sunset, who had seemed pretty normal, lamp notwithstanding, earlier was now acting in way that screamed, 'Abnormal!'

Rainbow didn't know how to approach that, and she fell back on some questions she wanted answered, “How about why you were eating out of a dumpster--”

“It's where the food is,” Sunset said.

“--why you were undernourished enough to pass out--”

“That wasn't about nutrition, it was about the magic,” Sunset said.  She had said as much last night, but Rainbow was pretty sure that wasn't the whole truth.

“--and where you live?”

“Wherever I want to,” Sunset said.  A moment later she gave a grunt, then announced, “And it's in.”

As Sunset slid out from under the desk, Rainbow said, “Sunset . . .” in a way that she hoped would be gentle and friendly enough to turn the suddenly snippy back and forth into a conversation again.

Unfortunately, Rainbow's attempt at 'gentle and friendly' happened to coincide with 'slow', which allowed to Sunset to interrupt with, “Rainbow . . .” said in the same way Rainbow had spoken her name.

Rainbow pinched the bridge of her nose and tried to remember if she was stocked up on headache medicine.  She said, “. . . if you're from another world--”

“Then I'm here illegally, yes,” Sunset said as she got back on her feet.

Rainbow hadn't thought about that at all, and didn't plan to start now.  She tried to get things back on track, “That's not--”

Sunset cut Rainbow off again; it was annoying, “After everything else you've learned about me,” Sunset checked that the lamp turned the lamp on and off, which it did, “I fail to see how that would be surprising.”

At this point Rainbow wasn't sure if Sunset was actively trying to be aggravating, or if that just came naturally to her.  Regardless, Rainbow finally got to the question she'd been trying to ask, “--where do you live?”

“Already answered that one,” Sunset said as she headed toward the hall.

Rainbow considered pointing out that Sunset's answer had answered nothing, but decided to drop that point and move on.  She asked, “Who do you live with?”

This time Sunset did actually stop walking to answer.  More than that, she actually turned and made eye contact.

“Rainbow, you've known me for years,” she said.  “Do you honestly think I could cohabitate with someone for any length of time without one of us killing the other?”

Then she turned right back around and walked out of the room. Rainbow followed.

Because it was the most straightforward way to approach things, Rainbow responded the way she would have if Sunset had said the same thing in a normal conversation, “This isn't a joke.”

“I don't know,” Sunset said, “after last night I'm kind of feeling like a punchline.”

Rainbow thought that statement over for a moment, just to check, then said, “I'm not convinced that makes sense.”

“A demon unicorn redeemed by weaponized rainbows walks into a bar . . .” Sunset said.

“That's a premise, not a punchline.”

“. . . and she gets kicked right back out because the bouncer thinks she's a human . . .”

“And that definitely doesn't make sense,” Rainbow said.

“No,” Sunset said, as she reached the front door.  “And humans aren't allowed to drink until a ridiculous age.”

While largely beside the point, Rainbow felt obligated to tell Sunset exactly what she thought of the alleged 'joke', “If there's such thing as the opposite of funny--”

“Goodbye, Rainbow Dash,” Sunset said as she left.

Rainbow followed her out the door then picked up where she'd left off, “--that's it. It's not even a bad joke, it's just . . . nothing.”

Sunset stopped and turned around, which left her standing in the middle of the street.  Rainbow was still on the sidewalk.

“That's not the joke,” Sunset said.

Rainbow couldn't tell what it was --it could have been her voice, her expression, her body language, or something else entirely-- but something about Sunset was different. It was not different in a good way.

Whatever it was, it was disturbing.  It was like looking at an injured limb hanging at an unnatural angle.  It was deeply, unnervingly wrong.

“The joke is that I'm standing here,” Sunset said, her volume just below a shout.  “A unicorn in a world with no magic.  An adult in a world that thinks adults are children because how the fuck can you people not realize that teenagers are old enough to look out for themselves?  The personal apprentice of a very real, and very powerful, god-Princess in a world where gods are naught but legends and princesses are impotent figureheads.”

Rainbow thought that Sunset's eyes were on the brink of tears, though she wasn't completely sure.  Sunset kept going, “The joke is that everything I am is made for another world and nothing about me belongs in this place.  I'm the non-sequitur.  I'm the thing that doesn't fit and makes no sense that you stick at the end of the joke to get a cheap laugh.”

Apparently to prove that point, Sunset started quoting a commercial their class had been shown when they covered non-sequiturs and other calculated forms of randomness, “'Anything is possible when your man smells like Old Spice and not a lady,'” Sunset said in a very non-Sunset way.  It wasn't hard to see where this was going.

“I'm a horse!” Sunset shouted so loudly that Rainbow was sure it must have hurt.

Rainbow said the word, “So,” slowly, drawing it out while she tried to think of how to respond.

Part of her wanted to say that teenagers shouldn't have to take care of themselves.  Rainbow's life, for instance, was only possible because someone else paid the bills. That allowed her concentrate on things like sports.

Part of her wanted to tell Sunset that everything would be all right, though she had no idea if it were true.

Part of her wanted to apologize, though she didn't know what she would be apologizing for.

Part of her wanted to avoid weighty topics entirely and instead mention that she'd completely forgotten about that silly commercial until Sunset quoted it.

There were doubtless other parts that wanted other things, but there was only so much one could think in the span of a single 'so'.

She ended up finishing the sentence with, “. . . you're not taking this well at all,” which was pretty weak and had become painfully obvious.

“I got hit by a magical light show and left in a hole in the ground,” Sunset shouted, “not six months of therapy!”

And they'd gone in a circle, because the only thing Rainbow could think of in response to that was, “I'm not even sure that sentence makes sense.”

“I want,” Sunset said. “To be. Alone.”

Sunset paused.

“Please leave me alone.” She was definitely blinking back tears now.

It wasn't that Rainbow was against that, but she was worried.  She took a moment to clear her head.  Then she asked, “If I do, am I gonna see you again?”

“Are you being morbid,” Sunset asked in return, “or do you think I'm a flight risk?”

Honestly, Rainbow wasn't sure.  She said, “Just . . .” and then gestured as though that would somehow get the point across.  It came as no surprise when it didn't. She tried again, “Just tell me.”

“I'll be at school on Monday,” Sunset said. She looked at the ground.  “Whether I'll be allowed to attend classes remains to be seen.”

Rainbow believed her, and said, “I'll see you then.”

Sunset didn't look up.

Rainbow wanted to say something else.  She didn't know what, but this wasn't how she wanted the conversation to end.  It felt like there had to be some better way to part ways.

She couldn't come up with anything.

Sunset, for her part, barely moved.  She just kept on looking at the same spot on the ground that she'd been looking at.

Rainbow walked back to her house.  Sunset hadn't moved.  Rainbow went inside, headed back in the direction of the couch, glanced at the window, then stopped.

Through the curtains, Sunset was a vaguely person-shaped blob.  What bothered Rainbow was that Sunset still hadn't moved.

After a few seconds, which felt like an eternity, the Sunset-blob did finally move.  When Sunset was on the opposite sidewalk, Rainbow let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding and looked away.

It still didn't feel right to let Sunset go in the state she was in, but Rainbow didn't know what else to do.  Also, she was well aware that continuing to watch Sunset would definitely cross the line between being concerned and being creepy, assuming she hadn't already, so she tried to turn her attention to other things.

It took a minute to get her mind moving in the right direction, but she eventually started thinking about the day ahead.  She should call her friends and figure out a good time to meet.  They still had a lot of catching up to do. Lost time to make up for too.

Of course, they also needed to discuss Sunset, and right now Rainbow wasn't up for that.

Things had seemed pretty good at first, too.  Though, truthfully, that was the problem.  If it had happened in the opposite order, 'shouty breakdown' first and 'normalish conversation' second, she probably would have had no problem dealing with it.  As it was, everything was a mess.

Rainbow walked over to the couch and let herself collapse onto it.

*
* *
* * *
* *
*

So, notes.

I wrote a thing!  Given how I've been lately, that's pretty major for me right now.

This was originally supposed to be part of a chapter with larger scope.  It was going to be three scenes.  This one, the relevant adults (Celestia and Luna) discussing the previous night, and Rainbow and her friends discussing Sunset.

Much of this was already written, the other parts as as stalled out as anything, and I crammed in so much here between the lines of dialogue that it's as long as Chapter 1 anyway, so I figured I'd polish it and post it as a chapter.

That didn't exactly go as planned.  A lot of this was overhauled or rewritten from the ground up, and I'm not sure if I managed to take out everything that no longer applies in the revised version.

If I'm doing this properly, familiarity with Equestria Girls is not required to understand this story.  No idea if I'm pulling this off.

I generally don't like assuming that the setting has the same pop culture as the real world because there are some huge differences.  Naming conventions, skin colors, and hair colors are the big ones.  Given how huge appearance is in the real world's present and past, the world of Equestria Girls can't have the same history or culture as our own.

So, with all of that in mind, I just included Soylent Green and the Old Spice man (and Just the two of me has the Twilight Zone, which is absurdly prominent in Chapter 2.)  I might not be the best at sticking by my convictions on this topic.

For reference, Soylent Green is people and this is the Old Spice commercial:

A cool tidbit about it is that the only CGI is the diamonds and the old spice rising out of them, the rest of it was done in a single take using only practical effects.

Rather less cool are the implicit assumptions it's built upon.

Stumbling Toward Redemption -- Chapter 1 (Equestria Girls)

[Originally posted at Fimfiction.]
[Picks up right after the climax of Equestria Girls, but you should be able to jump in with no prior knowledge.]

Quite a bit had been written about the Elements of Harmony, and the fact that most of what there was to read had been in the restricted sections of the library hadn't prevented Sunset Shimmer from reading everything she could.  By the time she finished theoretical works on what would happen in situations ranging from esoteric to exceedingly unlikely –like, say, if one were bring an Element of Harmony into an alternate world-- Sunset thought she'd known all there was to know.

Only now did she realize that there was one thing that had been very seriously lacking.

With Discord in stone and Luna banished to the moon there had never been a firsthand account of what it was like to be the target of the Elements.  Likewise there had been a distinct lack of speculation from third parties on what it would be like to to be caught up in a Harmony powered rainbow vortex with enough force to leave a giant crater in the ground.

Certainly nothing on what it was like to go from a demon to a powerless human as the magic of friendship tore through your body and turned it into something else.  Then again, the speculation on what would happen if one used an Element outside of its natural plane of existence hadn't been as accurate as she would have liked either.

She never planned on turning into a cackling monster who wouldn't hesitate to kill Twilight Sparkle, in spite of how infuriating the girl had become.

Regardless, it would have been nice if someone had bothered to even try to figure out what happened to the victims of the Elements' magic.  Maybe then she wouldn't have been quite so unprepared for what happened.

She hadn't just been turned back into a human.  She hadn't just been left steaming (or was it smoking?) in a giant crater.  No, those were the small changes.  The Elements had stripped her – left her bare, like an exposed nerve.  All of her illusions and rationalizations had been torn away and she was helpless under the crushing weight of everything she'd ever done.

She remembered every person, human or pony, she'd hurt and every time she'd hurt them.  She remembered every bit of perverse joy she'd taken in the suffering of others.  It had made her cry out about how sorry she was for everything.

At that point she was willing to do anything to change her life because it hurt.  Who she was hurt.  What she'd done hurt.  The kind of person she'd become hurt.  Everything she'd done since getting into this world and quite a few things from before then.  All of it hurt.

Of course, before Sunset could make it from Twilight to the girls who were supposed to teach her about friendship, Vice Principal Luna took Sunset away.  No one even noticed, their attention focused on the talking dog.

It had been surprising that Luna hadn't taken her to be punished right away.  Instead she brought Sunset to the school nurse, who had been one of the staff members supervising the dance.  Luna left to deal with Snips and Snails.  The nurse took Sunset to get her wounds disinfected.

She hadn't even known she had wounds, other things hurt too much for her to notice some scrapes.  Though when she looked in the mirror she was disturbed at how close the scrape running from her left forehead to the right side of her nose had come to touching her eye.

When that was over Luna kept Sunset, Snips, and Snails away from the other students in a sort of anti-dance detention.

And that was when it really started to sink in for Sunset exactly what it was like being redeemed by an Element of Harmony.

The moment had passed, sappy speeches about friendship were over, and now she had nothing.  All of her plans were for nothing and, beyond that, she was disgusted with herself for having made them in the first place.

The things she'd devoted her entire life to were . . . not things she wanted.  She hated herself for wanting them because every horrible thing she'd done had been done in pursuit of those things. She was Sunset Shimmer, the unicorn who didn't deserve to be an alicorn but demanded it nonetheless, the girl who didn't deserve power and couldn't be trusted with it anyway, the one who spent her life tearing others down because the only thing she wanted was to be on top.  And now she was where she belonged: at the bottom.

All that was left was pain.  The guilt over everything she'd done.  Hating herself for having done it.  In despair because she knew with all her heart and soul that she would never, ever make up for what she'd done.

* * *

When Luna returned she announced that the dance was over and the students had dispersed.  She looked over Sunset, Snips, and Snails and decided to split them up again.  She sent Sunset to wait at the school's entrance and took Snips and Snails with her.

Not all of the students had dispersed.  Five of them, five very specific ones, were saying goodbye to the resident alicorn princess.

Twilight looked right at Sunset, then asked the five, “You'll look out for her won't you?”

Naive.

Also it made the hurt even deeper.  Sunset knew she didn't deserve it.  The person she'd tried to kill, even if she hadn't quite been herself at the the time, wanted to help her when she'd done nothing in her life that was worthy of that kind of help.

Sunset half hid herself behind part of the wall that was still standing, as if that would somehow make everything less bad.

Rarity said, “Of course we will,” then turned away somewhat, crossed her arms, and added, “although I do expect some sort of apology for last spring's debacle.”

Sunset hid even more of herself behind the wall.  She didn't even know why she bothered.  Rarity met her gaze with a glare just the same.  Sunset dropped her her head and wished she could just make herself stop feeling.

Sunset heard footsteps behind her, and turned as Twilight said, “I have a feeling she'll be handing out a lot of apologies.”

Luna was smiling, until she saw that Sunset was looking at her.  The smile quickly turned to a frown.  She handed Sunset a trowel.  Snips and Snails arrived with a wheelbarrow full of bricks and a bucket of mortar.

They were red bricks even though the wall had been more of a pink that looked almost purple in the moonlight.

Who even built a wall like this?  It was four bricks thick, which was a pretty standard thickness, but you didn't actually make the wall entirely out of bricks.  You made a wall out of cinder-blocks and then put one layer of bricks on either side, which, because cinder-blocks were designed to be brick compatible, meant a thickness equivalent to four bricks.

No one in their right mind would build the wall to a modern building by making it four literal bricks thick, yet here it was.

And when in Tartarus had Sunset learned so much about human masonry?

She sighed.  She'd been here so long.  Impossible to say exactly when she picked up that tidbit, but it didn't matter.  She wasn't an Equestrian anymore.  Somewhere along the way she'd become human, and somehow that included random information about building construction.

She could drop the trowel and make a break for the portal, which would be extremely ill advised since Twilight Sparkle had made it clear she was supposed to stay here, but if she got there she'd never fit in.  In a way she'd been lucky that she came to this world as a child.  She was more adaptable then.  By pony standards she was an adult now.  She probably couldn't completely shift gears and assimilate into a different culture again.

She had no home now, and somehow this revelation was tied to bricks and cinder blocks.

She'd already stared on her task.  Get some mortar, plop it down, smooth it out, drop a brick, smaller amount of mortar beside the brick, place the next brick, repeat until you ran out of horizontal mortar from the original plop.  Repeat.

It was simple.  Straightforward.  She was able to do it without thinking.  She embraced that.  She didn't like her thoughts.  She concentrated on the thoughtless process of laying the bricks.  She tried to will the entire rest of the world –two worlds really– into non-existence.  There was no pain in the motion of laying bricks.  No guilt.  No shame.  Nothing but the same thing, over and over again.

Sunset barely noticed when the portal closed, stripping the five of their pony parts and dumping Rainbow Dash on her butt.  She did take a bit more note when Pinkie Pie charged the portal and bounced off.

All that did was make her wonder if whoever brought the portal statue here was also responsible for the strange cinder-block-less wall.

Then she was back to focusing her entire being on the mindless repetition of laying bricks.  Plop, smooth, place.  Plop, smooth, place.

* * *

“Go home.”

Sunset heard the words, but she didn't really process them.  She plopped a mortar on the top row of bricks, smoothed it out, and laid a new brick down.

“I said: go home.”

Sunset looked at the source of the voice.  Vice Principal Luna.  She didn't respond.  She didn't care.  It was more peaceful doing this.  Things were easier if she didn't have to think or feel anything.

“Snips and Snails already ran away,” Luna said.  “I'm somewhat surprised you didn't leave with them.”

One of the things Sunset hadn't been able to tune out while bricklaying was the part where Snips and Snails made very clear that their relationship with her was over.

She hadn't felt anything at all.  Compared to how everything else felt, well, that was basically good, right?

Besides, what else would she have felt?  There was no surprise there.  They worked for her because she had power, without the power she had nothing to offer and they had no reason to associate with her.

It wasn't like they'd been friends or anything.

The more important issue had nothing to do with Snips and Snails.  It had to do with the fact that Luna was there and probably expected a response.

“I'm somewhat surprised you had bricks and mortar just lying around,” Sunset said.

“There was going to be a student project to rebuild one of the out buildings,” Luna said.  “It fell through.  The supplies have been wasting space for ages.  Go home, Sunset, you've done enough for now.”

Sunset had never heard of the project, the 'ages' during which the supplies had been wasting space must have lasted years.

Sunset looked at the pitiful progress she'd made and the giant hole in the wall.

“Wall's not even close to done,” She said. said.

“Of course it isn't,” Luna said.  “We'll talk more about that on Monday, but for now it's time for you to go home.”

Sunset sighed.  “Whatever you say.”  Sunset set down her trowel and walked away from the school.

She didn't make it very far.

* * *

“I don't want a ride home, Rainbow Dash,” Sunset said.  Again.  This was getting tiresome.

“Walking isn't safe!”

“Right,” Sunset said.  “I'm sure I'll run into a manticore and die.”

“Look, the Vice Principal obviously thought that keeping you under supervision until most students went home would protect you, but I've seen kids lurking around waiting for you to be alone.”

She so very much did not care.  The only thing she cared about right now was how aggravating it was to have Rainbow Dash going on about things she didn't care about.

“You've seen them lurking?” Sunset asked.  “Where are they now?”

“Just because the ones I spotted seem to have gone doesn't mean that they really have gone or that there aren't groups I didn't spot.  You're not safe.”

“I.  Don't.  Care.”

“How can you say that?”

“Look,” Sunset said, trying to see a way out of this, “if I'm so unsafe then being with me means you're not safe, so you should just go and leave me alone.”

“It's just this once,” Rainbow  said.  “By Monday people will probably have calmed down.”

“Sure they will,” Sunset said, no attempt to hide how little she believed that.

“I'm not saying things will be good on Monday, but I don't think we'll have to worry about serious injury or death.”

“Because people are totally going to try to kill me tonight,” Sunset said.  God, this was annoying.

“They don't have to be trying to do something for them to actually do it,” Rainbow said.  “Most people don't realize how fragile bodies can be.”

“They can also be more resilient than people expect,” Sunset countered, but there was no force behind it.

“It works both ways, sure,” Rainbow conceded, “but– no.  That's not the point.  The point is that tonight I'm driving you home.”

“What if I run away?” Sunset asked.

“I'll catch you, and you know it.”

“So when you said you'd look out for me, you meant you'd run me down and tackle me in the street.”

“Maybe I'm concerned over nothing, maybe everyone really has gone home, but I'm not taking that chance,” Rainbow said.  “So tonight I'm willing to take extreme measures.”

“What if I refuse to tell you my address, or make you drive around in circles until you're out of gas?”

“What if I call in a favor and point out that you owe me for how you split up Applejack and I?”

“If you'd been better friends then it would have taken more than one–” it just slipped out on force of habit alone.  “Sorry!”

“You're forgiven if you agree to let me give you a ride.”

It was a better deal than she deserved, but there were still problems with it.  As she tried to figure out how to deal with them her stomach growled and she realized just how hungry she was.  That could possibly have the solution.

“I'll agree if you buy me something to eat,” Sunset said.  “I never had dinner.”

“You didn't eat!?”

Was that seriously all it took to shock Rainbow Dash?

“I was busy.  I had world domination to plan, I had to figure out how to plausibly break a magic portal without using magic, I had underlings to boss around, my schedule was full.”

“How would a sledgehammer have broken the portal anyway?  Wouldn't it just go right through?”

“You want to know, you provide food.”

“Twenty bucks, no more.”

“Is that before or after taxes?”

* * *

“Imagine that the portal didn't have a solid border around it,” Sunset said.

“Why?” Rainbow asked.

Sunset sighed.  It was that or groaning.  “Unless you want me to walk you through basic magic theory all the way up to inter-dimensional portals, which would be like teaching someone who didn't know math everything through calculus over complex numbers and differential equations in six dimensions, just imagine the portal didn't have a solid border.”

“Ok.”

“Now that you've got that, you imagine someone walking in the general direction of the portal.  If they hit the portal, they go to Equestria with no more resistance than going through empty air.  If thy miss the portal, they stay in this world and are actually going through empty air.  Same resistance,” Sunset said.  Maybe if she kept on explaining obvious things she'd fall asleep.  That might be a nice change of pace.  “So, pop quiz, what happens if part of someone hits the portal and part doesn't?”

“Instant amputation?” Rainbow asked.

“Top of the class,” Sunset said.  “And that wouldn't just apply to people but to space-time itself, probability clouds, magnetic fields, atomic nuclei, and so forth.  All sorts of weird things would happen if such a thing existed.  As it turns out, nature really doesn't like that sort of frictionless cleft in reality and attendant impossibilities.  It doesn't allow such clefts to exist.”

“And we're going to get to the point . ? .”

“Open air portals naturally form borders of their own, often invisible, that prevent things from crossing directly at the portal edge.  That's good for them, but when dealing with a stationary portal attached to a solid object it's inefficient, somewhat annoying, and a total waste of energy.”

For the first time since getting in the car, Sunset actually noticed where they were.  That was followed by figuring out what they were near and interrupting her explanation to say, “Turn left here.”

Rainbow did and waited for Sunset to continue.

“It's much easier, in terms of necessary energy, to have a physical border around such a portal to stop things from crossing the edge.  That's almost certainly why the surface with the portal was recessed into the statue pedestal.”  Sunset closed her eyes.  Maybe it was because she hadn't eaten, maybe it was the time of day, maybe it was because she'd been hit with powerful magic or because she'd been laying bricks, but she was getting tired in a hurry.

She might not need boring stuff to put her to sleep.  Would it be rude if she just passed out?

The decision to stay awake was accompanied by an involuntary jolt.  Her eyes had opened on their own too.  Where was she?  Right:

“The downside is that since the border is a simple physical thing it can be broken in a way that a naturally occurring portal border cannot.  Sledgehammer to the edge of the pedestal and I break off enough marble to expose the edge of the portal to air rather than solid.  Nature abhors a frictionless cleft in reality, and thus the portal instantly collapses.”

“That's it?” Rainbow asked.

Sunset shrugged.  “Sledgehammers aren't complicated.”

* * *

They got caught at a red light on a stretch of road that felt like the middle of nowhere.  It wasn't in reality, just a trick of topography combined with a slightly underdeveloped part of town.  Still, it felt like they were alone in the world.  No other cars were on the road as far as the eye could see, empty lots and woods surrounded them.

Actually, if it were possible to make a right turn at the intersection, if there were a road through the small wooded area, they'd be moments away from a place that Sunset often ate.  Not the one she was directing Rainbow to, but a perfectly fine place to make her stomach stop grumbling at her.

Rainbow could outrun her, but if she had a head start and she were going through trees where Rainbow's straightaway speed never came into play . . .

Sunset quietly unbuckled her seat belt.  Rainbow didn't notice.  Sunset carefully took it off.  Rainbow was still obvious.

In a burst of action and motion Sunset got out of the car and ran for the woods.

* * *

By the time Rainbow was out of the car she couldn't even see Sunset.  Rainbow swore.  She'd be able to catch up to Sunset eventually, but it would mean leaving her car in the middle of the road.

And that was when the light turned green.

Rainbow looked in all three directions, saw no signs of anything at all, and concluded that if she left the car in the road someone would immediately pull up behind it and be a jerk about it.

She got back into the car and tried to think of where Sunset might be going.  In spite of present appearance, this wasn't the boondocks and those woods would have to be very small and surrounded on all sides by roads and businesses.

A moment later she had her answer.  Sunset was hungry, there was a pizza place right in that direction.  Rainbow would have to go the long way, but she'd be doing it in a car rather than on foot.

* * *

Maybe she'd been wrong.  The place was closed and Sunset wasn't in sight.  Still, Rainbow got out of her car and prepared to take a look around.

It turned out that she didn't even need her eyes.  She heard a voice coming from behind the building.  As she approached words became clear”

“Pepperoni.”  Long pause. “Pepperoni”  Slightly shorter pause.  “Meat lovers,” said with utter disgust.  At the end of this pause, “Pepperoni.”

Just as Rainbow rounded the back corner of the building Sunset announced, “Finally!  Cheese.”

It took Rainbow a bit to really process the fact that she was watching Sunset Shimmer dig through a dumpster.

Sunset hadn't noticed Rainbow yet.  With a bit of struggle she got herself sitting on the dumpster and opened a pizza box.

“Running off like that was not cool,” Rainbow said.

Sunset gave a start, but then calmed down when she actually looked at Rainbow.  She shrugged and ate a slice of pizza.

“You're really eating that?” Rainbow asked.

They say there are no stupid questions.  That simply isn't true.  Rainbow knew it was a stupid question.  It was an extremely stupid question given that Rainbow could see Sunset was eating it.  Rainbow had asked anyway.

“I thought you'd be happy,” Sunset said.  “If there really are any dangerous lurking students, they certainly didn't follow me after I got in your car, so any obligation to keep me safe has stopped.” Sunset paused for a moment. “And I just saved you twenty dollars.”

“Did you really think it would make me happy to have you jump out of the car and run away?” Rainbow asked while doing her best to convey how little she believed the answer could possibly be yes.

“Of course not, I just . . .” Sunset's head bobbed for a moment and her upper body followed.  She said, “Whoa,” as she resumed sitting straight.

“I totally underestimated how much the run took out of me,” Sunset said.  Something wasn't right about her voice.  “Not just the run of course,” she said, speeding up and slurring a bit, “The run, the magic, the crown tossing, all of it.  It just . . . it . . .” her head bobbed again, “it adds up is what I'm saying and what I'm saying is that it adds up.”

“Sunset,” Rainbow said, “you're scaring me.”

“Oh don't worry, I'm not about to turn into a demon,” Sunset said.

“That's not what's scaring me.”

Sunset didn't seem to notice Rainbow had said anything, “This isn't turning into a demon, no, not at all.  It's just that using that level of magic, using it . . . using that level of magic without an external power source, like say when the Element of Magic stops working for you but you don't give up, using that level of . . . of stuff.  It does things.  It . . . it burns calories faster than any non-magical activity possibly could, given the laws of physics –hey, we should market magic as a weight loss solution– and that in turn leaves you with fa– fati– fati– tiredness that wouldn't normally be–”

Rainbow cursed herself for how long it took her to react.  She should have steadied Sunset the moment she seemed to lose balance.  She should have done something when Sunset collapsed onto the dumpster.  She should have pushed Sunset back on to the dumpster when Sunset started to roll off, she should have caught Sunset when Sunset practically fell into her arms.

She shouldn't have stood unmoving through all of that and had to practically fall over herself to catch and slow Sunset before she hit the ground.

But that's what she did.  She didn't, entirely stop the fall.  She just slowed it down enough to prevent damage.  That and she kept Sunset's head from hitting pavement.

A moment later she tried to shake Sunset awake, but the other girl was in what seemed to be a very deep sleep.

Rainbow said, “Well, shit,” to the empty night.

*
* *
* * *
* *
*

The plan is to keep to the continuity of the Equestria Girls movies.  With seven seasons, a film of its own, and more to come, keeping up with all the details of Friendship is Magic as well would be more than I want to cope with.  Thankfully Friendship is Magic is safely sequestered on the other side of the magic portal.

For those who don't feel like watching the movies, good news: You don't have to.

Everything you need to know will be covered in story.  You've already got the main points above.  Sunset wasn't a very nice person.  She was zapped with rainbow magic.  She no longer wants to be the person she was.

Later chapters will go into more detail, where necessary, about the ways in which she wasn't a nice person, but we've pretty much got everything we need to go forward.

I said somewhere that I had something like half a dozen Sunset Shimmer stories in my head.  This makes two.

Backgound info for "A New Path Forward" which you hopefully don't actually need to know.

This goes with the story A New Path Forward.

First off, if I'm doing my craft well you should be able to jump into A New Path Forward without knowing any of this and simply taking what the story provides itself.  That said, I wanted to give background for any who wanted it up front and in case I don't do things well.

It is, for the record, really, really hard to sum this crap up quickly.  Since I've completely given up on making an opening note explaining this, I'm not even going to try for "quickly" anymore though I will attempt to stop short of "absurdly long".  I will probably fail.

I'm not going to note where this diverges from canon.  This is about the story's canon.

Contents:

• When the story takes place in relation to other works
• Details about the setting
• Characters
• Sunset Shimmer
• Snips and Snails
• Twilight Sparkle
• Celestia and Luna
• Adagio Dazzle, Aria Blaze, and Sonata Dusk
• Fluttershy, Rarity, Rainbow Dash, Applejack and Pinkie Pie
• The angry mob
• Quick wrap up

~ * Location in Time * ~

A New Path Forward serves as a sequel to Dainn's Anon-a-Miss (except the epilogue) but not in a way that should make Anon-a-Miss into required reading.  As the title suggests it's about what happens moving on, not what happened before.  The title comes from the fact that Anon-a-Miss left off in a way that would necessarily have to make everything different in the aftermath so things can't follow remotely the same track as the canonical path.

Anyway, location in time.

What this story takes as more or less canonical (I will not be holding myself to exact wording or any such thing) are the movies Equestria Girls and Rainbow Rocks, all but the last seven pages of the comic Equestria Girls Holiday Special, and the pre-epilogue parts of Dainn's Anon-a-Miss (which begins where it diverges from the Holiday Special.)

It story starts during winter break which is before the movies The Friendship Games and Legend of Everfree would have taken place.

~ * About the Setting * ~

The Equestria Girls universe is the human-verse of the current My Little Pony multiverse.  Other than humans and certain animals being significantly more colorful it's basically a bog standard earth-type setting when taken in itself.  The thing is, it can't really be taken in itself.  It's connected by magical portal to the pony-verse that is the setting of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic which has allowed individuals and magical objects to cross over into it in spite of its lack of experimentally verifiable native magic.

The human-verse of Equestria Girls is the sort of parallel universe where there are alternate versions of individual people from the main (pony) universe.  They generally have the same name, voice, and coloration along with similar personalities and relationships.

The Equestria Girls stories take place in and around Canterlot High School and the local population largely mirrors Ponyville of the main universe.  Sunset Shimmer and Twilight Sparkle are not from Ponyville originally (Sunset never was, Twilight moved there in the first episode of the series as a result of events the human-verse had no parallel to) and as a result neither of their alternate versions has been encountered at this point in the timeline.

Transitioning from the pony-verse to the human-verse gives one the form of a native creature (usually a human, but Spike the baby dragon became a dog) and strips one of their magic.  Inanimate magical objects, however, retain magical power.

The sorting algorithm can do weird things, which we'll get to when talking about the sirens later.

There are only four known non-natives living as humans in the human world.  Sunset Shimmer and the three sirens.

~ * Characters * ~

Sunset Shimmer was originally a unicorn in the pony-verse.  She was a magical prodigy and Princess Celestia's personal student.  They had . . . different moral frameworks.  She took off to the human-verse and became a villain.  She reformed following her defeat and eventually saved her school and world when the next villains, the sirens, came along.

When A New Path Forward begins she's just recently cleared her name after being framed for going back to her evil ways (but stupider and less magical), completely estranged from her canonical friends, recovering from being severely beaten (indirect result of the framing), and reconnected (as friends this time) with her former lackeys from her villain days (who helped her after the beating.)

As an aside, thinking about the idea of what happens when Sunset is entirely separated from her canon friends is what drove me to start writing the story.

Snips and Snails are Sunset's former lackeys.  After her defeat, which dragged them down too, Sunset assumed they'd want nothing to do with her.  They thought she didn't want to have anything to do with them, believing she'd traded up to better friends.  The mob that beat Sunset dragged them along (with the expectation they'd be accomplices in the beating), which gave them the opportunity to help her.  (They didn't save her, they gave her the opening needed to save herself, and then followed her plan when she figured out how to do it.)

Twilight Sparkle was a unicorn who became Princess Celestia's personal student not long after Sunset.  By the time she actually met Sunset she had leveled up to alicorn princess.  She's the one who stopped villain-Sunset.  By the time of the story she's gotten the title "Princess of Friendship", she's figured out a way to open the portal at will, and she's the only one in the pony-verse Sunset is in contact with (via a pair of books that use magic to make it so whatever is written in one appears in the other.)

Celestia and Luna are sisters who are the human counterparts of the rulers of Equestria.  They're Principal and Vice Principal of Canterlot High respectively.  Their school has recently been afflicted by magical happenings, and more recently an entirely mundane plot that almost got one of their students (Sunset) killed by other students as well as inciting less violent but still severe conflict amongst the student body.

They've basically locked down the school in response, shutting down all extra curricular activities.

They're also responsible for the ones who attacked Sunset getting the less severe extralegal punishment that Sunset wanted, where letting the legal system run its course would have had those students facing second degree attempted murder charges.

Adagio Dazzle, Aria Blaze, and Sonata Dusk were originally sirens in the pony verse.  In this context that means flying horse-fish-things with gems embedded in their chests who can cultivate hostility with their magic singing and then feed on the resulting negative energy.  They can also use their magic singing for more direct influence, causing people to do what they want instead of engaging in general hostility.

When they were banished to the human world the gems stopped being parts of their bodies and started being pendants.  When they were defeated the pendants were shattered.  Without the pendants they can't feed on negative energy and when the story starts they are slowly starving to death as a result.  (Physical food can slow down how long it takes for them to die of starvation, but only magically feeding on energy can actually keep them alive.)

They haven't reformed, and Adagio and Aria aren't very nice people regardless, but Sunset agreed to try to them get new pendants (by having Twilight back in magical pony-land make them) so that they won't have to die.

While in theory new pendants could allow them to go back to trying to take over a world or two, given that defeat in the human realm breaks their pendants and that the only possible source of replacements wouldn't take kindly to another attempt at world domination, Sunset doesn't consider it a major risk.

Fluttershy, Rarity, Rainbow Dash, Applejack and Pinkie Pie are the alternate versions Twilight's pony-verse friends.  The helped her defeat Sunset, agreed to look after Sunset and teach her about friendship when Twilight asked them to (after Twilight saw Sunset was truly penitent), worked with Twilight to defeat the sirens (though that initially failed until Sunset stepped in) and rejected Sunset with incredible haste and vitriol when she was framed.

They're not going to be in the story much.  As noted above, the driving force behind the story is what happens when they're out of the picture.

The angry mob . . . is't actually very important to this story, but takes a lot of words to explain.  So just remember this section may be big, but it doesn't really matter that much going forward.  And the parts that do matter even a little will be explained covered in a fair amount of detail because getting the police to put an attempted murder case on hold as part of blackmailing the guilty into accepting a lesser punishment is complex and difficult.

That said, let me repeat, it's not very important to this story.  I'd be perfectly able to tell the story I want to tell if Anon-a-Miss had ended with them carted off to prison and never seen again.  It would be different, because changing things changes other things due to the interconnected relationship of all things, but it would still be pretty much the story I want to tell.

So have you got that out of all of the things here you don't need to read this is the one you really, really don't need to read?  Because now we finish with the long explanation.

The angry mob was a group of students led by one named Gilda who thought Sunset was guilty of that thing she was framed for that I keep on mentioning but not explaining.  Short version: being an internet personality called Anon-a-Miss (where Dainn got the name for his story) who was spreading around people's secrets, breaking friendships, making people targets of bullies, screwing up families, and wrecking lives.

They lured Sunset into a trap and beat her.

They didn't start out with intent to kill, but somewhere along the way they realized that, given how far things had gone, if Sunset ever told anyone what happened they'd be completely screwed.  Even then none of them were quite able to bring themselves to do the deed directly, and intended to leave her (bound) to freeze to death in an abandoned building with no hope of escape or survival where they hoped she wouldn't be found until the trail had gone cold.  (Thus second degree attempted murder, because there was intent to kill but that wasn't the plan ahead of time.)

From a legal standpoint they're getting away with everything, though they left enough evidence that all that needs to happen is for the case to be allowed forward and they (almost) inevitably would end up convicted of attempted murder.  Thus: blackmail.

What they're being blackmailed into as punishment, at Sunset's choosing, is making sure the ones actually behind Anon-a-Miss aren't harmed.  Not even a shove in the halls.

The guilty party happened to be three kids from the middle school adjoined to the high school so this protection means that the angry mob gets to spend the next four and a half years, until the three graduate high school, devoting their lives to protecting the people who actually did the thing the angry mob tried to kill Sunset for allegedly doing.

Sunset is apparently a fan of specially-tailored psychological punishment.

(Still less time than five to fifteen years for second degree attempted murder.)

How it's possible to blackmail the angry mob into this --which is to say: how it's possible to put a police investigation of attempted murder on hold when it already has the evidence necessary to convict everyone-- is nepotism and intrigue (involving Celestia and Luna.)  Mostly intrigue.

~ * Final Summary * ~

Word count doesn't equate to importance, as I noted when I pointed out that the angry mob is of basically no importance to the core story in spite of requiring the most words to explain.

So here's my quick summing up of the previous summations.

• This takes place in the human world so, other than the fact that they might have naturally purple skin or blue hair or some such, the characters can be assumed to be just like ordinary humans unless otherwise stated.
• The center of much of what will happen is the high school Sunset Shimmer attends which is run by Principal Celestia and Vice Principal Luna.
• Sunset Shimmer is one of four (known) non-humans currently living as a human, the other three being the sirens who are currently dying of magical starvation but Sunset has promised to try to (get Twilight Sparkle to) help.
• The bridges between Sunset and her former friends have been burnt to a crisp.
• Sunset is recovering from being injured.  Celestia and Luna are dealing with the fact that their school degenerated into a hive of scum and bullying villainy at the drop of an electronic hat and the fallout from blackmailing the students who attacked Sunset into accepting an extralegal punishment.
• The story starts in the winter break following Rainbow Rocks, and is thus before when The Friendship Games would have been if things had not diverged from canon.
• That's more or less it.

Magical World Building that makes sense, vs. stuff that doesn't, using examples from Pirates of the Carribian

The first Pirates of the Caribbean movie had magic in it that, in general, made sense.  It was simple, straightforward, and accounted for pretty much everything.  Not quite everything, but close enough.

The island could only be found by those who knew where it was.  Jack had a magic compass to point the way, so it was easy for him to triangulate the island's position.  After the position was found, he shared it with Barbarossa (big mistake) and Norrington.

Thus everyone who found the island did so by following the simple magical rule: you've got to know where you're going before you get there.

Presumably if someone didn't know where it was, and took the same route (at a different time since following someone who does know where it is probably counts as being led) they'd find open ocean.

The giant major magic thing, though, was the cursed treasure.

Cortés was an asshole so the gods placed a curse on the treasure.  The treasure and the stone box it is kept in are now magical.  Take any treasure out of the box and you're cursed.  The curse isn't lifted until all of the treasure is returned to the box along with blood from everyone who took treasure.

The stone box has writing on it explaining the curse and what needs to be done to lift it.

The pirates took the treasure, realized the curse was real when they were unable to experience anything pleasurable ever again and noticed that in direct moonlight their bodies and clothes had turned to something resembling what would happen if you left a dead body out for crows to feed upon.

In order to lift the curse they had to translate the box.

Their early translation revealed that they had to return all of the treasure.  At this point Will's dad thinks they deserve to be cursed and sends a piece of the treasure off to his son.

Since he can't be executed, Barbosa ties him to a canon and dumps him in deep ocean.

Additional translation reveals they needed that guy's blood.  Oops.

They collect all of the treasure save Will's piece and all of the blood save Will's dad's before the main action of the movie begins.

-

This has set up all of the magic seen in the entire movie.  They need to return all of the treasure but they're one piece short, they need a substitute for Will's dad's blood, that being Will's blood, but they've already contributed the rest of the needed blood.

It's short, simple, complete, and it makes sense.  The god's cursed the treasure and stone box, explanation for the how it works is written on the box.

There's no major problem.  No, "Wait, what?"  It works and makes sense.

* * *

Pirates of the Carribian: On Stranger tides, a movie I really wish I hadn't seen because as much as I might like certain characters, good fuck did that movie suck, revolves around the fountain of youth.

Here's how the fountain works:

1. You have to find the fountain in which requires smacking two silver Spanish chalices together and having their resonating sound set off a magic thingy.
2. You need a mermaid tear.
3. You need to fill the two previously mentioned silver Spanish chalices with fountain of youth water, put the mermaid tear into one of them, and have two people drink at the same time, one from each chalices.
4. One person dies, the other gets the dead one's life force.

How the fuck does that work?

I'm completely serious here.  The only purpose of the chalices is to be used in a fountain of youth ceremony, implying they were made after the fountain was discovered, but you can't find the fountain without the chalices.

And even if we are to assume that chalices were somehow made pre-fountain with all of the fountain specific magic within them, what then?

Are we to believe that that someone traveled every nook and cranny of Florida smacking the chalices together every step of the way in hopes they would magically lead to the fountain?

And once they got there, how did they figure out that you needed two people to drink for it to work, how did they figure out that there was need for a mermaid tear?  Did they try adding a drop of every fluid not to mention a sprinkle of every possible soluble thing?

"Well, buffalo piss and sea salt doesn't do anything, what's next?"

"We're going to try buffalo bile and sea salt.  Then buffalo brain fluid, then buffalo blood, and so forth until we've exhausted every single sea salt / buffalo combination."

Remember how easily these questions were resolved in the first movie.  The stone box and cursed coins were created by the same entities for the purpose of working together and an explanation of how they worked was carved into the sides of the stone box.

There certainly could have been something like that here.  Pictograms would have been enough, mind you there still would have been a question of why the fucking Spanish chalices.  But if that were the only problem we could handwave.  Maybe the original drinking vessels were damaged beyond repair and the Spanish chalices were created to exacting specifications to replace them.

As is, though, we have:

Fountain - can only be gotten to via land unless you can breathe under water (mermaids can get in, but don't expect them to just show up and give you a tear.)

Mermaid tears - very hard to get if you have a mermaid, and mermaids are even harder to get than the tears.  generally found in a cove where the fountain most definitely is not.

Chalices: From Spain which is nowhere near the other shit.

Ritual: Doesn't appear to be recorded anywhere, requires all there of the previous things, and seems very, very unlikely to have been arrived at through trial and error.

Absent Tiresias himself showing up and telling you how to put all of this shit together, it seems like the connection between the fountain and mermaid tears would never have been discovered, the chalices would never have been made, and none of this would ever happen.

We need all three things to, by extraordinary coincidence, appear together just for anyone to have the slightest inkling something might be going on.

Did she just cry in your silver chalice --created by order of the prophet who can see all things even the end result of self-fulfilling prophecy-- and then swim away?
I think it was the smell of my onion sandwich.
Whatever, lets have some spring water and toast to our continued partnership.
Yeah, lets do that.
*they clink, they drink*
*horrible magic starts killing him*
Oh God, what's happening to me?
[partner]!  Oh my God, what can I do?  Tell me what to do!
*he dies*
Hey, I feel reinvigorated.

I don't buy it.  The whole thing is bullshit.

* * *

In Curse of the Black Pearl (the first movie) it was clear they'd put thought into how to make the magic make sense.

Why didn't the pirates need blood from everyone with whom the cursed treasure had changed hands?  Because the treasure and the stone box were linked and only taking the treasure out of the box cursed you.

Will got his piece of the treasure so the curse wouldn't be lifted and then the people pissed off about it disposed of the blood they needed every bit as much as that piece of the treasure?  How does that make sense?  Because they still hadn't fully translated the explanation of the curse and how it was lifted.  Will Sr. (Bootstrap Bill) sent away the piece as soon as he learned they needed to return it, he was tied to a canon and thrown overboard shortly thereafter, then, later still, they realized they got further in their translation and realized they needed his blood.

So on, so forth.

Watching On Stranger Tides, on the other hand, it's clear that no one even considered how any of it would work.

It's possible that this is a result of On Stranger Tides being a kitbash that takes elements from an '80s book of the same name and attempts to make them into a Pirates of the Caribbean movie.  Or it could be no one gave a damn.

In large part what makes Curse of the Black Pearl work is that the creators thought about the first time.  The cursed treasure was still there to be taken meaning that Cortes put it back.  Cursed Cortes isn't marauding all over, meaning he put it back right.

As soon as you've answered why he put it back and how he did it right, you've basically got all of the magic in the movie figured out as much as it needs to be.  Not quite all because Jack has his compass which has no explanation in the movie, but a compass that points toward what you're looking to find is pretty self-explanatory.

It's clear that no one did the same, "What happened previous times?" thinking regarding the fountain of youth stuff, because they've created a system where nothing outside of absurdist magical slapstick (with dark undertones) could possibly result in the first time ever actually happening.

* * *

Magic makes it easy to have character's collecting plot tokens: This ritual requires mystical ingredients X, Y, and Z.  A story can be made out of needing to collect X, Y, and Z.

But it needs to be thought out.  Often times ingredients can be made general, that can reduce the "What the fuck?" factor of how people figured out these things in combination did something of note.  If it had been "water from a sacred spring, the tear of a magical creature, and twin goblets of an alchemist," then it would be a lot easier to believe that someone somewhere somewhen discovered that the given result was produced.

Other times the ingredients are specific, but in a set.  (For example, the unbreakable sword, impenetrable breastplate, and invulnerable helmet.)  Again, this can make sense because the things are designed to work together.

Where it doesn't work is when you do random asspulls (water from this one specific fountain, in these two specific chalices, and a mermaid tear in one of them) without ever asking, "Ok, how did someone find out that combining these seeming unrelated things in this rather random and counter-intuitive way, would produce the desired result?"

Magic lets you get away with a lot of shit, but there has to be sense rather that nonsense.  Even if someone's magical power is THE POWER OF NONSENSE it's going to have to be applied in sensible way.

* * *

Have I mentioned that I have no heat and it's cold in here?  The oil's coming today so I seem to have survived, but as I was out re-shoveling the path so it can actually be delivered, the absurdity of the On Stranger Tides magical system popped into my head (again, this is hardly first time) and demanded I write a post about magic that makes sense and thus works as a narrative element, vs magic that doesn't.