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The Twilight Zone · FiM Minific ·
Organised by RogerDodger
Word limit 400–750
Show rules for this event
Twilight’s Safe Zone
“Twilight Sparkle! Where are you, young lady? You are in a heap of trouble!” Twilight Velvet called out as she searched her house, having checked the likeliest hiding places and now checking the improbable ones. Another vase had been broken, and while her magical-prodigy daughter would fix it eventually, if a tad too creatively, it was the principle of the thing. Child breaks vase, parent chastises child, even when the vase had been a gift from Great Aunt Ostentia which would have been mathomed into the attic in a year or so.

Twilight Sparkle was nowhere to be found, but Twilight Velvet had been through this before and wasn’t unduly worried. She abandoned the search, and went to make some tea. Her little filly had found some unknown and very effective way to hide from her own family, but always reappeared in time for dinner. Making a batch of cookies had been known to improve the response time.

All the time her mother was calling her, Twilight Sparkle was smug, snug, and secure in her own private world. Ever since that one day in Magic Kindergarten where she’d made such a mess and the noodles had gotten everywhere and everyone had laughed at her, she’d felt an odd feeling when she teleported, as if there were an alternate destination available. One day, after many tries, she followed it and found a place she called the Safe Zone, a name she’d read on a school pamphlet.

It was a roughly cylindrical room, sometimes with stony grey walls, sometimes with soft padded walls of dark tan, but the floor was always a thick layer of warm felt that was nice to snuggle into. The ceiling appeared visually as a source of soft blurry light, and to her magical sense as a series of folds beyond her ability to unravel. She probed the area thoroughly for hidden traps and dormant monsters as recommended in her O&O manual, and verified that she could easily come and go as she pleased, then brought in parts of her comic book collection and toys, bit by bit, until she had claimed the space as hers, a cozy refuge from angry parents and embarrassing social situations.

As she grew, she returned to the problem of the odd ceiling and walls with little success, until she found a promising theory concerning pocket dimensions. Under this theory, she couldn’t pierce the ceiling because there was nowhere else to teleport to, locally, within that tiny dimension; it converged to a constricted matrix at the perimeter, with all the transport vectors involuted. Since all the available evidence supported this conclusion, Twilight shelved the problem. And over the years, the comic books were supplanted by notes and tomes, and the Safe Zone became a study area, unknown even to Spike, where Twilight could study intensely, free from interruption.

One day, Princess Twilight Sparkle was napping in the Zone, and dreamed that she was being gently scratched between her ears. She smiled in her sleep and snuggled into the feeling, but the scratching grew more insistent and annoying. She was just starting to waken when she was entangled in a huge white stringy mass, and hauled, squealing and struggling, through the ceiling and into bright blinding light!

“Twilight?” said Discord, squinting at the empurpled end of his cotton swab.

“Discord!?” she shouted, flapping her legs and trying to run with her wings. “Where am I? What are you doing!?”

“To answer your last question first,” he smirked, “I was cleaning my navel. I do it once every fifteen thousand, seven-hundred and eighty-two years.”

“You mean–” Revulsion wrinkled her snout. “My Safe Zone is in your navel? I was sleeping in your belly-button lint all this time?”

“Well, at various times,” he mused. “Your teleports must have intersected my worldline at discontinuous and even nonconsecutive intervals.”

“No… Wait.” Twilight was panicking, breathing with wheezy little whinnies. “You’re the physical manifestation and personification of entropy. You are an emergent property of the universal trend towards thaumaturgic self-consistency!”

Discord sighed, rolled his eyes and gave a curt, grudging nod.

“You were never even born in any meaningful sense! So why do you even have a navel?!”

He snorted. “Don’t be so omphaloskeptic. Trust me, you’d prefer not to know.”

“I do want to know!” she shouted. “Tell me!”

“Very well. It’s there so Celestia can park her chewing gum–”

Twilight’s horn blazed, and an instant later, there was an orange where Discord had stood.

A navel orange.
« Prev   32   Next »
#1 · 4
· · >>Not_A_Hat >>GroaningGreyAgony
Could I get a definition for “mathome” please?

In any case, this was certainly amusing, but the time transition really caught me off-guard. You had an established story going with the two Twilights, and skipping ahead as you did left me more than a little disoriented. A more delineated shift between time periods will do a lot to help this story.
#2 · 1
· · >>GroaningGreyAgony
Cute. Bit jumpy toward the end, but cute.
#3 · 1
· · >>GroaningGreyAgony
It made me laugh, so there's that. It really does feel jumpy and rough somehow, though. I'm not sure it's the time skip so much as the clash in mood between the seriousness of young Twi's refuge and the sillyness of the end.
#4 · 2
· · >>GroaningGreyAgony
>>FanOfMostEverything It's from Tolkien, for all the things a Hobbit owns without having a use for, but isn't willing to throw away. Often passed around at birthday parties. Think white elephant gifts.

This was silly, and pretty well put together, even though a few things seemed slightly over-done. Mathom was a more-than-just-obscure odd choice, and although I'm just about willing to buy omphaloskeptic (it's Discord) a literal actual noodle incident... is perhaps a bit on the nose.

Still, this is probably the best one-note jokefic I've read in quite a while.
#5 · 3
· · >>GroaningGreyAgony
This is too silly for me. At first, I was fearing I had to read one of those cute but lovey-dovey filly Twilight fics.

Then there was a jarring time jump (which ruled out the former hypothesis), and well, that idea.

As a matter of fact, I've never liked Discord, but I think the character is too navel-grazing to not have noticed Twilight's presence before. My opinion though.

I think I would've liked it better if Discord has psoriasis.

Oh, and also all the pseudo-scientific jargon... Please don't :P
#6 · 3
· · >>GroaningGreyAgony
This is one of those stories where the writer had a good idea that he or she liked, but just couldn't quite fit it into the span of a minific. Even though this story uses the maximum possible amount of words, it still feels haphazardly paced, with the majority of the story devoted to exposition establishing the safe zone to set up for the subsequent scene with Discord. It's very much a piece that if paced out properly and given some more scenes to show how Twilight has been using the safe zone and set up other business, the reveal with Discord would be that much more effective. As it stands, the story just doesn't really have enough meat on its bones to really describe it as a complete. It's more like reading the abridged version of a longer story.

Time-skipping mid-story I think was a poor choice as well. It really gives off the sense that there is a lot of information that the reader isn't privy to and has missed leading up the current day scene. It's hard to feel a sense of uncomfortable indignation from Twilight when the only time we've ever experienced as opposed to being informed of her using the safe zone with her is one time when she was a filly.

For additional yucks, I would suggest that Twilight should be trying to avoid something else when she encounters Discord in the safe zone. Currently, it's just that she just happens to be there, which doesn't add any additional layer of humor and just comes across as some coincidental happening. It makes it seem like the story is the story of the safe zone, rather than the story of Twilight in her safe zone, because every scene is framed relative to the safe zone rather than Twilight.

I didn't know what the hell a mathom was either.
#7 · 2
· · >>Syeekoh >>GroaningGreyAgony
Twilight Sparkle was nowhere to be found, but Twilight Velvet had been through this before and wasn’t unduly worried. She abandoned the search, and went to make some tea. Her little filly had found some unknown and very effective way to hide from her own family, but always reappeared in time for dinner. Making a batch of cookies had been known to improve the response time.


Then... Why the frantic search at the start of the chapter? That's like me tearing apart my house in search of my remote control when I know full well that I probably just left it in the dishwasher again.

Also, why is she rewarding her daughter's destructive impulses with cookies?

I don't think those initial paragraphs where Filly Twilight hides from a spanking really help the story any. They sort of confuse matters, in fact, since the story displaces itself temporally with little warning or notice. Setting it up with Twilight studying in her zone and narrating its origins might have been the better call.

Definitely funny, though. I actually liked the invocation of the literal noodle incident, and the punchline was both puntastic and canonically appropriate (orange you glad I caught that reference? :D)
#8 · 3
· · >>Posh
>>Posh
Um

Why would you leave your remote control in the dishwasher.
#9 · 4
· · >>Syeekoh
>>Syeekoh Do I judge you for how you live your life?
#10 · 5
·
>>Posh
You'd have to come over to my place to have enough data to judge me.

B-baka.
#11 · 4
· · >>Dubs_Rewatcher >>GroaningGreyAgony
The twist is a bit more silly and jarring than I would have hoped, but it works out. Nothing except disgust to stop her from going back, I suppose. Plus, points for "omphaloskeptic."

Though I'm a bit curious why it wasn't made of stone when she was young.
#12 · 3
· · >>GroaningGreyAgony
>>Rao
Though I'm a bit curious why it wasn't made of stone when she was young.

I legit hadn't even considered that. Good point.
#13 · 2
· · >>GroaningGreyAgony
I feel this should have been funny, but it just didn't work for me. I mean, yeah, I get it, but it feels like a one-off visual gag that Discord would pull while other, bigger stuff is going on. Making it the focus of the whole story falls a bit flat. Maybe if the ending was punchier. Just leave it at the reveal, and the disgust Twilight feels the moment she realizes she was snuggling in belly button lint. Everything beyond that is just sort of too much explanation, and an explained joke is... well, not.
#14 · 1
· · >>GroaningGreyAgony
oh my god this was a riot

actual out loud belly laughs, not even joking
#15 · 1
· · >>GroaningGreyAgony
Genre: Quantum Leap

Thoughts: There's interesting worldbuilding here, and there's a fun bit with Discord, but the transitions between parts are rough. I liked the way the story lulled me into thinking it wasn't going to have a twist, and then it hit me with a strong comedic twist. Yet at the same time, I feel like the perspective jump from Velvet to Sparkle disrupted that lulling process a bit.

Tier: Needs Work
#16 · 1
· · >>GroaningGreyAgony
Well, that was interesting... And while I'm not sure where I expected it to go, I definitely didn't expect it to go there. O.o

Though the initial idea of Twilight having her own little pocket dimension to hid away in is interesting... Just so long as it's not actually Discord's belly button.
#17 · 1
· · >>GroaningGreyAgony
Another story that would benefit from technical cleanup. The idea is cute and I think actually works quite well, but yeah, there's a lot of clunky writing in there.
#18 · 4
· · >>Rao
>>FanOfMostEverything, >>Fuzzyfurvert, >>SPark, >>Not_A_Hat, >>Monokeras, >>Cassius, >>Posh, >>Rao, >>Dubs_Rewatcher, >>Xepher, >>RawCringe, >>CoffeeMinion, >>TheCyanRecluse, >>AndrewRogue

Twilight’s Safe Zone: Retrospective

This was the idea I wrote for this prompt before the round started:

The Twilight Zone
Twi’s special place, a dimensional space she can pop into when she wants to be alone. Used since childhood. Turns out it’s a (hole in one of Celestia’s toys / Discord’s navel / Luna’s old bathtub / Faust’s vagoo / ?)


I judged that Discord’s navel was the most amusingly distasteful location that was also not too distasteful, and off I went. I did overwrite, and I spent a lot of time compressing it to keep the Twilight Velvet scene in the beginning, to which I’d gotten attached. I should have just removed it and saved it for the Fimfic version. I will smooth out the discordant junction in editing.

>>Rao
Though I’m a bit curious why it wasn’t made of stone when she was young.

I did address this! I mentioned that sometimes the walls seemed stony and sometimes leathery, and then Discord says that Twilight’s appearances were “discontinuous and nonconsecutive.” So, in the 15,782 year span between Discord’s cleanings of his navel, she was appearing in his navel at random times, only a few of which fell in the duration of his statutory confinement. (If I hadn’t done it this way, I would have had to have the stone walls turn leathery right after Discord was freed, which would have been too much of a tip off.) I could of course make this more clear, and I plan to do so now that I have time and additional space.

Thanks to all for the crits and kind words!
#19 · 2
·
>>GroaningGreyAgony
Ah, you're super right. I must have glanced over it, or perhaps the shock of the big reveal shook my memory. Good clue, in retrospect!