Esquestria: The House of the Sun - A pony cultist experience

Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
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Dear reader! Whether you are new here, archive-reading and whatnot, or you are already someone who has been with us for quite a while, I would like to say a few words that I believe are best kept close to mind.

-This is an MLP quest. And more importantly, none of us are gratuitously cruel. So good things will happen on this quest, and I hope that enough good things have already happened to prove that.
-This is also a horror quest, so bad things will happen. Bad things might happen to good characters if you are not able to protect them, and you most certainly will not be able to intervene if you lack the tools to do so.
-And finally, this is a quest in which you jostle with powers greater than yourself, with all that it entails.

Please, do keep those things in mind as you go forward. But ultimately, this is also a quest in which it is hoped we all have fun! So if any of the above points is not exactly your cup of tea, or somehow make the experience as a whole "not worth it", then this quest might not be for you. Which is fine! Individual tastes are a thing, so don't think any more about it if you don't want to read anymore. And regardless, I hope you have a lovely day!

Kaelor said:
PSA for whoever needs to hear it:

Readers should take their own mental health into consideration when voting and not subject themselves to triggering narrative elements like rape or constant mental torture of a friend just for the Greatest Good of a world that doesn't exist.

If those are fine for you or Regrettable is even more triggering, then GREAT! More power to you. But you aren't a bad or selfish person for picking the option that keeps the characters you've emotionally connected with safe. [REDACTED for spoiler warning]

This is a high intensity quest that doesn't hold back when it comes to horror and negative consequences. Take care of yourself.
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(Quote slightly edited to avoid spoilers)
 
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Pittauro said:
kinda by definition if we change enough we just won't care about our previous writing. We'll simply think of them as something the old, soft Velvet thought when she still didn't truly understand the world.

Also it's risky. What if a maid or our family finds the journal?

Other than that, do remember that this isn't only a cultist simulator quest, but a mlp one too. I'd be surprised if there wasn't a way to access the lores without being consumed by them, and thematically speaking the idea of raising them in harmony makes a lot of sense
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I doubt that's the case, the cultist simulator lores and hours seem fairly idealistically opposed to harmony from what we know so far
 
akuma123 said:
[X] You nod, a grim understanding coming to you: Equestria is in danger, and
something
must be done about it. You have not reached the point where you think a line has been crossed, not when considering what you have just seen. But you will keep that line close to your heart, for you know that you will lose something the day you cross it, and it is not something you wish to lose if you can avoid.
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Your vote is still off. Make it a single paragraph.
 
Asheler said:
I doubt that's the case, the cultist simulator lores and hours seem fairly idealistically opposed to harmony from what we know so far
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not really. From what we know IC they seem fairly opposed to MOTH at most, and that's because Moth is about hiding, and Harmony is apparently making Equestria a target (possibly unknowingly).

We also only have the word of our Master about this, and whatever observation we can make on our own.

What we KNOW for certain though is that, at the very least, the elements of Harmony were able to purge a Worm from Luna, something that I think should normally be nearly impossible.

I'm not an expert on the game, but I think I remember reading that once the contamination goes too far it's not really possible to save the infected. Luna probably counted. Also that normally only masters of Edge can defeat Worms in single combat, while apparently the Elements of Harmony had little trouble when powered by their bearers.

Basically we don't yet know how exactly the lore from the show and the games influenced each other. For all we know Harmony is a fragment of the Glory for example.
 
BirdBodhisattva said:
And @PrimalShadow, please present your story title. The one I put is merely a suggestion. Just start it with "In which" to keep to the theme, it being another History.
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Could you call it "In which Velvet Covers learns to love stories"?


BirdBodhisattva said:
But I simply adored how she "evolved" with each following paragraph, with some small timeskips visible in subtexts, to the point where "her first real lie about herself" was of how "honestly" she was apologizing.
I figure, as well, that said way of thinking and instantly reacting became second nature as time went by.
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I'm really glad you liked the portrayal of how Velvet changed. I was a bit worried about that, actually; originally I had intended to write a more static character with a fixed motivation, before I realized it wouldn't work.

To clarify, my goal for this piece was getting an answer for WHY Velvet would spend her life putting on a front. The obvious answer is of course ambition, but I didn't feel like it fit Velvet's circumstances especially well. Like, she is a scion of a noble family, but is acting as a manager in an out-of-the-way town, far removed from the core of her family operations and the political opportunities that entails; and I didn't have a good explanation for that. So that was the second constraint I set myself: that, whatever Velvet's proclivities, she didn't find the standard sort of power - as one might get from wealth or political connections - especially attractive.

What I settled on as motivation was "wanting to control how other people view the world". And the method clearly had to be through controlling what they see of Velvet. But, uh, that was almost too specific, and hardly a perfect fit. So I ended up "cheating"; instead of Velvet being the way she is because it is the optimal means of accomplishing her goals, it was more a matter of circumstance. Basically Velvet stumbled into a certain set of behaviors, found that they really resonated with her, and kept doing them, until it became a fundamental part of who she was. And, of course, this meant that it HAD to be shown as an evolution; nothing else would tell that story properly.


And that marries perfectly with how we see current Velvet. She cannot feel love, but she can make others feel loved. She raises her daughter with care, she comforts those in need (not just in Soft Sweep's case, but as a norm since we see how caring she is), she knows what sort of actions will be "do this, receive that result" and is smart enough to apply it on the complex web that is social interaction.
She make others believe that she loves them, but deep down she does not.

She would have been a fascinating Winter focus, as she slowly became more hollow as her knowledge deepened.
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Yeah, that first part is spot-on for Storyteller!Velvet. 100% what I was going for. She can, and does, reach out to people. She can be comforting, and kind, and loving. And to those people around her, those are real experiences. Truly, they are almost the real thing; save for one factor. None of it is heartfelt, on Velvet's end. (Not that her audience knows that. That would ruin the experience for them, after all!)

That said, while I definitely see how you would get Winter from that, if I was to characterize Velvet in terms of Mansus Lore, I'd choose different aspects. Namely, Moth... and Grail.
Okay, okay - I know Grail sounds ridiculous at first! How can a pony characterized by being hollow and only pretending to have real experiences be GRAIL of all things?

But, I think that, all considered, Velvet's primary nature here is that of lies and seduction. Velvet takes it as her nature to shape people through their experience of her - and is that not what seduction is, as it's core?

And - while Velvet doesn't feel much of the typical pleasures associated with Grail, and neither does she pursue her seductions with the goal of extracting those pleasures - well, the heady feeling of the seduction itself is something that Velvet explicitly experiences. And is that not a Grail feeling if there ever was one?
 
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[X] You nod, a grim understanding coming to you: Equestria is in danger, and something must be done about it. You have not reached the point where you think a line has been crossed, not when considering what you have just seen. But you will keep that line close to your heart, for you know that you will lose something the day you cross it, and it is not something you wish to lose if you can avoid.
 
[X] You nod, a grim understanding coming to you: Equestria is in danger, and something must be done about it. You have not reached the point where you think a line has been crossed, not when considering what you have just seen. But you will keep that line close to your heart, for you know that you will lose something the day you cross it, and it is not something you wish to lose if you can avoid.

I don't love this option, but to me it's certainly better than immediately deciding to one day leave the cult.
 
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Pittauro said:
not really. From what we know IC they seem fairly opposed to MOTH at most, and that's because Moth is about hiding, and Harmony is apparently making Equestria a target (possibly unknowingly).

We also only have the word of our Master about this, and whatever observation we can make on our own.

What we KNOW for certain though is that, at the very least, the elements of Harmony were able to purge a Worm from Luna, something that I think should normally be nearly impossible.

I'm not an expert on the game, but I think I remember reading that once the contamination goes too far it's not really possible to save the infected. Luna probably counted. Also that normally only masters of Edge can defeat Worms in single combat, while apparently the Elements of Harmony had little trouble when powered by their bearers.

Basically we don't yet know how exactly the lore from the show and the games influenced each other. For all we know Harmony is a fragment of the Glory for example.
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I mean I'm coming at this from the opposite angle; I know very little about mlp but Harmony and the dreamlands do seem to be encroaching on the Wood and the Mansus itself and whilst the Wood is mostly Moth aspected the Mansus is much more important. Also the Glory is about revealing and illuminating not uniting like harmony and even then there isn't the kind of antagonism between Lantern and Moth as between Moth and harmony

On the power levels side of things its obviously hard to make any definitive statements but there were three Worm wars in Cultist Simulator, all of them victories. I am not sure quite what your point is about the elements of harmony being able to defeat Worms; they are powerful items but as far as I can see, unique and thus more comparable to someone like an Edge Name rather than a Long or powerful mortal
 
Pittauro said:
kinda by definition if we change enough we just won't care about our previous writing. We'll simply think of them as something the old, soft Velvet thought when she still didn't truly understand the world.
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Maybe, maybe not, if there is an awareness that the change in perspective is due to outside influences there may be a want to not refuse that change, or a want to follow the last wish of an old Velvet that will never be again. A vague nostalgia for when things where simpler and we believed that we could accomplish our goal without sacrificing who we where.

Of course its possible that won't the case at all, or maybe we won't lose our sense of self at all because we friendships and harmonies us into keeping the personality drift to a minimum.

Pittauro said:
Also it's risky. What if a maid or our family finds the journal?
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Write a normal diary, write the other stuff in code, keep a key for it somewhere else, at that point people finding it is hopefully more than just a snooping maid or child. Or just keep it in one of the cult meeting places.
 
[X] You nod, a grim understanding coming to you: Equestria is in danger, and something must be done about it. You have not reached the point where you think a line has been crossed, not when considering what you have just seen. But you will keep that line close to your heart, for you know that you will lose something the day you cross it, and it is not something you wish to lose if you can avoid.
 
Here is my impression so far of Master - and the cult, which I'm counting largely as an extension of his agency at this point.

First, they have knowledge, and ability - and therefore power. This means that insofar as our goals align, we generally want to support the Master. Without them, we wouldn't be able to get nearly as much done. Even if our goals don't match, it may be worth compromising somewhat to get that power on our side. Our goals would have to be strongly divergent from the Master's for opposing him to be a good idea.

Second, they have knowledge, and experience - and therefore wisdom. We should be very carefully of opposing their wisdom based on our own ignorance; there is a decent chance that some of the Master's actions make sense based on context that we don't have, and we would be making a grave mistake by opposing them because we think they are wrong.

Third, they claim to oppose the Worms. It is important to have worthy goals, and trying to stop the end of the world is certainly worthy. It is worth supporting the Master in opposing this apocalypse.

Fourth, they call the Alicorns abominations, and have shown significant dislike for the current world order as maintained by said alicorns. It is not clear how much of the Master's distaste here is a matter of altruism and a desire to keep the world as a whole safe, and how of it is more personal enmity against a force that presumably changed the world away from a state that the Master may have found comfortable and happy with. At the end of the day, we don't have the information to conclusively say that the Master is wrong - see the previous point about wisdom - but we can certainly suspect that their agenda here may not be fueled purely by altruism.

Fifth, they acted in a way that caused great suffering and significant death, and have taken that entirely in stride. Those actions aren't necessarily wrong, but they show a lack of empathy that is a significant red flag. It is not clear that the Master can be trusted to act in a way that would be called "good".



Here are my conclusions, based on these observations:
  1. The Master should has our support, for now. He acts in opposition to a merciless fate looming over Equestria. He has the power to make his actions stick; power we cannot match. He has the wisdom to understand the true nature of the foes we face; wisdom we lack. Opposing him would be folly.
  2. The Master does not have our loyalty. The full breadth of their goals remains occluded, and their actions leave behind trails of death and suffering, and their biases may leave them unwilling or unable to pursue compromise with the current Alicorn order. It is likely that there will come a time where we will want to matters into our own hands; we should be prepared.

…I'm not actually sure which of the two leading votes this lands me in, honestly. But this IS my position. Until we are wiser and stronger we should stick with the Master, at least unless their actions force us to change our evaluation of them further downwards. In the meantime, we must strive to grown and learn - and, when possible, gather the tools that we will need if and when we decide to plot our own course.
 
Asheler said:
I mean I'm coming at this from the opposite angle; I know very little about mlp but Harmony and the dreamlands do seem to be encroaching on the Wood and the Mansus itself and whilst the Wood is mostly Moth aspected the Mansus is much more important. Also the Glory is about revealing and illuminating not uniting like harmony and even then there isn't the kind of antagonism between Lantern and Moth as between Moth and harmony

On the power levels side of things its obviously hard to make any definitive statements but there were three Worm wars in Cultist Simulator, all of them victories. I am not sure quite what your point is about the elements of harmony being able to defeat Worms; they are powerful items but as far as I can see, unique and thus more comparable to someone like an Edge Name rather than a Long or powerful mortal
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I think I've read a mention of an alternate past (secret history is pretty weird like that) in which the worms actually won.

Also my point about the elements of harmony isn't that they defeated a worm. It's that they SAVED the infected.

I remember reading about a heart ritual capable of doing so, but only on the recently infected. Luna was tortured for a 1000 years.

My other point is that, simply put, the backgrounds of the two settings are going to be mixed a little. We don't exactly know what the Harmony IS, or to be more precise what is its relationship with the Lore, the Mansus and the Glory.

Harmony being a piece of the Glory, changed through unknown means, is just my own theory. Maybe it's simply a completely separate power, possibly coming from another world.

We don't know enough to really be certain of anything, and the dreamlands sort-of encroaching on the Woods is potentially worrying, but that's not enough to say that Harmony and the lores are necessarily opposites/enemies/incompatible.

We don't even know if the Hours are the same as in Cultist simulator. Some of them were originally humans, right? but we have ponies here instead.

For all we know that makes a difference, as the being that would go on to become the Hours would have somewhat different experiences and (maybe) values.

Lord Warlock said:
Or just keep it in one of the cult meeting places.
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maybe not this one, Especially if we don't really trust the cult completely.

PrimalShadow said:
…I'm not actually sure which of the two leading votes this lands me in, honestly. But this IS my position. Until we are wiser and stronger we should stick with the Master, at least unless their actions force us to change our evaluation of them further downwards. In the meantime, we must strive to grown and learn - and, when possible, gather the tools that we will need if and when we decide to plot our own course.
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you're basically in the middle. You acknowledge that he knows more than us and has more power than us, and that we at the very least share the same goal of stopping the apocalypse.

On the other hand we also know that he despises the Alicorns (though a bit less now that he knows they're not voluntarily) attracting the Worms, that he believes himself to know better, and that he has few to no problems at all sacrificing ponies to accomplish his goals, even when there could be another way.

Maybe he thought the risk of the Alicorns being compromised/enemies was too great. Maybe he simply disliked them that much. Or maybe it's just the nature of Moth that stops him from acting too overtly. Hard to say.

I expect that if we openly ally ourselves with the Alicorns at some point the only way to keep him not hostile would be to

1)Have enough power as to show ourselves as too useful to oppose when, in the end, we share at least part of our goals

2)We need to show him that, at the very least, the Alicorns and Harmony can be trusted to help in this fight

3)We also need to convince him that simply hiding is not an option, or at the very least that it's not the only/best one.
 
[X] You shake your head in denial. This, just now, was wrong: There are better ways to do this. YOU know better ways to do it. But it is undeniable that you do know no a lot, about almost everything else. Your cult has an established structure and is growing, and you have a position of power within in, but after tonight, you do not intent to stay forever.

No one traumatizes the best girl moon princess and gets away with it. Besides that new to the quest here and just caught up. The QM's really good at this and I was on the edge of my seat in the Luna Dream sequence. Above all, we should get to Luna first and wrest her away from the Moth cult while at the same maybe establish our own cult in helping defend Equestria. I do NOT want Velvet to be part of something akin to Worm Cauldron but MLP
 
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[X] You shake your head in denial. This, just now, was wrong: There are better ways to do this. YOU know better ways to do it. But it is undeniable that you do know no a lot, about almost everything else. Your cult has an established structure and is growing, and you have a position of power within in, but after tonight, you do not intent to stay forever.

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JaceAoT said:
I don't love this option, but to me it's certainly better than immediately deciding to one day leave the cult.
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I mean, from what I can tell (and my only extremely minimal experience playing Cultist Simulator) the Mansus is a font of horrors and atrocities without end, its Lores serving no greater purpose than "the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must". They're simply another set of tools with which tyrants can twist, control, and destroy that which surrounds them.

I was willing to give the Master some amount of benefit of the doubt, even after the incident with Luna. What pushed me over into opposing him was that the last update made it clear he sees Equestria and the Princesses as something to be mocked and held in contempt. He might be partially motivated by a desire to rob the Worms of a meal, but I'm no longer willing to extend him the benefit of assuming his plans for Equestria and its inhabitants after that goal is achieved are worth implementing.

Prior, I had assumed Luna's meltdown was something accounted for. A possible outcome, but one deemed unlikely enough to be worth the risk. A necessary sacrifice to prevent a larger, messier catastrophe farther down the line. It broke my image of the Master as a being driven primarily by ideology or circumstance, much in the way his facade of being a bodiless, untouchable spirit was broken in the update itself. At this point, my impression is that either he's a bitter asshole, a gibbering madman, or a total monster.
 
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[X] You nod, a grim understanding coming to you: Equestria is in danger, and something must be done about it. You have not reached the point where you think a line has been crossed, not when considering what you have just seen. But you will keep that line close to your heart, for you know that you will lose something the day you cross it, and it is not something you wish to lose if you can avoid.
 
Pittauro said:
maybe not this one, Especially if we don't really trust the cult completely.
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Kind of depends on what we write in it doesn't it? I assume the cult know we have a family so as long as we don't write anything about major doubts I don't think we reveal anything the cult can actually use against us, if we want to write down more sensitive information though it would be a problem.
 
You know, I kind of want to see how the villain path would have worked out, if only to witness the sweet-but-chilling love between Silky and Velvet as the former grows to become as formidable as the latter. I can live with cautious neutrality, though.
 
[X] You nod, a grim understanding coming to you: Equestria is in danger, and something must be done about it. You have not reached the point where you think a line has been crossed, not when considering what you have just seen. But you will keep that line close to your heart, for you know that you will lose something the day you cross it, and it is not something you wish to lose if you can avoid.
 
BirdBodhisattva said:
Yes-yes, we shall be loyal-faithful. No better servant than we-we for the Master. He can trust us, and give us all the spoils-secrets, for we have no aspirations of our own.

God damned skavens made their way into this thread...
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What? No-no, I not evil-rat! Says right there below name-title, yes-yes?
BirdBodhisattva said:
[] Why, of course you do! And in fact, you can see it, in her demeanor and her habits, in her interests and manners... the fruit never falls down from the tree. (Silky Stream will be... like you are)
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...You know, this is almost enough to make me want to vote for villain now. A normal villain, while rare enough to mildly interesting, isn't enough to keep me interested by plain virtue that if we're at all smart, it would end up coming out as more of an anti-hero than an actually evil villain. A mother-daughter pair working together, however, might be interesting enough to make up for that... but, eh, I've made my decision and I should stick to it.

Anywho, is anybody else interested in, at some point when we've developed our Lores at least a bit higher, making a Cult of our own for some Lore other than Moth? Like, even if we do end up staying loyal, having a subordinate Cult would let us do a lot of things that Moths wouldn't necessarily be the best at, and would just be useful as both a smokescreen and giving us more power and influence to rise quickly through the ranks. Meanwhile, if it we do turn traitor, that same influence and power can be wielded against the inevitable enemies we will make and let us grow completely on our own. I'm just kinda stuck on whether it should be a Lantern or Heart cult, if we did... Actually, @BirdBodhisattva is there anything stopping us from making more than one cult, considering our Lore neutrality? Like, in the original game it made sense as a game abstraction to keep an already complicated system from getting more so, and keep you from just making a ton of exalted for every Lore, but here it just seems like it would be functional as an action focus?
also, rampant curiosity, but are any of our fellow Cultists supposed to be based on the disciple characters from the original CS? And if so, who is who?
 
[x] You nod, a grim understanding coming to you: Equestria is in danger, and something must be done about it. You have not reached the point where you think a line has been crossed, not when considering what you have just seen. But you will keep that line close to your heart, for you know that you will lose something the day you cross it, and it is not something you wish to lose if you can avoid.

Not into betrayal here, and outright loyalty vote is losing.
 
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