Ever had one of those stories that seemed super-great in your head, but never got anywhere when you sat down to write it? Today's story is over two years old and still consists only of the prologue so I'm guessing that's what we're dealing with here. The thumbs might be hidden, but it's probably at 9-0 or 8-1 based on the story's positioning in our folders when sorted by rating. Not bad, but I do expect to find some fatal flaw that prevents the author from continuing.

I included both versions of the story's description just so you can see how different they are. The short description promises a story focused on the pain of failure and the loss of one's dreams, while the long description instead focuses on body modification, for some reason. Er... These things can coexist, but I have the feeling that this story is going to be thematically confused. The only way to know for sure is to open it.

Some ponies say "Never meet your heroes". I never really understood that until now. For most ponies, they don't measure up to the legend.  For me, I didn't meet the requirements. All my life I'd been told to reach out for what you want and to just take it. The only thing that truly holds yourself back is you. Your mind, your body, your spirit. A few years ago I realized just how wrong I was; how wrong everything I had ever known was. I finally had a shot at my dream. I was going to become the hero of my own story, but I didn't meet the legend to be.

Aside from the sentence fragment and misused semicolon, this is a pretty solid opener. Right away, it brings us into Lightning Dust's mindset and connects with her character. Mixing the "never meet your hero" and "hero of your own story" concepts together is an interesting hook. It opens the door for some heavy introspection.

The story does continue along this line for one more paragraph before it stops to establish the setting. Apparently, Lightning Dust is being evicted because she's broke.

I didn't have a bit to my name. I'd been fired from my last job after the fiasco at the Academy found it's way into the ears of my manager. Needless to say, I was out on my ass before I even really started my shift. Being accused of nearly killing some mares with a tornado didn't exactly look good on my résumé.

Assuming that Lightning Dust worked weather in her day job, this does make sense. Her manager probably hated her, anyway. She then gets fed up with her landlord chewing her out, and punches him in the face, with her fist. Um... this story isn't anthro, so it probably has something to with that body modification. Speaking of which, this punch-out segues into a fairly detailed physical description of Lightning Dust that talks about her mechanical parts. Yep. She's now randomly a cyborg, and a heavily-augmented one at that.

In order to justify this, the story switches into exposition mode and dumps some recent history onto us. It works, I guess, if the goal is to cram a sci-fi setting into canon My Little Pony in as few words as possible. Another exposition-heavy paragraph talks about economics, just to rub in how poor Lightning Dust is. She then steals a few bits from her KO'ed landlord, and flies off.

Mugging ponies already? She's well on her way to starting a new life as a supervillain.

To say that I was fast was an understatement. As far as I was aware, there was still only one pony faster than me, but I haven't seen her in years. I had always taken comfort in that fact that even if I wasn't a complete pony I still ruled the skies.

This would have been a good place to segue back to the overall theme of having lost her dream, but no, she's apparently over her soul-crushing angst and completely happy with being second-best. I'm going to have to fault the story for this, especially considering the cybernetic enhancements done to her wings. Isn't the whole point of augmentation to improve? Shouldn't she be chomping at the bit for a chance to test her new body against her old rival? She sounds as if she's still fast despite what was done to her. Is there even a point to this augmentation? I certainly don't see any.

Lightning Dust rambles about how much she loves flying and then takes off in a random direction, completely aimlessly. And—I can see exactly why this story has come to an abrupt halt.

I picked a direction, and I flew.

No. Bad author. This is not how you end a chapter. There's nothing wrong with these words specifically, even centered like that, but Lightning Dust is left hanging without a goal. She has no purpose. She has nothing to work towards. There's no reason to keep writing her story. This is a shame, because it's fairly-well written. It's just... a tad confused as to what kind of story it wants to be.

The loss of dreams thing looked like it should have been this story's focus, given the title, but that concept wasn't explored much and was only used to set up her new life as a cyborg. Speaking of which, I have to ask: why!? Why is she a cyborg? What does that even add to the story? Given that she's incredibly poor, and that cybernetics are expensive, how did she even become a cyborg in the first place? The story did drop a hint:

The entire body of any species of pony was now replaceable, customizable, and cold metal. Most had adjustments made to better suit them for their occupation or hobbies. Some of us weren't so lucky, and were altered for different reasons.

But it didn't follow up on it. Lightning Dust is excessively vague here, and there's no reason for that, as she should know her own life story!

There's one other thing I should mention:

Author's Note:

Be aware, I changed all of maybe four words. The story has shifted to anthro. Yes I did just update a story that hasn't had anything new in something like two years. Yes I am much more likely to write more than I was when the story was first published. Bear in mind that it still might not happen.

The story is supposedly anthro now. If you're going to do that, you need to update the story tags, and cover art, or I'm just going to assume that mention of 'hands' is either a mistake or part of the cybernetics.

Skeptical is a good depiction of my feeling towards this story. It does have some good parts as the narrative flows well and it has a decent grasp of Lightning Dust's character. The exposition is mixed in well, and the descriptions are decent too. I think I would have liked the story more if it had focused on its initial theme of lost dreams instead of bringing in all that sci-fi stuff, but still okay even as-is. It's just not going anywhere.

Well, you tried to write a story, but forgot to motivate your character. Whoops.

Here's an idea: let's cut huge chunks off of Lightning Dust and replace them with metal bits. Why? Because it's cool or something. I don't even know!

Suddenly anthro because anthro. That makes even less sense than the cyborg thing.

I pulled the story from the submissions folder.