Application for My Little Jamjar
Mar. 18th, 2013 11:10 pmPlayer Name: James
Player Journal:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truebluehorrorAge: 25
Contact: e-mail: rutledgejames35@gmail.com; plurk - nathander
Characters Played: N/A
IN CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: Surprise
Canon: My Little Pony: The Mentally Advanced Abridged Series/Rainbow Dash Presents Here's a video of what she's from!
OU/AU/OC: AU
Canon Point: Shortly after “Rainbow Dash Presents: Captain Hook and the Biker Gorilla (But Secretly it’s “The Rainbow Factory”)”
History:
Like all little ponies, Surprise hails from the magical land of Equestria. You know what Equestria is, don’t you? Of course you do: it’s a magical land filled with adorable, kind animals and creatures, and most especially filled with ponies and all their breeds: the earth ponies, the pegasi, and the unicorn. The ponies are wondrous and kind creatures who tend to the nature of the world and are cared for under the watchful eyes of their benevolent ruler, Princess Celestia.
Well. That’s how the Equestria Surprise is from is like at first glance, at least. It’s a colorful, bubbly world that at first appearance seems to be a place of wonder and harmony and love. But when one looks behind external appearances the sense of friendship and joy the world seems to have fades away into something darker. Something not bordering on sinister, but in many ways is sinister and a cynical parody of the Equestria everyone knows and is familiar with. The three types of ponies are still the general caretakers of the world, but they hardly live together in harmony: the unicorns tend to flaunt and exercise what they believe to be their superiority due to being capable of wielding magic, the earth ponies tend to still be down to earth but pragmatic and cynical due to having to deal with the demands and moodiness of the unicorns, and the pegasi tend to have quite a few of their own problems and in many ways seem to be socially oblivious when dealing with the other races of Equestria. Celestia watches over and rules Equestria, but it’s an iron fisted and cruel rule, one that leaves its inhabitants in a constant state of paranoia and fear of the possibility of unintentionally offending their master, who is known to deal out harsh punishments that don’t meet the assumed offense.
One of the biggest differences showing this might be one of the results that occurred during Celestia’s battle with Luna a thousand years ago when Luna had been possessed by Nightmare Moon. The event was much like how it happened in canon, aside from one point. In this version, Celestia found she wasn’t powerful enough to banish Nightmare Moon as she was, even with any of the assistance she had at the time. For a while things looked bleak until Celestia developed a plan: in order to give a boost to her own power, she would sacrifice one of her lesser powers. While it took a great deal of deliberation, in the end Celestia surrendered her power to create rainbows. With this boost in power, Celestia was capable of banishing Nightmare Moon, and the battle between them was over.
However, the fact that there would be no more rainbows was too much for many of the ponies to bear. The ponies of Equestria desperately wanted to find a way to produce rainbows if Celestia herself would not produce them, no matter what the cost. As weather tended to fall heavily in the domain of the pegasi, it was up to the pegasi to find a means of reproducing rainbows. The pegasi set about finding a formula and what they needed to make rainbows themselves. The answer they’d found would be horrifying.
A council was set up with representatives of all three pony races meeting to vote on whether or not they would begin producing rainbows themselves. The pegasi representatives arrived, bearing horrifying news: the only way they could find to produce rainbows would be to grind up their own young, who would produce the pigments necessary for rainbows. Now knowing this, the pegasi begged their fellow ponies to reconsider the course they were taking and to try and live without a need for rainbows. The other ponies, however, were unreceptive. The great majority were just too heartbroken to deal without rainbows, and thus the votes from the earth pony and unicorn representatives were cast for the production of rainbows, and the pegasi forced to do this duty. And so, forlorn, the pegasi representatives returned to Cloudsdale to tell their local government the bad news.
A system was set up for seeing this terrible business carried out. A test was set up every pegasus to take upon when they were viewed as being old enough to fly reliably on their own. Those pegasi who passed the test would be welcomed as members of the community in their own right and begin to be able to perform general weather duties that fell to the population of Cloudsdale. Those who failed, however…
That’s where the Rainbow Factory comes in. Built at the heart of Cloudsdale, the factory gives a welcoming, positive first glance of ponies happily working. At the heart of the factory, however, is the rot that is the machine. The machine is a giant grinder into which young ponies who fail their flying test are fed, along with a pack of crayons, and picture of them with their family, and sometimes a puppy. It’s not entirely clear how the machine works, but the one thing that is clear is that it’s an incredibly painful process that leads to the young pony being converted into pigments that are then transferred into making rainbows.
The machine and what it does is, to put it lightly, a public secret: something everyone knows but doesn’t talk about, especially around fillies.
It’s around this time that Surprise comes around.
Very little is known or shown about Surprise and her background, although a few things can be inferred about her. It wouldn’t be a stretch to assume she is, perhaps, a descendent of one of the original pegasi representatives who discovered the secret to making rainbows, attempted to dissuade the other ponies from wanting rainbows, and ultimately helped design the machine. From images of the backstory Surprise both appears physically similar to that pony, as well as the fact that Surprise is apparently so personally familiar with the machine that she’s the chief engineer of the plant and her own vast knowledge of the events and reasoning leading to the creation of the plant. It’s quite possible she ended up working at the plant due to her own familial connection to it and of no choice of her own and, considering the brutality that can be in her world, may have been forced into the position due to her own familiarity with the situation.
Whatever the reason, it’s at least known that Surprise had been at the factory long enough to have become embittered and certain she had no choice about her own role when we meet her. Despite her own competence and knowledge of the factory and the machine, Surprise never apparently ran the factory or chose to become foreman, leaving that position instead to whatever poor sap might look into getting the job, whether or not they knew what they were getting into. From all of her outward sentiments and reaction it was clear Surprise hated working in the factory, and again the reasons as to why she’d stayed (with coercion being the most likely along with a sense of necessity for the actions) aren’t entirely made clear. In this case, the most recent foreman happened to be a pegasi who was naïve, somewhat dumb and gullible, and oddly good natured. That would be Surprise’s universes’ version of Rainbow Dash, who had taken the job because it was getting harder to pay the rent and she refused to look into getting a job that didn’t have a good enough pay rate that she could start looking into saving for health care.
Rainbow Dash didn’t take very well to the job. On the first day, and upon discovering what she was meant to do, Rainbow Dash managed to lock herself in the restrooms and sob hysterically, forcing Surprise and the other factory workers to spend the day trying to force Rainbow Dash back out to do her job, causing them to waste the entire day and having to send the fillies who’d failed back home. On the second day Rainbow Dash attempted the exact same thing, causing Surprise and comrades to removes all the doors in the restroom and losing yet another day. Things were getting tight, and they’d have to actually finish a day soon if Surprise and the other workers didn’t want to end up in the machine themselves. In effect, Surprises’ patience with Rainbow Dash was over.
And it’d be on the third day that everything hit the fan.
Among the group of failed fillies sent to the factory were Scootaloo and her friends who had come to give her support, Applebloom and Thrackerzod (Sweetie Bell possessed by a Cthonic horror, don’t ask). For once it seemed like Rainbow Dash would be able to keep control of herself and not freak out like the previous two days. Instead, upon seeing Scootaloo and her friends in the crowd Rainbow Dash immediately broke the anonymity she was supposed to keep around herself during “work” (via wearing a wrestler mask, an innovation thought up by Rainbow Dash to try and help raise morale for the other workers in the factory) to greet Scootaloo and reveal what was happening in the factory to a room of near one hundred children. In order to try and alleviate this Surprise ended up having to tell the story and history of the Rainbow Factory and why it was necessary, before trying to get Rainbow Dash to do her job. Dash, meanwhile, was constantly on the verge of breaking down and repeatedly trying to get Surprise to delay, something Surprise by this point no longer had patience for.
While Dash and Surprise were distracted, the Cutie Mark Crusaders managed to create a diversion and attempted to escape the Rainbow Factory, which as it happened had much of its interior modeled after the show “Legend of the Hidden Temple”. The Crusaders made it as far as the Shrine of the Silver Monkey before being apprehended due to being unable to complete the puzzle in time. With the Cutie Mark Crusaders returned to the heart of the factory, Rainbow Dash yet again tried to delay what seemed inevitable by placing a poorly written “out of order” sign on the machine, only to have Surprise scoff at it and reveal she’d know if something was wrong with the machine due to being the chief engineer.
Fed up with Rainbow Dash’s delay tactics and not wanting to risk giving the Crusaders another attempt to escape, Surprise suggested Dash take it slow and do a practice run, feeding only crayons and a picture into the machine. Rainbow Dash did so and to Surprise’s horror (and surprise) the crayon and picture by itself produced the pigments necessary for rainbows. Terrified at the possibility that they’d been grinding children up for nothing, Surprise demanded they do the test run again, and it came out with the same result. Ashamed and brought into a further depression by the realization that everything she had been doing could have been avoided, Surprise never the less continues to work at the factory at the end of the story, a constant reminder of the gruesome career she’d been forced into even if the means of fulfilling her job have changed.
Personality:
To say Surprise is a dour pony would be an understatement. In truth many of the ponies in her world are far more serious and less mirthful than those in the canon MLP universe are, for good reason. But even among the ponies in her own world Surprise is an extreme example. Surprise has very little tolerance for “horsing around”, so to speak. If something needs to be done, she expects it to get done, and attempting to fool around or do anything other than your assigned job gets under her skin beyond imagination. She’s brutally honest in most cases, telling ponies how it is (or, more accurately, how she perceives it). In some ways this could be seen as oddly admirable or understandable, such as the sequence where Surprise takes it upon herself to explain the history of the Rainbow Factory and the necessity of young ponies being fed into the machine to the Cutie Mark Crusaders after the explanation Rainbow Dash offers up ends up just telling why Rainbow Dash ended up working at the Factory and not explaining any of the questions asked of her. It would seem in many ways that ignorance and, to a degree, self-centeredness annoy Surprise, despite the fact that one could argue Surprise herself has a very self-centered view of things. Of course, Surprise also only bothered to explain to the kids why and what was going to happen because Rainbow Dash had already spilled the beans on what the Factory’s purpose was. Otherwise it’s implied Surprise would have been happy never having to reveal anything and would have preferred to keep the kids in the dark, as much as so their last moments wouldn’t immediately be fear until it was too late, and in part because of her own guilty conscious and not wanting to bother thinking about it and adding to it. After all, no reason to alert the kids to what is coming and risk a mass panic that could screw things up when it’d be so much easier to not say anything and make sure things go smoothly. For as hard-assed and business minded Surprise is in getting her job done at the factory, it can be seen as somewhat shocking that she herself was never made foreman of the Factory and instead continuously kept to her job of chief engineer.
The reason for that would be that, on top of being dour, Surprise has some serious issues with guilt. Even though most ponies would be used to living in a crap-sack world with a shiny layer of gloss over it when they reach Surprises’ age, most ponies still wouldn’t have as horrifying or soul crushing a job as Surprise does. Surprise puts on a stoic face about going in and just getting the job done when at the Factory, but the truth is that despite her tough exterior the job still gets to her ever after she’s done it for a while. The most obvious sign of this is when she attempts to reassure Rainbow Dash that the job won’t be so bad, even though she’ll still probably stay up late at night contemplating what she’s done and wondering what Pony Hell will be like, and her horrified reaction at seeing that feeding the children into the machine was never necessary and she had just been doing what she was doing because it’s how things had always been done. Other signs are somewhat more subtle: again going back to the fact that she bothers to explain the history of the Factory as she believes the Crusaders deserve to at least know that and why this is happening, and her constant by and barely being able to keep the purpose of the Factory a secret herself when she first meets the Cutie Mark Crusaders and is preparing to bring them to the machine. Surprise hates what she does, and is only able to continue doing her job by convincing herself that it’s a necessity. After all, what she’s doing was a task decided, democratically for once, by vote. Even if it was a vote that severely hurt the pegasi population. Even if it was a vote that benefitted the earth ponies and unicorns far more than it could the pegasi. A task, set on her and her people out of obligation by the other two races who just wanted their pretty pretty rainbows.
Needless to say, Surprise has a great deal of hostility towards the earth ponies and unicorns. While she seems to be able to keep her distaste somewhat under control most of the time, she’s capable of incredible crudeness in how she addresses them, going so far as to use slurs such as “mud pony” and “bonehead” in describing earth ponies and unicorns, respectively. Surprise’s anger towards the other races is born out of the fact that the Factory is, in her mind, their fault. In fact, her anger towards them is in many ways the main way she deals with her guilt: by reflecting her guilt on to other people. It’s the unicorn and earth ponies fault for forcing the pegasi to make the Factory in the first place. It’s the Princesses’ fault for having their stupid war and Celestia getting rid of her powers to make Rainbows that forced this whole catastrophe in the first place. It’s the government of Cloudsdales’ fault for not just telling the other two races they’d have enough and where they can stick their rainbows. It’s Rainbow Dash’s fault for being such a sissy as a foreman that she forces Surprise to take an even more active role, Rainbow Dash’s fault that they’re having to stay later at the factory and not getting any work done so Surprise and the other workers have even more time to contemplate what they’re doing, Rainbow Dash’s fault that she has to explain to children WHY they have to die, Rainbow Dash’s fault for being Rainbow Dash. If you can’t tell, Surprise isn’t particularly keen of Rainbow Dash, and the fastest pegasi in the skies has managed to win Surprise’s utter enmity.
It’s everyone else’s fault than Surprise’s. She’s just doing her job, and that’s all she’s doing. She’s doing what’s necessary, not something she likes, because it’s forced on her. She’s as much a victim of the system as the children are. That’s what Surprise believes. It’s what she HAS to believe, if she wants to manage to keep any of her sanity intact with this job. And when something as astounding as Rainbow Dash managing to find an alternative to making rainbows occur, it’s so jarring that Surprise will be forced to project her guilt and anger on to others even more than usual just to reaffirm that this wasn’t her fault. Wasn’t her fault for never trying to question. Wasn’t her fault for not looking for an alternative, instead of blaming others.
Yet underneath all her neurosis, and guilt, and anger issues, there is an odd sense of playfulness to Surprise. Being one of the first people to have to greet the children in the Rainbow Factory, Surprise tends to dress up as different roles to attempt to be amusing and reassuring, first as a Willy Wonka-esque figure and then again as a party clown. While this could just be seen as trying to hide her own identity, Surprise does seem to get into the roles she’s playing at least a little despite her awkwardness in trying to reassure the fillies that nothing wrong at all is going to happen. She also seems to get genuine enjoyment out of singing, as demonstrated during the two part song where Rainbow Dash and then she give explanations about the machine. Despite her constant annoyance with Dash having wanted to delay the inevitable of grinding up kids by first suggesting a pizza party and later breaking into song and Surprise’s demonstrated annoyance with this, Surprise still seems to enjoy singing and story telling when she gets the chance. It’s one of the few little joys she can get, even if it’s an awkward situation.
In the end, much of who Surprise is and has become is built upon circumstances. She really would have liked nothing better than to be able to live a normal life, and trying to adapt to the possibility of that in Ponyville will be a bizarre struggle for her. At the same time, it’ll be too tempting, and common, for her to fall back on her old ways of cynicism, dourness, and sheltering herself from others instead of taking the opportunity provided to her with this chance of “starting again”. This just seems too good to be true and, really, what chance does, or should, a murderer have to even receive a second chance? She can tell herself it isn’t her fault all she wants, but deep down, that’s how she’ll always view herself.
How could friendship ever come to a pony like her?
Strengths:
Being entrusted as the chief engineer for the Rainbow Factory, Surprise is a talented engineer. She may not be a mechanical or engineering genius by any means, but it can be assumed that she’s skilled enough with machines, especially sophisticated pony machinery, that she’s competent enough to build and fix a great deal of apparatuses. It may not be her favorite thing to do, considering the place she has to use this skill most often, but it’s something she’s good at.
While she doesn’t get to show it off very often, she’s also a very talented singer and musician, showing a fairly advanced skill in playing the guitar. It’s very possible that there’s a hidden side of her that really does like the idea of parties (she is, after all, based off the proto-type for Pinkie Pie when G4 began), but her lot in life and job has essentially caused that desire to be crushed down. When she does get to display that part of her, she shows she’s no slouch at it.
Weaknesses:
Her emotional state. While Surprise isn’t violent by nature despite her job, her emotional state has become strained during her tenor at the Rainbow Factory, and is now eggshell thin after the revelation that everything she had been doing at the Rainbow Factory was unnecessary. While she probably wouldn’t hurt a pony under any circumstance other than her job, she’s a powder keg of restrained anger and guilt about to explode, and she’s having a harder time containing it after the last round of nonsense she dealt with thanks to Rainbow Dash. And oh god if any pony found out about her past in Ponyville, she’s not sure what she’d do in order to keep her secret just that.
Her general unfriendliness, not to mention what could be considered racism towards earth ponies and unicorns, will be a hurdle she has to get over as well, or it’s going to end up making her an even more bitter shut in due to her treatment of others.
Pony/Animal Type: Pegasi
Cutie Mark: Much like Pinkie Pie, Surprise’s cutie mark is a set of three balloons, in her case all being purple.
Pony Picture:
SAMPLES
First Person:
Hey hey!
I don’t know about the rest of you, but something I don’t really appreciate is getting stolen out of my bed at night and plopped down in a different town man. If that wasn’t enough, I go back to Cloudsdale and no one seems to know me, or at least doesn’t act like it. Seriously, I went to the Happy Meal restaurant and the pony in the drive through didn’t even tell me to leave without taking my order. It was weird and kind of scary, which doesn’t even make sense now that I think about it.
So I just got to wonder….is this some kind of joke? Because if it is, it isn’t funny man. Really. It’s done. Joke time is over. I don’t have time to deal with this, you know? Some ponies, we’ve got a lot to do, and if abduction’s the new thing that’s going to happen during the rare times I can get to sleep, thanks for the warning. I’ll make sure to replace the locks on my doors. Again.
Third Person:
Surprise had found herself becoming a nocturnal creature. It wasn’t a choice she had intended to make, but like much of her life as far as she could tell It was a decision made for her. Most of her nights ended with her lying awake in bed for hours, contemplating things she’d thought of time and time again but inevitably returned to. Thoughts that were old friends she never wanted but came to her unburdened anyway, always letting her know they were there. Always.
It didn’t help that the wakeful restlessness tended so often to be the most tolerable part of the night. If those horrid wakeful thoughts were her obnoxious friends, she couldn’t begin to describe her dreams.
After tossing and turning and not trying that hard to fall asleep, Surprise decided she may as well surrender to the fact that this would be a sleepless night, and try not to admit to herself how reassuring that fact was. She tumbled lightly out of her bed, shaking her head a bit as she went over to the window in her room and looked outside.
She wouldn’t call herself an admirer of the night sky, but she appreciated it far more than she did the day time. There was something soothing that she couldn’t describe about the world just being wrapped up in this calm darkness, the stars and moon providing a calming pale light that she found more encouraging than the harsher glare of the sun. Not that she had anything against the sun of course! Celestia forbid she thought that or, well, forbid Celestia thought Surprise thought that! That would be an offense to the Princess, and Surprise knew how Celestia dealt with offense. Still, she couldn’t deny the night sky had some advantages she was thankful for.
After all. Who ever saw a rainbow at night?
The question now was what to do? Every pony would be in their beds and snoring away by this time at night. Every sane pony would, at least. It wasn’t like she had friends and, in some ways, she kind of liked that. It meant she didn’t have to worry about disappointing any other people, and that she could keep to herself most of the time. And she liked that, didn’t she? She had to, Surprise thought. If she didn’t like it, then it would just make things so much harder. And it wasn’t like she was entirely alone.
Music, at least, was something that wasn’t denied her. It was something she’d loved ever since she was a filly, that and playing with the little construction sets her parents would get her. But building and working on machines was something she hadn’t gotten to take joy out of for so long, but music remained untarnished for her at least. Her guitar was the only friend she needed.
And so, in her room in the middle of the night while every other pony dreamed, Surprise played. And sang. To herself, and to the stars, and to the rare moment where she recognized the night for the blessing it was.
