Zecora: The Poison Joke cure has been my life’s work. For seven years now, I’ve been forced to lurk. I’m very close, but not there yet, so I need one last data set.
Fluttershy: Are you… also affected by Poison Joke, Zecora?
DM: She simply nods.
Pinkie Pie: What about all the info I got? That stuff about the ponies in Ponyville disappearing or going mad?
Zecora: Yes, those ponies had to endure the effects of my partial cure. Every pony I talked to would mock me or flee. So I conducted experiments secretly.
Twilight Sparkle: So you WERE using ponies as test subjects!
Pinkie Pie: I WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG!!
That's certainly possible, but I'm thinking that the Poison Joke is what turned her into a zebra, creating a massive twist in what would have been a racism Aesop!
I think that doing good things with bad intentions falls under the heading of 'comic relief villain' almost any way you slice it.
Oh, wait. I remember writing a bit about the mafia owning a community center that was old and run down, so they hired a serial arsonist to burn it down, and collected the insurance money. Then they took the insurance money and...
Rebuilt the community center bigger and nicer than before.
Here's the thing. Kids that go to the community center are less likely to engage in gang activity. Less gang activity results in less competition for the mafia. There. Doing good things with evil reasons, and it's not just being ineffective.
The story was being told by the mercenary that was hired by the mafia. He tells about the arson job while working as a bodyguard, protecting the young daughter of the Burmese drug cartel kingpin. It was part of a few throwaway lines. If the character sounds morally ambiguous, he totally was. Mercenary for hire. Assassin, bodyguard, soldier, thief, pay him to do it, and he'll do it. He's the kind of lunatic who sneaks up to a large group of enemy soldiers, and then sprints right into the middle of their formation, slitting throats and stabbing them.
It works, because they all hesitate. It's not a battlefield filled with enemies, it's their own backyard. And there's this guy running at top speed, bouncing all over the place in a densely packed cluster of them. It works wonders on african, asian, and central american militaries that are poorly trained. Well trained French foreign legion... Not so much. That was a lot of fun to write.
Oh, and to answer your question, I do image training. I picture myself doing lots of sit ups and push ups, and it makes my mind stronger.
...Okay, I'm pretty sure that most of us had already figured it out by now, but that last post confirms in my mind that Raxon is actually Deadpool-Prime.
Actually, the french foreign legion is pretty much recognized the world over as a force of badass. The only reason France became a punchline is that France *WAS* the battlefield in WWI, and they had no time to rebuild their... everything before WWII.
Yeah, and then there's Agincourt, pretty much remembered because it was the only battle the English won in that conflict, and the matter of Louisbourg, which was really a lesson in why defense contractors need to be watched like hawks. Oh, and the English sometimes like to claim the Plains of Abraham, even though that was a case where both sides sent the worst general they could in the hope of losing that territory in exchange for something more valuable!
Don't look at me like that. I paid attention in Canadian history classes.
Pretty standard villain thing used in movies as well, where they build something for "a good cause" but it serves as cover or otherwise enables them to advance their evil plans.
If you look at V (either the original or the newer one), the aliens provide cures for human diseases. A good act, but one that also serves to advance their cause (healthier livestock, generate good will).
Sadly, I am a PC gamer, and it will not be available on that platform. I'll wait a few years until I can get a secondhand seventh gen console on the cheap. Also, I very rarely ever buy a game when it first comes out. The last game I bought at launch was Skyrim.
You named your laptop Sydney? Any significance to that name or just cause it's a nice name?
My laptop is named Sera, after a character I created which shares the same affinity to have "Blonde Moments" amd take forever to get up in the morning. :3
Have you ever heard of Fritz Haber? He invented Nitrogen fixing to make explosives for the Germans. But it also kind of keeps the world's population from starvation. He unwittingly saved and/or improved billions of lives.
I hope you mean on the part of an NPC, or an antagonist, because if you mean on the part of the players, you're going to get a thousand stories that end with "I rolled a one."
Oh yeah, so I run down the thing, and I land on top of the bear, and I, like, flip in the air, and then, as I'm coming down, I sort of, like, barrel-roll a little bit, and then I flip again, and then I come down here so I land just like this, so I'm flanking this guy. Yeah, and it's super-cool! And there's rock music playing while I do it, and I'm gleaming cubes on my way there, and as I come down, I use my Avenging Echo against him... ohhh, I rolled a 1.
Okay, so I was playing GTA4, and some jerk cut me off in traffic while I was on a date. He slammed into my front fender and smashed me against the concrete barrier. My date got hurt, so I ran as fast as I could to get an ambulance for her, and then all of a sudden, these cops show up. I tried to explain the situation to them, but they wouldn't listen. They just kept shooting at me!
I tried to get back to her as quickly as possible, but a big black police van rammed me from the side and sent me into a schoolyard. Thank goodness there weren't any children there anymore. My vehicle was flipped upside down, and it came to a screeching halt against a swing set. The police must have fired a rocket or something at me, because the next thing I knew, I was a hundred feet in the air, and flying towards the bridge where my date was waiting for me. Considering my predicament, everything was going fine.
And then some jackass in an ambulance pulls up right where my ambulance was going to land.
I'm going to go against your grain, Raxon, for this one story--
Shadowrun campaign. Our team of four are hired to act as bodyguards for a group of protesters outside a bank. Think "Occupy Wallstreet". We're just there to ensure no one incites a fight, starts a fight, or gets involved in a fight.
Two teammembers get word that the bank's main branch hired some goons from out of town to try and disperse the crowd with "persuasion". The goon squad just landed at the airport when the two party members told team mate #3 (I was sadly the uninformed #4) to come help set up an ambush.
Team members 1 and 2 hijack the subway train the good squad was on and proceeded to mow down the squad with lots of bullets, effectively rolling "20s" all around. Team member #3 gets lost trying to navigate the subway and ends up at a Starbucks or something.
The two-man army then escapes down the subway tunnels and elude the cops completely, thus making a clean getaway.
Meanwhile, I was left alone to defend the crowd when the bank sent out two high level mages to take me down. D:
The next day, the bank's main branch released a news statement that they sent a group of negotiators to try and make peace with the protesters, but that the negotiators were all murdered in cold blood and they blame the protesters. The protest is immediately disbanded.
Well in the show, AJ was having trouble actually getting to Zecora's, Rainbow crashed right in front of her, so AJ made a set of reins out of sticks and leaves and steered her to their destination. Thus, muzzle.
Wow, I mean, it's not like the guy who developed the polio vaccine tested it on his own kids, wife, friends and himself or anything.
It's not like she has anything else she can test her cures on.
@Moonrush
Hey, secretly could mean not telling everypony in Ponyville what she's doing. For all we know, she may have just given them the attempts at the cure without telling them she had no idea if they worked. And the reason no pony else knew WHY they were going crazy was because what ever the poison joke did to them was too embarrassing for them to even show anypony, and they went to Zecora because they assumed that any mysterious mare living in a dangerous forest on her own must obviously have a cure for things.
Making up a complicated explanation that contradicts what we know ("random ponies vanishing without telling anyone, occasionally coming back horribly insane" doesn't imply they went to go ask the nice, helpful voodoo zebra. Plus, 6/6 ponies in canon were fine with showing others their poison joke'd problems.) proves me wrong. Yup. Can't be that the song about foalnapping and making people crazy was actually about that. Must just be a helpful mad scientist using sentient beings as lab rats gone wrong. You should get a job at Aperture. /not awake enough to make that sound less insulting
@The Batman
...I'm hoping that's just something to further prove my comparison point.
Of course, you could be talking about the guy who used the live virus. I was talking about Salk, who used the dead one, and released his cure first. Cause I know he tested it on his kids, a Travel Channel show wouldn't lie about museum stuff, I think.
Pretty sure people understood how immune systems worked before they were capable of making vaccines, so... that'd be proof. Also, worst case scenario with the vaccine; get the disease you were going to anyway, since that's why you needed to be vaccinated.
Worst case with Zecora's cure; go from comedically altered (so Twilight and Rainbow Dash are out of a job, but otherwise there's not really horrible after the "oh my gosh my voice sounds funny" period, and it's clearly not contagious, judging from Applebloom piggybacking Appletini) to either presumed dead or proven insane.
@Moonrush
Yeah, it's already been stated in the comic that Poison Joke only affects creatures after a certain age. Plus, if it's anything like Posion Oak, then it can't be contagious because you get it from the plant itself. In the cartoon, Applebloom wasn't affected because she never touched the plants.
And the only way Zecora would know how her cures would affect ponies without testing it on them, and there's no way she could test it on any other creature in the forest cause they've probably learned to avoid the plants and wouldn't exactly be easy to catch, equipment she clearly has no access to.
I'm not say what she did was right, I'm saying it's not unheard of.