In unearthing Angel’s secrets, today’s story brings potent emotions to the page.

Of Angels
[Slice of Life] • 4,023 words

All his life, Angel Bunny has been plagued by a single question. At long last, he has an answer, and he longs to reveal it. Doing so may be the single most important thing he’s ever done, but Angel doesn’t know how to deliver the message. After all, rabbits have no need of writing.

Angel needs to learn. Knowing this task is far too important to let his pride get the better of him, Angel does something he never thought he’d do: ask for help. There’s only one pony for the job.

FROM THE CURATORS: In a way, this story is like getting two different RCL features in one — its 4,000 words are split into two chapters that impressed us in very different ways.  “The gimmick of the first half was awesome, and the second half was a great domino-topple,” Present Perfect said.  “This is just a really unique story.”

That uniqueness will be obvious to any reader within the first few sentences, as colored text splashes across the screen, but we agreed that this story pulled it off.  “The structural gimmick — that we’re reading excerpts from an enchanted book (a la EqG) — is both well-used and well-explored, and the story itself is short enough that the novelty doesn’t have time to wear off,” Chris said.  A large part of that was the way it helped the voices shine through — “the way he manages to convey the characters so well and so completely simply from their ‘dialogue’ just makes me happy all the way around,” AugieDog said — but there was also more depth here.  “The addition of interjections from Fluttershy and Discord kept the first half tense, which I wasn’t expecting,” Present Perfect said.

That depth extended everywhere in the story, from the overarching structure to the little details.  “I should mention that the spelling/grammar mistakes Angel makes are pretty realistic,” Chris said.  “I sometimes think I’m the only person in the world who cares about the realism of poor spelling, but for what it’s worth, this story has it!”  As he noted, even without the textual gimmick, it stayed strong throughout.  “The second chapter soon shifts to a genuinely poignant bit of backstory, which ends up reframing the entire work,” Chris said.  “The specific emotions and desires which color it paint Angel in a pleasantly complex light.”  Overall, it added up to a story powerful enough to sway even curators looking elsewhere for a feature.  “One of the reasons I accepted the invitation to come on board here was to nominate ‘Frequency,’ but I’ll still happily send this one to an interview,” AugieDog said. “I have a dark little corner in my heart for Angel Bunny, and to see him clearly from his very first attempts at writing all the way through the actual note in the second chapter, that’s good stuff.”

Read on for our author interview, in which PaulAsaran discusses deliberate mistakes, Discord codes, and giving voice to the voiceless.
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