Good news! Since you're so sick of the condescending nicknames I came up with for the leads, and I'm sick of reading all the complaints about them, I'll stop using them. Though it's a bit of a bummer on my end, I was looking forward to referring to Homage as "Lesbian Jokes."
Anyway, chapter 8 opens up with a nightmare sequence. Sure. Then Littlepip wakes up and we get our first "proper" introduction to Velvet Remedy. Mainly this consists of her expositing about her backstory and giving an explanation that although she got her cutie mark for singing, her true talent is medicine, so she's able to do magic for both. Cutie mark is a nightingale, blah blah kinda got into arguments about that already and it doesn't really matter. Nightingale cutie mark, can do magic for both singing and medicine. No word on where the forcefields come into play there, though. Guess that's just RPG logic, party healer also does buffs and defense boosts and etc.
In any case, soon the train gets attacked, and Velvet complains about how she doesn't want to fight. You know how last chapter I boiled her down to "token straw pacifist"? Okay, that was wrong. Or at least it will be wrong, but this chapter doesn't really help my impression. Anyway, Littlepip floats her over a needle gun. The narration points out that one of the ammo boxes might have tranquilizer darts in it. She doesn't think this is important enough to tell Velvet, and basically just tells her she needs to suck it up and fight. Now, an excerpt:
“Learn to.” It was a harsh, even brutal, thing to say. But that was the Equestrian Wasteland.
The part after "Learn to." was completely unnecessary. We already get it from the dialogue, and the narration afterwards is just redundant and melodramatic (I use the word "melodramatic" a lot when talking about the narration). And I guess there's that thing where we get the reason the narration is the way it is, but even if that contextually makes sense it doesn't really help the "this is annoying" part.
I'm gonna just glaze over the fight scene. There isn't a whole lot to say or make fun of, except for the fact that there's a time skip in there (blah blah I comment on how the story agrees with me re: boredom, joke isn't funny), there are griffins fighting. They go back to the room where Velvet is guarding the foals and she's in a bit of a tizzy because she's just shot a slaver full of needles and his body is hanging from the ceiling.
Fight scene proceeds, and by the end all I can think is "well, Velvet's doing quite well for someone who just killed someone, got stabbed, and had chunky pieces of slaver spattered all over her."
Then they find that the train is out of control and they can't stop it because Calamity disconnected the only car that had the breaks, so they narrowly avoid crashing.
I'm gonna try to clear through the next few chapters fairly quickly so I can get back to actually reading the story.
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