This week in 'stories I will never finish': Cutie Mark Crusader Capsuleers · 4:27pm Apr 2nd, 2013
I figure I might as well share the fruits of a short-lived EVE Online adventure crossover I tried to write several months ago but never did finish. I've polished it up a very little bit, but it's still unpublishable and unfinishable (by me, because I'm a lazy bitch) and you might well enjoy it as it is; feel free to carry on with it if you really wish.
Cutie Mark Crusader CapsuleersIn retrospect, it’s kind of obvious why the most successful of us were earth ponies.
The unicorns, you know, you’d think they’d be fine with it, already knowing how to move the very forces of nature themselves with a little thought, but it turns out a lot of them’re just fine with it as they are. And sure, you might think pegasus ponies want to see past the sky most of all, but it turns out they’re just pretty happy where they are, too. Apparently it’s the easiest for us to stick with the whole thing. Too foreign to let go too easy.
I suppose you could say we have—heh—endurance. Sure need a lot of that up here; sometimes, I’ll have to admit, there’s a few years in a row where all I wanna do is jump into the biomasser and let whatever’s up there sort me up for good, but I never once went anywhere near one.
Well, except that one time.
Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start from the beginning—but first, let me introduce myself.
My name’s Apple Bloom, and I’m the first pony capsuleer.
I’m sorry if I’ll ever have to kill you.
—
When the first few ships landed—well, they weren’t outright ships, but back then I didn’t know much about tritanium—we were, to put it kindly, scared out of our minds. I think Celestia herself went to go say hello. The details are fuzzy, of course. It was probably five hundred years ago, so excuse me if some of my clones weren’t up to date.
Yeah, I know it’s a stupid mistake to make, but at some point I was sure I’d never die.
Laugh it up.
Anyhow, the Jovians—some sorta two-legged, white-skinned aliens—gave us near everything they had. Some kind of disease made them all depressed or something—apparently we deserved to be their successors or something like that. Again, I’m not very clear on the details and maybe it’s better I’m not.
For all I know about it, after all, I might well catch it.
From what I do know, though, the capsule worked perfectly for ponies. Better than for the Jovians, even, which is kind of funny because the Jovians invented it. Maybe this place just happens to be made for us. When they started setting up schools for foals—foals because apparently adults just weren’t malleable enough, although they probably didn’t know how cutie marks work—Scoots, Sweetie Belle and I signed up together.
Applejack said I shouldn’t go, that ponies weren’t meant to go into space, but the Jovians had made it clear that no one could stop us. We figured we’d get into it, maybe get our cutie marks. Back then, of course, we felt like it was a game.
We still do.
—
The first few years were the hardest, learning to move without moving.
“Focus. Push the ball.”
The voice was perfect Equestrian. Back then I thought they’d learned it through hard work. That was before I woke up in the bay, of course, but that’s for later.
The stuff they put on my head, some kinda soft plastic connected to what I used to call a ‘fake horn’—I later found out that it’s apparently called a ‘devolved electromagnetic violation-inhibiting curatory emitter’, not that there’s much real difference—was getting really itchy, but I kept my concentration. Looking to the right gave me the sight of Sweetie Belle doing it real easy, her horn glowing through the tiny membrane they put over it. She was quickly pulled out of the room, giving me an encouraging kinda look as she went.
“Like your friend.”
I imagined the red, rubber ball moving, imagined my hoof reaching forth and bumping it off the edge of the metal. The tip of the fake horn shone a bit, but nothing moved.
He—was it a he? I never did get used to Jovian gender—spoke as if he had read my mind. “Do not imagine any analogue. Push as if you were calculating a sum. Use the strength of your mind.”
I stood there for about half an hour, trying to figure out exactly how to push the darned thing. Most of the other non-unicorn ponies were having problems, too, but the Jovians never once seemed to notice the difference between us. By the end of the lesson, the unicorns had been helped out of the room, leaving just the earth and pegasus ponies, three Jovians looking over us.
A very distinctive Trottingham-accented voice came from behind me. “This isn’t fair,” I heard, breaking my futile concentration. I was a mite frustrated when I turned around to see Pipsqueak. “Unicorns can just use their magic.”
“We’ve analysed unicorn ‘magic’ and found it to be primarily gravitic in nature. We have used energised fullerene membranes to nullify all gravitational manipulation.”
That explained what the horn-stuff was for, at least.
Pipsqueak gave the Jovian a look that was part questioning and part indignant. “Then why do their horns glow while they’re doing it?”
“Their minds focus on the task. They are already well-adapted to extending them.”
Nobody else raised a ruckus after that. Pipsqueak was the first one to succeed, and went out with the rest of them—they went pony by pony ‘til I was the only one left.
But I didn’t give up, and the invigilators didn’t seem to mind the wait.
“Student Apple Bloom,” one finally said, after five hours. “You may forfeit at any point. Your species, though well-suited to the capsule technology, is not universally competent.”
That gave me an idea. “Say,” I said, “I’m supposed to push this here ball off of this here table, right?”
“Using the device, yes.”
I reached up, pulled the fake horn from its little holster and poked the ball over the table.
It hit the ground with a mighty satisfying ‘fmp’.
—
I know it isn’t a really exciting story, but that’s how it happened. I didn’t pass, of course, but they let me go on anyhow. I got the hang of it in the end, and we spent the next few months going over the basics—learning how to use our heads, basically. None of us flunked out. Not even Diamond Tiara.
Thank goodness she didn’t.
—
I didn’t even know at first when I died for the first time.
“The process is painless and instantaneous.”
I nodded a bit. “So, I’ll wake up fine and dandy with some new bits on my back?”
He nodded back as I was laid onto the table, and I felt a little pricking sensation in my right hoof.
I woke up just in time to see my body pulled away on a gurney.
It wasn’t breathing, and as I fell out of the tank I ran towards it and I felt arms on me and they held me and I screamed for my body and one of the Jovians was shouting about withdrawal and trauma and stasis and I didn’t know what the buck and there was a little prick in my neck and I didn’t feel any more.
When I woke up they talked to me for a few hours about how I was just the same as I was before and that I was absolutely, perfectly fine and how I wasn’t anything but me and that I was fine and not dead and ground up and turned into goo they’re using to make more of me.
I held a little funeral for myself that night. Candles and everything, touching the bits down my spine as if they were anything but circuits and metal.
It’s real funny what little foals do when they’re scared.
It’s the sort of feeling I hurt for now.
ìbábìnrin lòpõ ní dandan.
..... I've no idea what the source material, EVE Online, is, but this is awesome. I love Sci-Fi shit, I just don't care to play Online games all that much. Besides, my laptop can't handle running anything that's game-esque other than Inkball and the other simple games that came with it. Even Runescape has problems.
A thought: did her clones keep her cutie mark or did she have to earn it over and over and over again?
974438
Probably her cutie mark travelled with her.
We don't really know what happens when a pony dies... It could as well lose its cutie mark (which is tied with their minds).
974629
I figured that cutie marks are tied to mental states.
tis magic
What little there was, that was enjoyable. Hope somebody competent chooses to pick it up.