TPrincess Twilight Sparkle's School for Fantastic Foals: Winter Break
MLP: FiM
Romance
Drama
Slice of Life
School may be out, but the lessons continue for Sumac Apple.
Trixie
DJ P0N-3
Octavia
Maud Pie
Twinkleshine
kudzuhaiku · 129k words · 394 16 · 3.9k views

Sumac Apple hears the song of the Sausage Creature · 6:17am Apr 17th, 2017

The trip home was all the more pleasant because the snow had eased off a bit and the sun was almost shining. In the distance, an army of pegasus ponies decorated Twilight’s castle, stringing lights all over it, along with beautiful garlands made of varying colours of tinsel. Ponies, both foals and adults, played in the snow together. There was a festive mood that hung over the whole town, and this sense, this feeling that everything was secure.
Sumac didn’t know if everything was secure, but he was glad for the feeling nonetheless.
After everything that had happened, Sumac now had some association with security equating to power. Magic kept ponies secure. Powerful magic users, such as Twilight Sparkle, Starlight Glimmer, and his mother, Trixie, kept ponies and Ponyville secure. In the future, ponies like Olive, she would keep things secure. Though he did not realise it, nor fully understand it, Sumac’s young mind would forever associate security with power, and power would recognised by the security it offered.
All the more reason to become a powerful wizard, at least by Sumac’s thinking.
Sticking his tongue out, Sumac concentrated with all of his might on a ‘come to life’ spell focused on the sled that he rode in. He wanted it to move under its own power, or at least help Lemon Hearts pull it through the snow, because today, it was her turn to be a draft pony. Come to life spells were complicated—Trixie used them on occasion when she pulled the wagon, but the spell was draining under load and never lasted long, usually it was just enough to get them up a steep hill.
The magic flowed through Sumac, he felt it, he felt the powerful allure of complex, complicated magic, the most complicated and complex of all magical schools, enchantment. Common unicorns couldn’t even begin to cast these spells, in general. Only special, gifted unicorns, unicorns of advanced, sufficient ability could squeeze off a spell of this complexity.
Rarity was one such unicorn, and he had observed how she animated objects around her with her telekinesis, making them her puppets. Rarity was far, far more powerful than she realised, and Sumac knew this because of his own magic sense. Rarity had magic enough to give him a headache if he focused too much on it.
All around Sumac, snowflakes no longer fell, but remained suspended, floating in mid-air. The scent of winter was replaced by the stench of ozone. Sumac could feel some of his consciousness seeping into the wood of the sled, which buzzed and thrummed beneath him. Boomer scurried out from beneath his poncho and the blanket covering them both, ran up his neck, up the back of his head, and then clung to his knitted hat with her claws.
“No.” Boomer said, shaking her head. “No, no, no, nononononono!”
Mid ‘no’ there was a lurch from the sled and Sumac felt his magic get away from him. The sled accelerated like a rocket, shooting forward, right into Lemon Hearts, who tumbled into the sled with Sumac, and making a valiant effort not to harm the fragile colt. Trixie and Twinkleshine both let out a cry of alarm, and then the sled took off.
Like a bullet, it zoomed forwards, and Ponyville became a blur. Sumac’s cheeks were peeled back away from his teeth, and they flapped like flags in the wind. Somehow, Lemon was behind him now, holding him, and supporting his neck. Boomer was still shouting ‘no’ over and over while clinging to his hat. Everything was a confusing jumble and Sumac’s senses were overwhelmed.
Lemon Hearts was laughing.
She laughed like a mad pony, bellowing laughter, and she also squealed with delight while squeezing Sumac. A shield bubble manifested around them, protecting them as the sled picked up speed. And the sled was picking up speed, oh goodness, it was getting faster, and faster, and somehow faster still. Ponies shrieked and screamed as they dove out of the way, trying to dodge the runaway rocket-sled that was shooting through Ponyville, accelerating to absurd speeds.
Protected from the wind, Sumac’s face sagged back into place, but only for a moment, because when he recovered from having his face almost slide to the back of his skull, he began grinning. He was doing magic! Real, serious, honest-to-goodness magic! Already, he could feel the drain on his system, but he didn’t care, not in the slightest. He was going Rainbow Dash-fast through the streets of Ponyville and Lemon Hearts was laughing her head off.
Sumac’s euphoric elation was dulled by the sudden realisation that he didn’t know how to steer and this straight run couldn’t last forever. He also didn’t know how to stop—a real problem indeed. He blasted past a startled Starlight Glimmer and the rush of his wake peeled off her hat, her scarf, and her earmuffs. She shouted something, but Sumac couldn’t hear it, and the cold wondered if he had broken the sound barrier or something.
FWOOM!
He was still accelerating, which concerned him, and Sumac could feel the magical expenditure sucking him dry. Lemon was shaking with laughter—was it terrified laughter? Sumac had no way of knowing. To his left, a pegasus zoomed up and flew at street level beside him. It was Rainbow Dash, of course it was, and she looked as though she wasn’t even trying hard to keep up. She kept pace just outside Lemon’s shield bubble.
Glancing at Rainbow Dash, Sumac couldn’t help himself. He asked, “Hey, slowpoke, wanna race?”
To which Rainbow Dash replied, “Wanna be grounded forever?”
Just as Rainbow Dash had spoken, there was a brilliant, blinding flash of magenta light, and Twilight Sparkle exploded into existence just above the streaking runaway sled, along with two very worried, very concerned looking mares, neither of which were laughing like Lemon was laughing. Twilight Sparkle began to cast a spell while Boomer wailed like a siren and much to Sumac’s relief, (and his dismay) the sled began to slow.

Raising little unicorns presents many unique hazards not experienced by other parents.

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Breakfateschain

Breakfateschain #1 · Apr 17th, 2017 · · ·

Sausage Creature?

kudzuhaiku

kudzuhaiku #2 · Apr 17th, 2017 · 1 · ·

4499278

Song of the Sausage Creature
by Hunter S. Thompson
There are some things nobody needs in this world, and a bright-red, hunch-back, warp-speed 900cc cafe racer is one of them - but I want one anyway, and on some days I actually believe I need one. That is why they are dangerous.
Everybody has fast motorcycles these days. Some people go 150 miles an hour on two-lane blacktop roads, but not often. There are too many oncoming trucks and too many radar cops and too many stupid animals in the way. You have to be a little crazy to ride these super-torque high-speed crotch rockets anywhere except a racetrack - and even there, they will scare the whimpering shit out of you... There is, after all, not a pig's eye worth of difference between going head-on into a Peterbilt or sideways into the bleachers. On some days you get what you want, and on others, you get what you need.
When Cycle World called me to ask if I would road-test the new Harley Road King, I got uppity and said I'd rather have a Ducati superbike. It seemed like a chic decision at the time, and my friends on the superbike circuit got very excited. "Hot damn," they said. "We will take it to the track and blow the bastards away."
"Balls," I said. "Never mind the track. The track is for punks. We are Road People. We are Cafe Racers."
The Cafe Racer is a different breed, and we have our own situations. Pure speed in sixth gear on a 5000-foot straightaway is one thing, but pure speed in third gear on a gravel-strewn downhill ess-turn is quite another.
But we like it. A thoroughbred Cafe Racer will ride all night through a fog storm in freeway traffic to put himself into what somebody told him was the ugliest and tightest decreasing-radius turn since Genghis Khan invented the corkscrew.
Cafe Racing is mainly a matter of taste. It is an atavistic mentality, a peculiar mix of low style, high speed, pure dumbness, and overweening commitment to the Cafe Life and all its dangerous pleasures... I am a Cafe Racer myself, on some days - and it is one of my finest addictions.
I am not without scars on my brain and my body, but I can live with them. I still feel a shudder in my spine every time I see a picture of a Vincent Black Shadow, or when I walk into a public restroom and hear crippled men whispering about the terrifying Kawasaki Triple... I have visions of compound femur-fractures and large black men in white hospital suits holding me down on a gurney while a nurse called "Bess" sews the flaps of my scalp together with a stitching drill.
Ho, ho. Thank God for these flashbacks. The brain is such a wonderful instrument (until God sinks his teeth into it). Some people hear Tiny Tim singing when they go under, and some others hear the song of the Sausage Creature.
When the Ducati turned up in my driveway, nobody knew what to do with it. I was in New York, covering a polo tournament, and people had threatened my life. My lawyer said I should give myself up and enroll in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Other people said it had something to do with the polo crowd.
The motorcycle business was the last straw. It had to be the work of my enemies, or people who wanted to hurt me. It was the vilest kind of bait, and they knew I would go for it.
Of course. You want to cripple the bastard? Send him a 130-mph cafe-racer. And include some license plates, he'll think it's a streetbike. He's queer for anything fast.
Which is true. I have been a connoisseur of fast motorcycles all my life. I bought a brand-new 650 BSA Lightning when it was billed as "the fastest motorcycle ever tested by Hot Rod magazine." I have ridden a 500-pound Vincent through traffic on the Ventura Freeway with burning oil on my legs and run the Kawa 750 Triple through Beverly Hills at night with a head full of acid... I have ridden with Sonny Barger and smoked weed in biker bars with Jack Nicholson, Grace Slick, Ron Zigler and my infamous old friend, Ken Kesey, a legendary Cafe Racer.
Some people will tell you that slow is good - and it may be, on some days - but I am here to tell you that fast is better. I've always believed this, in spite of the trouble it's caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba....
So when I got back from New York and found a fiery red rocket-style bike in my garage, I realized I was back in the road-testing business.
The brand-new Ducati 900 Campione del Mundo Desmodue Supersport double-barreled magnum Cafe Racer filled me with feelings of lust every time I looked at it. Others felt the same way. My garage quickly became a magnet for drooling superbike groupies. They quarreled and bitched at each other about who would be the first to help me evaluate my new toy... And I did, of course, need a certain spectrum of opinions, besides my own, to properly judge this motorcycle. The Woody Creek Perverse Environmental Testing Facility is a long way from Daytona or even top-fuel challenge-sprints on the Pacific Coast Highway, where teams of big-bore Kawasakis and Yamahas are said to race head-on against each other in death-defying games of "chicken" at 100 miles an hour....
No. Not everybody who buys a high-dollar torque-brute yearns to go out in a ball of fire on a public street in L.A. Some of us are decent people who want to stay out of the emergency room, but still blast through neo-gridlock traffic in residential districts whenever we feel like it... For that we need Fine Machinery.
Which we had - no doubt about that. The Ducati people in New Jersey had opted, for some reasons of their own, to send me the 900ss-sp for testing - rather than their 916 crazy-fast, state-of-the-art superbike track-racer. It was far too fast, they said - and prohibitively expensive - to farm out for testing to a gang of half-mad Colorado cowboys who think they're world-class Cafe Racers.
The Ducati 900 is a finely engineered machine. My neighbors called it beautiful and admired its racing lines. The nasty little bugger looked like it was going 90 miles an hour when it was standing still in my garage.
Taking it on the road, though, was a genuinely terrifying experience. I had no sense of speed until I was going 90 and coming up fast on a bunch of pickup trucks going into a wet curve along the river. I went for both brakes, but only the front one worked, and I almost went end over end. I was out of control staring at the tailpipe of a U.S. Mail truck, still stabbing frantically at my rear brake pedal, which I just couldn't find... I am too tall for these new-age roadracers; they are not built for any rider taller than five-nine, and the rearset brake pedal was not where I thought it would be. Mid-size Italian pimps who like to race from one cafe to another on the boulevards of Rome in a flat-line prone position might like this, but I do not.
I was hunched over the tank like a person diving into a pool that got emptied yesterday. Whacko! Bashed on the concrete bottom, flesh ripped off, a Sausage Creature with no teeth, fucked-up for the rest of its life.
We all love Torque, and some of us have taken it straight over the high side from time to time - and there is always Pain in that... But there is also Fun, the deadly element, and Fun is what you get when you screw this monster on. BOOM! Instant take-off, no screeching or squawking around like a fool with your teeth clamping down on our tongue and your mind completely empty of everything but fear.
No. This bugger digs right in and shoots you straight down the pipe, for good or ill.
On my first take-off, I hit second gear and went through the speed limit on a two-lane blacktop highway full of ranch traffic. By the time I went up to third, I was going 75 and the tach was barely above 4000 rpm....
And that's when it got its second wind. From 4000 to 6000 in third will take you from 75 mph to 95 in two seconds - and after that, Bubba, you still have fourth, fifth, and sixth. Ho, ho.
I never got to sixth gear, and I didn't get deep into fifth. This is a shameful admission for a full-bore Cafe Racer, but let me tell you something, old sport: This motorcycle is simply too goddamn fast to ride at speed in any kind of normal road traffic unless you're ready to go straight down the centerline with your nuts on fire and a silent scream in your throat.
When aimed in the right direction at high speed, though, it has unnatural capabilities. This I unwittingly discovered as I made my approach to a sharp turn across some railroad tracks, saw that I was going way too fast and that my only chance was to veer right and screw it on totally, in a desperate attempt to leapfrog the curve by going airborne.
It was a bold and reckless move, but it was necessary. And it worked: I felt like Evel Knievel as I soared across the tracks with the rain in my eyes and my jaws clamped together in fear. I tried to spit down on the tracks as I passed them, but my mouth was too dry... I landed hard on the edge of the road and lost my grip for a moment as the Ducati began fishtailing crazily into oncoming traffic. For two or three seconds I came face to face with the Sausage Creature....
But somehow the brute straightened out. I passed a schoolbus on the right and got the bike under control long enough to gear down and pull off into an abandoned gravel driveway where I stopped and turned off the engine. My hands had seized up like claws and the rest of my body was numb. I felt nauseous and I cried for my mama, but nobody heard, then I went into a trance for 30 or 40 seconds until I was finally able to light a cigarette and calm down enough to ride home. I was too hysterical to shift gears, so I went the whole way in first at 40 miles an hour.
Whoops! What am I saying? Tall stories, ho, ho... We are motorcycle people; we walk tall and we laugh at whatever's funny. We shit on the chests of the Weird....
But when we ride very fast motorcycles, we ride with immaculate sanity. We might abuse a substance here and there, but only when it's right. The final measure of any rider's skill is the inverse ratio of his preferred Traveling Speed to the number of bad scars on his body. It is that simple: If you ride fast and crash, you are a bad rider. And if you are a bad rider, you should not ride motorcycles.
The emergence of the superbike has heightened this equation drastically. Motorcycle technology has made such a great leap forward. Take the Ducati. You want optimum cruising speed on this bugger? Try 90mph in fifth at 5500 rpm - and just then, you see a bull moose in the middle of the road. WHACKO. Meet the Sausage Creature.
Or maybe not: The Ducati 900 is so finely engineered and balanced and torqued that you *can* do 90 mph in fifth through a 35-mph zone and get away with it. The bike is not just fast - it is *extremely* quick and responsive, and it *will* do amazing things... It is like riding a Vincent Black Shadow, which would outrun an F-86 jet fighter on the take-off runway, but at the end, the F-86 would go airborne and the Vincent would not, and there was no point in trying to turn it. WHAMO! The Sausage Creature strikes again.
There is a fundamental difference, however, between the old Vincents and the new breed of superbikes. If you rode the Black Shadow at top speed for any length of time, you would almost certainly die. That is why there are not many life members of the Vincent Black Shadow Society. The Vincent was like a bullet that went straight; the Ducati is like the magic bullet in Dallas that went sideways and hit JFK and the Governor of Texas at the same time.
It was impossible. But so was my terrifying sideways leap across the railroad tracks on the 900sp. The bike did it easily with the grace of a fleeing tomcat. The landing was so easy I remember thinking, goddamnit, if I had screwed it on a little more I could have gone a lot farther.
Maybe this is the new Cafe Racer macho. My bike is so much faster than yours that I dare you to ride it, you lame little turd. Do you have the balls to ride this BOTTOMLESS PIT OF TORQUE?
That is the attitude of the new-age superbike freak, and I am one of them. On some days they are about the most fun you can have with your clothes on. The Vincent just killed you a lot faster than a superbike will. A fool couldn't ride the Vincent Black Shadow more than once, but a fool can ride a Ducati 900 many times, and it will always be a bloodcurdling kind of fun. That is the Curse of Speed which has plagued me all my life. I am a slave to it. On my tombstone they will carve, "IT NEVER GOT FAST ENOUGH FOR ME."