It didn’t take me long to locate the Cutie Mark Crusaders. As part of their bid to get a public service related cutie mark for picking up trash, they had collected some bright orange bags and vests. If the bags had said Canterlot Correctional Institute on the side I would not have been the least bit surprised.
I flew down towards them to offer a hoof and spend a little time with them. The fact that there were no signs of siege weaponry was a definite plus, perhaps a sign that they were running out of truly radical plans and had to resort to the kind of mundane tasks that the rest of us spent our lives doing for a living.
“Hey, squirts,” I shouted as I flew down and landed next to them. I tilted my head to the side as I looked at the large bag of trash Sweetie was dragging along a bit haphazardly with her magic. “Wait, where’d you get so much trash? Now that I think of it, I haven’t really seen a trash problem in Ponyville before.”
“Dawn!” The three fillies smiled and ran over. “Oh,” Scootaloo answered, “it’s mostly cupcake wrappers and spoiled goods from Pinkie’s emergency cupcake stashes around Ponyville.”
“Uh, then shouldn’t Pinkie be out picking them up?” I asked.
“Well, normally she would, but we came up with a plan to help out and get our cutie marks,” Sweetie explained. “Normally the trash pony would go around emptying all the public trash cans placed throughout town and picking up any stray litter, but for this entire week, we’ve been doing it!”
I chuckled and looked around at the street we were on. There was a bit of frost and snow in some of the bushes, but the road itself was in between being dry and muddy. Luckily, my hooves only sank an inch down in it when I landed, as I’d have to clean my hooves off thoroughly before doing pretty much anything now. It was definitely a large plus that, as a pegasus, I didn’t have to land if I wanted to keep my hooves clean, but the window for that had passed. As for the trash, Sweetie was right and I noticed the nearby trash bin, a decorative wrought iron affair, with an empty bin inside.
“It’s looking good girls, good work,” I stated. “I figured I’d come see if you want some help.”
Sweetie breathed a sigh of relief, “I thought you’d never ask! I’ve been lugging these bags around all day. Want to carry this back for me?”
“Uh sure.” I walked over and looked at the bag as she tied it off, picturing this in my head. I couldn’t grip something that heavy with a hoof, there was nothing to get my fetlock around and the frog of my hoof itself was more of a suction cup and less of a proper replacement for an opposable thumb. There was only one way I could pick it up, and I suddenly realized why Sweetie, with her magic, had to do all the lifting. “You want me to lift it with my mouth?”
“Heh, yeah, that’s why we have her on bag duty,” Apple Bloom explained. “That, and we’d have to drag it, we’re not big enough to toss it over our backs.”
I sniffed at the knot on the top of the bag apprehensively. It seemed that unlike trash bags on Earth, these bags were much longer allowing the knot to be further removed from the smell of garbage, and giving something a bit further from the ‘action’ to bite onto. “I wonder if kissing a trash collector is like digging around in a trash bag for food.”
“Huh?” Scootaloo tilted her head.
“Oh, nothing, lead the way.” I bit the knot and twisted, bringing the bag into an uneasy balance on my back. I followed after the crusaders as we headed towards the dumping point for the trash.
“I’m glad this week is almost up, I still haven’t gotten a cutie mark! And you know what that means,” Scootaloo stated.
Apple Bloom and Sweetie sighed, “Yeah, it’s your turn to pick again,” Sweetie responded.
Scootaloo flew up onto a small picket fence in front of a house to our left and started slashing at the air with a hoof. “I’m thinking musketeer cutie marks, we can practice our sword-fighting.”
“I was thinking something that didn’t involve weapons would be a nice change of pace,” Sweetie replied.
That’a girl!
I continued to follow them as we veered left towards the center of town, and listened in.
“Well, we never did advanced potions with Zecora, we could do that, Scootaloo,” Apple Bloom suggested.
“I don’t know, that sounds kinda boring… what about Vinyl? She could teach us to drop the bass,” Scootaloo responded.
“Rarity says she gets enough noise complaints, I doubt she’ll get fewer of them with us helping,” Sweetie answered.
“Ugh, you take the fun out of everything… Well, I was saving it for a special occasion, but we could try our firefighting cutie marks!”
We rounded one last corner to the backside of the day spa, and came across a large metal monstrosity. I dropped the trash bag. “You’ve gotta be kidding me. The metal working alone—how? Why?!”
Sweetie shrugged and levitated the bag into the trash compactor, grunting as it took all her effort to lift the bag fully into the air and shove it into the compactor.
“Oh, we just improved the design, there’s always been a compactor here. It’s powered by geo… geo-magnetic… no…” Apple Bloom paused to think about it.
“Geothermal energy, the day spa is built near some vents!” Sweetie explained. “It was Scootaloo’s idea, with a few minor adjustments, it can compact more trash more densely more often!”
I nodded as I slowly backed away from the Crusaders, until I was peeking out from behind the corner of the day spa. “Ahuh, sounds good.”
Scootaloo looked to her side and noticed I wasn’t there, then looked back at me. “Hah, come on, Dawn, you’re acting like a filly. We’ve been running it all week without a problem!”
“No offense, girls, but the only cutie mark you three are likely to get related to heavy machinery is a demolition cutie mark,” I explained. I pointed to the machine, which was full to the point of overflowing. “Now, since I seem to be the only adult around when you three need supervision and that thing’s full to bursting, I’m going to supervise from back here.”
Apple Bloom nodded and walked up to a control panel on the machine, pressing the green start button. “You know, I heard if a pony got stuck in there it’d flatten ‘em to the size of a pancake.”
“Do you think that’s how Pinkie makes her famous windigo pancakes?” Scootaloo asked.
The machine happily hummed away as the giant metal roof pressed down on the garbage, and soon the side walls started moving, too. “What, you think she sticks windigo in a trash compactor?” Apple Bloom asked.
“No, but, like, she could have a smaller one in her basement or something?” Scootaloo explained.
“Windigo aren’t real anyway, our sisters are just pulling our legs and tryin’ to get us all to watch the Hearth’s Warming pageant,” Apple Bloom countered.
“Oh, I didn’t peg you for a skeptic,” I interjected. The trash compactor was starting to rumble and hiss as it neared the limits of what it could compress.
“Twilight says they’re real and I believe her, Apple Bloom is just convinced that Dash brings the harsh winter snow to help sell some prank,” Sweetie explained. “I don’t think ponies are still that disharmonious that windigos will ever cause another century-long winter, but they’re out there somewhere.”
The trash compactor hissed and came to a full stop, silence filled the air. I waited for a moment and stepped out, approaching the girls. “Wow…” I looked at the machine skeptically, “I was totally expecting that to blow up and cover us all in garbage.”
“We don’t always end up covered in tree sap, it’s just sorta become plan B,” Scootaloo offered.
“Though the time Apple Bloom convinced us to try for a lumberjack cutie mark, we didn’t get a single drop of tree sap on us. Go figure.” Sweetie chuckled and pointed to the machine. “I guess we should open her up and see how big the trash bale is.”
Apple Bloom nodded and pressed the red button on the machine, but nothing happened. She pressed it a few more time. “I think it’s stuck, we better just leave it for the trash pony to figure out.”
I was about to say something when I saw a ripple in a small puddle of muddy water, then it vanished. After a few seconds there was another ripple, followed by a small tremor in the ground. “Uh, girls?”
“That’s not fair to leave it for someone else to clean up,” Sweetie replied.
“Yeah, but last time you had me crawl under it to repair something, I had mud in my mane for days,” Apple Bloom complained.
The ripple crossed the small puddle again. “Girls,” I said more loudly. “There is either a Tyrannosaurus Rex coming to brutally murder us, or something’s wrong with that machine.”
“A tyrasorn—what?” Sweetie asked, but I at least had all three fillies attention now.
There was a hissing sound as steam escaped the trash compactor and the rumbling intensified, followed by a stream of obscenities as I realized exactly where this was going. Though not productive, it certainly felt good. The crusaders were looking at me like I’d just scrubbed their brains out with a brillo pad.
“Run, you fools!”
I am certain I would have made it to safety, but my hoof sank in the mud and I stumbled forward rather slowly. I looked back to see them running towards me too, followed by a loud whistle as a pressure valve on the trash compactor blew open. If I survived this, I was going to have a long talk with whatever pony had decided to let the Crusaders run their machinery for the week.
A moment later, there was a loud pop, followed by the sound of crunching metal. My life flashed before my eyes, a jumbled mess of human and pony images, before I dove on top of the nearest Crusader to shield them from what I could only assume would be a fiery ball of death.
A wave of air hit me, followed by the sound of debris raining down on nearby buildings. I looked down and found that Sweetie had been the one I’d leapt on top of to protect, and she was compressed between me and the mud. Her white fur was caked black, but she was safe.
Then the stench hit.
I don’t know what the ponies in this town were throwing away, but it tested the limits of my imagination to try and figure out exactly what I was smelling. I could only imagine that someone had bathed a rotting carcass thoroughly in skunk extract, wrapped it up in towels soaked in rotten milk, stuffed it into a gym duffle bag that hadn’t been washed out for years, tied it off with the intestines of a cow with Irritable Bowel Syndrome, pumped it full of sulfur and hydrogen sulfide, and lit a stick of dynamite inside of it.
To say that the stench could peel paint off the side of a barn would be an understatement. Large blobs of discarded food, diapers, socks, and other detritus landed on and around me. I’m fairly certain that where the trash touched, my hairs started to turn gray prematurely.
With a frustrated sigh, I felt a final piece of trash land on my face and blew it off with a huff. In front of me, a small poster landed in the mud. There was a cartoon drawing of Owlowiscious on it.
Give a Hoot,
Don’t pollute.
INVISIBLE NOTE: You know, I've had blank spaces at the end of my stories forever and I've never hidden a message in them? I don't like when I'm reading a story and I see the "end" coming from a full page away, so I decided to add some empty space at the end of my stories. It seems like an elegant solution, until everyone asks why I do it at least. Maybe, if I hid little messages in it, people would be like "Oh Kaidan you're so cool! It's like A/N for the cool kids only!" But on the other hoof, people on mobile or using night-time friendly color schemes where this message isn't white on white, will be like "What the fuck? I'm trying to mind my own business and enjoy the story and then this huge off-topic rant comes out of nowhere!" So I don't know. I guess we'll see how this goes. Maybe I've already hidden some messages in my other stories, just to reward you for going back and checking. Maybe in the future, all my A/N's will be white on white. I guess you could call these hidden notes... AHHH YEAH!