Ch 24. Getting the hair chopped.
I, for one, don’t like birds and especially not on my head. I wave my hoof in front of the owl, trying to get it to move. Owlowlicious stays where he is and hoots a couple of times for good measure. It’s like he knows that he is annoying me.
I plop down on the couch and look at a couple of the books that are closest to me. Most of them are about some sort of advanced magic. Typically Twilight.
“I got your book,” Spike says as he walks over, holding a medium sized book in his claws. “I think that this should be good to brush up a bit.” He gave it to me and I hold it a bit awkwardly in my hooves, and fortunately he doesn’t notice anything strange even though I am a ‘unicorn’ and I’m not using my magic.
“Thanks,” I say as Spike walks back to the kitchen. I hear some sounds coming from the kitchen, but I don’t pay much attention to them.
I open the books and look at the contents. The first chapter is called ‘What is magic actually?’, and the second one is called ‘The basics: A small start.’ I think that I should just start with the first one.
I open the book and start reading, seeing Spike run about every once in a while. The first chapter tells me that magic is a force, some sort of floating energy, which is all around us. Floating all around us is the magic, having more or less energy depending on the area.
Seeing as Equestria is occupied by quite a few unicorns, so the general level of magic is quite high, but in certain places it’s higher. Like the Everfree forest, which causes the strange and powerful animals, and the Canterlot Castle, where the high concentration of magic was one of the reasons that the princesses chose that spot to build the castle. The rest of the chapter mostly names certain places and their respective levels of magic, expressed in mmeters (magical meters) and is compared to the EMS (Equestrian Magical Standard). Most of the cities are close to it, but a few stick out. Appleoosa is on the low side, but Ponyville on the other side is quite high, mostly because it is close to the Everfree. Manehattan was high too, but has been lowering due to the high level of pollution.
It gets a bit dry at the end to I quickly flip through a few pages and arrive at the second chapter. I grab a random piece of paper and put it in as a page keeper. This stuff is too dry to read for too long so I think that I’ll take a break.
“Hey Spike, can I borrow this book?” I say waving the book at the little dragon that makes one of his regular ‘walks across the room’.
“Sure, just write it down in the book over there,” Spike says as he points his finger to a new looking book and a pedestal where it lays on. “If you don’t write it in there Twilight will go crazy and hunt you down even if were on the moon.”
“Then I’ll make sure that I’ll write it in good enough,” I say as I walk over to the book. “Getting hunt to the moon doesn’t sound like a nice way to spend the week.”
“It sure doesn’t.” Spike says as he walks back to the kitchen, probably to make some food for himself. I write my information down on the page, hoping that Twilight in the form of a banshee won’t haunt me in my dreams. The thing that scares me the most is that I know that she could do it.
I walk back to the book and balance it on my back, having to try hard to not let it fall. “I’ll be off then. See you later, Spike.”
“See ya.” I hear coming from the kitchen as I open the door and walk out, letting the sun hit my fur. It surprises me that I haven’t been cooking every time my coat was exposed to the sun. I know that it’ll be nice to have in the winter, but the summers must be brutal. I wonder how the ponies would look without their fur.
I shake my head as I try to get that weird image out of my head. I really hope that the ponies won’t shave their fur in the winter, but looking at my mane I really need to get a haircut. The hair is sticking out in various places. I hope that there aren’t any murderous barbers here in Ponyville.
I soon see a typical barber cutting somepony’s hair behind a glass window. I walk over to the shop and look in my bag of bits, seeing that I have enough for a nice cut. I walk in and sit down in one of the many empty spots. I put down the book on the empty spot next to me and look around a bit, waiting for the barber to finish.
He has a nice looking shop, a couple of posters of ponies with nice haircuts, some books with photos of ponies with nice haircuts and a couple of postcards of ponies with nice haircuts. It seems he has an obsession with ponies with nice haircuts, but then again, he is a hairdresser.
I flip through one of the books with ponies with haircuts and look for a nice haircut. Some of the haircuts are just outrageous and some are close to being bald or about as bald as a pony can get. After some searching and looking at ponies with nice haircuts I finally found the one perfect for me, a normal haircut, nothing too complicated, with just the slightest bit of me. I hope that he won’t start questioning my seriousness and give me a new smile.
He smiles tired at the customer as he puts a few bits in the register and gestures to me to come over. “And what do you want for a haircut? Have you found something nice?”
“I did. This one.” I say as I point to the pony with the nice haircut.
“Good choice,” The barber says as he grabs a scissor with his hoof and starts snapping some of the longer part of my hair off.
The hair flies all around me as the barber starts chopping.