Lost In The Herd: Four
Teacup
Down On The
Farm
By Chatoyance
Chapter Two: Her Name Is Teacup
The violet-maned mare was a little slow to learn. Cornflower started with the basics, just as she would have with a foal of her own. It was a might strange teaching a mare like it was a foal, but, she remembered, only a short time ago this mare was some strange critter from a scary, dangerous world. Cornflower reckoned that it couldn't be easy to try to become a proper, normal pony after that, and she wouldn't have it said of her that Cornflower Provender lacked pity for them that were worse off.
She had the befuddled mare up and trotting around the kitchen by the middle of the first day. Cornflower, Missus Provender, reckoned that all foals are born with the knowledge of how to stand and walk, so this newfoal couldn't be all that different. It just took a little time and encouragement for any young'n to get their hooves on the ground.
The mare seemed happy to clop around the lower floor of the farmhouse, but there was no getting her up the stairs yet. Missus Provender resigned herself to having a makeshift bed in the kitchen for awhile, so she laid out another comforter and brought down a pillow from the guest room. When she got downstairs with the pillow, she was pleased to see the newfoal trying to straighten the impromptu bed as best she could. She was a bit clumsy, but there was no doubt she wanted to help. That was a good sign.
Illustration by Shai-hulud_16
Missus Provender tried to get the mare to go outside before the Princess lowered the sun, but again her guest balked at the stairs out, as well as the ice and snow. It made sense, if indoor stairs were too difficult for the newfoal, then slippery outdoor stairs would be even more intimidating. Cornflower felt foolish then, it should have been obvious. Just gettin' old I guess, she thought to herself.
The newfoal was clearly interested in the world outside though, and stood at the door staring at the farm, and the hills behind, sniffing the cold air for all she was worth. It was as if she had never seen a farm before. This was getting the room cold, though, so Cornflower nudged her in the flank, moving her back into the kitchen, so she could close the door.
The mare followed her everywhere, staring intently at whatever she did as if it were the most amazing thing in the world. While she set about her chores for the day, Cornflower constantly talked to the mare, hoping some words might stick. Also, she had to admit, it was kinda nice to have someone about the place during the day, while Mister Provender was out tending to the livestock. It reminded her of the days when her daughters were still home, days filled with laughter and an endless series of fusses and messes, which in retrospect, she missed a lot more than she ever reckoned she would.
The newfoal mare tried to talk back to her, using whatever language they speak in strange critter land, but none of her new guest's words meant anything to her. Missus Provender went about her tasks, the two of them close and chattering to each other in different languages. It was a might silly, Cornflower felt.
In the early afternoon, Cornflower liked to have a cup of tea. She had Durum get her tea whenever he went into Withers, and she was cross if he should forget. She decided to see if newfoals liked tea, and so set out cups for them both.
The newfoal had some trouble at first, perching on a hay-bale seat by the table, but soon she was sitting nicely enough. She seemed both fascinated and troubled by the teacup Cornflower put down in front of her. When the newfoal put her hooves up on the table, clearly trying to pinch the cup between them, Cornflower stopped her, and motioned for her to put her hooves back down. This seemed to further confuse the poor creature, and for a moment it seemed as if she was going to cry. Cornflower couldn't make any sense of this. Maybe human critters ate with their hooves or something.
While the tea was steeping, the newfoal was going on in her peculiar language. She seemed excited by the teapot, by the cups, and by the situation. It seemed to Cornflower as if the newfoal was familiar with it all, somehow. She had heard that the world the newfoals came from was somehow linked to Equestria, perhaps they had tea there. If they had tea, then they couldn't be all bad, she decided.
The newfoal was trying to lift the cup by the handle. She had learned not to use her hooves on the table, and had seen Cornflower bring the tea things to the table in her teeth. The newfoal had grasped the handle of the teacup in her mouth with some effort and was lifting it. It was a good thing there was no tea in the cup, because if there had been, it would have been all over the table by now. Cornflower figured she had better show the mare how to properly use a cup.
Cornflower caught the mare's attention and said "That's a teacup. Teacup. Let me show ya how to use it." Cornflower lowered her head, and lifted her upper lip in an exaggerated way to show the newfoal how she used her teeth. She clamped the lip of the cup between her upper and lower jaw, then lifted it up. She held it a spell, and even shook her head a twitch to show that she had the cup held firmly. Next she tilted her head back a might, and made a slurping sound with her lips. Finally she lowered the cup to the table and set it down.
The newfoal mare looked at her own cup, then at Cornflower, and appeared to be considering. She duplicated the behavior Cornflower had demonstrated to her. Then she set her own cup down. It wobbled and fell over, so she nibbled at it until it stood upright again.
"Teacup. Tea-cup." Missus Provender intoned. "Go ahead, you try it. Say Teacup."
Suddenly the mare blurted out, in perfect Equestrian "TEACUP!".
"Yes!" It was her newfoal's first word, and Missus Provender could not be prouder "Yes! Teacup! That's right. Teacup! Very good!" It felt like she had a daughter at home again. Warm memories filled her mind.
The newfoal seemed very proud of herself. "Teacup!" she repeated, and put a hoof to her chest "Teacup!" Then she added a string of words from her own language that made no sense. Next she pointed at Cornflower and surprised her by saying "Cornflower!"
"I guess you've been payin' more attention than I gave ya credit for." Cornflower was happily surprised. She used a hoof to gesture at herself "Cornflower!" Then she pointed her hoof at the newfoal.
The mare responded "Teacup!"
"No, I wanted your name. Your name, honeycake." Cornflower gestured again "I'm Cornflower, and you're..."
"Teacup!" The mare pointed at Missus Provender "Cornflower!" Then she pointed at the tea cup in front of her and said a word in her own language. After that she rattled on a bit, nothing of which made any sense at all.
"Oh dear." Missus Provender poured tea into the two cups. "I guess we'll just call you 'Teacup' then. Here, have some tea, Teacup."
Teacup looked down at the tea and called it something in her own language. "Cornflower?" Teacup was now staring intently at Missus Provender with a glad expression on her muzzle "Teacup...." She paused a moment, and then hugged her front hooves to her chest "...Cornflower." The newfoal looked grateful, that was the only word for it.
"You're welcome, honeycake." Cornflower sipped her tea.
There was a bit of a mess, but in the end Teacup managed to get some tea down her, and likely had learned how to use cups in the process. As Missus Provender cleaned up afterwards, Teacup looked a might embarrassed. There had been various assorted spills, and one time the newfoal nearly broke her cup when it dropped as she was setting it down. Messes and fusses. "It's OK, Teacup. Shucks, ain't nothin' I haven't dealt with before!" Memories of her daughters flooded back.
Although she wasn't about to fully admit it, maybe having an untrained, refugee newfoal on her farm wasn't such a burden after all. Cornflower hadn't had such a fun day in many a year.
♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
Snow fell outside the multi-paned windows of the kitchen. It was obviously a kitchen of some kind, food was prepared there. Tikvah had never seen one made entirely of wood before, and such wood as well! If she had to be a pony, well, this was not so bad. The comforter was warm and soft under her belly, and the nice lady had tucked her in, as she had the previous night, and given her a nuzzle before going upstairs.
Tikvah couldn't help but think of the light gray mare as a nice old lady. That's who she was in her mind. A world of talking ponies, and now she, Tikvah Feinstein, was one of them. She wondered if the human world was truly gone. Had Zero Point already happened? It must have, by now. All of human history, the entirety of the planet earth, swept away like so much dust.
Then again, she thought, maybe it was for the best.
Tikvah had been living, when she was human, in Wilmington, Jersey. Just a ride from Newark, faster if you took the maglev. She had worked as a nanofabricator in the huge plant they had opened - she was one of the lucky 2% in the North American Alliance that had a job at all. After all, 98% unemployment was the norm, but she didn't feel special, just fortunate. She had known somebody that knew somebody. That's how it worked. That's how it always worked.
It was a pretty crappy job, really, but Tikvah was beyond grateful to have it. She took the maglev to work, even though the plant was only a few miles away, because it was safer. It cost a lot to ride the maglev, but that was better than being slashed open and harvested for organs. A lot of that had been happening on the regular routes, but so far the organ thieves hadn't dared the high security of the maglev.
It was nicer, too. The maglev cars were in disrepair, like everything else, but the seats still had covers on them, and that was much better than riding on bare springs.
Nanofabrication was a tedious task. Every day, at the start of her 16 hour shift, a list of morphological parameters would be uploaded to her workstation, and she would begin sorting them into topological groups. Then she performed transforms on the data so that the quantum system could digest it more efficiently. When that was done, she moved to the fabrication center and checked the bins and tanks, topping them up as needed. She was one of only five people in the entire, vast building, each isolated in their own section.
Outside, the streets had been packed with an ocean of the destitute and the dying, makeshift shelters and the endless favela that encrusted the world like cardboard and sheet-metal barnacles. Nineteen billion humans lived on the earth, all but one tenth of one percent of them impoverished slaves working for the most minimal of wages, or simply surviving.
Tikvah felt fortunate to be a 'wage slave'. To say that was not facetious. Her contract, like all employment contracts, was so arranged that no matter what her pay rate, she would always fall deeper in debt to the corporation. Having work meant that she was restricted to purchases from her employing corporation, so all of her food, shelter and power had to come from Eastern Corporate. Fortunately, Eastcorp owned everything that existed in her sector of North America, so all it really meant was that she couldn't buy anything off the hypernet.
Tikvah had to be careful with loading the nanohoppers, because everything she worked with was perilous. She spent much of her day inside a sealed environment suit, but her actual task was pouring something grey into something a different shade of gray. A tear or rip in her thin suit, and it could mean two weeks quarantine without pay, and possible mutilation or death. Naturally, she tried to be careful, but failure to complete her tasks adequately was a firing offense, and of course the debt she was already in for having a job at all would be with her for life. Then, if she was lucky, she could hope for industrial prison, or if unlucky, she could return to the world-spanning favela, and the usual life of sickness and barely surviving.
Actually, her degrees in nanoscience weren't really elite enough to hope for industrial prison. So, it would be the slums if she was ever fired. She'd still have to pay back the corporation, even from there, or end up part of the mandatory organ donator selection pool. She wondered if she should have studied law, or finance, instead.
Her home was a living pod in the Union Park Megacomplex. She was lucky to have it, it was just within her budget. Two meters long by a full meter and a half tall and wide, she had space to stretch out, plus just enough room for a microfridge and her threevee tablet. She slept bent around these items, and she liked to imagine they were friends she was cuddling with. She felt so fortunate!
But the best part was the hatch. Each pod had its own locked hatch. The lock was a quantum lock, and could not be broken by anything short of the might of a corporate entity. Inside her pod, she was safe. She would never be raped again, never lose her other ear, never be beaten, never be hurt while she slept. Her living pod was more than a place to sleep, it was a fortress, a castle, and for the first time in her 34 years, Tikvah knew what it was to feel safe.
When Equestria first rose from the sea, Tikvah didn't really pay it much attention. Her work was demanding, and she only allowed herself a half an hour to surf the hypernet, just enough for half of an old show, before dropping some Noeticin for two hours of concentrated REM sleep. It simply wasn't part of her personal world.
She first discovered her world had changed irrevocably when she lost her job. It was a very strange situation, because not only was she discharged, but everyone at Eastcorp, at every division, everywhere in North America had been fired simultaneously. All debts were cancelled. No severance, no debt, no hope of prison, no nothing. Eastcorp was simply gone. The single, monolithic, unitary industry of the entire east coast had pulled out of North America. No person was employed anywhere in the North East Zone.
There was a cryptic explanation: Due to current events, all employment has been terminated without penalty.
She hadn't heard anything. As far as she knew, nothing was going on, the company had never mentioned anything in their employee bulletins. There had been no mention in the net shows she watched, then again she only watched reruns of old favorites, so there was that. She never bothered with newsfeeds, there was no point - there was nothing she could do about anything, hell, it was all she could do just to stay employed.
Her life had been so insular - pod, food dispenser, maglev, work, maglev, food dispenser, pod - that she had basically missed the last five years. On that last day, she finally met one of her co-workers at the nanofabrication facility, the woman shrieking about something as she ran past her, clearly outside of her normal workspace. Tikvah was lost, her world, her life, everything suddenly destroyed.
In five years the world had changed. With her robotic schedule gone, Tikvah wandered, in shock, away from the secure tunnels that led from work to maglev. For the first time in five years, she found herself above ground, and in her stunned state had forgotten to put on her Resperex breather to deal with the smog and ash.
There wasn't any.
The perpetual smog and ashfall that blackened Wilmington was simply... gone. The vast skyscrapers that towered over the ramshackle favela huts and constructions were as grimy and dark as always, but something impossible glowed behind them. A vast field of blue, a color Tikvah had not seen outside of images on the hypernet, filled the sky. It was the sky. The original sky, which she had read about in her childhood. The sky was supposed to be blue, somehow.
She was breathing easily. As easily as in her living pod, as easily as in her envirosuit. Her lungs almost stung from the raw freshness of the air. She couldn't take it in. It was impossible, insane. The sky was ...blue.
And that is the exact moment she saw her first pegasus, turquoise with a crimson mane, gliding overhead. It was followed by others, many others, and as she felt her sanity failing her, she whipped her head down and crouched low to the ground, hands on the side of her head, staring intently at the crusted plascreet walkway, as if somehow that patch of normality could bring her mind stability.
"Excuse me, are you alright?" The voice was eerily kind, as though it were genuinely concerned. It was a soft voice, high of pitch, and it wasn't asking for money, or demanding her kidneys. Somehow she managed to look up, her curiosity overcoming her fear. She couldn't take much more.
"Do you need help? I'll help you!" It was a peach-colored unicorn, wearing saddlebags and a Jersey Nets baseball cap.
12748 You're just obsessed with this song, aren't you?
Odd....I'd thought that Equestrian and English were one and the same.....
13076
MLP:Fim is shown in numerous countries on earth, and you can find dubs in German, Spanish, French, even Dutch out there. The product is not only for English speakers already. Which version is the 'true' version? The one we see first, of course. For the French, their version is the True one, and English is the bastard version of the show.
But that aside, consider the result of taking the Conversion Bureau premise as literally true, by suspending disbelief. In my version of the CB universe, I suggest that Equestria has had a constant background connection with Earth, and has been part of the great history of stories of fairylands that all cultures have. That said, Equestria would be its own universe, with its own culture.
One could, then, interpret the show version as a metaphoric deformation of what a 'real' Equestria would be. When we see a cultural reference from modern day earth in the MLP show, we can imagine that that is a translation from something uniquely Equestrian, like how jokes in anime have to be re-written, sometimes entirely, because there simply is no cultural equivalent between Japanese and English sometimes. Rainbow Dash may not be '20% cooler' ('cool' deriving from originally 1920's Black American subculture) but 'something something' that is unique to 'real' Equestrian culture and history. We hear the nearest English equivalent.
This is how I play my CB stories. I take the premise as literal reality, and run with it as such.
Now, all of that stated, I offer that maybe, just maybe, Equestrian language might contain elements of Old English, ancient French, and of course Latin, as well as possibly even more ancient earth languages, because of those possible brief contacts between the two universes that would have created our own history of fairy stories and tales of magical lands.
But more likely it is entirely unique, made up of the sounds that equines naturally make, or would make, if they had vocal cords and a Broca's area in their brains. Equestrian linguistics could be utterly alien. Probably would be, considering.
To me, that is the essence of good fantastic storytelling: take your premise, however impossible or bizarre as literal fact, and then work out what that truth must imply if it were actually real. I figure that if one does that well enough, the story kind of writes itself, it naturally progresses from the nature of the contrived reality.
13091
nice explanation, and since we are talking about small, talking equines, it makes sense that their language would be fundamentally different from any human language. still, this raises one question:
how did the unicorn talk to her?
13222
The unicorn was a newfoal, released to the street. Commonplace in the Conversion Bureau universe; many converted humans remain and do not immediately emigrate to Equestria. They continue their training at the Bureaus, usually in the same city in which they converted.
Almost all Conversion Bureau stories have the earth covered in the converted, the newfoals vastly outnumbering the remaining stock humans. This story takes place right at the end, when all the newfoals are called to Equestria for the final purge of the earth.
Doubtless that unicorn was a native of Jersey, formerly New Jersey, before the fall of the United States.
You did a really good job creating such a dark dystopia. I kinda wish a semi-expert in dystopia settings gave you a critique, but that's not likely and I can't really try myself.
sez:: "Remember kids, unregulated capitalism is a breeding ground for pure evil."
Oooh, another one. I like the fact you're playing with the idea that humans (the newfoal, in this case too) can't speak Equestrian. I'd like to know why (if you're going to address that at all and not just leave it as an intriguing plot-point) because that in itself could tell us a lot about the world.
I love it!
The bleak picture you paint of corporate employment in the post-collapse nanotech era is pretty incredible, especially seeing her internal thoughts about it. The way she saw her horrifying situation as *fortunate* really puts into perspective what things are like. Whether she's brainwashed by propaganda or if things really are that bad is difficult to tell but that's what makes it so fascinating.
Ah, and now (well, after the first half or so of the chapter, which was nice, sweet, happy, and the like but which didn't really spur any commentary from me) we're getting a bit from the newly-named Teacup's perspective.
"She spent much of her day inside a sealed environment suit, but her actual task was pouring something grey into something a different shade of gray."
Huh. Now that sounds like an easily automatable task. I wonder why management didn't do that?
"and the usual life of sickness and barely surviving"
Hm. I may have been using some inaccurate information as a base for the things I said in my last comment on the previous story. I keep thinking that I'm pessimistic about human nature, and then I'll find something that indicates I was being optimistic. Seriously, you're a world government with ridiculous resources; you can't spare even a tiny bit for the selfish purpose of making sure the global favela doesn't evolve some horrible plague?
…Yeah, and when "small-scale violence" is that common, the lack of war may not be much of a comfort.
Quite a bit of a shock, there at the end! :D
Is it just me, or is the world getting worse every time we look at it? I'm confused at how this fits together with the first stories, honestly; in the first story, things seemed to be pretty close to normal. People gamed and had fun, they had money to afford said games, and there was no mention of 99.9% poverty or 3 square meter homes or anything like that. And in the second story, the protagonist has time to learn all kinds of things, which seems incongruous with the world where those few with a job are in indentured servitude performing 16-hour days. This character's backstory seems to be set at around the same time as the other stories, after all. Is this some sort of localised problem, rather than the entire world being this way? It seems rather inconsistent with the world that's been built up so far, which seemed dystopian but nowhere near as bad as this. I'm hoping this gets addressed later on in the story/ies.
I'm thinking with the world this bad, the HLF becomes increasingly dumber. I mean, it's one thing to believe in the nobleness of humanity in 2014 Earth, but an entirely other thing to believe in it in TCB!Earth, given what a mess TCB!humanity has managed to make of everything. I imagine in a world like this, 99% of people would be jumping at the chance to become ponified immediately. I certainly would. What's there to look forward to as one of the unwashed masses, after all? That's a bit disappointing admittedly; the HLF seemed to have a great deal of potential for ambiguity. But then, this might be an unreliable narrator, so I'll just have to wait and see. In fact, it seems pretty canonical that the world isn't as bad as it's presented in this chapter, and in-universe consistency is something you seem to value highly, so I'm assuming that things aren't really as bad as our protagonist thinks, at least not everywhere in America.
Man, that sucks. What people don't realize about debt, is that at some point it is unethical to repay one. I imagine there's a lot of money into making sure this is true but, people don't realize that debt is an investment, and an investment is a calculated risk, a gamble. Nobody would throw the casino owner in chains until they paid back all the coins you put in the slot machine, and in actuality forcing someone to pay back a debt is just as crazy a notion. Not to say pressure can't be applied, but there is a limit, the point at which you have to admit that it's the investor's fault for loaning money to someone who wouldn't pay it back. People instead consider debt an absolute ultimatum, going well beyond that point, and absolving investors of their own bad decisions, or even their deliberately malicious decisions exploiting your baseless faith in debt repayment.
That's what the old housing bubble was about. People observed that the world had forgotten that sometimes collecting a debt is more unethical (or infeasible) than defaulting on it, so they convinced investors to make bad loans, since everyone assumed any debt would get paid back no matter what. Bankers laughed all the way to the bailout.
4866649
To a degree, it's the author getting used to the ideas she's presenting. I imagine the earlier stories didn't have as much thought put into them about what total ecological collapse would mean for a post scarcity society, so later ones will have more of that fridge horror packed into it. The notion of corporate towns on a global scale, where they use debt slaves to cover up their bad investments, probably isn't something you really think about until you try writing about this stuff, and then you already wrote a bunch of stuff.
Wow that has to be the worst job ever. I honestly think under those circumstances I'd take my chances with being unemployed, since at least in that state these corporate people seem to not give a shit about you. Then again this whole things like being neck deep in piss and having someone about to dump a pail of shit on you.
I tell you though I've often thought about what I'd do in this setting, but considering this I'd probably be among the first in line to be converted, cause seriously fuck this shit!
The turquoise pegasus, with the crimson mane... was that Rocket Racer?
I know it came after this fic by a long while, but it sounds like she basically was a Solaris from Warframe except with much less free time.
Tikvah's flashback is truly telling. So this was the world the HLF wanted to save?!
Good riddance.
And Missus Provender is continuing to be wonderful. She already loves Tikvah--Teacup--a little. I can tell.
From Tikvah to Teacup. As a strange little girl I once knew who was named after a butterfly said, "It works."
Hey! Is "tikvah" the Equestrian word for teacup?
Holy smoke!
Welcome to the apocalypse I guess, what did humanity do to go that many steps backwards? Even giant cooperations and politics care about the environment to some degree…
Talking about politcs, the government would never allow for 98% unemployment. After all, that’s 98% less tax income. Also, don’t get me started on the worker unions. They would sing those cooperations an orchestra of a song that would send them out of their fancy socks, the income straight trough rockbottom and the market into chaos!