Clementine Apple (née Orange) receives an extremely long-distance phone call. Equestria Girls-based content.
Now with a Spanish translation by Spaniard Kiwi!
Chapters (1)
Skywriter
Joined 17th Jan, 2012 ·
Offline
Also LikedSimilarAuthor
- Skywriter · 6k words · 390 7 · 4.7k views
- Skywriter · 11k words · 493 10 · 6.8k views
- PoweredByTea · 3.8k words · 394 4 · 4.9k views
- Skywriter · 1.1k words · 626 13 · 5.9k views
- Skywriter · 4.5k words · 628 5 · 9.3k views
- Skywriter · 44k words · 735 10 · 11k views
- Ponydora Prancypants · 7.8k words · 271 5 · 4.5k views
Featured In16
Short Stories5,074 stories ·548 members
Alicorn Applejack and Other Amazin' Apple Stories2,261 stories ·653 members
- Fics That I Think Are Really Good967 stories ·120 members
- bibliotheca metru172 stories ·5 members
I'm Gonna Rec It!1,155 stories ·112 members
- ssokolow's Recommendations1,270 stories ·65 members
Cryosite2,675 stories ·252 members
Pony Tales - FimFiction Edition (Stories That Have Been Turned Into Audiobooks By Scribbler)1,236 stories ·264 members
Join our SubscribeStar to remove these adverts!
Join our SubscribeStar to remove these adverts!
Stats
Page generated in 0.433 seconds
Total duration
885 users online
179,525 hits today, 2,139,894 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
Well...
This was different. Using telephones and the parallel universes to contact loved ones?
That's pretty clever. Or did she just do something with the mirror?
~Skeeter The Lurker
It took me all of three paragraphs to hold in my train of thought.
Well, it's fallen off the tracks, because this just broke my heart in so many ways.
Goddamn it, right in the feels. It's like dropping buttered toast with you, man. Right in the damn feels every time.
That was really pretty and quite clever, too. I liked it.
And remember, everyone, treasure the time you have with the ones you love, because they may already be dead in an alternate universe where you're a tiny, sapient horse.
...or something like that.
I hate to see what their phone bill will look like if Twilight reverses the phone charges.
I think there's a term for this... Dramatic Irony? I'm pretty sure it's something like that.
That was not what I expected at all.
Twilight, that was probably a bad idea. Talk about opening old wounds.
And then ... the twister struck!
But seriously, this is a phenomenally good idea and proof that good can come from Equestria Girls. It was touching with just the right amount of cutesy bits. Thank you!
In a farmhouse, near an orchard
Came a call on the landline
To a farmer, name of Cortland
And his missus, Clementine
Phone's a ringin', phone's a ringin'
Phone's a ringin', Clementine!
It's our daughter, on her cell phone,
That we bought her, on the line
And they listened while the caller
Said she loved the man and wife
Never knowin' that she'd lost them
In another world and life
Considering how I've just moved away from family and friends to strike it out on my own quite recently, this is striking quite the profound chord with me.
I don't think you meant to imply Applejack thinks these denizens of the EqG universe really ARE the souls who bore her or that she's speaking with the afterlife, but just the idea alone that you could have parents who are and aren't yours at once gives me food for thought, too. Excellent piece and deft delivery of character in such a constrained space, and I definitely appreciated how Applejack's call didn't rock her parents' world substantially other than a simple confirmation that she's moving on with her life.
That took a turn that I was not expecting, nor was I ready for.
This was a good story, friend.
Babysitter's castle. Good recovery, Twilight.
As usual, your prose is disgustingly vivid, imaginative, precise, and focused.
I'm gettin' misty eyed over here.
Oh my, this was a fantastic little tale. One of the best EqG crossovers I've seen.
This was a grand, clever idea... Warm, touching, funny, and a great merging of continuity and character with an inventive concept. Great stuff!
On an aside, I do wonder if human AJ will put it together if she hears that she mysteriously called home and her mother talked to her friend Twilight.
Ow. Okay, you hit me in the feels so hard I'm coughing up blood.
3603622
Realistically? Not much. It's obviously an experimental setup that interfaces with the EQG phone network, not some kind of inter-universal phone company with massive charges. The Equestrian side and the universe-crossing are free. It's going through the mirror portal, so the interface with the EQG phone network will probably be near Canterlot High. Therefore, it would cost as much as a collect call from Canterlot High.
...
I upvoted this from 27 to 37. My upthumbs are as the upthumbs of ten men, because my heart is pure!
3604034
You underestimate the power of the dark side (aka phone company billing).
Sky. Stop. Stop making me have feels from Equestria Girls. I wanted to live in safe, comfortable nerd rage, and pretend every possible thing about it sucked.
First you singlehandedly redeem Cadence, and now this? It's like you want me to enjoy the show or something.
3604034
I could only do two. I think I might've done three had I not drunk the whiskey I bought my Dad for Christmas.
3604154
You underestimate Twilight's abilities as a phreaker.
3604367
Somehow I don't think Twi's using the Blue Box or the Captain Crunch whistle, so we shall see.
Wow, wasn't expecting that. Ow, my heart...
Very nice.
On the critical side, you missed a couple spots of grammar here and there, and I'm not quite sure how I feel about the decision to stick it in an EqG frame story. It takes a lot of punch out of the emotional core, but not everything needs to be full-bore feels-heavy and action-packed. This lets you do a bit of nice world-building and sets up a couple nice laugh-lines that you probably couldn't pull off otherwise: the one 3603803 mentioned below and "we… decided to pick up our cellular telephones in our hands and give you a call". But part of me really does wish we'd gotten to see the fullness of what this did to AJ, not just the snippets available to us through the phone.
Part of me. Though the more I think about it, the more I think you did make the stronger choice here, to play the scene in a lower key. It has more nuance, and I like the early ambiance, especially the paragraph detailing Clementine and Cortland's dinner menu. Some very nice detail in that.
In any case, this is good stuff. I think I'm going to have to toss it in my favorites list, for the sheer fact that it's some high quality Apple pathos from concentrate, and I'm confident I'll want to come back and read it more than once.
Poor, poor Applejack.
3604034
If she didn't bring a phone back with her and hasn't been back through the portal to set up equipment, I figure she's (ab)using someone's autopatch. Assuming there's one in range, it'd be a lot easier than talking with the cellular network.
Do Equestria and the Crystal Empire count as separate countries for DXCC? Do ponies have WAC (worked all castles)? Who handles QSO cards for Twilight?
3603704
Sometimes, you have to open old wounds to make sure they finally heal true.
Well, this is definitely one of the better stories involving AJ and her parents. Possibly the best I have read. Jeez Skywriter, stop making everyone else look bad.
(Please don't stop)
3605661 Though the more I think about it, the more I think you did make the stronger choice here, to play the scene in a lower key. It has more nuance, and I like the early ambiance, especially the paragraph detailing Clementine and Cortland's dinner menu.
It's the same choice I made in Long Distance, where Twilight makes a phone call to try to reconnect with Ponyville, but the story instead shows the mayor at the other end.
3606954
Hmm. Generally true, though I think it adds to the pathos more in "Long Distance". The Mayor is completely unreceptive to Twilight, whereas here Clementine is just less receptive. They're both about one-sided phone calls, yes, and they're both told from the perspective of the less involved party, but I think the choice leads to a stronger result where you make it and a more subtle one here. This winds up feeling more atmospheric and "Long Distance" more hollow, I think, and each serves its story well.
3606954
The similarity to your quite excellent earlier work did not, of course, escape me.
A strange EqG/FiM crossover. I wonder how long AJ had to badger Twilight to do this, after all, crossing over the dimensional boundaries, even only just a communications signal, is taking a big risk.
That said... it is obvious that Applejack had something that she desperately needed to say.
3607306
Are you kidding? This is Twilight we're talking about.
Ouch, my heart! My feels riddled heart!
3607361
Though A.J. says that Twilight was "right" when she said it was a bad idea, suggesting she campaigned against it, I can't imagine that there wasn't a lot of this going on as well. And the resulting argument was probably all the more tepid for it.
3608757
Well, once she'd established proof-of-concept sure, she realized it was a bad idea. But by then the phone was already built, so they might as well...
I read this right after I read Home, and oh god my heart.
My reaction in a nutshell:
"Wait, what? What's going on, I don't- oh? Oh! Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh!"
You can tell it's a good story when realizing what's going on makes you feel smart.
Skywriter, I've got to stop reading your stuff. I never regret it, but I'm also deep in thought when I finish. I try to use FIMFiction to relax!
3610259
Perhaps my next story will consist solely of a verbal description of tranquil music and ocean waves and stuff like that. In any case, glad that you didn't regret reading!
Damnit Skywriter, now my feels are all over the place....
I gotta get a broom
"Maudlin"? "Imbibing"? Where do you find these words.
I was, I will admit, thoroughly confused the first time through despite the warning of Equestria girls content. It took me a quite to twig that Clementine was the human version. I guess AJ's parents are alive in Equestria girls? I ended up entertaining all sort of theories culminating on the idea the this was the past and Twi had set up a phone call to the past. Got more of the humour on the second reading, including the "Er… that is to say, we… decided to pick up our cellular telephones in our hands and give you a call, Mrs. Apple", which made me smile. Twi, you're really not the best liar.
You know, I bet that's what most ponyfic reads like if it were actually read by ponies. I often specify that ponies pick things up "with their hooves" because I like to keep the fact that I am writing are ponies present in the narrative.
Speaking of language...
I like the way Applejack does not use the word "beef". It stands to reason that Equestrian would not have the diverse names of the meat of animals like mutton, beef, and ham. I wonder if she knows what a "hamburger casserole" is. Fun historical fact: in English, the meat names, as opposed to the names of the actual animals, tend to be French derived as a rule because after the Normal invasion of 1066 the French nobility were in charge an, presumably, were more concerned with eating the meat than farming it, a job which fell to the Anglo Saxon farmers.
Tangents. Today I am all about the tangents.
3612373
I worried about that problem. I tried to drop as many hints as I could but I worried about overcorrecting in a "flashing neon sign" fashion, so maybe not enough?
3612575
It's probably fine, you can't expect everyone to get everything first time without dropping expositional anvils all over the place. I did figure it out before the end, and I know next to nothing about Equestria Girls other than it's humanised, Spike is a dog, and there is a Sunset [1] in there.
[1] I wanted that name for something, damn it. Now it's tainted.
3612575
It wasn't hard for me. I think it was clear that AJ's parents were her human parents. It took a moment to catch that AJ was pony AJ, but really not long.
3613426
Thanks for the input!
Deciding to read this was one of those infinity times zero situations. Oooh, new story from Skywriter! Ew, human tag? EQG!? But... it's from Skywriter!
Obviously, the only choice was to read it.
While if I had received such a call (without any knowledge of it's source) my eyebrows would probably have been raised significantly farther than Clementine's seem to have been, especially for lines like "your breath warm on my withers.", but the emotional significance of what's going on here is... impressive. It's surprisingly effective, in fact. Despite the fact that her mirror universe parents aren't actually her parents, it's fairly believable that they're close enough that this conversation could actually happen, and have the impact that it does.
Much as I resent the reminder that this bizarro world is actually canonical, it's existence does put a lot of multiverse fics on far more stable ground than they would be without. After all, if there's one mirror universe with uncannily similar relationships in it, then there could very well be others. Maybe the mirror goes more places than just Canterlot High if you set it up right, like that multiverse mirror thing from Stargate.
Also I'll have to agree with Bradel in that I think this point of view is the right one. I tend to prefer subtlety to the neon sign approach, as the former can add to immersion by making me think about the setting, and my own conclusions are more likely to pull on the heartstrings, whereas the latter can damage it by making me think about the writing.
Sooo, well done. You made me read about EQG, and you made me like it. What can't you do?
3614887
I'm terrible at scruffing cats, for one thing. There's this mystical kung fu five-finger death punch thing that you are supposed to be able to do to immobilize a cat by seizing just the right spot on its neck, and... yeah. Never works.
Also, I'm really bad at cooking eggs.
Anyhow, glad you liked!
Nice. I really liked this one Shy.
I know the feeling of having missing loved ones and ones that you can only talk to over static filled phonelines.
Excuse me, I need to call my mom.
Really liked how well worded everything was. Some months back I would certainly be completely destroyed by it, but in any case it was great.