At the Inn of the Prancing Pony

by McPoodle

Chapter 15: Everypony Should Believe in Something

At the Inn of the Prancing Pony

Chapter 15: Everypony Should Believe in Something

---

The next morning, Midnight and Hope, their relations radically altered since the previous morning, made their way to the communal mess hall, and paid far too much for a couple of lumps of greasy slop.

They then joined a group of mostly enthusiastic ponies waiting in front of a wooden placard which had an outline of the Castle of the Two Sisters drawn upon it in charcoal. It had been stapled in front of an old wanted poster.

The chief exception to the “mostly enthusiastic” rule consisted of a middle-aged gray earth pony stallion, of greater than average girth that was barely contained behind a faded gray coat and shirt front. The end of his muzzle was red and rounder than that of an average stallion. He was wearing spectacles and a straw hat, carried a bamboo cane, and had apparently forgotten to shave the stubble off his face that morning. The scowl upon his face looked to be perpetual, or perhaps caused by him being dragged here at such a relatively early hour by his wife, an equally large brown earth pony mare in a plain red dress.

“Where in Equestria is that tour guide?” she asked loudly to anypony willing to answer.

“Probably fortifying himself to face the masses,” answered the husband, his back to her. From his coat he pulled a long corked bottle full of a clear liquid. From his pocket he removed a corkscrew, and in a matter of seconds he had started drinking from it.

His wife, seeing this, promptly snatched bottle and corkscrew away from him. “Water Cooler!” she exclaimed. “Show some self-control!”

“I exercise extreme self-control, my little turtledove!” the stallion protested. “I never drink anything stronger than a salty dog before breakfast.”

“Now you behave yourself,” the wife warned, “while I go off to do some important business.” She then went off to exchange gossip with a bunch of other mares.

“I swear that mare would drop dead of apoplexy if she ever contracted laryngitis,” the stallion observed. Then he produced another bottle and corkscrew. “Everypony should believe in something,” he said to nopony in particular. “I believe I shall have another drink.”

Celestia, highly amused by all of this, decided to continue to observe the gray stallion.

After a few moments of leaning back and forth on his cane, the stallion surreptitiously used it to lift the placard and look at the wanted poster underneath. This turned out to be none other than the same poster that Prince Blueblood had prepared for Midnight. The stallion gave a double-take as he compared the poster to the dark unicorn standing obliviously right next to him.

Hope nudged Midnight and pointed.

Midnight face-hooved.

The gray stallion snickered, and let the placard fall back on top of the poster. “Fifty bits?” he asked himself. “I wouldn’t sell out my mother-in-law for fifty bits! Now a hundred, on the other hoof...”

Not too far away were a pair of unicorns, mother and daughter, with matching mint green coats and light blue frilly dresses. The mother was attempting to keep up with the perpetual stream of gossip pouring out of the brown earth pony’s mouth.

“Are we going to the castle?” the filly asked her mother. As she said this, she kept pronking up and down on her hooves.

“Yes, Dear,” the mother answered patiently, only half-listening.

“When are we leaving?” the filly asked.

“Soon.”

“How soon?”

The mother sighed. “Soon.”

Not getting the answer she wanted, the filly turned to a nearby white pegasus. She was listening politely to the gossip, but at a safe distance so that nopony would accidentally notice her. “Hey! Hey Miss!” the filly said, tapping the mare on one leg. “Do you know when we’re leaving for the castle?”

“Oh...I’m not really sure,” the mare said quietly, trying to retreat from her behind an oversized sun hat.

The filly found a third target, the gray stallion. “Do you know when we’re leaving, Mister?”

“Go away kid, you bother me,” the stallion growled at her.

“I’m not a goat, I’m a pony!” the filly enthusiastically corrected him.

The stallion went through the motions of adjusting his spectacles, and stepped back in mock surprise. “Well, so you are!” he exclaimed. “You sure bleat like a goat, though.”

“I like him!” Hope declared brightly to Midnight.

A unicorn stallion pushed his way through the crowd. “Excuse me, pardon me,” he said curtly, not really meaning the polite words he was saying. “Now then, is this the group for the morning Castle of the Two Sisters tour?”

Various members of the group nodded.

“Very good! I shall be your tour guide, Mr. Shine. Now, if we’ve collected my fee…”

Most of the adults in the crowd tried to act as if they had, in fact, already paid for the tour.

“I didn’t pay!” the filly loudly declared.

The earth pony stallion shook a hoof menacingly in the filly’s direction.

“Oh hush, Water Cooler!” urged the stallion’s brown earth pony wife, who had finally rejoined him. The first thing she had done was take away his bottle and corkscrew.

“I saw a wanted poster last night for a pony guilty of perjury, theft, and cheating at cards,” Water Cooler muttered under his breath. “But it said that he hated chatty fillies, so he couldn’t have been all bad.”

Meanwhile, the unicorn guide had produced a wooden cup, and went around collecting two bits from each of the tourists.

And then, finally, the group set out from Everhold.

# # #

The moment the group entered the castle, they felt the same oppressive effect that Midnight and Celestia felt a day earlier. The guide brushed it off as an “ancient protection spell—nothing to worry about.”

“Famous last words,” Water Cooler told the others with a wink.

The group spent less than five minutes in the library before the guide ushered them along into the “Gem Room”.

Said room was of course utterly devoid of any gems, but that didn’t stop Mr. Shine from spending nearly an hour pointing to every spot where a gem was, and describing its history and supposed fate in exhausting detail. The stream of words was so inexhaustible that not even the gray stallion could get a word in edgewise. By the time they finished, the feeling of being stared at had completely faded away. Celestia’s considered opinion was that the tour guide was just so boring that it exhausted even the infinite patience of the gods.

Water Cooler’s wife caught him using another bottle and corkscrew to while away the time, which she also confiscated. “I swear! They wouldn’t let you get away with this sort of thing in Rockville.”

“I spent a year in Rockville once,” Water Cooler lamented. “I think it was on a Maresday.”

Mr. Shine led the group into the next room, which contained the castle’s collection of Classical Era wall tapestries.

“Here we see a depiction of the frigid north!” the guide announced, hitting the tapestry dramatically with one hoof.

The tapestry toppled to the ground.

The guide looked down at it, nudging it nervously with one hoof.

“Again! Again!” cried the little unicorn filly.

“I remember visiting the frigid north once, selling toilet plungers to the ice ponies,” Water Cooler said, smoothly stepping into the role of replacement tour guide. “I lost all of my corkscrews.” He looked off in the distance as he contemplated the most horrible of fates: “I had to live on nothing but food and fresh water for days.”

“O...over here we have a Maretesian grid pattern,” Mr. Shine declared, walking over to another tapestry.

Most of the ponies stayed with Water Cooler.

Celestia and Midnight took this moment to sneak away. Celestia took a moment to look back at Water Cooler.

“Never give a sucker an even break,” he declared, expounding his philosophy of life. “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a foal about it.”

“I’m going to miss that stallion,” she said sadly as she walked away.

“Why?” asked an incredulous Midnight, walking beside her. “If he were in your government, he’d completely wreck it in less than a week!”

“Exactly,” she replied. “He’s the kind of pony I’d never possibly meet as myself. I love government, but after a few centuries, you need a little variety!”

# # #

Celestia entered the library, and looked around. “Alright, the books on rune magic are on the second floor,” she said. “Hopefully, the staircase in here is still sound, otherwise we’d have to navigate through a rather elaborate series of passages.” She pointed over at a spiral staircase, varnished in black. It looked a little lopsided.

“Well, if you fall you just...I don’t know, ascend in pixie dust? You go first. I’ll follow you up,” Midnight offered, turning to keep an back eye on the others to make sure they wouldn’t follow.

Celestia looked regretfully at her rump. “Very well,” she said, “although I’m undoubtedly the heavier of us two.” Cautiously, she put one hoof on the lowest step, and started climbing. The structure creaked a great deal, but didn’t actually change shape any further, which was a good sign. “Alright,” she finally said, leaning over a railing, “I made it up.”

Midnight wondered what was going through the god pony’s head. It was obvious which of the two of them was heavier. Perhaps she was just so used to being a towering alicorn. “Okay, coming on up.”

Midnight didn’t take the stairs slowly, she rather took the approach of walking up as though she had somewhere important to be, hoping that it would have collapsed under the earth pony it if it were intended to collapse at all.

The second floor of the library was quite obviously almost never visited. Numerous books had fallen out of the shelves and onto the floor, and piles of dust were simply everywhere. In one corner, under the bare sky, the books looked as if they had been magically bleached, having pale covers and, in the books that had fallen open on the floor, what appeared to be blank pages.

Luckily for Midnight, that was not the section that Celestia was leading her to. A row back from the balcony, she stopped and pointed. “They should be about halfway down that row, on both sides. Most of the books lean towards the artistic side, made by ponies that couldn’t even read runes. But I’m pretty sure there are a few useful works in there.”

“Excellent...you don’t wish to accompany me? I feel a bit odd rooting around in your library after all.”

Celestia raised a hoof, about to deliver a perfectly reasonable explanation of impossibly wide objects in impossibly small spaces. Her mouth opened, as she looked from one bookcase to the other. Then she looked down at herself. “Oh, alright,” she said, and walked into the narrow space, her eyes darting carefully from one wall to the next. “Let’s see...none of those yellow ones...oh, they look at lot different at this angle...this one, and maybe...no, this one, and these three over here.” She stopped with a brief look of confusion on her face at the fact that there were no books currently floating behind her. “Oh, right, no horn.” She began removing the books one by one with her hooves. “You know, as long as I was in completely unfamiliar places, I had no problem remembering my current breed, honest.”

“Well...if you need a horn to use I’ll lend you mine. That is what friends do, right?”

The soft statement would almost be ordinary for any less proud pony, and a cerulean glow wrapped around the books to carry them delicately at Hope’s side.

“Thank you,” Celestia replied with a wide smile. An instant later, her lips were pursed. “You didn’t see that,” she said. “I’m grateful, but you didn’t see that.”

“I didn’t see what?”

“I’ve got...agfflksml,” Celestia mumbled.

“What?”

“I’ve got a goofy looking smile, alright? Just another reason to be polite and restrained in public.”

Midnight shook her head incredulously. “Your smile is delightful...miraculous, even. Ohthislooksnice...” With a blush, she added a book she spied to the pile. “You really should do it more.”

“I had to be a lot more careful as a princess,” Celestia admitted. “Ponies had a habit of treating a stray barrel scratch as a sign of omniversal import.”

Midnight sighed, and lowered the pile of floating books to look Hope over again. “This still feels like I’m about to wake up from a mushroom fueled dream.”

Celestia’s eyes flicked around her, and she smiled, much more cautiously than last time. “My dreams are much crazier than this. Mushrooms or no mushrooms. I mean, nopony’s manes have even burst into flame yet. No, wait, Firefly. Maybe this is a dream.” She was trying really hard to not laugh.

“Oh no, if this is a dream, than I fear you may have some very repressed feelings for the Inn, being so focused on it. I mean really what god or goddess would be so obsessed with the cycle of adventure?”

Hope raised one eyebrow. The look would have been utterly devastating coming from an alicorn. Trying it on a pony taller than herself however...not so much. “Should I just put the books back?” she asked dryly.

“Nono, sorry...I should continue calling you Hope, yes? Not your majesty? I’ll call you whatever you want if you’re saving my flank from the mess I’ve found myself in.”

Midnight began carefully stacking the books into her bag.

Celestia shook her head. “Hope is fine. Using a title’s inevitably going to get awkward in public. And besides, I don’t exactly rule anything right now. Oh, and you won’t be able to take those books out of the library. It’s part of the enchantment that kept most of them from decaying from exposure to the elements.”

“Oh...right.”

After pulling them back out, Midnight sat down at a nearby desk and began flipping studiously through the first few, sorting them into neat piles with the organizational prowess of a true student. She did stay nearly entirely silent though.

Celestia spent the time strolling through the aisles, seeming to pick books to look at more for the color of their spines than their subject matter. “Heh, heh...okapi jokes,” she was heard to say to herself at one point.

“Here we go...Hope, come look at this.”

Midnight had separated two books from the rest, both heavier volumes full of detailed diagrams. They were opened to pages with specific circles and runes described in detail.

“This one here is designed to turn magical energy into...lightning? I think that’s what it says, the phrasing is a bit odd. But then this other one would try and siphon the energy back into a waiting font, being myself.” She looked up to Hope with a nervous smile. “So, shall I try to overflow myself with magical energy, or become a lightning rod?”

Celestia looked around at the other books. “Well, I wouldn’t recommend the lightning rune’s use around combustible materials, especially enchanted ones. The other one might be slightly safer, with the universal dispel on hoof.” Come to think of it, she thought, wasn’t the universal dispel invented by a Sparkle?

“Then I shall commit that one to memory and duplicate it,” declared Midnight. The unicorn set to painstakingly recreating the rune on a piece of parchment she had brought, using a well-loved quill and small vial of ink.

---

Celestia and Midnight managed to sneak back into the truncated tour group without their absence being detected. They were still in the Tapestry Room, after all. It was perhaps unsurprising then that Water Cooler’s group was nowhere in evidence. Celestia guessed that they were probably back in town, drinking.

Meanwhile, having spoken of the only two subjects he was at all interested in—gems and tapestries—Mr. Shine rushed the group through the rest of the rooms. (“Up there is the second floor. Nothing interesting ever happened there.”) Finally, a couple of hours before sunset, they returned to Everhold.

“Please,” the unicorn pleaded with them. “Don’t tell anypony what happened, or I’ll never get to give a tour again!”

The green filly, who had been forced to go with him instead of Water Cooler, put on a scowl of displeasure that was remarkably like the grey stallion’s. “I’m gonna tell!” she promised.

Celestia started to laugh, then quickly pulled Midnight aside right before they could be trampled by an armored party that entered the town right behind them.

“Hey!” bellowed the voice of Vaya Con Dios. “Where in the Seven Hells can I find a healer?!”

Walking close enough to the two mares to breathe on them if they only turned their heads, three of the four adventurers who had so impressed themselves into Celestia’s memory trod by in a seeming funeral procession: Swipe the Thief, Torchlit the Wizard, and Vaya Con Dios the Cleric. Held high above them by Vaya’s magic was a large woolen blanket, on which was supported the body of a large pony. By a process of elimination, this could be none other than the group’s leader, Soul Cleaver. There was something wrong with the way the body was resting on the blanket, with some large object up there that was rolling, back and forth, back and forth.

“I think I may be sick,” Celestia said.

“I don’t think a healer is going to fix what ails that pony,” Water Cooler remarked, walking by in the background.

“It’s an adventurer, I’ll bet his spirit is being welcomed into his own little paradise,” Midnight said with a dour smile. “May his journey and reception be swift...”

“And may they never discover that little Hope Springs is standing right behind them, for they have promised upon her a most righteous pounding,” Celestia added in a low voice, a smirk upon her lips. “Amen.” She still hadn’t forgiven Swipe for his sick little insinuations of what he would have done to her her if his fellow adventurers didn’t prefer her alive and sane.

“You’ve crossed a group of adventurers already? And they are still living?” Midnight asked as she led them down the path quite a ways behind the armed and armored group.

“If I still had my ‘smiting stick’, I’d still be on the throne,” Celestia quipped. “Let’s pick someplace as unposh as possible tonight, and hope they don’t decide to ‘slum it.’”

The unicorn sighed, looking around at the path they traveled through.

“This whole place gives me a sinking feeling of dread. I wonder if it was designed that way, or if it’s an effect of all those who die here.”

“Just desperation, sadly,” Celestia remarked, her steps slowing. “This is the last safe place that many of these ponies will ever...wait, I just have to know.” She turned around, and headed back into the crowd, returning before Midnight had even made up her mind to follow.

The earth pony had a dissatisfied frown on her face. “They must have been joking me when I asked the bystanders what sort of beast could have taken down their large—and very physically impressive—leader.”

“Oh?” Midnight simply asked.

“Yes. Dire’s just a name, so how bad could a mere bunny be?”

Midnight’s laughter carried them all the way to their inn.

Comments

[Gigh]

I hope W.C. sticks around for a bit. I'm not sure how many people will get the reference so you can mine that vein dry.

[Pilcrow]

That fellow's right to carry so many bottles. Without them he'd be forced to drink water, and one should never drink water. That's the stuff that rusts pipes.

[djthomp]

Nine paragraphs in and I already love Water Cooler.

“I had to live on nothing but food and fresh water for days.”

I'm grinning so hard at that comment my face hurts.

I have this strange hope that the story turns into "Celestia saves Equestria with the help of a tourist party".

[Commander_Pensword]

oh my...

Dire Bunny....

A dire.... the teeth, do you see the bones?

AHAHAHAHAHAHAH

Oh and water Cooler is awesome, I do not get any of the references he is saying but frankly I am enjoying it, and outright having a giddy time about this.

[Sunny]

Okay now I want an exhaustive list of what jokes Water Cooler made

I mean, a deadly killer rabbit with nasty sharp pointy teeth I get