Fellowship is Madness

by Imperator Chiashi Zane

Tales of the Cutie

“Why is none of this working! How come we can’t get our Cutie Marks?” Apple Bloom scowled at the list of attempts on the wall of the clubhouse, covered in black lines crossing out suggestion after suggestion.

Sweetie Belle lifted her head out of the tub they had set in the middle of the floor, pulling on a clump of sap stuck in her mane. Again, “Oww. Cuuper, can you get this chunk?”

The Griffon dug his talons into the purple and pink mane, and started dragging them through carefully, gripping with one side, and pulling with the other. The sap slid out slowly, bit by bit, “I’m guessing we need to try things that relate to our talents, not just throwing ourselves at everything we see.”

Scootaloo spat out a chunk of Rumble’s mane, and started rubbing at the sap in it, “We’ve gone through a dozen bottles of shampoo in a week. Maybe we should start asking the other ponies in town how they got theirs. Get some new ideas,” she gritted her teeth and jerked a stubborn hunk of sap out of Rumble’s hair, “Or we can try my brilliant plan.” Her hoof absently pointed to the last suggestion on the list, and the only one not crossed out. Cannon-fired ponies.

A chorus of “No!” rang out through the treehouse, if muffled slightly by the water and suds, followed by Strawberry Punch popping her head up out of the water, “I think we should start with family. They’ll probably be more open about their stories.”

This time the chorus was unanimous in the affirmative.
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“So, y’all want to hear how I got my Cutie Mark then?” Applejack looked at the assembled fillies and colts, “Well, shoot, Ah was barely older than y’all.”
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Iron Hoof looked at the Destiny Knights, and shook his head, “I didn’t have it when I went into the service. I thought maybe by getting out to see the world, my mark would show itself.”

”On your knees MAGGOTS! Give me eighty!” The white Unicorn stallion towering over Iron Hoof stomped on the dirt in front of him, “I want to see your eyeballs sweat!”

Iron growled under his breath, but said nothing, even as the commander stepped up to a small filly, barely old enough to convincingly lie about her age, “Give me real pushups, or get off my field!”

“She was too stubborn to give up there, or ever really, but she couldn’t keep up in combat training.”

”Block! Block the strike!” The drill sergeant was swinging his pugil stick faster and faster, striking the filly’s failing defenses, when the staff stopped abruptly.

“What’s this now,” he looked down at the grey colt gripping the pugil stick in his teeth, “It’s supposed to be one-on-one, maggot eight. Where is your partner?”

Iron rolled the stick in his teeth, “Right in front of me.” The staff floated away from his mouth and landed on the ground.

“I believe I gave you explicit orders to stand in line with Maggot Four. And wait your turn!”

“I believe you were beating on a defenseless filly. AFTER she begged you to stop!” he pointed at the filly on the ground, “First time she EVER gave up, and you didn’t let her. LOOK!” He stepped aside, and pointed.

“Ultimately, she wound up with only a broken arm, and by the time the news came back, I realized that my Cutie Mark had appeared, representing my need to get between other ponies and harm. And she wound up third in our class,” he smiled at the memory, “But that probably won’t work for you, since you can’t actually join the Guard until you’re at least sixteen.”

Dejected sighs filled the air, but one spoke up, “In the Empire, we’re required to join the home guard at six. Training includes thirty-six months of out-of-country training, to ensure we know…Uh…Um…About the cultures around the world.”

“Yes, I trained with a Griffon during his own. It was interesting.”
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“Are you girls still obsessing over your Cutie Marks?” Rarity smiled at the Knights, “I know how you feel. For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t have mine. It all came to a head one day after I was recruited to make the costumes for the school play…”
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“Hey, it’s not so bad. Sometimes it just appears. Like my Cutie Mark,” Kajiik tapped a rune carved into his bracer, one that matched his Cutie Mark, “It was the greatest day of my life, the day I met Princess Celestia for the first time.”

The day was clear, nothing but blue skies over Canterlot. Kajiik stood in the middle of the room, ready to take his entrance exam’s practical portion. If he passed this part, he was basically guaranteed a position in the class, regardless of how he did on the written portion. Which was good, because his mouthwriting was awful, at least in Equestrian script. His Zebrican was much better, but none of the proctors could understand it, so he had to do everything in Equestrian.

Luckily runes were universal, a language that had been passed down by magic users since the beginning of writing. He withdrew a piece of chalk from the box the proctors had provided him with, ensuring that he was required to use his own energy to fuel the spell matrix, rather than any in the chalk.

Five different overlapping runes made up the first part, a simple shielding matrix. The second part held eight runes, wrapped in a circle around the first, the basic encryption template that would light up the outermost layer. Twelve runes in an overlapping circle pattern that would force his energy into the encryption template, then into the shield.

With a flourish, he rolled the last line of the final rune in. His eyes lit up, and the proctors leaned eagerly forward. The inner circle went brilliantly bright white, and the room lit up before a circle of the room vanished entirely in a sphere of destruction that blasted everypony in the room out onto the grass. As the spots faded from his vision, Kajiik spotted the circle he had drawn, sitting in the middle of the hole where the explosion had hit. Perfectly intact, even if none of the rest of the room was. The radius had been exactly enough to encompass the runes, and barely beyond that, so it hadn’t cut off it’s own energy flow. But what had exploded exactly?

“What did I do wrong? Oh no…I failed, didn’t I?”

Princess Celestia shrugged off a piece of roofing and trotted over to the circle, “Looks good to me. Mostly. It looks like you forgot to put in a regulator between the supply runes and the encryption matrix. Remember that next time, and you’ll make a fine student.”

“But I failed. I blew up the room.”

The princess sighed, “You are only six years old. I wouldn’t expect you to know everything about regulation. I also didn’t expect you to need it. You have much more power than I expected.”

“And she recruited me as her student that day. It wasn’t until I got home that I found my Cutie Mark.”
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Fleethoof shook her head, “It’s a long, and very boring tale, really. You see, I grew up on a cloud plantation just south of Cloudsdale.”

Fleethoof gazed out across the plain of clouds. Fifteen acres across, and almost five miles deep, the top surface was wispy, and they got darker as a pony went further through the layers. Her brother was already trotting across the clouds, towing a special plow designed to shave layers of cloud for seeding. In a few months, those clouds would be ready for shipment to wherever in Equestria needed them.
She had a different job today though. A thin wooden rod with nails protruding from the shaft went on either side of her saddle, and started pulling on her as she glided through the wispy upper layers, harvesting them for shipment to Manehattan tomorrow. It was boring work, mind-numbing, and boring. It only took a few minutes to do, anyway. Afterwards, her parents allowed her to go into town, to hang out at the park.

The park. What a joke. That was where all the jerks hung out. She hated it, but her allowance wasn’t until next week. That meant no movie. Belatedly, she sat outside the theater, watching ponies come and go, and trying to figure out what movie to go to after she had some money. This part of the city wasn’t the best part for a filly to be hanging around though, and she noticed a cutpurse slipping around several groups of ponies, then wandering casually away.

That wasn’t right. She tucked beneath the cloud layer of the street and crawled over to the alley where the cutpurse was counting his prizes. Her own hooves moved quickly, swiping one of the bags sitting on the clouds.

“He never noticed me, even as I slipped past him with two bags. I pocketed one, you know, for later, but the first one I swiped had a name on it. I slipped up behind the crowd and called out the name…”

The stallion that responded was one of the Wonderbolts, though he was in his civilian attire. He checked the small bag, and counted out several coins, which he hoofed over to the filly, “Here you go, kiddo. Go see a movie or something, on me. Thanks.”

Almost as soon as the crowd turned away, she felt a tingling on her haunches and looked back. Beneath her skirt, she spotted a new pattern on her fur.

“And that was how my Cutie Mark appeared,” She smiled at them, “Is that all you wanted to know?”

“Almost. Do you know where Hammer is?” Cuuper responded as the other Knights nodded in agreement.

“No, but Blueberry might know.”
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“Blueberry, do you know where Hammer is?” Sweetie Belle put on her most information extracting smile as the words rolled past her lips.
Blueberry sighed, “This is about your Cutie Marks, isn’t it? You’ve been asking everypony around. But you haven’t gotten to ask a Thestral yet. Is that it?”

“Yes,” Scootaloo responded guiltily, “We just want to get all of the information we can so we can find our own.”

“Well, maybe I should add my story too. It’s not like the others, you know.”

Strawberry smiled. She never tired of hearing Changeling stories about Cutie Marks, mostly because a Changeling’s mark was never related to their true talent as an infiltrator, but rather to their secondary talent.

“Well, it all started when I was a filly. I travelled to Detrot for an education in civil sciences.”

”So, I’m supposed to find this hotel on my own. In Detrot. By myself. While disguised as a harmless Pegasus filly. Thank you very much mom,” the purple Pegasus filly trotted off the train, muttering to herself. Detrot was a large city, the main production center for autocarriages and locomotives. It was also home to a number of gangs.

The ‘Civil Sciences Studies’ document was more or less a lie. It was meant to get her around any searches, along with the nearly empty backpack that held only a notebook, a quill, and an inkpot. Really, she was here to practice her infiltration skills, to sneak into a group of criminals and bring back information without being caught.

She was watched closely by a taller green Unicorn, a stallion who had passed his own infiltration test years before. He was actually her older brother, but that was a secret, as secret as she was supposed to be here. He had helped plan the entire processes. Detrot was a Changeling hive itself, run by Lord Silvertongue Skunktail, Prince of the Skunktail hive, and the fifth generation of career criminals. He knew exactly what to expect, and where his sister would be challenged.

“So I wound up visiting several key locations in the city, and smiled at the right ponies, and pretended that I wasn’t scared.”

It took her almost two weeks to investigate the entirety of the gang, but something about it never sat right with her. “I want to go back to my farm, honestly. I don’t belong here, among you. As nice as you ponies have been to me, helping me survive out here on my own, I really would be happier back home. I promise I won’t tell anypony anything I’ve seen here.”

“Thank you for your honesty, miss d’Jar’k. We will send you home on the next train, and this whole incident will be forgotten.”

Her jaw dropped, “I’m afraid I don’t understand. Who is d’Jar’k?”

The Don, a broad winged Griffon, shook his wings into the air, and black flames licked at the feathers, racing down to his back, revealing crimson red wing surfaces. A black shell with two white stripes appeared behind the flames as they licked across his body, consuming the white striped fur across his back, “My name is S’Tol’k, dear niece. You did an excellent job of blending in. If we hadn’t been watching you from the time you stepped on the train, we would not have been able to tell it was you.”

“But that’s not my name. I’m not a Changeling.” A scowl, and the Don’s horn lit up. Everypony in the room flickered, including Blueberry, revealing themselves as Changelings. “Well fuck. I forgot about that spell.”

“Language, filly. Your brother is here to take you back home whenever you’re ready.”

“My cutie mark appeared the day I decided to come back, and Raspberry came out to pick me up.”