When You Wish Upon a Station
Canterlot – Residential District – Lemon Hearts' Apartment
"Fuuuu... fuuu... fuuu..." Twinkleshine sat on a couch, breathing in and out of a paper bag. At last, the sweat dried from her brow... and she leaned back on the furniture with a prolonged sigh.
Lemon Hearts shuffled up, levitating a glass of lemonade. "Feeling better?"
Twinkleshine quietly nodded. "You know..." She took the glass from Lemon Hearts and sipped. "...I've been thinking. It's not my traumatized mind's fault that I'm getting so stressed over my second job." She blinked. "Retail just sucks."
"See?" Lemon Hearts smiled. "You're learning something new! And who said these regular therapy sessions weren't helpful?"
Twinkleshine took another sip of the glass and smiled delicately. "Thank you, Lemon Hearts. Seriously... for everything." She glanced up. "It's far more labor than we deserve to put you through."
Lemon Hearts shook a hoof. "Think nothing of it. You're my best... best buds." She leaned in to nuzzle the mare. "Seriously. I wish I had sisters as awesome as you."
"Heehee..." Twinkleshine giggled, sighing tenderly. "Without you and Shrinkenfurter, I just don't know where we'd be."
"Er... yeah..." Lemon Hearts' jaws clenched. "The doctor... sure is helpful, isn't he?"
"Like..." Twinkleshine squirmed. "...I shudder to think what condition I'd be in if it weren't for his sage advice... month after month after month after—"
"We'd probably be like Lyra!" rasped a voice from the other side of the apartment.
Lemon Hearts turned around, gazing at the kitchen table where a blue body was slumped. "How are you holding up, Minuette?"
"Huh? Me? Oh... just fine. Eh heh heh heh..." Minuette laid her fuzzy cheek down in a sea of doughnuts. "Just worried for Lyra, is all. Missing so many sessions..." She shivered. "...the poor girl must be needing a padded cell by now! Hee-hee-hee! Bouncy bouncyyyy!"
"Are..." Lemon Hearts grimaced slightly. "...are you going to eat any of the doughnuts, or...?"
"No thanks..." Minuette gulped, sweeping the pastries up in her arms and cuddling them to her face and neck. "...I'm good." She hummed off-key as her ears and eyes twitched.
Lemon Hearts fumbled for words...
"So... uh... Appleloosa!" Twinkleshine exclaimed. "Sounds like an adventure!"
Lemon Hearts spun around to face her. "Huh?" She coughed. "Oh. Right. Well..." The mare's eyes fell on a signed letter resting on the edge of the kitchen table. "Let's... just... t-take things one step at a time."
"But Hans says that's gonna help us, right?" Twinkleshine cocked her head aside. "A trip to a meditation center so we can more easily find our happy place?"
"Mrmmmmmf..." Minuette waved from a bed of powder and sprinkles. "Happy places are good! This is a fact!"
"I... know that he... uh... thinks that this is the best course to take." Lemon Hearts gulped. "But... happy places are one thing. The bits to make it all work is another..."
"I'll shovel whatever it takes," Minuette slurred. "Just to get the cockroach cricket ghosts out of my head..." She smiled crookedly, sweating. "Eh heh heh heh heh heh heh..."
"And I'm working two jobs!" Twinkleshine exclaimed. "I can more than handle it! Besides..." She smiled. "I'd be with my friends, right?"
"Yeah!" Minuette's head briefly arose. "Girl vacation! Woooooo." Fwomp! Chocolate flakes lifted and fell in a tiny cloud.
Lemon Hearts rubbed her head, sighing.
"Is... everything okay, Lemony?" Twinkleshine asked.
"Mmmmm..." The mare eventually nodded. "Just... gotta get some things together... gotta start planning."
"Lemon Hearts, this is for our therapy," Twinkleshine said.
"Yeah, Lemmy!" Minuette's voice echoed from the kitchen. "If it's a burden to go out to Appleloosa, you needn't go on our behalf."
"That's not the problem. Don't you understand?" Lemon Hearts leaned in close to Twinkleshine. "You girls are my life. I want to see you all receive the best care possible. It's just..." Her nostrils momentarily flared. "I have to deal with a few things first... some square pegs to shove through the round holes."
"Please..." Twinkleshine shuddered, triggered. "Don't mention 'holes'."
"S-sorry!" Lemon Hearts instantly winced. "Just... uh... relax here. You can both crash overnight, if you like."
Minuette lifted her powdered head, squinting at Lemon Hearts as she trotted briskly across the apartment. "Where you going?"
"I... uh... gotta head out of town and meet somepony," Lemon Hearts muttered, her voice scratching like angry gravel. "Nothing to worry about... though I may be back super late. Just... make yourselves at home. Twinkleshine? The bed's made. Minuette? Er... you know where the doughnuts are."
"Heeeeeeeeeee... boy do I." Fwomp!
"And if a panic attack sets in... remember... breathe slowly and count down from one hundred." Lemon Hearts threw on a saddlebag and left through the front door. "There's some advice for free."
The door slammed behind her.
Thud!
"I'm sorry, ma'am," a pony inside a ticket booth shook his head. "But the four o'clock train is the earliest one leaving that heads to Ponyville."
"I know. I know. You've said so a dozen times." Lyra Heartstrings nevertheless pressed herself up to the metal bars between them, smiling cheekily. "But I don't suppose you could... use your conductor powers to make it arrive faster? Squee?"
South Canterlot – Train Depot
"Uhhhhh..." The conductor's hairy eyebrows bunched together. "I don't know what comic books you've been reading, ma'am, but we... don't exercise so-called 'conductor powers.' If I did..." He chuckled. "...I'd have better excuses for why I come home late."
Lyra's brow furrowed. "Do I look like I read comic books?"
"Quite frankly, ma'am, I don't know what you read. You've been doing a pretty poor job with my lips so far."
"For realsies! What's the deal with this city?!" The mare grunted. "I think the name 'Canterlot' got a vowel mixed up somewhere."
"If you desire faster trips to Ponyville..." The stallion reached a hoof through the bars and pointed towards the city's east edge. "...there are plenty of aerial stagecoaches loaded at the taxi office—"
"No. No!" Lyra grimaced hard, waving her forelimbs wildly. "No flying!"
The stallion leaned back, his muzzle scrunched. "What's so bad about flying? I mean, besides the ever-looming threat of putting me and all of my friends out of a job." Silence. "Huh..." He gazed absent-mindedly off into space. "I wonder why I never thought of that before..."
"You can have all of the random epiphanies you want," Lyra grunted. "I am not flying. It's trains... trains for life."
"Amen, sister." He raised a hairy eyebrow. "Had a bad experience?"
Lyra looked greener as she brushed a hoof through her mane. "You... know how some old mares' tales speak of towns being rained on by frogs and slime?"
"Sure... I guess?"
"Well, this one time I made a trip across country..." Lyra hung her head. "...and Bostrot got rained on by a partially digested breakfast burrito."
"Oh wow..." The stallion grimaced. "That sounds horrible."
"Not half as horrible as the hash browns that followed." Lyra coughed. "Believe me when I say this: starch kills."
"Well, ma'am, I don't know what to tell ya." The stallion gestured. "But there simply is no train heading straight for Ponyville."
All of a sudden, Lyra brightened. "Wait... what about an indirect route?!"
"Huh?"
"Do any of the trains going to other towns lead to a Ponyville-bound route?"
"Hmmmm..." The stallion shuffled through a series of timesheets and notes. "...come to think of it..."
"Yes?" Lyra leaned forward. "Yes?"
"You could take the two o'clock train to Baltimare..." The stallion tongued the inside of his muzzle. "Which... stops by Whinnysocket. And if you got off there, you could take a locomotive towards Neigh Jersey... stop off at Cow Town... then take another train back west towards the heart of Equestria..."
"Just..." Lyra leaned back, wincing. "...how many stops are we talking about?"
"Oh, about five or six. But..." The stallion smirked. "It could get you to arrive at Ponyville about... ohhhh... twenty to forty minutes before the four o'clock departure from Canterlot."
"Wow, really?!"
"Absolutely!" The stallion smiled. "... ... ...wait." The stallion unsmiled. "Uhhhh... one second." He opened the drawer of his desk and whipped out an abacus. "Mmmmm... so a train leaves Canterlot, traveling east for Baltimare at sixty miles per hour..."
With a groaning sigh, Lyra leaned against the ticket booth. She rubbed her aching forehead, gazing at the station full of meandering ponies and workers. "I should have studied up on Teleportation 101. Life would be a lot easier if I could just zap myself to and from home." She gulped. "So what if the old 'me' dies and a lifeless doppelganger replaces her? At least she'd be richer..."
Eventually, the stallion's muffled words disappeared into the background. The world around Lyra turned into a hollow bubble...
...and a high-pitched rhythm echoed from beyond.
As soon as Lyra heard it, her heartrate increased. She shot up, standing dead still with locked limbs. Shrunken pupils looked every which way... searching...
...for the source of cricket song.
Lyra's breaths grew shallower and shallower. Nervously, she glanced left... then right.
Ponies gathered in bunches, chatting casually along the loading dock of the station.
Workers pushed dolleys with luggage to and fro.
Steam hissed from the wheels of a parked train engine.
Lyra began sweating. Something carved an onyx streak through her peripheral vision. Gasping, the mare glanced to her right.
Layers and layers of an equine crowd marched in and out of the antique station building. Lyra saw bright, pastel-colored coats and fruity, flowing manes... pretty dresses and silk suits...
...but somewhere from the depths... floating through the living mass like a scurrying black beetle...
...she saw a carapace. Grasshopper combs. Fangs and compound eyes. The buzzing increased as the figure came to a stop. Ponies passed by between them, but Lyra was almost certain that a glossy set of eyes was staring back at her... antennae twitching—
"Yes!" the stallion's voice was somehow magnified, shaking Lyra out of her stupor. The cricket song dissolved as he held up a series of computational notes hastily scribbled onto a notepad. "You'd get there exactly forty minutes early! Well... assuming there are no steers lying on the tracks at Cow Town. Heheheh... so how 'bout it, ma'am?"
Dead silence.
The stallion blinked. "Ma'am?"
"Uhhhhhh... f-forget it!" Lyra Heartstrings stared sweatily into the busy crowd, seeing nothing but natural pony colors on natural pony bodies doing natural pony things. Despite the normalcy of it all, she was still shivering. "I'll... uh... I'll be b-back for the four o'clock train to Ponyville!" She scampered off. "Gotta go somewhere quiet! Alone!"
"Ma'am! Don't forget your saddlebag!"
Scuffling hooves. Lyra dashed back, grabbed the item in her muzzle, and scampered back out. "Mrmmff-gmffuuu!"
"Uh... you're welcome?" The stallion leaned back, taking a breath. "Yeesh... whatever fertilizer they're sniffing out in those country towns... they'd better lay off!" He sat up straight as another pony shuffled in from the opposite side of the station. "Good afternoon, ma'am? Here to buy a ticket?"
Lemon Hearts slapped some bits onto the counter between them and frowned. "When's the first train to Ponyville?"
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Oh boy. Ive done the choochooswitcheroo. got the train 5 minutes earlier, its indirect route got caught in even worse conditions, ended up staying overnight at an intermediate station.
Write what you know.
It's so fucking true.
And I see that Zap reference in there.
~Skeeter The Lurker
Normally I'd make a Tumblr joke here, but she has a very good reason to have actual PTSD.
I know that personally, the idea of being mind controlled is more terrifying than the idea of being brutally murdered by an angry midget with a spoon.
*starts chucking grasshoppers at Lyra*
7359037 depends. which kind of murder are we talking about here. stabbing? scooping? ... bashing
?
7359070
Well I thought scooping, like having me tied down while various organs were scooped out and eaten, before chiseling away inexpertly and impatiently at my rib cage for quite a long while before finally getting to my heart and cutting it out.
And the spoon is made of Q-Carbon.
The doctor is clearly a changeling deliberately fostering an unhealthy dependency for the purposes of sustenance. And also swindling them.
The conductor's epiphany is hilarious, as well as the ambiguous phrasing which suggests that, while he doesn't exercise his powers, he's neither confirming nor denying that there is some kind of magical ability exclusive to train conductors.
And as someone who until very recently was complaining about the delay on the story reaching Lyra... I'm officially shutting up about it. At this point, all the first-timers who can't stomach a few hours extra effort have been weeded out, and only dedicated Skirtsians remain.
That, and the Lyra story is actually good.
So, we've finally gotten to Lyra, but we still haven't satisfied the description!
False advertising is illegal, y'know!
Yeah, Shrinkenfurter is definitely not the best option. Of course, that leads to the question of what is.
As for Lyra, it's unclear whether that was a delusion or reality. I look forward to finding out which.
I enjoyed that line way more then I should've.
These references you're throwing out everywhere are kind of like how the comic book do, no?
The world building has been great so far! Looking forward to what this daily has to offer.
Please oh god please get to the advertised story already.
*Chucks rocks at author until they write the next chapter.*
7359380 I wasn't looking for support, or your approval. I said how I felt about the first 15 chapters of the story and how I feel it should have been handled.
Uhhh....I'm with Lemon Hearts on this one...
"Wow" and/or "whoa".
7360084
Oh mY GoD YoUr aCcOuNt pIcTuRe. XD
Show Minuette was this adorable bundle of smiles, this Minuette is trying way too hard to be happy and positive... and it's only going to end in tears. I'm half expecting her to snap and seriously injure somepony.
data.whicdn.com/images/62013390/large.gif
Now this is a curious statement, possibly related to this fan art? I wonder if this is what's taken for fact in this universe about teleportation or if it's just Lyra's beliefs.
7359389
I'd agree, the doctor is clearly suspicious and acting not in the best interests of the girls. If he's a changeling or not... that's a little bit less clear. With the corruption and problems we've seen this universe have it could easily be a corrupt doctor trying to guarantee himself an easy paycheck from these mares coming back time and again for little progress. Probably the best 'evidence' for him being a changeling is that he wants to send them on "vacation" elsewhere, which would be a perfect opportunity for re-abduction.
"And as someone who until very recently was complaining about the delay on the story reaching Lyra... I'm officially shutting up about it. At this point, all the first-timers who can't stomach a few hours extra effort have been weeded out, and only dedicated Skirtsians remain."
And that's not a good thing, don't get me wrong, I'd like to think that I'm a dedicated Skirtsian like the others here but the fact that this story (and perhaps his others) have such a barrier to entry that they turn away many potential new readers is... troubling. Those that were criticizing this story have made some very valid points which have been continuously shot down by white-knights. I feel that this is something that Skirts should be concerned about and at least read through the comments that they have made before they get buried by downvotes.
7359823 We are at the advertised story. Admittedly, we're at what should be the first few opening chapters of the story, but we're there.
7360986 I think a large part of the problem is that this is the only time I've seen that Skirts' stories had any sort of wall. Every single story, even the daily ones that stretched forever, either start with and build on a very solid, understandable premise or start as a mystery and slowly reveal the truth and let the reader piece things together.
Here, all the backstory's been front-loaded and it took tens of thousands of words for the main character's name to even be mentioned, let alone for them to appear. Even reading every blog post Skirts makes about the subject doesn't give away any explanation as to why this is.
It's an enigma, it is.
Ever since the food poisoning recieved at Bon Bon's shop Twinkleshine experiences shell shock even at mentions of its name.
So Lemon Hearts is informing herself that the bed is made?
I think it should be Twinkleshine instead.
7359389 don't know if the Doc is a ling or not but hr is definitely only in this Jon for tjr money as the only one who is functioning is Lemon Hearts, Lyra is also doing relatively well with her PTSD by not going to him as this guy is saying a load of crap.
As for weeding people out I am not a fan of this author, I'm actually leaning very much in the opposite direction, I'm wanting to see how long it tales him to get to the story promised in the description of he ever does at all.
7472553 Hi there, you appear to be missing some information, so let me fill you in.
Nothing ever said this story was about the Lyra/shell and her alone. In fact, the description clearly says
If you didn't expect to be reading about all these other characters and groups, you were mistaken. This is exactly the story the description promised.
Now, I know not everyone reading this fic also read the blog posted about it, so let me point you to the important part.
Act one ends on chapter 50. You're barely out of the prologue. We have many, many chapters to go before the superheroing begins.
This is a skirtsian-long-form daily. To say it will be massive is a serious understatement. If you were unaware of that fact coming in, you are now. So please refrain from posting a comment on every chapter about how you've been deceived, because you haven't. Instead, why don't you just enjoy the fic, because believe me, its worth it.
Have a nice day!