The maid cowered, shaking.
“But—but we have—we have tasty cupcakes!” She held up a platter with numerous colorful pastries, their frosting expertly decorated but the whole of the tray shaking from her fright.
M’Ress stared at her, annoyed, and did her best to retain her composure.
“Yes. I see that. I cannot eat those. They have sugar.”
“But the sugar—it is so sweet--”
“I will literally die. Feed me MEAT. Do you not have meat? Is there not somewhere I can get it?”
“We—we don’t—we can’t—that isn’t something—” Her eyes widened, and she squealed, dropping the tray. The cupcakes scattered to the floor. The maid proceeded to flee. “DON’T EAT MEEEEE!!”
“I was not going to...” M’Ress groaned. Although the environment had been relatively pleasant to sleep in, the beds were designed for small horses, not a Caitian, and she had awoken hungry only to find that the entirety of their society was herbivorous and had no concept of meat outside of the meat that they themselves were constructed of. Therefore, she was tired, hungry, and annoyed. The only consolation was that the numerous maids were unexpectedly good at brushing things, and M’Ress was consequently at her silkiest.
Spock emerged from wherever it was that Vulcans tended to hide. The shadows, M’Ress assumed, at least based on historical stereotypes. Spock was notoriously difficult to detect. While purblood humans smelled strongly—not unpleasant, in M’Ress’s opinion, but strongly nonetheless—Vulcans and even half-Vulcans were disturbingly odorless. Especially in an environment that reeked of baked goods and sweet-scented small horses.
“Ingesting our hosts will not be beneficial to our diplomatic situation,” he said, as passively as ever.
“Do you take me for a Kzint? I would not lower myself to eating sentient meat.”
“Vulcans in general consider eating any manner of meat unnecessary.”
“Yes. And Vulcans have biosynthesis pathways that allow for a vegetarian diet. I do not.”
“Nor, did I at any point, say or imply that you possessed such biochemical pathways. I was simply stating a fact about the nature of Vulcan culture.”
M’Ress gritted her teeth. “I am doing my best to be civil considering your rank. However, I have not been fed and am greatly displeased.”
“I do not know what my rank would be an impediment of, unless you were intending to eat me.”
“At this point, I may very well be considering it.”
Spock raised an eyebrow but otherwise seemed unperturbed. He shouldered his tricorder and began walking toward the door.
“Where are you going?”
“For a walk. This castle is surrounded by what appears to be a peaceful and well-constructed city, and I intend to view the alien architecture and take ground-level scientific readings.”
“But we have a party to attend later in the day.”
“Yes. You and the Captain do. However, it would not be logical for me to attend such a function when my time and effort would be better directed toward scientifically productive activities.”
“So you will be avoiding the party? How very...Vulcan.”
“A minor insult based on an outdated racial stereotype is both inappropriate as well as pointless. But yes. I will be avoiding this function.”
“No, Spock, you most certainly will not!”
Kirk emerged into the common area. He was not alone. A pony was held under his arm. A minty-green xenobiologist.
“Captain,” said Spock, raising an eyebrow. “Where have you acquired that pony?”
“I found her staring at me while I was sleeping.”
“Captain, that would be impossible. If you were sleeping, then you would not have seen her. You would instead have seen her upon waking.”
“I told him the same thing,” said Lyra, wrapping her front legs around Kirk’s leg. “And it wasn’t weird or anything, even if I was naked, I was taking notes. I was doing it for SCIENCE. Also I stroked your hair and may have tried on your uniform...I was not naked during that part...”
Kirk set her down. The pony immediately produced a sack. A sack that was dripping a foul fluid. A fluid that smelled to M’Ress delicious.
“What is that?”
“That isn’t from me, is it?” asked Kirk.
“No, of course not, I haven’t figured out which parts hoomins grow back yet,” said Lyra, opening the sack and producing a meaty sphere. “I had an understanding that hoomins either eat or yeet meat, the translation was variable, so I made some.”
“Made..some?”
M’Ress grabbed one of the globules and, before Kirk could stop her, bit into it.
“Oh yes,” she said. “It tastes like bacon!”
“It is made of pig,” said Lyra. “So I would expect that.”
“So you slaughter pigs here?” asked Spock. “Despite being vegetarians?”
“Oh no, of course not. Ponies never kill any creature, ever, under any circumstances. They’re special pigs. Their bodies are all covered in tumors that swell up and fall off sometimes. Until you got here, I was sure they were the closest relative of hoomins, and from the look of you, I’m guessing you did, in fact, evolve from a piggy ancestor.”
M’Ress, upon realizing what she was eating, nearly ejected it from her stomach as if it were an especially virulent furball. Instead, though, she kept it down. She had eaten worse in the Academy. She had before tasted the vilest of flavors, the accursed human fruit known as the olive. Mutant tumor was far superior in flavor.
“Um, no,” said Kirk. “The cupcakes were very good, though. They also brought me fruit. It was...strangely similar to Earth fruit.”
“Why would fruit be any different?” asked Lyra. “Fruits is fruits.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be a xenobiologist?”
“Yes. Specializing in anthropology. I’m not some kind of fruit-doctor.” She paused. “Unless you’d like to feed me grapes and turn me into one. One at a time. Or...or...” She began to salivate. “A banana. Peel it. PEEL IT NOW.”
There was a knock at the door.
“Come in,” said Kirk.
The door opened suddenly, and an especially haggard McCoy nearly fell into the room.
“Bones!” cried Kirk, moving to his side. “What are you doing here?”
“What am I doing here? What am I doing here? What makes you think I even have any idea the answer to that question?! That ungrateful little—that tiny horse—she teleported me here! Scattered my atoms across god knows where, put me on this living hell of a planet! Now I’m stuck here!”
“Bones, what are you talking about? This planet is actually really nice.”
“We have edible cysts,” said Lyra, holding up the bag. When she saw McCoy more closely, though, her face flushed. “Oh my...now that's a hoomin...I want you to peel MY banana...”
“See? This is what I’m talking about! I spent half the night giving examinations to over thirty separate ponies that had absolutely nothing wrong with them other than Munchhausen's syndrome, and then when I finally got into a bed, I woke up an hour later with half the castle’s population of maids squeezing me to death! One of them sat on my face and I almost suffocated!”
“I had a cat that did that once…”
“Jim, I’m not in the mood for your story about the Caitian twins again, not in the slightest!”
“Well, what do you expect?” asked a slightly raspy female voice.
The occupants of the room—other than Spock, who had already seen her—jumped. McCoy had been accompanied by Rainbow Dash, who was wearing her standard white armor with a white shawl or cloak wrapped around her back against the chilly morning.
“What do you mean what do I expect? I expect to not have horses in my bed when I’m trying to sleep, and not get teleported by magic ones either! I’m a doctor, not a stablehand!”
“One, super offensive, but it’s funny so I’ll let it pass. Second, what do you expect? Mares outnumber stallions seven to one and probably eighty percent of stallions aren’t into mares. If you know what I mean. Being a hetero mare is hard work. Right, Lyra? You have a husband, right?”
“I have an ex-wife.”
“Oh...well, um....same thing?"
"She didn't believe my theories...I wonder if she'll come back now that I'm right?"
Rainbow Dash winced. "Sure. Let's go with that."
A beep interrupted the awkwardness of the conversation and Kirk, much relieved, opened his communicator.
“Kirk here.”
“Preparing to beam down the package, Captain.”
“Acknowledged. Send it.”
Kirk stepped back, and the air before him shimmered. In less than a second, a container had appeared before him. Lyra stared at it, gasping.
“What was—what was that?!”
“A transporter,” said Kirk, opening the trunk. He removed a small bag of cubed meat and tossed it to M’Ress, and a medical tricorder that he handed to McCoy.
“Wait...Jim, why do I need this?”
“Because you’re part of the landing party now.”
“But you can’t be serious--”
“I am. You’re here, you might as well make the best of it. Think of it like a vacation. You’re singlehandledly absorbing half the ship’s coffee ration with your insomnia every night you're up there. If you get a few good night's sleep down here, maybe there'll be some left for the rest of us.”
“We do have a replicator,” added Spock. “I can see that neither of you have acquired the level of proficiency necessary to operate it. Perhaps you should speak with Mr. Scott. Although I recommend against mentioning anything concerning the quality of the alcohol substitutes it can prepare with him.”
Kirk ignored him, instead addressing Lyra. “We use the transporter to move things between two positions. Don’t you have something similar?”
“A machine? For teleportation? Because you...don’t have magic...” A look of awe came over her face.
“We teleport,” sighed Rainbow Dash, interrupting Lyra’s stupor. “Sort of. Only unicorns can do it. Not all of them, though. Just the really powerful ones. But even Celestia can't. I think Luna can, sometimes, and maybe five or six wizards on the planet? I never really counted.”
“You can just...do that?”
“Damn right they can,” grumbled McCoy. “That’s how that horsey vixen got me down here.”
Kirk seemed greatly surprised by this, but Spock seemed even more intrigued.
“Can you do this?” he asked Lyra.
Lyra, snapped out of her stupor, turned to him. “Huh? Me? Oh no, I can’t. Not without one of the big amplifiers. But those make me really, really queasy. Also they only go to the moon. Or back, I guess. And I don’t want to go to the moon, they’re a bunch of weirdos up there.”
Rainbow Dash frowned. “My uncle lives on the moon.”
“Then your uncle is a weirdo. Sorry, I’m a xenobiologist, I call ‘em like I see ‘em.”
Kirk produced one of the dress uniforms, one belonging to Spock, and passed it to the reluctant Vulcan. Then he gave M’Ress hers, and took his.
“Be sure to review Uhura’s suggested protocols. We want this to go as smoothly as possible.” He looked at McCoy. “Bones.”
“What?”
“You can stay here. With Lyra.”
Lyra released a high-pitched squee.
“Jim, you can’t be--”
“Or you can go to the party. I can have the yeoman prepare your uniform. Celestia has a sister I think you would like.”
“Giant blue and black pony with wings and a horn, and cat eyes?”
Kirk looked perplexed. “Um...yes?”
“I met her. I almost got hung.”
“Almost?”
“Clearly not, Jim.”
“No. Did you seduce her?”
McCoy looked disgusted. “Jim, she’s a pony.”
Kirk shrugged and smirked slightly. “Ms. Dash, are you attending the gala?”
“It’s obligatory. I’m a national hero.”
“Then have Bones check out your wing before you go. Maybe he can do something about the pain.”
McCoy appeared confused. “Wing?”
Rainbow Dash, her expression fallen, sighed and removed the cloak covering her back. Her cybernetic wing emerged, perfectly symmetrical with her organic one but clearly causing her great discomfort to move.
“What in the name of—why the heck were you the only one NOT asking for me to check?”
“Because I don’t need your help.”
McCoy knelt down, producing his newly-acquired medical tricorder and examining the appendage. “This is...this is cybernetic. It’s linked directly to your spine, how I have no idea. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“Do you not have this technology on your planet?”
“Well, no, not anymore, cybernetics is something of a dead science.”
“Dead? Why?”
“Why? Because with modern stem-cell reconfiguration, we usually just undergo treatments to grow most things back, not outright replace them like this.”
Rainbow Dash jumped back. “Wait, what? You can—you can grow things back?”
“Well, in theory, sure, it’s not very complicated. Eyes and hearts, those are hard, but limbs are usually pretty straightforward.”
“You can grow my wing back?” Rainbow Dash looked to Kirk. “Can your alien magic do that?”
Kirk looked to McCoy. “Bones?”
McCoy stood up. “From what I saw with the other one? Frankly, Jim, I have no idea. Their cell structure is unlike anything I’ve seen before. Their blood is rhenium-based, at least for the unicorns, and their bones use titanium like ours use calcium. The unicorns have neural density above and beyond anything I’ve ever seen, with a brain pattern unlike any in the galaxy. I’m pretty sure they’re not even mammals. They’re some kind of fungus. The only thing that’s even close to anything at all is the epidermis.”
“Bones, that doesn’t answer the question.”
McCoy pointed. “If you lost an arm, I wouldn’t even be able to do it. Not with what I have here, it’s a very complicated procedure. Maybe on a big starbase, or on Earth, and that’s just for a human. The Enterprise just doesn’t have the equipment.”
“But we could share the procedures, couldn’t we?”
“Well, sure, I suppose we could, if they have computers.”
“Don’t we have something self-contained?”
McCoy thought for a moment, then his eyes lit up. “Captain. I think we do. The emergency medical hologram unit.”
“That is a test prototype from Starfleet,” stated Spock, his wording as strong as it reasonably could be. “We were assigned a duty to test it in the field for use replacing doctors due to incapacitate or emergency--”
“Spock, is your tiny Vulcan heart really that shriveled and dried up? This isn’t some special strategically important power cell or intake manifold or whatever, this is basic medical science. They deserve—no, they outright NEED—that hologram. Denying it to them would be a heinous crime.” He turned to Kirk. “I suggest you beam it down at once. As soon as possible. As in, right now.”
“Um...sure, Bones. We can do that. After the gala.” Kirk straightened his uniform. “After all, that’s the first order of business, to establish peaceful diplomatic relations. That’s it. A nice, easy task. And we get to do it at a party. Isn’t that nice?”
The others looked at him. Whether or not they agreed with his enthusiasm remained unclear.
They drop their limbs and it grows into a baby pony.
Ah so a little The Outer Worlds cameo with the Cystypig. Nice touch. I would also like to go on record to say I love this story keep up the awesome work!
11046843
Geeze maybe the Apple Family really does drop from apple trees in this universe?
I would suggest the author tone down the sex joke before they become too prolific, over abundant sex jokes and refrences makes things seem less like a cross over fic and more like a crack shipping.
Are you nuts? Have you seen meat prices lately? I'd love that, it'd be cheap as fuck and delicious
Oh Bones... You just got a horse with the best reason ever to want to sleep with you. You Poor bastard.
Fungus based...oh crap they are Orks, cute furry little Orks...which actually explains alot.
Sigh... I really don't want to read another story about ponies being ridiculously overpowered assholes with no consequences. I guess I'll stick around for a few more chapters to see if it gets better.
Yikes. If the ponies have a gender ratio of seven mares to one stallion, then the average stallion needs to sire eight foals to maintain a stable population. (No pun intended.) And if only twenty percent of stallions are straight then those guys need to sire forty foals each. And then add that not all straight stallions are going to want to have foals in the first place, so the ones that do need to have even more. At this point monogamy is impossible, the precious few straight stallions that can and want to have foals need to be assigned entire harems of mares to keep the species going. Lucky bastards.
I know that Robert Picardo’s EMH Doctor doesn’t exist in the TOS Timeline but Goddamn is it funny to think about the interplay between bones and him. Seeing Bones want to all but shove the EMH off the ship? Makes perfect sense.
11047030
Not to mention it doesn't makes any sense in terms of evolution. Neither gender inbalance or homosexuality ever reaches the point to threaten the survival of a specie.
I find Rainbow's comment about the gender ratio's extremely unplausable and highly unrealistic so I assume that reality is different. The ponies havng an extremely abnormal physical structure is interesting.
11046860
Huh, I didn't know it was a reference.
11047022
This was actually established a while back in Hole's work, I think. Pureblooded unicorns and Alicorns are even crazier.
EMH: “I’m a Doctor, not a Farrier!”
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Ponies reproducing through spores would certainly explain the gender and preference imbalance. What they see as gender are actually two different strains of the same fungus. Of course they wouldn't normally be attracted to one another.
Or the author has taken a common headcanon and made it even more biologically improbable, but I like the fungus hypothesis.
In any case, looking forward to the party and seeing just how disastrously it goes wrong.
11047118
Unless they're like ants, where there's a huge imbalance of females compared to males. I guess that explains changelings.
11046950
Including how their Warp technology works: because they believe it works.
11046950
Great.
Pinkie Pie as a Squig!
It all makes sense now.
star trek medicine has always been in a weird place of not quite futuristic and also trying to say that they've solved most biological problems. Like there was the tng episode where warf's spine was broken and they had seemingly no idea what to do yet by that point we had already seen that they had nanobots, cell regeneration technology, machine-mind-interfaces all sorts of ways to put someone back together, but the writers tended to be way more conservative with the medical stuff, though they also seemingly couldn't envision email which even by the middle of ds9 was a bit silly. there's a scene where sisco is sitting at his desk with stacks of tablets because that's just how everybody hands in their reports even though its 1995 and the writers absolutely know what email is
11047350
"I'ma tank!, I'ma tank!, I'ma tank!"
Pretty sure Moondancer was very close to offing McCoy in the previous chapter.
No, it is logical to say "She was staring at me while I was sleeping" because if she was staring at you when you awoke then logically she was staring at you while you were asleep. I've noticed this a lot about vulcans and humans in Star Trek. Humans tend to speak in ways that refer to conclusions whereas vulcans tend to speak in ways that refer to the moment.
11048192
It could have been for security reasons. An e-mail can be intercepted or hacked, a non-networked tablet cannot unless you physically acquire it and then hack its security. Just like a sheet of paper with a coded message.
Is there a reason our resident cat girl hasn't made the leap in logic between "baked goods" and "eggs"?
11048383
na it was just unimaginative writers, in TNG they just handed each other the pads like you would a piece of paper which, OK i guess its 1987 and you don't really have large scale email systems but fast forward to ds9's later seasons and its like, obviously you'd just send the digital file not the whole dang tablet! I'm not even sure if they fixed that in Voyager which came even later into the modern era of computers
its kind of a running thing in star trek, they figure out the form but can't understand how you'd use it. They invented flip-phones but the captain used it like a radio, they came up with tablet pads, but chose to use them like paperwork, they came up with holodecks and could only conceive of it being used for shakespear plays.
Fungal ponies and cyst sausage.
I don't know what to say to that but I feel a need to comment.
...I had to look that up! I had to do research while reading a Star Trek fic. You know how long it's been since I had to look up something while reading ANY sci-fi?! I've been reading sci-fi since the early 80's and my mom gave me her Star Trek Library that dates back to the late 60's!
You've earned your geek cred, my friend!
"We just built and maintain an orbital ion cannon for light shows, totes!"
11048383
PADDs were all networked to the ship's or facility's central computer system, so that's definitely not the explanation.
11049134
Thank you, Rainbow Dash. Is not like you and the other ponies have been offending the nice aliens since the very second you met them.
11049304
Heh, it's not like they can go hypersonic without being totally encased inside a machine or they're mush, so she's entitled to be a little cocky with them.
I want to see McCoy's face when she asks if he can tweak her wing to match her biological one so she could get back up to those speeds again.
11048965
Not to mention that this would make so much sense how much the ponies fall or bash things and hardly break any bones or their skulls. Pegasi wings seem to be the most vulnerable of all the ponies body parts
CYSTYPIGS?! I damn, I have a huge urge to play The Outer Worlds again! (So much hype for The Outer Worlds 2!) I didn't know cystypigs were a thing in Star Trek, though…
The cat would literally eat anything, they just prefer meat
Hmm That last one sounds logistically difficult with Lyra still under his arm
Yes... but it's a good way to have our dog hate you ^^;;;
Okay, that made me laugh.
So, I get ponies as a whole being utterly horrified at the idea of anyone eating meat, but you'd assume the ones in the castle have staff used to dealing with Griffins and other carnivorous sophants.
Also, are none of them going to question how Lyra knew anything about humans, as vague as it was, before they showed up?
I like the titanium bones idea, the "fungus" thing really makes little sense and I'm just going to assume it's Bones being Bones. Unless we are also going to have Mario show up too.