Petty Power fully understands the responsibility of being a luggage inspector: he's there to make sure nopony brings anything onto the zeppelin which could interfere with Profit. And those nasty rumors about a potential sabotage attempt? Those have to be ignored, because nervous passengers don't board. Less ponies, less profit. Easy. And here's a group of young mares waiting to pass his checkpoint. Inflicting them with Rules and Regulations should be simple.
Petty is mere hours away from losing his job and leaving Equestria forever. But realistically, he probably deserves it.
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Chapters (1)
So, they needed secret investigators... And they sent the bearers.
I want to assume the Zeppelin company pissed the Sisters off somehow.
Those guys were good, but they were about fourth on the list of competance?
Second best would know Not to carry Exactly the right amount to pay for All the Small Additional Charges for all the onboard resources thet were going to use?
As for the best?
Petty would have done it all on his own violition.
What a delightful farce!
Talk about willful ignorance, there… saddlebags shouldn’t completely hide Twilight’s wings, eh? Unless she’s also wearing a comprehensive saddle blanket that’s not mentioned (or maybe she’s wearing an illusion spell?).
But he also fully ogles Pinkie but misses all of her magic. He may have his own SEP field engaged as part of his mark.
I can’t decide.
I have to wonder what the pregnancy that led to that name was like.
So, is this experience going to be more Gödel, Escher, or Bach? I'm guessing Escher. It's amazing how many impossible shapes a stallion can twist himself into while trying to avoid blame.
I love the descriptions of Twilight's assorted testing equipment. I probably wouldn't appreciate looking at the actual equipment, but it's fun to imagine.
Always nice to see Fluttershy demonstrate her freaky knowledge of sewing.
I'm legitimately unsure whether the unspoken part of this sentence is "while on the clock" or "ever."
Delightful study in different forms of insanity colliding with one another (and Pinkie, the Socrates of madness, who knows she is mad and thus is saner than the vast majority of ponies.) Thank you for a most entertaining read.
11330960
It's also possible that this happened before the wings.
11330964
Only Petty refers to Twilight as a unicorn. Throughout the text she’s referred to as a ‘mare’.
>.>
Estee is a clever bastard. Left lots of room there.
Haha, I guess everyone got a good ending in the end of this one, huh? Even the asshole Petty Power. He got a reward by getting to go to the objectively worst place on Equestria's planet, Prance. Pretty entertaining story, if an insufferable POV. Thanks Estee!
I love how you consistently subvert common expectations of the Bearers' personalities with your characterizations.
Twilight is basically a mad scientist, emphasis on scientist first. Never mind practicality: If she can fit an entire laboratory into a suitcase, she will, and it will be thrice as good as anything the most well-equipped university can offer, because she can bring her lab to the science instead of needing to bring the science to her lab.
Pinkie Pie is hyper-observant, thoughtful, and respectful of personal boundaries. Also, she's big and tall, which translates into Absolutely Jacked for an equine, because they're basically all muscle.
Rarity is a portable sewing machine. She also has a portable sewing machine, and you cannot stop her from using it.
Rainbow Dash is constantly thinking of outcomes and possibilities of different actions and circumstances. She's a scientist with lightning in her veins.
Applejack, rather than being bland or a simpleton, is the undisputed champion of dark humor and Thinking Of Everything; she's a problem solver, because farmers can't depend on outside help and have to solve their own problems, and so when confronted with a suspect problem, she analyzes it immediately and determines its ramifications (however silly they might be in this case).
Fluttershy explicitly acknowledges her freaky knowledge of sewing and acts swiftly and decisively to mitigate disaster while under duress.
Spike, as always, demonstrates why he is the Number One Assistant, and also why it pays to be friends with dragons. More seriously, he goes out of his way to abide by the rules even when they are blatantly stupid, instead of what his larger brethren might do in response to namby pamby pony policies.
What a wonderful bit of description this is.
This intrigues me, because Petty doesn't seem to me like the sort who'd have a type...unless it was carefully dictated to him by Rules and Regulations.
Let alone for that type to be Pinkie.
Mr. Gasbag exploding seems to be the Chekhov's Gun of this story, or so is the impression I'm getting. Sort of looking forward to it, honestly.
My first guess would be helium then, but this is Equestria--surely they can do better than helium as a lifting gas.
As much as I want to hate Petty for telling this lie...I'd be lying myself if I didn't admit that I've similarly just made things up to pacify an unreasonable customer because you just know they aren't going to be satisfied with the real answer (even if, in my case at least, it's a completely valid and logical one, but you know customers--logic and validity need not apply if it means ensuring they get their way).
It does sound rather like the Gasbag Zeppelin Touring Company has been cutting some corners here, which presents an interesting conundrum, at least by Petty's logic, because obviously cutting the corners is done so to boost Profit by having to spend less of it on maintenance, but at the same time, cutting the corners eventually makes it less likely passengers would be willing to come aboard, which also cuts into the Profit...perhaps more critically so.
It's the paradox of greed, really, though it can be addressed somewhat by asking yourself which you want more: a short-term profit, or a long-term profit? Because cutting corners generally doesn't result in long-term profit.
There are other very flammable things aboard a zepplin, Twi, enough of which that something catching a flame while in flight would still be generally considered a very bad thing.
By any chance...was that expert Twilight?
And how dare their attempts to pursue Profit interfere with the Gasbag Zeppelin Touring Company's attempts to likewise pursue Profit, right?
Well, to be fair...he was following the Rules and Regulations to the exact letter of their definitions, all of which, by those same exact definitions, allowed for all of the elements used in the sabotage to come aboard in the first place, technically speaking.
So the argument could be made that, by Petty's logic, it should be whomever wrote said Rules and Regulations who was at fault...but I think I'd rather still blame Petty for allowing his thinking be so rigidly defined by the Rules and Regulations that he couldn't see what should've been obvious.
Also...we did indeed get that gun of Chekhov's fired...or rather, exploded.
Whelp...I'll gather the pitchforks and torches, the rest of you round up the angry mob.
Gah... I don't know what it is about this estee story but it sure does drives home why I HATE canon rarity.... and in this story not only did rarity become THE RARITY but so did twi- I mean SCI-Rarity and rain- I mean SPORTS- rarity...
That being said all this leading to a HOA joke?! I dont know whether I should applaud while simultaneously gasping for air from all the laughing and groaning or find a way to reach in and STRANGLE Petty Power...
But seriously why would any one ever EVER buy a HOA home? But blah blah blah...need job blah blah blah need house blah blah... Where do you live Soviet Russia circa 1930s/1940s?
You are going to gain a whole new understanding of the concept of Eternity.
Added to the "Noncanon" folder of the Triptych Continuum Rebooted group.
How to both cause and prevent a disaster in ten steps. Staring: The Mane 6
Excellent and hilarious as always
I’ve worked in tourism to some degree for most of my working life, so I know a lot of what Petty Power was talking about from his perspective. And honestly, while he absolutely is a jerk, I was impressed by the way you handled his perspective— there really are things that it’s not his job to make decisions on, and questions he really shouldn’t be expected to have to answer. The fluid ounces rule might be stupid, sure, but Applejack was breaking it and it wasn’t his fault. And Rarity was being completely insane, even if it turns out that it was apparently a ploy and done for good reasons. At the end of the day, your jerk had a perfectly reasonable explanation for being a jerk, which makes the character that much easier to appreciate.
Other than that, awesome to see how the Bearers work as a team when a crisis hits, and just a generally delightful story. And I always love your Pinkie Pie in particular.
Wonderful as always, Estee.
He's a bureau-crazy. If he thinks he's ever going to be thanked, he's just crazy.
At first I thought Twilight had rather badly misunderstood how Zeppelins work, which wouldn't be -entirely- out of character, given that Equestrians in general seem to believe everything outside their experience is done with magic, and Twilight in particular knows a lot more about magic than what we would think of as conventional science, but apparently there IS a device like that onboard, so Zeppelins in Equestria are already very different from the ones that were built on Earth. Though I guess we already knew that since we've seen them on the show. (Also, apparently, magic allows for at least temporary transmutation since the device is apparently changing what the air is made of. I wonder if that's why passengers are able to breathe inside of the gasbag? I wouldn't have thought there'd be enough oxygen for that, but I can't seem to find any answers one way or the other on the exact mix that real life airships use for lifting gas.)
Aside from that, the fact that it's held up with one giant gasbag rather than multiple cells (Since Spike can heat the whole thing), and that the skin of said gasbag is the same as the outer skin of the ship (As Fluttershy's comment about the stictching implies) makes it sound like this is really more of a giant blimp than a rigid airship like a Zeppelin. But unless it really was unraveling -that- quickly, even a blimp should have had time to maneuver to a safe crash site; airships IRL have a very low internal pressure, so even with quite large holes in their envelopes, the lifting gas is usually fairly slow to escape. It's not like a balloon popping.
11331097
Unless Discord is involved I don't think they could get a better lifting gas than Helium, since we already know they don't use Hydrogen. If we're restricting ourselves to things that are physically possible (And Estee's stories usually seem to run on the logic of 'like real life physics unless otherwise noted'), those are literally the two lightest elements on the periodic table. There are other things you can use as a lifting gas, but most of them have the same problems as Hydrogen or -worse- and ALL of them are heavier.
But what I -really- want to know is why it's called a Zeppelin. In real life, Zeppelins were named after their inventor, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. Does this mean there's a Count von Zeppelin in Equestria as well?
Is the Equestrian dram smaller than ours, or are their tablespoons bigger? 32 US drams is a little under 8 US tablespoons, or a little more under 6 Imperial tablespoons.
Anyhow, I laughed aloud at the ending. Bravo/a!
Awesome, laugh out loud stuff
I have to say, though, that for me, the real villain of the piece is the explosive (and wonderfully named) Mister Gasbag.
Sure, Petty is an arse, but anyone who has ever worked customer facing roles will have a good selection of stories about the nasty bullshit they have had to smile through (protip: if someone at Disney World tells you to have a magical day, they basically want you to fuck off and die). Sometimes there really is nothing for it but to get shut of them as soon as possible.
He is corrupt and unpleasant, he extracts the maximum misery he can out of his tiny scrap of authority (hence name), and Prance is plainly his natural home, but he didn't make the rules he gleefully enforces. Guys at his level have no say at all in that.
That falls to Gasbag.
Gasbag either wrote or cleared all of those. He is the one who oversaw the design of an absurd, inconvenient security theater that plainly only exists to facilitate ways of extracting as many Slight Additional Charges as possible. He would have done very well at EA or Activision.
And, in the finest traditions of corporate scumbags, he dumped all the responsibility on the low level grunt who was enforcing and enacting his flawed, profit centric system.
Hopefully he will explode all over collapsing income and unavoidable bankruptcy, but, he's a corporate scumbag, so he will likely get away scot free.
Well it seems the Bearers were literally the best group for the job. Somehow. But in there own fashion they made it much harder than it needed to be.
Loved the bit with Pinkie and Petty Power at the end. Stay classy Pinkie. Stay classy.
This has left me wondering if the reason the TSA is still a thing is that the airline companies have realized that by encouraging certain "rules" they can increase profit. I'll have to look into that.
Petty was an idiot. Then again that is how most things get smuggled places, the smuggler lies about what they shipping/bringing. I have a RL horror story from my job on a different shift that closed down the building for hours. I wonder how expensive it was to have a device that could check for the dangerous stuff?
This one was a lot of fun…. Loved the format, building to the resolution and the description of how our heroes’ teamwork saved the day. (I’m kind of impressed that they ultimately made it onboard at all.)
The dig at HOAs was much appreciated as well. Petty Power indeed.
👍
11331319
That's kind of why I was wondering if they were using some fictional super-gas instead of helium, because there were so many elements implied about this airship's design that wouldn't be totally consistent with a real-life craft of similar design, and the abilities of the gas when used in this capacity didn't seem quite consistent with real-life helium in all ways in my mind.
Particularly if this airship is really shaped anything like the ones seen in-show, because the in-show airships simply don't have big enough envelopes to be using helium or hydrogen--neither would be able to provide enough lift at those volumes. So I guess when it comes to MLP airships, I just tend to automatically assume it's some fictional super-gas, because the real ones probably aren't going to cut it for MLP's purposes.
Besides, I noted that Estee quite deliberately never said one way or the other on just what gas it actually was...just that it wasn't, apparently, hydrogen. So for all we know, it could be.
The zeppelin question is a valid one, though...but to be fair, I'm pretty sure it's not the only time in MLP continuity such a thing has happened.
I do love a happy ending. (Prance deserves every bit it is getting)
11331422
Might I request you report for findings in this thread?
Even if it turns out to take several months.
This was one of two things which utterly spoiled this story for me (the other being the zebra terrorist, I mean really?).
I live in Texas, the US state where HOAs are at their most powerful under the law. They sprang up as a way of keeping people of color out of neighborhoods through enforcing racist deed covenants at first, then target harassment when the deed covenants became dead letters. HOAs generally are at their worst in places with the LEAST government, not the most, because only in such places can they thrive while denying their victims any recourse. HOAs exist specifically because the people who make HOAs don't WANT there to be any government except that which they have total control over.
So, yeah. A small thing that hit one of my pet peeves with a sledgehammer.
11331372
Yeah this. He isn’t ‘nice’ but he didn’t strike me as malevolent, just kinda petty. Felt sorta bad for him because petty asshole or not, the Mane 6 in Estee’s universe are engines of chaos despite their harmony affiliation. Twilight pushing every boundary for what could or could not be brought onto a flight, rarity and her excessive baggage and wanting to break safety regulations by overloading it, Rainbow being a living missile by nature, Fluttershy critiquing every little thing so far outside his control that its laughable, and AJ arguing about rules. Pinkie Pie was however a true champion in this and did nothing wrong aside from brining a cannon onto a blimp.
At least he found ‘happiness’ in Prance.
11331902
I think you're misreading this as referring to the Prench government where it's intended to mean the Prench culture.
11331909
So, in the Triptych Continuum Prance is a sort of Tartarus for unpleasant annoyances rather than world ending threats?
Ah,a fantastic read just before bed.
Well done.
"standards for the title he permits"
"standards for the titles he permits"?
"Collect your devices and bring them there."
"Collect your devices and take them there."?
Though that one might have been in character, I thought I'd point it out just in case.
""..it's heavy," the pegasus"
""...it's heavy," the pegasus"?
"two weeks before it could be even be moved"
"two weeks before it could even be moved"?
Hah. :D
Thanks for writing!
11330964
While on the clock, of course. "Ever" is reserved (in duplicated triplicate) by another bureaucrat.
Honestly, we're at the point where the people you have to worry about are the ones who aren't on some kind of list.
11331565
Hm You could make the calculation for the lifting power of a rigid vacuumed envelope. That is the limit of buoyancy. Obviously it's impossible to use as the rigidity necessary would mean using heavy material.
11332424
11331565
I'm pretty sure this wasn't intended to be an advanced airship science story, but rather the author venting about things story.
This was great thorough, and then the end came and hit me like a truck - of course Petty would end up founding something as vile as that.
Does 'The Hindenburg' ring a bell?
11332638 Only if you believe in debunked conspiracy theories. In the case of this story, the conspiracy was real. Well, fictionally real.
11333494
I don't get into arguments with people who've already reached their own conclusions regarding my motivations, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and actions. At this point, anything I could say regarding my use and treatment of what has been (outside of an alternate universe moment in DELWMG which was based in an actual political movement) a FICTIONAL PARODY for a nation would only contradict what you'd decided I had actually said.
11332487
Don't worry about it. Having this sort of thing happen in the Comments section for just about everything I write is the reason I was able to solve cold fusion.
...well, technically, I've solved cold fusion. There's two steps to go.
* Write a story involving cold fusion.
* Wait for someone to correct me.
I don't mind having experts on a topic chime in: their knowledge can add something to the discussion and, on occasion, longform stories. However, finding out my audience included 1,700 professional blacksmiths was something of a surprise.
11333494
We never saw Prance in the show proper, to my memory; it was just used as “Place with Horse-Joke Name” and referred to as somewhere vaguely snobbish and high-class. Beyond that it has no connection at all to the real-world version of France.
Estee has taken that concept, of it being a Pony Nation that is not Equestria and vaguely snobbish and high-class, and turned it up to eleven as a running joke. We have never seen Prance in their writing, nor ever met a Pony from there. There have been no jokes that could in any way connect to the actual nation of France. You could swap it out for “Bitaly” or “Japony” or “Mexicolt” or “Germaneigh” and the joke would work exactly the same, except that in the show canon, Prance is the fancy snobby place and so Estee has used that.
In short: it is a joke about a fictional place that Estee didn’t even technically come up with, they just ran with it. No real-world locations or people were harmed in the making of this fanfiction. Take a deep breath and relax, because there is nothing bad happening here.
11333553
That was a fine piece of comedy writing. >.>
I’m choosing to believe the exasperation was affectionate. ^^
11333553 I'm waiting for the Wikipedia article "One of the greatest leaps forward in technology was at the start of the 21st century when a young engineer, incensed by a fanfiction story about cold fusion, went on to prove the author wrong by actually creating a fusion reactor in his basement. Authorities who responded to the explosion and subsequent fire recreated the experiment from the livestream the deceased engineer had ongoing and dubbed the new reactor the Static Tokamak, or ST for short..."
11332638 Yeah, lets make a giant fabric device filled with flammable gas and coat it with *rocket fuel* before flying it in a thunderstorm and mooring it to a giant steel lightning rod... Are we sure Von Hindenburg wasn't a pony?
11333598 Besides, FimFiction authors are not the only people to make fun of France (for various good reasons)
11333730
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/fleet-taxis-did-not-really-save-paris-germans-during-world-war-i-180952140/&ved=2ahUKEwjt0qWG2sv5AhU9LkQIHTtQAXUQFnoECAcQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1yWOxsqPNjHxmigJsvcRa9
The French deserve some slack.
11333553
Too bad cold fusion isn't my thing. But if you ever feel like delving into organic chemistry or industrial/neofolk, I may be there.
Interestingly enough, in RL France's much larger bureaucracy then the U.S's tends to be much faster and responsive. Several businesspeople I've spoken to who do business in France praise their quick bureaucracy. They also build infrastructure like roads and rail lines for much less per mile, in part due to their effective bureaucracy.
Also, interesting fact: RL HOAs were originally created in California as an outgrowth of the anti-tax movement. The hope was that HOAs would be able to maintain neighborhood infrastructure like roads and parks at less cost and be more responsive to people. Of course, the opposite happened. There's nothing like an actually well funded and competent government...