Ch. 2 - A Slight Misunderstanding
The Traveling Tutor and the Librarian
A Slight Misunderstanding
“Hi, I’m—” Spike watched the book bounce against the library floor as a rippling wave of air filled the space formerly occupied by the green pony carrying it.
“Wow, and I thought Rainbow Dash was fast.” The little dragon picked up the book and gave it a heft before closing the library front door.
“Spike! Who was that?” Twilight Sparkle’s voice threaded upstairs by way of the open door into the basement laboratory. Since late last night, she had been engaged in yet another pointless experiment which would probably only generate broken glass and ashes for him to clean up. If he was lucky.
“Just a delivery pony with that book you were missing. Looks like they had to send you a used copy.” He gave a skeptical look at the somewhat ragged cover with fresh tooth marks. “Really used.”
“Well, don’t forget to put a library card in the back of it before you shelve it,” she called back.
“Anything that keeps me out of the lab,” he muttered, before looking in the back of the book. “Hey Twilight! It already has a card! Looks like it got checked out by somepony named Greengrass last year.” Spike stuck said card back into the book and totaled up the overdue fine while an enthusiastic downpour started outside. “That can’t be right.”
“What isn’t right?” asked Twilight Sparkle as she trotted up the stairs with a yawn and hung up her lab coat and safety goggles. “The rain outside? Because I know we were scheduled to get an afternoon shower, but that seems a little excessive, even for Rainbow Dash.”
“No, not that. I added up the fine on this book according to the formula you came up with, and I ran out of beads on the abacus.” The young dragon glanced out the library window with a thoughtful frown. “Now that you mention it, the rain is coming down pretty heavy.”
With an explosive bang, the front door of the library fairly sprung off its hinges and a green pony holding a bucket of water dashed across the library floor—
* * *
“DragondragondragondragonDRAGON!” gasped Green Grass as he dashed away from the fire-breathing dragon in the flammable library with the flammable books and the most probably flammable Miss Dewey since her age was coming up on her century mark, and she seemed drier than any old stick. “Fire!” he screamed up at the pegasi putting the final touches on the afternoon rainclouds. “Fire at the library! Hurryhurryhurry!”
“I’m on it!” shouted the rainbow-tailed leader, grabbing a big chunk of cloud and shoving it over the giant oak tree. “Come on girls! Twilight’s going to be upset if any of her books burn!”
Green Grass grabbed the fire bucket from his wagon and held it under the downpour as the weather ponies hopped on the cloud. There was no real way of stopping an armored, clawed, fire-breathing dragon, but you could slow it down if you could put out its fire. He gripped the bucket’s handle with his teeth and bucked in the front door of the library, calling out, “I’ll save you Miss Dewey!” in a voice muffled by the bucket handle. Soaked in rain and holding the bucket full of water as a flimsy defense against the dragon’s fiery breath, he plunged across the library floor and heaved the water straight into the face of the stunned dragon — and the purple unicorn standing next to him.
Slowly, a set of facts became clear to his fear-scrambled mind:
The dragon was very small, perhaps even a baby.
The purple unicorn was not afraid of the dragon, even standing to his side.
A purple unicorn with a baby dragon could only be Twilight Sparkle, protégé to Princess Celestia.
She looked angry when wet.
So did the dragon.
I wonder what the moon is going to be like.
“I can ex—“ he began weakly before a purple aura yanked him abruptly into the air by his tail.
“OUT!” His surroundings passed by in a blur as he flashed through the doorway and across the lawn in a long parabolic path that intersected a small tree at the end of the block with predictable consequences.
“AND STAY OUT!” The empty bucket followed the exact same path, exchanging potential energy for pain just as he managed to pull his head out of the tree. The library door slammed shut, locked, and the Open sign flipped over to Closed For Cleanup.
“Hi Grassie! I see you met Twilight! Isn’t she just the neatest friend anypony could have? Huh? Huh?”
There was obviously something wrong with his vision after hitting the tree. All he could see was waves of pink passing in front of his eyes.
Oh, wait. Pinkie Pie.
“Hi Pinkie.” His eyes refused to focus, and it did his scrambled nerves little good to see multiple pink party ponies all hopping happily around him.
“Does this mean the library’s not on fire?” The irritated voice from above sounded familiar. As he looked upwards, his view turned from multiples of pink into two angry rainbow-maned pegasi sitting on two clouds.
“Oh. Hi Rainbows. Rainbow. No, nothing is on fire. I just… was confused for a moment. Don’t sweat it, the library tree probably needed some more watering anyway.” Green Grass took off his hat and wrung it out before flopping it back on his head with a squelch. “I was needing a shower too, but not anymore. Where’s Miss Dewey?”
Pinkie Pie bounced in circles while chattering, “Oh she moved out a couple weeks before the Summer Sun Festival and missed all the excitement when we fought Nightmare Moon! You should have seen it, she was all like ‘The Night will last Forever’ with her doomy evil voice and we were all like ‘Oh yeah!” only that was Rainbow Dash because I was trying to figure out how to have birthday parties if there were no more days and birthnight parties would be all gloomy and depressing and how would you tell how old you were if there were no more days anymore but—”
The cloud descended over Pinkie Pie with a soft squishy sound as Rainbow Dash brought herself down to eye level with the embarrassed tutor. Despite her voice being muffled to a faint mumbling by the cloud, Pinkie Pie continued to chatter as if nothing had changed.
“Hey, long time no see, Grassie,” said the short-tempered pegasus, tapping one hoof against the edge of the cloud with little crackles of lightning. “Did you really think the library was on fire or were you just pulling one of your little pranks on me on your first day back into town? Because it wasn’t very funny.”
“Oh, I saw the dragon, and I overreacted. A little.” Green Grass pulled his hat lower to shade his burning cheeks and sulked while Rainbow Dash snorted with a suppressed chuckle. “It could have happened to anypony.”
“Anypony? Right!” Rainbow Dash fell backwards onto her cloud and waved all four legs while filling the air with peals of laughter. “Oh yeah. Like when Sparkler managed to blow all the windows out of Ditzy’s house every day for a week, or that horde of mice⁽*⁾ that nearly ate—”
(*) The Vermin Repulsion spell is entirely too similar to the Vermin Attraction spell, but it could have been worse. It also is quite closely related to the Lawyer Attraction spell.
—
“Hey! It was my first year teaching! I’ve gotten a lot better since then.”
“Surrrre you have. Just wait until you start teaching Sweetie Belle.”
Rainbow Dash quit laughing suddenly and glanced at her house floating above the edge of town. “Maybe I should move outside the city limits a mile or two until you’re done. Fluttershy won’t mind if I tie up there for a few weeks until the wreckage quits bouncing.”
Green Grass’ blush had almost made the green pony a nice healthy McIntosh red by the time Rainbow Dash hefted her cloud up and started to fly away with one last snort of laughter. “Well, I gotta get back to the rainstorm that somepony delayed. I’ll catch you at Sugarcube Corner once we get the rain started and you can settle your bill for turning in a false fire alarm.”
“…and that’s how Equestria was founded! Pretty neat, huh? Huh?” Once the cloud lifted off her, Pinkie Pie resumed her hopping path around Green Grass. “So can we eat now? I’m starving!”
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And more is already here!
Well, that was a fairly unique way to introduce yourself to Twilight, but that's just about the best thing I can say about it. Nice one, Grassy.
I like that he is quite well known to the residents of the town.
Dat first impression.
Seems good!
1720876
'Already friends with all the main characters' is usually one of the things that makes OCs so awful, but it's done well here!
I think that's probably the best possible way to get off on the wrong hoof with Twilight Sparkle. I don't think that he needs to worry about being sent to the Moon. That will be painless compared to what Twilight might do to him, given some of the skills she seems to have (based on 'Magic Duel').
Oh boy. You have sown nerdrage, Green Grass, and you shall reap the intellectually irate whirlwind. I envy you not one iota.
So how did Green Grass know, not only about the Elements of Harmony but that Twilight is one of them, yet not know that she lived in the library?
This is exceptional so far! Such a win when I released that reality of Green Grass's dragon situation.
Open sign flipped over to Closed For Cleanup.
-If her experiments blow up that often (not to mention Dash "dropping in unexpectedly", or her coming out of a studying trance to find she left books all over the floor), it makes sense that she would need faster access to that than "Closed Until Morning"... if they do close. Ponies are honest enough that leaving the front door unlocked so people can look up things in the middle of the night (for instance, ideas for hushing a restless newborn) might actually be viable.
-I see you have clouds being somewhat solid to non-pegasi.
-Wouldn't the lightning have risked shocking Pinkie.
-I do like Prachett-style footnotes.
“Maybe I should move outside the city limits a mile or two until you’re done.
-Well, her house probably IS mobile.
Fluttershy won’t mind if I tie up there for a few weeks until the wreckage quits bouncing.”
-This probably supports my theory.
So far, so good. I think I'll be liking this story.
"The Vermin Repulsion spell is entirely too similar to the Vermin Attraction spell, but it could have been worse. It also is quite closely related to the Lawyer Attraction spell"
Baaahahahaha!
Lawyer attraction spell huh? I know prank I'M going to pull on Celestia now!
*Mad cackling*
Oh dear.
__________
**What isn't commonly known is that the Lawyer Attraction spell shares several components with (miscast) regular spells.
In fact almost any spell can cause litigious lawyers to appear when cast incorrectly.
And then the minions of Habs-Rho would have descended upon their world, freezing its progress through time.
I love these lines more than his thoughts afterwards, a lot because of the timing, but partly because of the oddity of such a phrase as "looked angry when wet".
I love the notes and would comment how they remind me of Discworld, but I see from later comments that these were indeed influenced by the late author of that series. Some obviously land better than others, but such is the nature of comedy.
I can appreciate how these direct references are used, but I've never been a big fan of them. Or maybe it's just because of how overused some of the references have become. Either way, I prefer when an author kind of does their own thing with the character rather than relying on some one-liners ripped directly from the show. To be clear, that's not to say I don't like what you've done here, but that these show and fandom references generally fall flat with me. Such is the nature of comedy, I suppose.
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I don't have too much to say about this chapter. Most of it is more setup after it delivers the punchline for the first chapter.
To be fair, the way he describes it, this was a perfectly logical course of action
Interesting that there's no limit on the overdue fee
Silly Spike, increase the mantissa and you'll be fine with that calculation! Not like it's getting paid...
... Waaaait. I thought Lawyers were Vampires. Somethin' don't smell right here...