A collection of more random stories from the Prompt-A-Day group's prompts
A random collection of prompt-driven one-shots. Each has been lovingly hand-crafted. The subjects are as diverse and colorful as the ponies which they describe.
New stories will be added now and then, so be sure to check back frequently.
She’d saved up for years to afford it. It was important to have a goal to work towards, after all. Sometimes when the stress of the mail route had been just a little too much to take, or Dinky had hoof-painted all over the living room walls, it was nice to go into her bedroom, close the door, and take out the jar of bits, pour them over the dresser, and count them, one-by-one.
Then came the magical day when she finally had enough bits. As soon as she got out of work, she took her jar and carefully set it in her saddlebags. She practically galloped through town, so eager was she to get to the small, out-of-the-way shop at the far end of Stirrup Street.
The shop was ill-lit, and very cluttered. The ancient unicorn who ran the store didn’t believe in attracting ponies with a modern shop; instead he catered to a very particular type of pony who was more interested in selection than presentation. Every single one of his trinkets—for that’s what they were—had been hoof and horn made by him, and each one of them could be personalized. Within reason.
Mail deliveries to his shop were not unheard of, and it was that which had brought Derpy in for the first time. An oddly-shaped box had to be signed for personally. He insisted on opening it and inspecting the contents right in front of her.
It was a self-playing crystal-powered ukulele. He explained that the owner had requested that he add a few new songs to its repertoire, and he was more than happy to do so. Naturally, one thing led to another, and before too long, he showed her The Box.
To him, of course, it wasn’t capitalized. It was just another thing he had made, no more interesting than any other. Certainly, it didn’t have the aesthetic appeal of one of his music boxes, or the utility of his self-heating soup pot. The box, in fact, was simple slabs of pine, neatly dovetailed together. A lid closed over the top, and that was that. Painted neatly on the side was a single word: “Fetcher.”
“Hey, what does this do?”
He looked up at her, squinting with his good eye. “It duplicates something.”
“Anything?”
He shook his head. It would not duplicate inorganic material at all, so you couldn’t make it generate bit coins or jewels. Such things did exist, of course, but they were not legal to possess or sell. It could replicate simple life, although they possessed little to no intelligence. Naturally, items were limited in size, too—if they would not fit in the box, they could not be duplicated. Finally, it could only be set once. Henceforth, it would make but one item, replacing it whenever the box was emptied.
Just then—as if the hoof of fate had touched her—Derpy’s stomach rumbled.
The Fetcher sat unused for a week. It was carefully locked away, lest an inquisitive filly put something in it and close the lid. Derpy spent this time tweaking her muffin recipe. Finally, the day arrived when she was satisfied that she had made the perfect batch of muffins, and without wasting any time, she took the absolute best muffin—still warm from the oven—put it in the box, and closed the lid.
When she re-opened the lid five minutes later, the muffin was still there. A little cooler than it had been, but no less enticing. With trembling hooves, she lifted it out of the box and gently set it on a plate. No sooner had she done so than a second muffin appeared in the box with a faint green flash. It was just a touch warmer than the sample muffin: apparently heat was one of the qualities the box duplicated flawlessly.
Derpy petted the box reverently. This was going to make her mornings so much better. No longer would she have to get up early and make fresh muffins, or re-heat yesterday’s in the oven. She could just pop the lid open, and out would come a fresh, warm muffin. She set it carefully in the kitchen cupboard.
As planned, the next morning a batch of fresh, warm muffins came out of the box—one for her, one for Dinky, and one for Sparkler, and another one for her. And the morning after that, and the morning after that, and the morning after that, and the morning after that. She was able to sleep in just a little bit later, which meant she could play with Dinky just a little longer the night before, and still have some ‘mare time’ with Sparkler after Dinky had gone to bed. All in all, the handy little Duplicator was saving her nearly a half-hour each day, and while that may not seem like a lot, that adds up to about 180 hours a year, which everypony knows is one full week . . . and that is a lot.
Everything was just perfect.
Derpy slowly opened her eyes. A small pair of hooves was shaking her.
“Mommy, mommy, wake up!”
“Dinky? The sun’s hardly up, and it’s a weekend. What are you doing up so early?”
“I was going to make you breakfast.” Dinky started crying. “But . . . something went wrong.”
Derpy jumped out of bed in alarm. “The stove isn’t on fire again, is it?”
Dinky shook her head.
“Nothing else is on fire?”
“No, but—”
“And you’re not hurt, are you?”
“No. But I kind of made a mess. . . .”
“Aww.” Derpy rubbed Dinky’s mane. “We all make messes. It’s nothing to cry about. Did you spill something?”
Dinky nodded slowly. “Kinda.” She took a deep breath. “I opened the kitchen cupboard all by myself and tried to get the oatmeal down but knocked over a box that was in the cupboard and all of a sudden muffins started pouring out of the cupboard and I dropped the oatmeal and slammed the door shut but I couldn’t hold it and it came open and more and more muffins came out and were falling all over the place and I couldn’t get into the cupboard any more and by the time I got Sparkler the whole kitchen was up to my neck in muffins and she’s holding the door shut but we don’t know how to make it stop.”
It was supposed to be a simple cruise. No one ever expected that iceberg so close to the equator.
It was really nobody’s fault. The HMS Lutefisk was running at full-steam to escape from a possible U-boat sighting, and the bridge crew mostly had their binoculars trained over the stern, hoping against hope to spot the telltale trails of a torpedo in time to take some evasive action. Even the pilot was paying more attention to the bridge wings than the ocean, and who could blame him? It was the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, so what could they possibly hit?
It hadn’t been a big iceberg, but it was big enough. The hull plates were torn open, and the engineering crew quickly reported that water was coming in much faster than the pumps had any hope of coping with.
Captain Smith made a hard decision in an instant. He ordered the engineering crew to keep the boilers up for as long as they could, but once water began entering the engine room to open the safeties and get out. The lifeboats were run out in their davits, ready for a quick launch, and the XO ordered a check to ensure that they were fully supplied.
To prolong the inevitable, the captain ordered full speed astern. There was a small chain of islands within a few hours steaming; the closer they could get before the ship sank, the better off they’d be.
There weren’t supposed to be any U-boats, the captain muttered. Not all the way out here. Just a short hop . . . ha!
Were he a younger man, he might have lamented the loss of his ship. This was wartime, though. It was the third ship that had been sunk under his command, and—if he survived—it probably wouldn’t be the last.
He rounded up a few personal belongings from his cabin and made sure he knew where the logbook was. If at all possible, it should survive the sinking. He wasn’t sure why it mattered, but it seemed like the thing to do.
Almost two hours after striking the iceberg, the Captain made his final entry: Finished with engines. Abandoning ship. He put the pen in his pocket, the logbook in his rucksack, and walked down to the main deck. The sun was just beginning to rise, which would help them land, and the navigator had gotten several good fixes. They were no more than twenty miles from the islands.
The boats were launched with little fanfare. The small gasoline motors started easily—the crew had had plenty of time to make sure they would—and the pair of lifeboats motored away from the doomed vessel on a steady easterly course. The ocean was as flat as a millpond.
Every five minutes Captain Smith looked back. Each time, the ship sat lower in the water; when he judged it was close, he kept watch until the Ludefisk finally slipped below the water. He looked down at his watch and noted the time in the logbook. Good record-keeping was vital, even in stressful times.
• • •
It was not long after the sinking that the islands were spotted. The crew headed towards the largest—although even that was not particularly big. Still, it was better than nothing.
As they got closer, they angled towards a natural cove. A small sailboat was moored in the harbor, which was a good sign. It looked to the captain somewhat like a dhow, but he suspected that whatever natives lived here had their own name for it.
As the ship closed in on the beach, shouts could be heard from the cluster of huts that surrounded the harbor. Natives giving warning, I suppose, the captain thought. Uncomfortable memories of books and movies where the primitives were cannibals came bubbling to the surface of his thoughts, but he suppressed them. Even if there had been such people once, the world had been explored and all the natives had been found. No matter how remote these islands were, there was likely to be a village elder or someone who spoke a smattering of English. They’d radioed the Admiralty with their position and intent to make for the islands after hitting the iceberg, so rescue could be expected in a few days.
They pulled the boats up on the beach and secured them. Most of the officers and crew stayed to watch the boats, while the captain and cook—who spoke Swahili—went to look for help in the village. The radio operator pointed as a cluster of zebra ran across a hill and out of sight.
They got to the huts sooner than Smith had expected. They were smaller than he’d expected, which was why he’d assumed they were farther away. The doors were only chest-high. “Are there pygmies living on these islands?” he wondered out loud.
“No idea.” The cook peered through a window. The inside of the hut was fairly primitive: tribal masks hung on the wall, and clay bottles and jars filled an alcove on one wall. The center of the hut had a small fire in it with a tripod above it, and two mats were laid out on opposite sides of the fire.
“Maybe they’re all in their fields or something. Might have chased off those zebra we saw earlier.”
The pair walked out of town, looking for some sign of the occupants. There was no one anywhere, much to their frustration. Finally, the cook spotted a well-worn path leading towards the center of the island.
“Keep alert,” Smith muttered. “They might be waiting to ambush us.”
• • •
The path led them up a grassy hill, before it turned towards a stand of trees. Off in the distance, they could see dozens of zebras watching their every move.
“How would zebras get out here anyway?”
“I . . . don’t know. Maybe a ship carrying some ran around and they swam off?” The captain walked forwards into the woods. “Are you thinking of catching one for dinner?”
“Too much work. Doubt we’d ever get close enough to hit one with a pistol, and I don’t know if it would bring it down, even if we did. Maybe when we run low on supplies, I’ll reconsider. Until then, I—”
Too late, Smith realized that they’d walked into a trap. Instinctively, he grabbed his gun and spun around. If there was only one of them . . .
But there was no one behind the cook. Only a zebra.
He started to lower his gun when a voice muttered something behind him. He didn’t recognize the language, but the sharp jab in his back told him all he needed to know. He dropped the gun and turned his head, hoping to plead his case.
He looked down at the wielder of the spear, then back towards the cook. “You . . . don’t happen to speak zebra, do you?”
Ponyville looked exactly like it did in the show. That had been a pleasant surprise.
The residents of Ponyville were essentially the same as the show, too: an even better surprise. True, there were some problems, mostly with names. Those who were seen in the show as major characters were accurately named; the minor characters often were not.
While this was annoying—at least as far as my headcanon went—it wasn’t really a deal breaker, since I’d tried my best to not admit knowledge of the show. There were two major reasons: first, I figured that if I told them that they were all characters in a television show on a different world, they’d mostly freak out. More importantly, if I used my freaky knowledge of them, I might get a Pinkie-esque reputation around town, and I didn’t want that, either.
I wasn’t sure exactly when I was in the show’s timeline (or if the show’s timeline coincided with their reality), although some discrete asking around had revealed that Twilight Sparkle was the librarian; unfortunately, she and the rest of the Element Bearers were up in the Crystal Empire for some sort of event.
I had seen no sign of Spike, nor the Cutie Mark Crusaders, so one possibility was that they were engaged in attempting to persuade Miss Harshwhinny to hold the Canterlot Games there. Of course, it could just as easily have been something else.
I learned, fairly quickly, that while the ponies were generally accepting of strange creatures, they were not so generous as to provide me with a place to stay. After much asking around, I found an inn, but the innkeep was not willing to extend me credit, since I had no visible means of support. In all honestly, I couldn’t blame her. Still, I figured that hands could be useful for something; indeed, by the afternoon I’d landed two part-time jobs. Both involved fairly backbreaking labor: in the morning I got to help unload the daily freight train, and then I spent all afternoon moving barrels of grain into the windmill, and sacks of flour out. The job was made more difficult by watching my supervisor tie grain bags shut with mouth and hooves better than I could with my hands. Still, it paid well enough that I could afford a room at the inn and three meals a day, with a little bit left over.
My next major discovery—a week into my stay—was that Ponyville had a jail. I was escorted there by Twilight Sparkle—who had returned from the Crystal Empire—personally. By escorted, I mean floated along in her aura.
It had happened like this: I had gone by the library on my way home from work and seen that the lights were on. I’d knocked on the door, just to see if she was home,and she’d opened the door. When she saw me, she took a step back and flared her wings out. Whatever I had been about to say had been replaced with pure gibberish as I ran forwards and glomped her furiously. She was so cute, I couldn’t help myself. I was still grinning as she marched me through the street, floating me about five feet in front of her.
She left me in the holding cell, saying that she didn’t want to deal with me tonight, and then departed.
About an hour later, the cell door opened and another pony was helped in. She was swaying side-to-side on her hooves, and reeked of alcohol. I’d seen Berry Punch around (the fans were right about her name), but we’d never really talked.
She flopped down unceremoniously on the floor and looked at me warily.
“What’d they pinch you for?”
“Uh.” I considered the question carefully. Twilight hadn’t really said why I was in jail. “Glomping a princess? How about you.”
Her cheeks reddened a little—I have no idea how the ponies do that. “Indecent exposure.”
“I . . . what?”
She looked at me flatly, muttering, “Hay, I’m drunk, what’s your excuse?”
“Twilight was too cute. But wait, back up a bit. You’re nude. You’re all nude. How did you even. . . .”
She smiled a little bit. “I did a pressed ham on the mayor’s window.”
“Oh.” That seemed reasonably offensive, I thought. But then her words hit home. “Wait, how do ponies even know what that is?”
“A pressed ham?” Berry looked at me like I was an idiot. “It’s where you lift your tail up and press your rump against a window.”
“I know what it is,” I sputtered. “But how do you? Why do you call it that?”
She flopped down on the single bunk, grabbed the covers in her hooves, and rolled into a pony-burrito. “Because your rump looks like a ham, pressed up against the window, duh.”
Twilight’s ears perked. The sound of an argument outside the library door was less unusual than she would have liked, and as often as not, it was Applejack’s voice. Twilight had been a mediator for her arguments with Rainbow on more than one occasion, after all.
“There’s gotta be a book in the library that’ll show you Ah’m right and yer wrong.”
She furrowed her brow. A book? Most of AJ’s arguments with Rainbow involved physical prowess, rather than something which might be found in a book. Although, it was nice that the headstrong farmer had considered settling her argument with research, and as the best librarian—technically, only librarian—in Ponyville, it was her duty to settle the argument. She rubbed her hooves together. Why, there might be a good friendship lesson in this!
“Nopers! Books won’t settle this.”
“Ah’ll let Twi be the judge of that.” The door swung open, revealing Applejack and—oddly enough—Pinkie Pie.
“Got a bit of a debate goin’ on here, Twi.” Applejack pulled off her hat. “Pinkie here says chives are food, an’ Ah say they’re seasoning.”
Twilight’s mouth dropped open, and she stared at the pair dumbly.
“Yeah! They’re food. You can eat them, and they’re in a lot of yummy dishes.”
“As a garnish,” Applejack insisted. “You wouldn’t eat a plate of chives for dinner.”
“Yes I would.”
“Point taken. You would. A normal pony wouldn’t.”
“Girls!” Twilight stomped her hoof down. “Look, we can settle this easily. I’ve got a book on herbs, and we’ll just see what they have to say about chives.”
Leaving her two friends glaring at each other, Twilight hurried over to her shelf of gardening books. One day she was going to try and grow her own vegetables—it seemed silly to live in a farm town and be one of the few ponies who didn’t grow something—but she hadn’t had enough time to research the proper crop just yet.
With little difficulty, she slid the enormous tome off the shelf and began flipping through it. “Chives: a herb commonly used for seasoning foods or for its medicinal qualities—”
“Ah told ya it was a herb!”
“—the chive is the smallest of the edible onion species.”
“Onions are food,” Pinkie countered.
“Jest ‘cause it’s related to a food don’t make it one.”
“Yeah-huh.”
“That was surprisingly unhelpful,” Twilight muttered. “Well, hold on a minute, you two. You’re putting the cart ahead of the pony here. We can come up with an answer to this scientifically. First: what is food?”
“Somethin’ ya can eat.” Pinkie nodded.
“Okay, something you can eat. Is that it?”
“Nah, it’s gotta be good fer ya. Ah mean, foals an’ pregnant mares’ll eat dirt sometimes, but that ain’t food.”
“Not even if you make mud pies,” Pinkie agreed.
Twilight laid a parchment on the table and took a quill in her telekinetic grasp. “Okay, so it has to be something that a pony can eat and it has to be good for a pony.”
“Wait—does it have to be good for a pony?”
“‘Tain’t food if it’s bad fer ya. You don’t think that the paste they have at the schoolhouse is food, do ya? Even if it does taste pretty darn good?”
“Cakes and cookies and cocoa and chocolate aren’t good for a pony,” Pinkie said. “Even though they taste really good.”
“Chocolate is,” Twilight said. “It’s got the mild stimulant caffeine in it, plus dark chocolate has flavonoids and antioxidants, which are good for the heart. But if you eat too much, you get fat.” She sighed, thinking of her hips. She’d been spending too much time in the library lately . . . maybe she should get out and exercise more. How is Pinkie Pie so in shape, with all the treats she eats? “Most foods are bad if you eat too much of them,” she concluded. “A pony can’t live on just one kind of thing; she needs a balanced diet. Every different kind of food has different nutrition.”
“Yeah. Everypony seems ta forget we grow crops other’n apples, an’ we eat other stuff, too.”
“And chives have nutrition in them,” Twilight said. “They’ve got vitamins, calcium, and iron. So, I’d have to agree with Pinkie that chives are food.”
“Toldja so!” Pinkie happily bounced around the library.
“Jest don’t seem right. Nopony’d eat a while buncha herbs as a dinner.” Applejack scuffed her hoof across the library floor. “Well, shoot. Ah guess I owe you an apology, Pinkie.”
“Accepted!”
Twilight smiled. “I’m glad we learned something today, girls. I’ll have to send this in a friendship report to Princess Celestia. Research can settle arguments.”
“Outa morbid curiosity, Twi, have ya got a dictionary?”
“Well, of course I do. This is a library, after all. Why do you ask?”
“We coulda jest looked up the definition of ‘food’ in there, couldn’t we have?”
“Um, yes?” Twilight’s face colored, and she grabbed the dictionary off its perch. “Let’s see. ‘Food. Any nutritious substance that ponies or animals or plants eat or drink or absorb.’ Huh, so I guess magical energy is kind of food, too.”
“And love, if you’re a changeling.”
“That’s a good point, Pinkie.”
Applejack’s eyes narrowed. “What about worms?”
“Worms?”
“Worms.”
“I—ah, well, birds eat them, and fish will. I think moles do, and probably some other burrowing mammals, so, by definition, worms are food.”
“Aha!” Applejack glared at Pinkie. “So there. Ah was right about worms.”
“I never said you weren’t,” Pinkie replied. “I just said that you shouldn’t have put worms in muffins, silly. I should have known that worm muffins aren’t edible.”
“Are, too.”
Two sets of eyes turned to look at Twilight. “Er, well, technically, I suppose a pony could get some nutrition from a worm. Protein. Vitamins and trace minerals, I’d imagine. I’m not sure how healthy it would be, though, but if it was washed. . . .”
“Are you confident enough that you’d eat a bowl of worms?”
Applejack narrowed her eyes. “Only if you’ll eat a whole bowlful of chives.”
“It. Is. On.”
Twilight rolled her eyes. This won’t end well. I’d better refresh my memory on emetic spells, and notify nurse Tenderheart.
“So how was your Earth vacation?” Blue Belle asked.
Cipher Splash held up a hoof and waved it in a ‘so-so’ motion.
“Oh, come on. You gotta give better than that.”
“Yeah. Tell us all about it!”
“Well, okay.” She took a sip of her cider and considered how to begin. “So, you know about the contest and all of that.”
“Yeah.”
“And—well, I guess I ought to pick up the story after everypony got kicked out of their seats. I didn’t know; I was in the bathroom.” She leaned close and lowered her voice. “’Cause the nachos they had, those were . . . well, if you’ve ever eaten Mexicolt food you pay for it later. Totally had the trots.
“I was so eager to see the end of the game, though. And it was right at the end. They have a big clock that counts down, everypony can see it, and there was time for just one more play. The Broncos had the ball at the line of scrimmage—”
“What’s a line of scrimmage?”
“It’s the place that the two teams try and defend, where the play starts. Anyway, the only chance the Broncos had was to throw a long pass, and—I was kinda caught up in the game, so I was watching from the aisleway and when the Broncos won, the whole crowd erupted and some of them were angry and I was getting nervous so I trotted back to our seats as quickly as I could, and everypony else was gone!
“I didn’t know where they’d gone; I thought that they’d just left in the time it took me to get back there.”
“Didn’t anypony wait for you?”
“Well, I wish they had. But a lot of us, we didn’t know each other. It’s not like going to a hoofball game with a bunch of your friends. Neither of you would have left me behind like that.”
“No, of course not,” Lilac Notes assured her.
“So I went out of the stadium to where our buses were.”
“That was smart. I think I would have panicked.”
“I kinda was,” Cipher admitted. “I . . . I galloped most of the way there.
“But the buses were gone! They’d left without me, and I didn’t know what to do.
“Human cities aren’t like Canterlot or Manehattan where everything is close and I didn’t know if I could walk far enough to get back to the hotel. I can’t speak any Humanish, and what were the odds of finding a human who could speak pony?
“So I didn’t know where I should go or what I should do. I knew that the buses would have gone back to the hotel—we were staying one more night before returning to Equestria—but I didn’t know how to get there.
“I did have the hotel key, though. And it’s not like a proper key; it’s a flat card with a spell in it that lets you use the elevators and get into the room, and it’s got the hotel name on it. And I had some human fiat currency, so I could afford to rent a taxi or something, if I could find one.”
“How long did you look for a taxi?”
“Well.” Cipher paused long enough to take another sip of her cider. “That was an adventure! I thought that since the stadium had lots of entrances, one of them would be for taxis. And when I was on my way there, I saw some policemen on Earth-horses, so I asked them, and they were no help at all. They whinnied politely enough, but they couldn’t understand a word I was saying. So when it was obvious they weren’t going to help, I went on my way through their big pavement pasture and back to the stadium.
“It didn’t take me too long to find the taxis—luckily, they’re yellow with checkers, just like the ones in Manehattan. But instead of telling the taxi pony outside, you have to get in first and then you can say where you’re going.
“Of course, since we couldn’t speak the same language, that was a problem. So I showed my hotel key and he got the idea, and pretty soon we were off.
“We got to the hotel, but it was the wrong hotel—why would they have two hotels with the same name? Who’s gonna know where to go? What if I’d told you girls to meet me at The Tasty Treat but there were actually two of them?
“I got kinda lucky, though. They had movie boxes in the lobby, and some of them were showing pictures of the other unicorns. I pointed to them, and to my hotel card and eventually the people at the desk figured out that I wanted to go there.
“They were really nice, luckily. They got a little bus for me, which was too much, I thought. The taxi was roomy enough for me. The driver knew exactly where the right hotel was. Boy, I sure was glad to meet up with everypony again!”
“That sounds like a crazy adventure, Cipher.”
“I know, right? I don’t think I’ll ever go back. Not until I learn the language, anyway—it’s scary to be all alone after dark, in a strange world where you can’t talk to anypony.”
You obscure aunt has died. leaving you her only possession—a mysterious trunk. You think you hear noises from it. . .
It’s what’s called a steamer trunk. You see knockoffs of them at furniture stores—much flimsier than the genuine article, of course. In and of itself, it’s not terribly valuable. At best, a few hundred dollars if restored.
What’s more interesting is what’s in it. That’s a mystery. Something inside is bumping back and forth when you lift it.
There is, of course, no key. You could pry it open, or unscrew the hinges, but you don’t.
You could call a locksmith, and maybe you will, but you have to think that locks like this aren’t too challenging, and it’s a fun way to spend a little bit of time, so you watch a few videos on YouTube and with a bit of bent wire you finally manage to click the lock open.
The hasp is seized with rust, and you need a screwdriver to pry it clear of the latch. And the hinges are stiff, too, but you’ve got the whole lid to provide leverage, and with a protesting squeal, it comes open.
Inside is a smaller but otherwise identical chest. It’s also locked.
You’ve got the whole lid to provide leverage, and with a protesting squeal it comes open.
Inside is a cardboard box, stickers on each side indicating it’s fragile. There’s packing tape across the flaps, several strips to make sure it stays secure.
“What’s in the box?” you can hear Brad Pitt saying.
You don’t want to open the box.
You have to open the box.
You lift the box up out of the chest and wonder just how heavy a human head is anyway? Ten pounds, maybe a bit more? About the same as a bowling ball?
Your Swiss Army Knife makes short work of the tape and you cautiously pull the flaps open.
It is a bowling ball. A custom Brunswick. You shrug. You never knew your aunt was a bowler.
The hasp and hinges work easily; they’ve been oiled recently. Inside is a box, a nondescript cardboard box with airholes in it.
You open the box that was in the chest and inside is a light blue rainbow-maned filly pegasus pony . . . it’s My Little Dashie.
It’s a lavender unicorn in a box. Not Twilight Sparkle: it’s Amethyst Star, a.k.a. Sparkler, a.k.a. Amey the Hoof, and she’s got her Sig Sauer and she’s pissed.
“This had better not be Flint again,” she mutters as she steps out of the box.
Inside is a small metal chest. Some kind of ammo box, most likely; it’s got stenciled numbers along the side and top and where it isn’t rusted it’s still an olive drab.
The writing isn’t in English, it looks like Cyrillic and your great-uncle fought in World War II, so maybe this is some war souvenir. Eagerly, you flip the latch and lift the lid.
A tentacle comes out.
You try to slam the lid shut but it’s too late; now there are two tentacles then four then a dozen or more and some abomination that never should have been able to fit into the box is squeezing its way into the world and you’re utterly powerless to stop it.
A nice wooden box is inside, and it helpfully says “Open Me” on it.
You very carefully pick the box up out of the chest and examine it from all sides. It’s really too small to contain anything particularly dangerous, but you’re wise enough to not take chances. You gently set the box back inside the chest and shut it back into darkness. You will guard it for your whole life, and then you will pass it on to someone else who will do the same, because that’s how it works.
Inside the chest is a single National Geographic magazine, August 1938.
The leading article is titled Our Search for the Lost Aviators, and you assume that’s Amelia Earhart, so you crack open the magazine and quickly learn that it isn’t about her at all.
There’s a coffin in the chest. A small one, certainly smaller than an adult human would fit in. It’s quite ornate. It’s probably something you shouldn’t open, but you do anyway because you’ve gotten this far.
Inside is your aunt. She’s smaller than you remembered.
She sits up and looks you right in the eye, and then says, completely deadpan, “Surprise, motherfucker.”
Inside is a red helium balloon. It bumps briefly against the lip of the chest then floats up to the basement ceiling.
“We all float down here,” you hear a voice whisper, so you burn your house down and move to Slab City and that’s the end of the story.
“At least we finally got out cushy hotel room,” you tell Daring Do.
“Aw, come on, Hannah. That box car wasn’t that bad.”
“Easy for you to say, you’ve got a fur coat.”
She shrugged. “Maybe you should keep a blanket in your bra.”
“Did you—” You pause for a second to consider. “I don’t think it’d fit. I’d wind up looking like Lara Croft.”
“Who’s that?”
“She’s a fictional character, who inspired me to get into adventure archaeology. She’s got really big boobs. Made her popular with all the boys.” You stretch out on your bed and change the subject. “You ready for your presentation?”
“Ugh, no.” Daring sighs and flops on her back as well. “I don’t even know what to talk about. How the hay am I supposed to inspire other writers when all I do is write down what I’ve done? Change some names so nopony gets mad. Decide if I’m going to put in getting tied up again or not, because one reviewer said he thought that A.K. Yearling had a confinement fetish.”
“Do you?”
“I don’t think so. You were with me at the Andravidan Temple; did I look like I enjoyed being tied up?”
“Yeah, actually. You were kind of moaning.”
“I was not.”
“Squirming around on your seat.”
“That was to keep the ropes from being too tight. I wasn’t—ugh.”
“I’m just messing with you,” you say. “I wasn’t actually paying that much attention to you; I was looking around to see if there was a chance to overcome Dr. Callebron’s henchponies.”
Daring throws a pillow at you anyway, and you put it under your head so she can’t get it back. “You could talk about the basics.”
“Basics. Like, invest in a typewriter unless your mouthwriting is really good? Learn to spell?”
“I hope learning how to spell is obvious.” What would people want to know about the writing process? “How do you decide what to put in a story?”
“I dunno, if it seems interesting I include it. Otherwise I don’t.”
“Have you started working on a story with our raid on the Temple?”
She nodded.
“Am I in it?”
“Of course you’re in it. I couldn’t have done it without you. Nopony else would have been crazy enough to jump off the top of a temple and grab onto an airship.”
“Out of curiosity, what are you gonna call me?”
“Well, I don’t know much about human names, so I figured that I’d just spell your first name backwards.”
“Backwards?”
“Sure, nopony will know the difference.”
“Sounds reasonable. I wond—hey!” You roll over to face her, and she’s got her tongue stuck out, so you pull her pillow out from under your head and throw it back at her.
“Maybe I should just not give a speech.”
“You’re a guest of honor,” you tell her. “You pretty much have to.”
“I could just do question and answer for the whole thing. Find out what people really want to know, and then come up with something that sounds good. What would you want to know?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it,” you tell her. “I think that maybe when you tell your stories, it’s like you’re telling a friend at a bar or something, right?”
“Kinda, but my editor gets mad when I go on tangents. Speaking of telling stories at the bar, do you want to go down and have a drink? I hear that they have special ones for the convention.”
“Really?”
“Really really. I saw the sign when I came in. There’s one called the Marina that sounds pretty good.”
“A marina? Like where boats dock?”
“No, Marina like the orca-pony. Look, see how I’m moving my ear, that means it’s a name and not a thing.”
“Wait, you’re telling me that ear movement is how you tell names from nouns?”
“Yeah. In case you were wondering why I can never figure out if you’re talking about a pony or a piece of furniture.”
“You ponies are silly.” You stand up and Daring flies off her bed and lands on the floor. “Okay, but we’re not going to drink too much and we’re going to be sure that you’re ready for your speech, okay?”
“Yes, Banana.”
•••••
She’s up before you, pacing nervously around the hotel room like a caged animal. “I thought we talked this all out at the bar last night.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“I can bring some rope, tie you to the chair, if you’d be more comfortable that way.”
That at least gets her to stop her pacing. “I’m being silly,” she decides.
“Yup.”
“I can do this.”
“You’re a brave adventurer. You’ve faced countless dangers.”
“Yeah.”
“Like Ahuizotl.”
“Did you know his real name is Fred?”
“What? Really?”
“No, not really. It’s actually Āhuitzotl. The only change I made to his name is dropping the macron over the a, since most ponies don’t speak Classical Nahuatl.”
“Back on topic, if you get nervous, just imagine that everyone in the audience is naked.” You stop and think about that for a moment. “Okay, well almost everyone in the audience will be. Except for me and the cosplayers. Huh.”
“That’s one of those human things, isn’t it? Imagining other people naked?”
“Yeah. Another one is break a leg, but that doesn’t seem like something you should say to a pony. What kinds of little pep talks do ponies have anyway?”
“Pain fades, glory lasts forever, and chicks dig scars.”
“Really?”
“No, not really. That’s from a human movie. But it’s good life advice.” She tips out a small packet of green coffee beans and begins nibbling on them. “You want some?”
“I prefer my coffee brewed.” The hotel doesn’t have little coffee makers in it. “But I guess when in Rome.”
They’re really bitter, but certainly wake you up. You’re going to have to remember to pack them in your adventure kit. After a handful you feel ready to wrestle a hydra. “Do you want me to make cue cards to hold up? In case you get lost?”
“Oh, that’s just what I need.”
“So that’s a yes?”
“That was sarcasm. One ear a little bit back, and the other kinda angled.”
“I’ll be there for moral support. And to bop any bad guys.”
“I’m sure there won’t be any bad guys at the panel.”
•••••
Daring did start off a bit nervous. You’re not sure if anybody else on the panel picked it up, but you could tell. So you waited until she was looking right in your direction and pretended to start unbuttoning your shirt, and that was enough to get her back on track. Good thing, too, because you hadn’t brought any poster board to write an inspirational message on.
She still rushed through her presentation, but that didn’t matter because when she got to the question and answer section, ponies quickly filled the aisle. It was obvious that there wasn’t going to be time to get to all of them.
And they all felt like introducing themselves and giving a brief rundown of their work. You think that’s kind of rude; it cuts into everpony else’s question time, and not always necessary in order to answer a question about if you can write a good self-insert story.
Daring is starting to look a little bit overwhelmed, so you turn to a fresh page in your notebook and scribble in big letters FIRST DRINK IS ON ME and then hold it up until she nods and brightens a little bit.
•••••
“So how did I do?”
You’re both sitting at the bar. True to your word, you bought her her first drink. A Marina, named after the orca-pony, not the place where boats dock.
The drink is blue, roughly the same color as windshield washer fluid. Judging from your first sip, it’s also got about as much alcohol in it.
“You didn’t uninspire me from writing,” you tell her.
“Shame. I like my niche, and I’d hate it if other adventure archaeologists were crowding the market.”
“The good news is that I’d probably write about working at Jim Jam’s shop. Nopony wants to read another book about exploring a dangerous temple.”
“Or dangling from the nose of an airship while Dr. Callebron’s henchponies shoot arrows at you.”
“Exactly. Readers want something that’ll put them to sleep.” You swirl your drink around and take another sip. “I wonder why they named this after the orca-pony? Do you think it’s because it’s blue like the ocean?”
“Yeah, or maybe Marina’s drunk all the time.”
“Very much a possibility.” You take another sip of your drink. “So what are you doing next?”
“I was gonna go to the cosplay contest as myself, see how I do. What about you?”
“Go around the merch hall, see if I can find a Daring Do plushie. And then have you autograph it.”
She slaps you with a wing. “If you do that, so help me, I’ll commission a Hannah Hawes plushie, and I’ll make you sign it.”
“Sounds like we’ve got a deal.”
She sticks her tongue out at you, and you return the favor.
