Twilight Sparkle stomped her way across the castle courtyard, fuming. “I cannot believe what that pony just said!”

Cadance looked up from the book she was reading. “Was it Blueblood again?”

Twilight nodded. “Ever since I became a Princess, he’s been trying to get me into his bed. Today he decided to enumerate the things he could do for me with… extremely creative metaphors. I think it was supposed to be poetry?”

Cadance laughed. “I suppose he can be kind of a cute little teddy bear.”

Twilight stared at her, incredulously.

Cadance smiled back at her. “You look like you want to throw something. Want to play horseshoes?”

It turned out that Cadance was not very good at horseshoes. Neither was Twilight, but at least she could usually get the shoe in the general vicinity of the target stick. “Oh, blueberry muffins!” Cadance exclaimed as another shoe went wide.

Twilight carefully tossed another shoe, that missed the stick and ended up a little farther than her last throw. It was still closer than Cadance’s best, though, and would count for points. “Are you letting me win?” she asked, with a cocky smirk.

Cadance stuck out her tongue, and made another toss. This one hit the target straight on – then bounced off to land a few inches away. Not a ringer, but close enough to invalidate all of Twilight’s.

“Uh oh, looks like you might finally score a point,” Twilight said, narrowing her eyes and focusing, then skimming her shoe quickly at a low angle, sliding it into Cadance’s and sending both flying off out of range. “Not!”

“You… you…” Cadance said, her ears flattening. “Twilight, you adorable fluffy kitten!” She blushed, and looked away.

Twilight laughed. “Yeah, that was the sort of thing a kitten would do,” she said. “You have the cutest little swears, Cadance. Is that how everypony curses in Hollow Shades?”

“Oh! Oh, no,” Cadance said. “It’s really just a quirk of my family. When I was young, the ponies I grew up with always used to swear by the same sort of unpleasant things as anypony else – ‘buck’ for being kicked by another pony, ‘horseapples’, when somepony has to go and doesn’t make it to a restroom, or ‘ponyfeathers’ referring to the worn and broken feathers a pegasus has to painfully pull loose when preening.”

Twilight winced in sympathy at that last one. Getting a pair of wings indeed had not been entirely without its drawbacks, although the feeling afterwards was usually worth it.

“But my mother taught me that it could be just as cathartic to loudly invoke the names of things that you enjoy,” Cadance continued. “I usually use baked goods, or cute little baby animals, but the important thing is for it to be something that will make you feel better when you think about it.”

“Oh, that makes sense,” Twilight said. “Baked goods, hmm? Is that what your mother used?”

Cadance laughed. “Oh, no, she always used sex. ‘Fuck me’ or ‘fuck this’ or ‘you motherfucking whore!’”

It's short, it's light, it's dark... yeah, it's kind of both. It's not related to anything else I wrote. Hopefully it's fun to read, it was pretty fun to write.

Spirit Tethers

Warning: contains a slightly antisocial Twilicorn

I want to write something, but I'm not sure what. The options that I've been thinking about include:

(a) Finishing up a non-pony story that I kind of trailed off on to write MLP fanfiction instead. It involves otters in space. Completely separate from the 'moon ponies'.

(b) Instead, writing a crossover between space otters and MLP. Probably, posthuman 'internet' users 'projecting' solid avatars into Equestria because they think it's a game, and proceeding to wreck the place accidentally. The idea would be to re-imagine various events of the series (eg, the existance of Cadance) as being fallout of that.

(c) I kind of want to do a Conversion Bureau story where it's all a trick and run by changelings. Twilight's famously bad speech is because the 'real' Twilight Sparkle was assassinated just before the speech and a random security guardling had to take her place. Problem: distinct possibility of there being no actual ponies in the story.

(d) I was going to do 'Pinkie Pie has always been a changeling' but I think that's been done to death by now. In particular I've read at least three different stories that did the same angle I was going to do and they weren't so horribly bad that I feel compelled to do it right.

(e) Various sequels to Space Captain Pinkie Pie...

   (1) The straightforward sequel, where they build a new ship and go out to explore space. This would probably end up being a crossover with something.

   (2) Side story with Twilight as an Earth Pony

   (3) Side story with Ditzy and Thunder Lane

   (4) Something horrible with mirrors.

(f) Requests?

The default, if nopony cares, is probably 'nothing for the next couple weeks and/or until I suddenly get the urge to write something in particular'.

It's another 'rainbow dash failed the rainboom' story but it focuses on the characters growing up differently, and it's pretty compelling. There hasn't been even a hint of nightmare moon yet, but...

A Minor variation

Argh. Stupid brainworm. 'This Day Aria' is way too catchy for a villain song.

I was thinking about writing a 'conversion bureau' story where a lot of the weirdnesses and inconsistencies in the setting were explained by a simple secret that no pony is allowed to tell. But of course I started singing to myself...

This Bureau's going to be perfect,

the kind of scheme of which I've dreamed since I was small...

Humans come from far and wide

hoping to be ponified,

what they don't know is that I have fooled them all!

So, I've been trying to write the next chapter of SCPP for a week now, and I've been forced to come face to face with an unalterable truth -- writing about mining with lasers is boring. (cue rimshot) Even if you have Pinkie Pie singing mining songs in the background.

I think I have the solution, though, so I should have something like a chapter in a few days. That's not really what this post is about.

In the shower this morning, and while I was doing my morning walk that pretends to be exercise, I saw the whole rest of the story in my head, scene by scene, with dialog and action and drama and it was so beautiful! I even had a few ideas for a sequel!

...and by the time I get home from work and can actually try to write anything down I'll probably have forgotten everything. Hell, I've probably *already* forgotten all the details that would make writing it out easy. I'll have to go by the vague mental outline and try to recreate everything from scratch. v.v

Why do I only get ideas when I'm in no position to act on them?

I'm on vacation from last wednesday until this wednesday and too busy to even keep up with fanfic let alone write any. Busy in a good way of course! n.n

Buuut that means Space Captain Pinkie Pie probably won't have another chapter up until next weekend at the earliest and maybe not then depending on how much of a backlog of fanfic-reading and diablo-3-playing I've accumulated. c.c

And, um, right. If you were following my completed stories that probably means you wanted me to mention if I started a new one. So, um, yeah. I did. It's the same general tone but not in the same alternate universe.