Buggy and the Beast - Monday · 4:11am Feb 21st, 2016
Starting Monday, I'll be releasing Buggy and the Beast two chapters per day (AM/PM) until all twenty chapters are out. I *should* have it edited to perfection (with Tek, Peter, and docontra's help) by now, but if you're interested in pre-reading/pointing out my horrible misuse of the English language before my flaws are exposed to the world (again), drop me a note and I (might) let you look at the Gdoc. Details after the break.
Yes, it's a take-off from Beauty and the Beast (duh) done with changelings.
--Long Description
Once upon a time, there was a young unicorn who was scarred and battered by the cruel world until he was forced to retreat behind the walls of a solitary life as a bitter and spiteful creature. As he grew up, he remained a lonely recluse, with only his best friend for occasional companionship.
Until one day, he found something the world had treated even more callously and cruel than himself. She was a changeling, badly wounded and crushed until she hung onto life by a slender thread. The only chance she had for surviving her injuries was love, but that was no chance at all, for she was a monster in pony society.
And who could ever love a beast.
Editors: Peter, docontra and Tek
Rated T for references to sex, crude language, obnoxious behavior, and weathervanes.
Cover picture FIM Sleeping Changeling is courtesy of Avarraptor at Deviant Art.
(Gypsy is so cute!)
-Short Description
When a critically injured changeling is discovered by a reclusive unicorn, her only slender hope for survival is to somehow help them both to feel love again. They’re doomed.
(Teaser)
Buggy and the Beast
Shattered Glass
An experienced night watchpony at the Baltimare docks develops a second sense to the crashing sounds of impact. A drunken sailor or two flapping their way back onboard one of the griffon airships would normally express serious profanity before and after their crash, sometimes repeating the impact multiple times with increasing profanity until they were able to stagger back into the air and get back to their berth. Sometimes the occasional freight hauler with a defective tie down or cargo gate would spill a box or two from altitude along their designated flight paths, making even the most careless watchpony give a habitual glance skyward when crossing the bright yellow lines on the ground. And, of course, there were always the ‘accidental’ jettisoning of cargos occurring when Customs got a little too inquisitive about some shabby tramp skyliners’ manifest.
Beet Salad would have preferred to work the nearby seaside docks, even though the number of plummeting airborne items would be nearly the same due to cargo winches hefting huge pallets of bananas and mangos from the burro crewed freighters on their way to Equestrian cities. Still, the splintering crash splitting the air on his way home seemed more to be a mid-air collision than a cargo failure.
The burly night watchpony paused with one hoof shading his eyes, scowling up into the bright sunny day. If it was not bad enough that the airborne citizens of the city had decided the docks made a good shortcut, it was only made worse by their inability to follow the clearly-marked public skyways. The interminable staff meeting he had just left had droned on and on about the importance of the docks to Equestrian commerce and how everypony needed to be on the tips of their hooves with the new security warnings being hammered on an almost daily basis. And of course the staff meeting had to happen during the day, when he normally would be sleeping. Pegasi, griffons, or whoever else trespassed across docks airspace were to treated strictly and all traffic regulations enforced from now on, with no exceptions.
So the crash he had just heard was going to make him late getting back to bed for a few hours of sleep before having to get up again and return to this same spot in the dark.
I’m off work! Bucking brats playing in the pallet piles. Even if I chase ‘em off, I’ll probably still have to do paperwork I won’t even get paid for!
Still, he had developed a fairly effective way of making sure the young pegasi or griffons in the city did not make a habit of trespassing on the docks. Beet Salad pried loose a fairly thick slat off a nearby pallet with his magic as he strolled in the direction of the noise. It only took one lesson for the teenagers who thought sneaking around the docks at night was cool, although the lesson normally came at the expense of their dental bills and some limping for a few weeks to complete the educational process. Beets had been in far more than his fair share of brawls as a child, and had carried his enthusiastic habit through his life to the present, as his craggy face and considerably bent nose showed. Ropey scars down his thick legs and chips in his heavy hooves only showed the failures of his fighting history. The truly impressive scars all adorned other ponies who had been either stupid or drunk enough to get into a fight with him once and only once.
He really did not try to get into fights. Fights came to him. So there were a few teeth of his still not pointing exactly the right way, a number of permanent chips in his somewhat-short horn, and a general musky smell in his vicinity reminding one of a damp dog. None of those physical traits explained just why other ponies picked fights. Perhaps it was the kink in his tail.
His naturally pink tail, which he refused to dye any other color.
It was an extremely pink pink which drew derisive comments far more than his mottled tan and brown hide, which looked dirty even when pristine clean. That brilliant flash of color should have been a warning to inebriated sailors and airponies, much as a venomous snake might shake a rattle in order to warn foolish predators.
The problem was that the lessons it taught were only learned after a rather abrupt trip through a barroom wall or window and subsequent awakening in an intensive care facility of some sort while attached to tubes and wires. Jobs for ponies who attracted violence and dealt with it were few and far between, but Beets had taken to the job of Night Watchpony with a grim enthusiasm. Over the years, he had shown no problems dishing out the kinds of beatings he had received, and then some. Sometimes it got dicey when more than one teenage pegasus was involved, doubly so with griffons, but he had always come out on top because he had no problems cheating in a fight. The sharp nails sticking out of the pallet slat he was carrying in his magic were not there just for looks.
“Hey, kids,” he growled as he came around the corner of the stack of pallets. “The Beast is here, so you better get your asses out of my patrol area.” Beets waved the stick while looking around for a prospective target, only to come up empty. Normally at night, he had to get fairly close in order for the little brats to see his ugly face and run away. In the sunlight, they must have torn out of there before he could even see them.
Still, it kept him from having to fill out any paperwork.
“What did you little bastards break this time?” muttered Beets as he poked around the tall stacks of wooden pallets. Goods from the farthest corners of Equestria had probably traveled through the Baltimare port on these pallets dozens of times and probably would again, if youthful idiots did not break them into pieces first.
The broken pallets did not look the way they normally did when the teenagers messed with them. There was a dark lump in the middle of the shattered wood, as if a heavy bag of trash or an animal had been dropped from a great height. Occasionally, a land-bound pet from one of the zeppelins would get loose and fall, but Beet Salad was fairly sure this was not a dog or some reptile. It seemed to be an insect of some sort, nearly the size of a smaller pony with filmy translucent bug wings bent and split on impact and several of its limbs twisted in ways they were not meant to go. All across its chest, sections of its dark exoskeleton had been caved in nearly flat, and a film of clotted green ichor formed at every single tiny crack, making it look like some sort of three-dimensional puzzle abandoned partway through assembly.
* * *
“Hey, Beast. Open up. We’re going to be late for work.” The hammering at his apartment door did not stop until Beet Salad unlocked the two deadbolts, unhooked the security chain and let it swing open from the force of his best and only friend’s pounding hoof. “About time,” continued Nectarine as he stepped inside the tiny apartment. “I was beginning to think you had somehow bedded some blind mare either drunk or stupid enough to fall for your personality.” The lanky stallion flicked a membranous wing over his back and cast a critical look at where his friend was tucking a blanket over a motionless shape on the floor. “Oh, no. Not again.”
“It isn’t a dog like last time,” said Beets as he made sure there was some water in the bowl and a couple pieces of dry dog food. “It’s some sort of exotic pet, I think.”
“Huh. Let me see.” Nectarine craned his neck to look over his friend’s shoulder. “I’m the critter expert, after all.”
“You’re a pest pony,” scoffed Beets, although he did tuck back a corner of the covering blanket. “You deal with fruit flies and cockroaches.”
“Eww,” said Nectarine while wrinkling up his nose at the sight. “You found something uglier than you. It’s a huge bug of some sort.”
“So glad to have an expert opinion from a professional pest,” snarked Beets as he tucked the blanket back over the motionless form.
“You’re not going to keep that thing, are you?” Nectarine’s golden eyes blinked as he considered the grim glower his friend seemed to have draped over his ugly face like a comfortable mask. “Ninth life’s the charm?”
“You’re never going to quit bugging me about the cat, are you?”
Beets used his magic to lift the pull-down bed back into its vertical position, which would have made it look almost but not quite like the bookshelf it pretended to be, if not for the rumpled sheets sticking out of the cracks. The high-pitched squeak of aged springs caused Nectarine to lay his fuzzy ears flat against his head until the Murphy bed settled into place with a thud and his friend picked up his night watchpony gear. After retrieving his keys and buckling the thick belt holding the truncheon around his waist, Beets chased his friend out the door and locked it behind them. “This is different,” he added as he levitated the door key into his pocket and turned for the short walk to the docks.
“It’s some critically wounded critter you dragged home and are going to nurse until it dies on you like the last five or six times you dragged some broken cat or dog home,” said Nectarine with a shake of his head which made cascades of violet mane swish around his neck. “Seriously, I worry about you sometimes. You need to find a mare.”
“Yeah, a blind one,” he grumbled as they trotted down the street.
“Or one with reeeeeealy low standards,” added Nectarine. “Or both. Since we work at night, you can’t just hope for darkness to hide that ugly mug of yours on a date.”
“Shouldn’t you be looking for bugs instead of bugging the night watchpony?” said Beets with a glance at where the sun was just tucking itself behind the horizon for the night.
“Have a little respect for the Agricultural Produce and Health Inspection Division, ingrate. APHID has a brand-new security protocol, so I’ll have to have a manual in one hoof for every ship I inspect tonight. At least whatever has Security all batty has driven away a bunch of the fruit ships so it won’t be such a killer of a night.” Nectarine yawned, showing off his sharp nocturne teeth. “I can’t even snitch a banana for lunch any more without filling out twelve forms.”
“Poor foal. Now go on and scat. Protect Equestria from a horde of pony-eating spiders or something.”
Nectarine recoiled in false shock, holding one charcoal-grey leg across his chest. “How dare you insinuate Arianie could possibly hurt a fly. Just because she bit you once or twice when I let her out of her cage.” The lanky batpony laughed as he flapped up into the darkening sky, leaving his friend to start his patrol path for the evening.
Blimey.
That certainly is pushing it. You certain the Mods Almighty will let you get away with not rating that sort of filth "Mature"? I suppose as long as no blatant, uncensored bananas (or $DEITY forfend, oatmeal) are involved, you should be able to eke out a "Teen" rating...
On a more serious note, I am certainly looking forward to this!
3767623 Um. Bananas are bad? Uh-oh.
(exerpt)
His speech was so fascinating to Beet Salad that it took a while to realize most of the onlooking ponies were paying it no attention at all. Instead, they were looking past the newly-crowned prince at the very familiar Princess of Love sitting quietly in the Royal Chariot behind him. She was not saying anything, or acting in any dramatic fashion at all, but just resting as if she had all the time in the world.
While peeling a banana.
One small slip of yellow peel at a time, the banana was ever so carefully being stripped of its covering as the ponies in the crowd watched. As she peeled, Princess mi Amore Cadenza looked back at the crowd from under hooded eyelids. There was not a single pony in attendance who did not know of her marriage a few days ago to Shining Armor, the handsome unicorn dressed in his shining golden armor with a few bent hairs on the helmet crest and scuff marks indicating it had been put on in a hurry after not being used for the last few days of their honeymoon.
Pony eyes traveled from the handsome unicorn prince, looking justifiably angry at being pried out of his well-deserved honeymoon, to the beautiful alicorn princess, just sitting in the chariot while peeling a banana. Back and forth, with each repetition bringing renewed sincerity among the crowd to maintain a law-abiding lifestyle from now on and a deep and sincere regret for spoiling what must have been an impressive honeymoon evening to have gone on for this many days and still leave a passionate princess wanting more.
How is this at all related to Changelings, Love and Lollipops, and why is it in my feed?
3767820 It follows the same (or similar) plotline, with far fewer cannons and no M6 characters. Stronger language, but less (far less) nookie. In short, it's a lot like that one, but different. (if that makes sense) I'm always a little hesitant about making sequels to even successful stories because Sequel 1 = 1/2 of the audience, and Sequel 2 = 1/4, Sequel 3 = 1/8 and so on...
I think I was channeling Bujold while writing, because Beet Salad has a lot of Miles in him, and Nectarine could easily be Ivan. There will not be a sequel to this one. It took three (3!) rewrites to get the last chapter the way I like it, and I'm moving on to There Goes The Neighborhood (or Olympian Home Make-Over) or whatever I wind up calling Princess Celestia and Luna moving into Mount Olympus with the rest of the Greek gods and transforming the whole place, one little bit at a time. Too much serious for now, need some more funny.
3767813
Of course bananas are bad...they get you sent TO THE MOON!!!
Monday?
But I want it noooooooooow!
3767813
Banana peeled, Cadance gently caressed the banana shimmering, lightly undulating field of teal magic and slowly brought it to her lips.
The eyes of every stallion over the age of 15 were fixed fast upon her. They were all thinking of one thing, and it was not how their dear princess of love was eating a healthy, well-balanced diet with the proper servings of leafy greens and fresh fruit.
She knew what they were thinking.
They knew that she knew that they knew what she was doing, but it had become so recursive at this point that they did not care. They leered on to the rolling eyes and dismissive snorts of the mares in the crowd. Cadance cracked a small smile, the barest hint of a one-sided smirk as if amused by a secret, intimate joke.
She gave the banana a coy little kiss and began to gently push it into her mouth, never breaking eye-contact with the crowd. So smooth and graceful were her actions that they seemed to all the very pinnacle of alicorn elegance. Something worthy of being enshrined in the finest marble by Michaelneighvaho: La Banane de Candeza. Many of the stallions unconsciously leaned ever so slightly forward, staring at her performance with bated breath.
*CLACK*
Cadance suddenly bit through the banana right in half with a loud snap of teeth audible even to the furthest pony in the crowd. All the stallions as one shuddered with a wince, ears splayed back and hind legs slightly crossed and tightly clenched.
.
(Oh god! What have I done?)
oh man... I'm excited for this one, and then some! Whoo!