Sun and Hearth Post-Update Blog: Chapter 10 (No Matter the Weight) · 12:06am Apr 5th, 2017
...is running a bit late tonight. But I didn't want to hold up the chapter, I hate publishing it when everyone is going to bed. So watch this space, and your regularly scheduled blog post will be along in three or four hours, depending on when human toddler Trixie goes to bed.
Here we go! Post-update blog is up for real now. Sorry for the delay. Standard stuff, read the chapter first, spoilers below.
Ending Credits:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhfrD-BRj68
Random Trivia:
So, there are chapters I worry about writing, because they have to say or show something important, and there are chapters I worry about publishing, because they’re the ones with a payoff on the chapter I worried about writing. If I set everything up right, it should work. If I slipped up it’s going to jam on people’s mental breaks and I’ll hear about it in the comments, or they’ll stop reading.
This is one I worried about publishing. If you’re still here, that’s a very good sign for me.
That said, I’d advise you to buckle up for the next few chapters. Things are about to get bumpy.
That’s about all I have to say about the Celestia and Cookie part.
With regards to Celestia and Luna, I do have something else to note. They’re both right at this point in time; Luna doesn’t realize how hard Celestia works to be good at politics, and Celestia doesn’t realize how much luck has played a role in her popularity. Including, in this setting, Cookie. At this point, the two of them really are (as Luna implied) a political powerhouse, borrowing one another’s strengths and protecting their weaknesses. Which is not to say Celestia wouldn’t have done just fine on her own, just that it’s one of the benefits that Luna doesn’t have.
Also, I guess it’s obvious between this and Respect and Respectability that I have a thing about leadership requiring the ability to communicate with people on their own level. I don’t have anything against intellectual leaders, but I do think that a hallmark of great intellectual leaders is that they always seem just a little smarter than whoever they’re talking to.
World Building:
You might have noticed that as of this flashback, Cookie is somewhere around three hundred years old, and still publically active as Smart Cookie.
My take on this is that ponies do think it’s strange, but in Equestria strange things happen from time to time. Everypony knows it’s magic, and for most ponies that’s enough of an explanation. For the ponies who are curious, Cookie is happy to allow them to study whatever they like about him at this point, so long as it doesn’t get in the way of his life.
So, why isn’t this something ponies in modern Equestria know about? Well, for the same reason they seem to have forgotten Celestia and Luna were sisters, and Twilight has to have every ancient evil explained to her: ponies suck at keeping records, and Celestia is cagey with history on certain subjects. She doesn’t deliberately hide things, but if ponies have managed to forget something she’d prefer was forgotten, she’s not about to remind them until it’s necessary.
Questions to answer:
How cool would it be to have wings for snuggling under? It’d be like a combination of hugging and having a warm blanket to wrap around someone whenever you need it.
What object would you like to turn into a bundt cake? How often would you use a spell of bundt cake transfiguration?
The trouble with having wings is finding shirts that fit, if you have the "normal" back wings or if you have harpy "wing arms". That and fitting into just about anything you have to sit in for back wings, our world just isn't back wing friendly. And arm wings offer up just as many if not more problems.
So, no, I wouldn't want any sort of wings. Then again when asked the question "What superpower would you like?" I am not the most common answer of "flight". If not being serious I say "omnipotence", because it's the power of having all powers. If actually wanting a more "reasonable" power I say "regeneration" because chronic pain sucks and if I can get away with something more powerful but not totally broken I say "bio-manipulation" because you can have so much fun with that.
I've never had a bundit cake before so I'd not really have any idea why I'd want to turn stuff into one. But if what you transformed didn't effect the taste and the "cost" of the spell wasn't too high I'd turn trash into cakes and donate them to food drives slash soup kitchens. Cleaning up the world AND feeding the hungry.
Ponies really do seem to be terrible historians, to say nothing of how they take two generations to notice a nearby country undergoing near-total collapse.
As for the bundt cake transmutation, I would probably use it far more often than I should. Especially if I could control the flavor of the cake.
Because Time's deer lies slain.
Okay, off my lyrical hobbyhorse: because everything that happened before you were born happened in a world exactly like Equestria: a place you could read about, or see pictures of, but to which you can never, ever go.
You could get in a rocketship and go to the moon or any of the planets: there'd be technical issues to solve but the laws of physics do not forbid. Yet you can never, ever set foot on the Earth of one day before you were born.
And so most people don't care. They don't study history any more than they study the canon of My Little Pony: to them it's just as fictitious and just as irrelevant. So the only people who study either are nerds.
But I haven't told you the best part. As you get older, you will find this happening to your own life. Events of your youth will become as fictitious and fanciful to capable adults you meet, as the Cross of Gold speech and the Diet of Worms are to you. Fictitious, fanciful and eventually--forgotten.
Ever wish you lived in Equestria? I tell you truly: you're living in it now, or as near as makes no difference.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy...
I'd just like the power to do this at random. Whenever I felt like it, there could be news reports of "somebody stole the traffic light on 1st and Main and replaced it with a bundt cake of the exact same shape!"
Pony record keeping is so crushingly bad that I have to wonder if it crosses some sort of vague or implied cultural taboo. There's nothing modern about the practice of writing stuff down for posterity, after all. And darnit there's the seed of a story right there. Get on it, somebody else
I'd be down to snuggling with someone who had wings, and I should probably stay away from a bundt cake spell as I have a Sweet tooth the size of Sweet-en (I'll just be going now, please don't hurt me).