Omelet Rejected Chapter 2 · 7:47pm Dec 23rd, 2021
My new story, Omelet, was a speedwriting exercise -- I wrote it in about 2.5 hours. Speedwriting is a lot of fun, but it can be hit-or-miss. I think Omelet was a hit, but it's second chapter was not. I decided to leave Omelet as a stand-alone story, and if you're curious, the rejected Chapter 2 is posted here in its entirety.
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Spring was the season of the enemy.
In the old stories, winter was the season of endings, the season of death, and perhaps it was so for things of flesh, but what concern was flesh to Starlight? Flesh was where the enemy was strong and the rightful dominion was weak. Her concerns lay with wood and steel, wires and gears, paper and glass, and for these things it was spring that was the cursed season.
Spring was when nature challenged the rights of ponykind. It was when snow melted and got into buildings, when the rains came and washed away old roads. It was when food preserved through freezing spoiled, and wires corroded, and wood rotted. It was when vines grew into gearboxes and insects came for the grain.
An electric car lay by the side of the road, abandoned by its owners where it had ceased to function. In the first month of spring, Starlight hid inside it from a pack of wolves. For hours they circled until finally she could bear it no more. Heaving and gasping, soaked with sweat, she conjured a spell from her horn that would restore electrical function to the vehicle.
The cabin lights came on, and the battery indicator -- aglow with magic -- showed full. But when Starlight depressed the accelerator a horrible grinding noise emerged from under the hood, and the vehicle did not move.
Starlight wept for the engine, as she had not wept for her friends.
A city in the skies. Buildings that float not because they are made of clouds, but because they defy gravity. Earth ponies flood its streets, and the celebrations last for days. Starlight tries wine for the first time. When she wakes up the next morning and sees clouds outside her window, she cries because she is happy.
Conflict with Cloudsdale. Pegasi fill the skies over the earth pony’s floating city. Some jeer and taunt, some piss on the roofs, some throw clods of dirt. One throws a clod of dirt that contains a rock. Perhaps he knew, perhaps he didn’t, but the heavy payload strikes an earth pony in the skull and sends them to the pavement. That earth pony’s brother produces a pistol and points it skyward. The weapon roars, and blood-stained feathers rain from above.
Starlight meets a pegasus. He is young and handsome, and smitten with her at first sight. They go for a long walk and converse on every subject. They argue, furiously and passionately, two intellectuals of strong convictions. She ends the argument by kissing him.
They make passionate love, wild and hot and without reservation.
Both of their parents seek to pull them apart. Their skies are full of wonders: wind and lightning, magic and industry. But can they leave their homes to be together?
Summer was a season of fierce character.
The heat was unrelenting. Dust choked the air. Starlight’s many winter layers sat forgotten at the bottom of her cart, next to her plastic sleds, her remaining supplies, her collection of odds and ends. The cart’s axle stuck often, and the cart itself rattled with force on the rough trail that its harness left bruises on Starlight’s shoulder.
She planned a route that crossed through many farming towns, hoping there to find food and shelter. Had she been wiser, the appearance of dust would have forewarned her plan’s failure. No electricity meant no pumps, no irrigation, and that land which was once desert became desert again. A combine harvester that would never move again stood over a field of desiccated husks. Dozens of agricultural robots lay by the side of an irrigation ditch. Spring had had its way with their wires and joints.
Many of the ponies Starlight passed were in worse condition than she. Two attempted to rob her, and one she was forced to shoot, but to every pony she met -- even the one who lay dying in a pool of her own blood -- she asked the same question.
“Have you heard of the Rikken?”
Each gave the same answer: that they had heard of it, but only from a friend of a friend, something a pegasus trader had heard from an earth pony farmer, something a unicorn craftspony had heard from a diamond dog caravan. Depending on who she asked, it was everything from a military ship with its own nuclear reactor to a fair-folk caravel that ran on strange magic. Its home port was with equal certainty named as Manehatten, Tall Tale, Harmonizing Heights, Trottingham, and Griffonstone.
Nearly all of their stories were years old. Some had not heard the name for over a decade. One young mare, born after the disaster, confidently asserted that the Rikken first traveled her waters twenty-one years ago, perhaps unaware that that date was before the end.
She didn’t understand why her story made Starlight cry.
A university, with brick buildings and ivy on the walls. Starlight is an academic who studies starfish. Her work has no practical application, and she prefers it that way. The world is simpler when indulging her curiosity is both her job and her passion. She never needed a reason to learn.
Serious military ponies come to her lab and tell her she’s needed. A secret train whisks her away to a top-secret listening post deep in the wilderness. Equestria has made first contact with extraterrestrial life, and from what little information has been so far deciphered, they appear to have evolved in a manner similar to starfish. She will be part of the team responsible for figuring out how to communicate with them.
She watches the scientists and the military ponies squabble, hears plans for a preemptive strike on the alien ship, and she wonders: if ponies cannot understand each other, what hope do they have of understanding something that evolved in strange shoals? Can there ever be peace in a universe that has ponies in it?
Her work progresses in a haze of mathematics, linguistics, and animal psychology. To communicate in a language that requires five arms, they build an animatronic. Starlight must direct its limbs.
At the last moment, she changes the message that will be sent: [We/I] are [eager/excited/happy] to meet [you/us/they]. But we are [young/foolish/budding] and not yet ready for [life/deep waters/strong currents].
In perfect Equestrian, the aliens reply: “We understand. We’ll come back later.” In a flash of light and radiation, their ship vanishes from all sensors.
Fall was a season for sweat and blood.
The supplies Starlight had taken with her from Ponyville were long since gone. No longer was she in a position to be helping those in need, and the communities she passed offered no handouts to freeloaders. The best offer she could find was from an earth pony family, who promised to fill her cart with flour if she would do the same for their basement.
Day after day, she walked through the wheat fields with a scythe in her grip, harvesting as ponies once had thousands of years ago. Every night she turned the stone wheels of the mill with two shoulders and four legs, and was reminded by her hosts how grateful she should be there was a real mill instead of a mortar and pestle.
She collapsed into bed bruised and sweaty, muscles burning. Pound by pound, the farmhouse basement filled with sacks of flour. The air grew cold. The eldest daughter of the family snuck into Starlight’s room at night, observed that it was chilly, and offered to warm her bed. Starlight said that she was no longer a young mare, and it was no longer appropriate for a twenty-something to be with her in the sheets. When the young mare persisted, Starlight showed her the wedding ring she kept in her pocket and threw her out.
For the rest of her visit, the young mare was icy to her, and the rest of the family unpleasant as well.
It was not until the first flakes of snow began to fall that Starlight placed the final sack in the basement. Per their arrangement, she said, she was permitted to load the next sack into her own cart, and that once her cart was full she would continue on her way. The family with which she was staying argued that the basement was not quite full, that Starlight’s work was not quite what she had promised, and that perhaps it would otherwise be better if she continued to work until spring.
So Starlight produced her pistol.
A typewriter clatters in a tiny Manehatten apartment after midnight. Every time the shuttle returns, neighbors groan and cover their ears with their pillows, banging on the thin walls. Starlight doesn’t notice; she is a writer, and she’s on a hot streak. Her prose is elegant and evocative, her stories deep and layered.
The next day, she can hardly focus on her day job: making fries at a Hayburger Drive-In. For her whole shift, her heart is aflutter, and once she nearly burns herself on the peanut oil. She knows today is her day.
After work, her editor says it’s terrible, that her descriptions are confusing and overwrought, her characters inscrutable and irrational. He respectfully suggests that maybe she try something easier, like romance novels.
That night, she drowns his review in a bottle of wine, and beats her typewriter like it owed her money. With furious strikes of her hooves, she shapes the worst romance novel she can conceive: crass and filthy, juvenile and purile. Every mare has wide hips and flanks like rocks, every stallion has luxurious hair and is hung like a horse. Their problems are entirely of their own making, and the solution is always passionate lovemaking tinged with strange fetishes.
Starlight throws it in front of her editor, intending to prove some point to him about art, about meaning. He loves it, and offers to introduce her to a publisher. He thinks he can get her five-thousand bits in advance, and 8% on the back end.
That night, she sits in her apartment alone, and wonders who she is. Tomorrow she has a decision to make: is she a starving artist, or a commercially successful hack?
Winter was when Starlight found Jackrabbit’s Cove.
It was a little coastal resort town, though the vacationers were long gone and the residents as well. She might have passed it by entirely, were its stone pier not marked in bright orange spraypaint: “THE RIKKEN DOCKS HERE.”
She conducted a thorough search of the town, and found signs that ponies had been there recently. Trees were cut with chainsaws, and large neatly-stacked woodpiles were left to dry under overhangs. Salvageable goods were gathered together in ports by the warehouses, and there were remains of old camps in the buildings.
The town had one remaining resident: the librarian. She said that the crew of the Rikken had evacuated the other survivors, and taken all her textbooks, all her trade books, any book that might contain useful information on technology or survival, but that they had intended to use the novels as kindling. She wouldn’t let that happen, and she wouldn’t go with them. So she stayed.
“You stayed,” Starlight asked, “to guard a building full of novels?”
“We’re the last generation that will appreciate them,” the librarian said. “Even if civilization eventually recovers, even if the books themselves survived, when was the last time you read a Suneighan short story? Or laughed at an ancient Mesoponytamian comedy? Some of these books may survive as relics, but we’re the last ones who will ever see ourselves in them.”
“Right, but…” Starlight paused. “What’s the point?”
“What was ever the point of fiction?” The librarian shrugged. “The Rikken usually stops here in the middle of winter, just before the ice gets too thick to pass. If you’re willing to share your food, you can stay until it arrives.”
There was already plenty of wood to burn, little in the area worth forraging, the building was in good condition, and Starlight could power an old robot to bake the bread and do the minor chores. There was very little she could productively do with her time.
So she passed the early winter sitting in an old library in front of a fire, reading paperbacks.
Giant scorpions wander through a radioactive wasteland. Punk ponies in leather and spikes rule over the twisted remains of cities. Atomic power, that same force that made civilization burn, serves twisted tyrants and their mutant armies. Only one mare can save Equestria’s future; Starlight, the survivor out of time.
She emerges from her fallout shelter with a smirk on her face and a laser pistol on her flank. Bandits, mutants, and deadly monsters all fall before her on her one-mare quest to bring justice to the wasteland. With daring-do and a swashbuckling air, she saves Scrapper Town, unites the Sparklepony Tribes, frees Manehatten from the psychic tyrant, and defeats Humogus Badpony in a bold duel. All admire her deeds, and she has a handsome mare or a beautiful stallion in every town she visits.
Until one little foal asks her: “How old are you?” And she says, she’s twenty-five, young and fit and happy.
And the foal asks: “But wasn’t the war fifty years ago? You keep talking about things from before the war like you were there. But you couldn’t have been. Right?”
“Well I went down into a bunker and…” Starlight pauses. “And…”
Only then does she realize that her own memories don’t quite make sense. Everypony hails her as the Apocalypse Mare, but who is she really? Can she uncover the secrets of her own past? Can she find a way to restore civilization and prevent this all from happening again?
Or are ponies inevitably doomed to destroy themselves?
Starlight’s reading was interrupted by a foghorn.
The Rikken was a fishing trawler from a previous century, and Starlight did not for a moment doubt it had been a museum piece before the disaster. It was small, barely fifty feet in length, with nothing on the deck but a single cabin and a smoke-stack that poured black soot. Its hull was freshly painted, but in an ugly blend of colors that adhered to no design, the vessel obviously repainted with whatever naval paint the crew could find. Before the disaster, it would have been entirely forgettable.
But such times had passed. Though the vessel was meant for a crew of five, over twenty ponies crowded its deck, and behind it towed a barge three times its own size. A machine gun had been mounted to the front deck, and it was with considerable mistrust that Starlight was greeted.
She spoke of her mission, of her desire to rebuild civilization. One stallion on the ship said that she needed to talk to Captain Steel, but that he was only the first officer. The Captain was back at their home port of Desolation Point, for this was only a supply run: they were picking up dry wood, grain, forage and scrap metal, and were willing to give her a ride back.
The subject then turned to the library. The first officer informed the librarian that Desolation Point then had a printing press, and a paper mill, though the mill could as yet only recycle old paper, for they had not the facilities to pulp raw wood to the degree required. She was asked to turn over her remaining collection, that it might be used to make paper for the recording of “civilizations technological and scientific heritage.”
The librarian’s name was Page Turner, and she told the stallion that she had been asked before, and the answer was still no.
So he stopped asking and produced a gun.
She made a sudden movement. Or at least, what the gunner on the deck interpreted as a sudden movement. The first officer berated the stallion for a lack of trigger discipline but didn’t otherwise seem to broken up about it.
The crew conscripted Starlight to help them load the cargo. She managed to keep one book for herself.
A robot, strapped to an old road sign, stands vigil over a frozen garden. It is a steel scarecrow, an attempt to keep crows from the crops below. But the ground is hard, and there are no crops. A raven is perched on its shoulder, looking for carrion.
The shell of a one-bedroom cottage casts a long shadow over the road. Everything that will burn has been taken: the doors, the wooden fixtures, the furniture, the siding. The spoils of this pillage are piled into a wagon, with the biggest items on the bottom and the smallest thrown on top. A foal’s set of wooden blocks, with numbers and letters, are visible atop the pile.
A sign on a single-family house reads “No Refugees, Trespassers Will Be Shot!!!” There is ice on the inside of the glass. The snow around the house has not been disturbed.
An old town library stands as a looted shell.
Starlight does not enjoy the tale of the Apocalypse Mare. She suspects that, even if every book survived, it might age poorly in this new world. But she keeps it for her own purposes. There is far more wood in the piles than the barge can carry, and she convinces the crew to let her build a pyre for Page Turner.
She folds the book in under the librarian’s legs and lights the fire herself.
I thought this chapter was as well done as the first. Starlight fits well into working her way through a troubled world while helping others.
I really enjoyed this! Hopefully you might continue this story or perhaps it will inspire something else. Either way, I thought it was great.
It was heartbreaking for the Rikken to change from a beacon of hope from the beforetimes into the decrepit parasite that was reality, with just a hint of rebirth. I really liked it :)
... and then produced her rapier
Honestly, I was curious to see chapter three.
Even if I thought a chapter was not absolutely perfect, I thought it was pretty good?
"but it's second chapter"
"but its second chapter"?
"rough trail that its harness"
"rough trail such that its harness"?
"ports by the warehouses"
Eh? What?
"can save Equestria’s future; Starlight"
"can save Equestria’s future: Starlight"?
"picking up dry wood, grain, forage and scrap metal"
"picking up dry wood, grain, forage, and scrap metal"?
"civilizations technological and scientific heritage"
"civilization's technological and scientific heritage"?
"She suspects that, even if every book survived, it might age poorly in this new world."
Hm. Meaning every book containing that tale?
And I am now very low on time, but this was interesting, if, aye, seeming a bit jarringly different from the other chapter, perhaps, for them to be together (though see above about me being very low on time; I might just be in too much of a hurry, sorry). Thanks for posting it!
I really liked it, because your prose is *chef's kiss* but also understood why it doesn't really work as a second chapter to Omelet. Omelet works splendidly on its own as a short story, and feels a little more realized than the second chapter. It has a beginning, middle, and end. The second chapter felt a bit more like mood piece, or a series of drabbles tied together. Like, the first chapter was an episode of Kino's Journey, but the second was a series recap?
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Thank you! Appreciate good feedback. That was how I felt about it -- good prose, but not as narratively solid as it could be.
"We understand. We’ll come back later."
Whew man that line hits. This whole story catches a vibe like a ss&e blargh. Very cool. And good call not putting it in Omelette.
I can understand why you didn't include this with Chapter 1. But I see the seeds of several interesting ideas here, just waiting to be planted so they can grow into full stories. One can only hope...
I think this should be elevated into its own sequel to Omelette–it doesn't have to be Chapter 2, and it shouldn't be languished as a blog post.
As for the story itself, wow, it's depressing, but well written and intriguing. My biggest questions are: what happened to Starlight's friends? To Celestia? Who raises the Sun, or is it an independent celestial object? At one point Starlight called it "Celestia's sun"; was this a holdover from the beforetimes?
I'd love to read more, if you ever return to this.