The path was slowly getting steeper as we curled around the mountain, the sun getting lower in the sky. To both sides, the ground was getting more and more tilted. Maybe a little riskier, but the path was plenty wide for three or four ponies to comfortably walk side-by-side. Aegis was still looking around like he was in some kind of wonderland. Really, really, really a city slicker. I decided to pull him out of his reverie. “Aegis?” I asked.
“Yeah?” he said, not pulling his gaze from the trees overhead.
“Do you think I’m pretty?”
I couldn’t help it. He’s cute when he’s flustered.
He tripped on nothing and started blinking a lot. He flicked his ears over and over. He looked away, babbling nothings, his voice getting softer and softer. “Well, uh, it’s, I, you, uh…” His tail kept swishing back and forth and his steps started getting smaller. He looked a few notches away from hyperventilation.
I smiled faux-innocently. “Well…?”
“Well, um…” Aegis gulped. “Did, did you really have to, to drop that bombshell on me? It’s, uh, kinda-”
“Oh, c’mon,” I said. I nudged him him the belly. “You know me, I really don’t care. I just wanna know.”
Aegis blinked again and regarded me suspiciously. “You really don’t care?” Kind of hard to blame him, to be honest. Some mares always talk like, “I don’t care if you don’t think I’m pretty and I really don’t care and did you know that I don’t care because it’s really important that you know that I don’t care you should know that! WHY? DO YOU CARE? ‘CAUSE I DON’T (as long as you think I’m pretty, of course).”
“Aegis, you arrived four years late for this date and in completely the wrong place, and I still went out with you.” I bumped my muzzle against his and scowled exaggeratedly. “I think I can handle it if you don’t think I’m pretty.”
Pushing me away, Aegis looked up. His panic tremors died down a little. He clicked his teeth a few times, then looked me in the eye. “Total honesty?”
I nodded. “Total honesty.”
“Alright. W-well, um…” He took a deep breath and said, “Kinda, not really.”
“Alright, but nothing special?”
“Y-yeah,” he said. He flicked his ears, rubbed the back of his neck, and looked away. “It’s, you, you’re not ugly, but, but you don’t really have anything special going for you, either, and you’re just kinda… there, if, if you get what I’m saying. Looks-wise, I mean. You know? Not that bad, not that great.” He looked at me, grinned for half a second, and looked away again.
I shrugged. “Fair enough.” I kept walking.
It took Aegis a second to process it. “Wait, that- that’s it?” he called out, trotting to catch up to me.
“What’s it?” I asked innocently.
“I tell you you’re not pretty, you’re just ‘meh, whatevs’? Come on. I mean, it’s great you’re not exploding, but- but-”
“But what?” Still innocent.
“Well, I don’t know!” Aegis said, throwing his front legs wide. “It’s just- I expected something more than just ‘fair enough’!”
“How about this?” I said. I clambered over a fallen log in the path. “Your perception of me matches my perception of me.” As he climbed over it, I turned around and started walking backwards. “I don’t think I’m pretty, either. Just kinda alright. I’ve never really cared about it. Sure, I’d like to be pretty, but I’m not going to go out of my way to make it so.”
Aegis huffed. “You could’ve said that rather than just ‘fair enough’.”
“I know,” I said with a smirk. I turned around and started walking forwards again.
“So what about me?”
I looked over my shoulder as I pushed aside some branches from a bush growing over the path. “What about you?”
Aegis rolled his eyes and gave me a light telekinetic smack on the back of the head. Worth it. “You know. Do you think I’m pretty? Or handsome or hot or whatever?”
“Weeeeeell…” I slowed my pace a little to let him catch up. “Kinda, yeah. And, no, not ‘kinda, not really’. Actually kinda.”
“Really.” His tone of voice was leaning towards the interested side of “whatever”. Guess he didn’t care, either.
“Sure,” I said with a nod. “I’ve always been kind of attracted to royal guards. They’re so… studly. As long as they keep their bodies.” I lightly poked him in the stomach. “You’re pushing, juuuust a little.”
“Yeah,” Aegis said sheepishly, “like I said, I like sweet stuff when I can afford it. Still manage to exercise, but I need to cut down a little.”
“And you need to shave. Why’re you trying to grow a beard? Didn’t you say you couldn’t?”
“Yeah,” Aegis said, cringing slightly. “It’s, I, uh, I forgot to shave before I left, and… yyyyyeah.”
“Ah. So if you let it grow, would it just stick like that and not actually grow?”
“Uh-huh. More or less.”
“Hmm.” I took a moment to squint at his face. “Too scraggly for my tastes.”
“Too scraggly for mine, too,” said Aegis.
We walked in silence for a few more moments before Aegis asked, “So why do ponies place so much emphasis on beauty? It doesn’t really do anything. But, I mean, we’re attracted to it. So why?”
I shrugged. “My guess? Biology. It’s all bunch of leftover signals for evolutionary fitness or something that we’re still attracted to.”
“Weak,” Aegis snorted.
“Well, I don’t know! Beauty’s just kind of a… thing that holds way too much sway for how irrational it is! It’s gotta be hardwired in somehow, and that points me to biological stuff.”
“Still weak.”
I batted him in the face with my tail. “Well, let’s think about it. What do you find beautiful in a mare?”
“Seriously?”
“Sure.”
“Well, um…” Aegis flicked his tail and an ear. “For body shape, tall and lean, so, um… lithe. Yeah, lithe. Not skinny, though. More like sleek.” (I unconsciously rubbed my not-small belly.) “I don’t really care about coat color. Or mane color, for that matter, as long as they match. Kinda longish mane and tail, don’t care about style. Face, um…” He tapped his forehead underneath his horn. “Face, face, face,” he muttered.
“Nah,” I said, “if we’re guessing beauty comes from biology, then the face doesn’t matter as much. Now, I li-”
“But, wait, hang on,” Aegis interrupted. “When ponies talk about beauty, we usually talk about the face. Like, yeah, the rest of the body matters, but the face is like ninety percent of it.”
I frowned and thought about it. “Right,” I muttered. “Dang. I was feeling so good about that.”
“There’s still probably some truth to it,” said Aegis. “My idea of a beautiful mare is kind of skewed toward a fast one, and we did evolve from prey animals, so they’d need to get away from predators quickly. Maybe that has something to do with it?”
“Maybe,” I said with a nod. “Or maybe, now that evolutionary fitness isn’t as important, wires are getting crossed for what’s ‘desirable’ and natural selection isn’t uncrossing them.”
“Or both.” Then Aegis grinned. “You know, since we don’t think the other’s all that beautiful, you know what this means?”
“That we like each other solely for our minds and personalities? I’m pretty sure we said that five years ago.”
“Oh.” Aegis looked mildly downcast in the way that said he had a good idea, only to find it’d been done. I knew the feeling. “Kinda wonder what it’d be like to be the sexiest guy in the room, though.”
“I don’t,” I said. “You’d have to deal with all sorts of crap. Ponies trying to butter you up because they think you’re purty, not taking you seriously, ponies obsessing over you… Not my cup of tea.”
He tilted his head back and forth and flicked his tail. “But would all that be worth it? Maybe, if-”
I shook my head. “Definitely not. You know who first came up with the theory that would form the basis of dragonfire transport?”
“No.”
“Hedy Lamare.”
Aegis blinked and stared at me. “Hedy Lamare? As in, that Hedy Lamare? Bombshell black-maned Hedy Lamare?”
“Bombshell black-maned Hedy Lamare,” I said, nodding. “She was really, really smart, especially when it came to magic. One of the smartest ponies out there in that field, or so I heard.”
“But there’s no way she could be that smart!” protested Aegis. “She’s too- She’s… too…” His voice trailed off.
I raised an eyebrow.
“Oh, wow,” Aegis mumbled. He slapped himself in the face. “I knew what was coming, and I still did it.”
“So imagine what it was like when other ponies didn’t know it was coming,” I said. “She had trouble getting ponies to take her seriously because she was so pretty. She once said something like, ‘My face has been my misfortune.’ Oh, and, ‘Any filly can be glamorous; all you have to do is stand still and look stupid.’”
Aegis snickered. “Dang. Smart, pretty, and witty, too? Talk about a dream mare.” Then he frowned and added, “Which was part of the problem, I guess.”
“‘It has attracted six unsuccessful marriage partners,’” I recited. “‘It has attracted all the wrong ponies into my boudoir and brought me tragedy and heartache for five decades. My face is a mask I cannot remove. I must always live with it. I curse it.’”
“Nice,” said Aegis. “Very nice.” He nodded in approval. “You never really think about that sort of thing, do you? Well, you might. How do you know so much about her?”
“Got her autobiography as an I-don’t-know-what-to-get-you Hearth’s Warming gift a few years back,” I said. “Short list that year, told friends and family to get me whatever, wound up with Ecstasy and Me in my bookshelf when it was done.”
“Cool. You like biographies?”
“A bit, yeah. Not a collector or anything, but I think I read more than the usual.”
“Cool.”
“Yeah.”
Silence.
“So we’re, what, about halfway to the summit?” he asked.
“About, yeah.”
Aegis bit his lip and looked at the sun. “You’re sure I’ll have enough time to get back to the train? We’ve been going up this for over an hour, and with sunset at the time it is…”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said, brushing it aside. “We’re moving slow down the scenic route, and when we’re done, we’ll rush and get you down on time.”
“If you say so.”