"So you're into Daring Do too, huh?"
Cloud Hop had a strange concept of what "work" meant. Right now, it meant "going to a Daring Do convention in Ponyville because deriving vortex solutions to the Hoovier-Stokes equations is hard and I don't feel like it right now." His friends were not entirely sure how he was still employed, but they knew better than to ask questions. It hadn't taken long for him to meet a bunch of fellow fanfic writers, and he had somehow managed to get into a discussion about different cloud management paradigms with a young, purple changeling called "Pixely."
"Yeah, I got into the fandom a few years ago when the train I was on broke down in the middle of nowhere on the way back from Canterlot," explained Pixely. "My friends had given me a bunch of Daring Do books and kept pestering me to read them. I was stuck on a train and bored out of my mind, so I did, and then I got the rest of the series and read that too and now here I am!"
Cloud Hop nodded. "Yeah, kind of how I got into it. Around the time the second book came out, my friend started bugging me and then I wound up just reading the whole thing and now I'm going to Daring Do conventions! Oh, by the way, I think the A.K. Yearling panel is in an hour, do you guys want to get lunch first?"
"I'm hungry!" piped in Berwyn, "I haven't eaten since 7 AM." Berwyn was known for his questionable diet at conventions. Here, “questionable” meant “should probably have died from malnourishment several days ago.” Anypony who figured out how he managed to remain standing could’ve written a thesis and earned a PhD.
Thus, the trio wound up at 13 Bits Restaurant down the street from Sugarcube Corner, and it was quite a trio indeed. Cloud Hop (a blue pegasus) with Pixely (a rainbow glitterbug) and Berwyn (a self-proclaimed "grumpy" batpony). Thankfully, far stranger things wound up in Princess Twilight Sparkle's Ponyville, so nary an eyebrow was raised.
"So, what are you doing these days?" asked Cloud Hop, munching on something that vaguely resembled food if you were really generous about it.
"Well, I helped with the Daring Do convention's weather setup a couple years ago when it was in Fillydelphia; I'm actually on a panel later that talks about it." Pixely took a sip from his glass, which involved using a disturbingly long changeling tongue that all the other ponies tried very hard to ignore. "But right now I'm doing outsourced contract work for the Cloudsdale weather factory while living in the Fillydelphia ghetto."
Cloud Hop blinked. Berwyn also blinked. Several other ponies within earshot may have also blinked. "Uh, why are you living in the ghetto? I mean, aren't you going to university?" asked Berwyn.
"Well, it's cheap, and being a contractor doesn't really pay very well." Pixely shrugged. "Honestly, I get paid better before they realize how young I am."
Berwyn snickered. Cloud Hop frowned. "Wait a minute, are you living alone? How old are you?"
"Um..." Pixely needlessly rearranged his silverware before answering. "I'm old enough to get a work permit?"
"...Are you even supposed to be living alone?" Cloud Hop began gesturing in his general direction in an unnecessary attempt to add emphasis. "Where are your parents? Where's your family? How are you even paying for school?"
The changeling swallowed another bite of his salad. "Well, I have a scholarship to university, so my job's just to pay my rent because I don't exactly want to be anywhere near my family. It's kind of hard, actually. I can't get any credit lines because my credit score is shit."
Cloud Hop's facial expression contorted into a novel form of confusion. "What?!"
"Well see," said Pixely, leaning back in his seat, "no one in my family is actually a legal citizen of Equestria. I am, because I was born here after the Changeling Reintegration Laws of 1007, so they used my social security number to open a bunch of credit lines and buy weird things and then abandon them—"
"What?!"
"—and they were almost deported two years ago," he continued, "and that's really when I decided I needed to get out of there, so I used my experience from doing weather for the Daring Do convention to get an internship to pay for a crappy apartment, and now I've moved to a slightly less crappy apartment!"
Cloud Hop continued to invent new and fascinating ways to be confused while staring blankly at Pixely for several moments. "What is even your family?!"
"Well I don't actually know, honestly, because my great grandparents were born in the badlands, moved to Griffonstone, moved out of Griffonstone after the war broke out to Yakyakistan, then moved back to the badlands after Yakyakistan declared war on everypony, again, and then moved to Equestria after the reintegration law finally allowed changelings to apply for asylum. The problem is that they were born in the original changeling kingdom, but moved out before it was blown up and taken over by King Thorax, so the citizenship wasn't transferred over because the new kingdom thought all the changelings had been there and never bothered filling out the paperwork. So technically, my grandparents are stateless—they don't belong anywhere, but they can't be deported because there's no country for them to be deported to, because technically it doesn't exist anymore."
"WHAT?!" Cloud Hop and several nearby ponies were now utterly flabbergasted. It was the kind of flabbergasted you would be if you woke up in a large field of flowers with a giant lettuce on your head as a bunch of small gnomes danced around you singing discordant tunes.
"Also, I don't actually know who my parents are because I was raised by two moms and never knew my father. I tried to look up my real father in the Canterlot birth record archives, but according to them, he died 10 years before I was born."
There were no longer any words in the Equish language sufficient to describe Cloud Hop's utter bewilderment. It had passed beyond the realm of mortal comprehension and created a pocket dimension filled with such concentrated amounts of confusion that it would’ve made Discord green with envy had he been capable of comprehending it. "WHAT IS EVEN YOUR FAMILY?!"
"Well, they do run a laundromat. Oh hey, did I tell you about that one time where I got Berwyn a refund for his hotel room?"
At this, Berwyn nearly fell off his chair laughing. Cloud, of course, was still trying to recover from the utter madness of the first story, but seeing Berwyn struggling to breathe inevitably piqued his curiosity.
“Okay, I’ll bite. What happened?”
Pixely grinned. "See, the hotels in Fillydelphia were charging extra for non-pegasus ponies even if they had wings, which is illegal because it's discrimination and stuff, but he didn't know while he was visiting, so I took his receipt to Town Hall, which has been offering free refunds if you turn in a receipt with an illegal markup."
Cloud Hop nodded, idly sipping on a drink that had long ago turned into a pile of slowly melting ice instead of anything resembling a liquid.
"What he hasn't told you is that you need the original purchaser's cutie mark in order to process the refund," interjected Berwyn, who was now sipping on a martini because he was far too sober for this.
"Well, see," explained Pixely, "it turns out I had accidentally taken a picture of his butt—"
"How do you accidentally take a picture of somepony's butt?!" exclaimed Cloud Hop as Berwyn collapsed into a fresh round of laughter.
"There was a really pretty cloud formation and I took a picture of it and his butt was in it! I swear!"
"That picture was 30% my butt," objected Berwyn, who only narrowly managed to avoid spilling his drink. "What are you talking about?!"
Pixely shrugged using both his forelegs and his wings to such a degree that he managed to shrug in bold. "Well, anyway, I had photographic proof of his cutiemark so they were able to look him up on the registry and process the refund, so I saved him $25!"
"By taking a picture of my butt!" objected Berwyn.
Ignoring him, Pixely took another sip of his drink. "Well there was also that time I slept in a bathtub in the attic of a crackhouse."
"WHAT IN CELESTIA'S NAME IS WRONG WITH YOU?!"
Truly, you meet the strangest creatures at conventions.