//------------------------------// // Chapter 2 // Story: Indigo // by Alaborn //------------------------------// Indigo By Alaborn Standard disclaimer: This is a not for profit fan work. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is copyright Hasbro, Inc. I make no claim to any copyrighted material mentioned herein. Chapter 2 “Psst. Check your e-mail,” Tall Tree whispered to Blue Twilight. Blue Twilight’s earth pony friend was in many of his classes, and was a sharp coder. He was very interested in the developing Internet technologies, and created one of the first Web pages Blue Twilight had seen. Tall Tree’s e-mail just had the words “Did you write this?” and a URL. The school’s e-mail program was out of date, and didn’t show hyperlinks, so Blue Twilight had to manually type the URL into the Web browser. There, at the top of the page, he saw: Indigo Written by Blue Twilight Fleeting Words: The Literary Journal of Royal Canterlot University Volume 245, Issue 2 November 1644 Reading on, it was the story he had written in his creative writing class two years earlier. Blue Twilight had heard talk about digitizing the school’s library and archives, but he was surprised to see the literary journal be part of that. “Yeah, I wrote that freshman year,” he replied to Tall Tree. “Great! Can we talk over lunch?” Blue Twilight nodded. Lunch break was right after class, and Blue Twilight and Tall Tree headed to the cafeteria. They waited in line for food, and then took a table. “So how did you find my story?” Blue Twilight asked. “I’ve been volunteering with the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Literature to digitize the Literature department’s journals. It’s mostly boring work, putting the paper on the scanner, editing the pages together, then skimming the final product to make sure the translation matrix didn’t make any mistakes. Your story was one I scanned, and it caught my attention, so I read it. I even wrote a story of my own inspired by it!” “Great,” Blue Twilight replied. He was a bit flattered and rather more confused to hear of the impact his story had on somepony. Great authors influenced others, not college students. “I’d like to invite you to talk about it at the next meeting of the Running Swiftly club.” “What does my story have to do with your running club?” he asked. “Not running. It’s a club for fans of the Swift Current series,” Tall Tree explained. “But my story has nothing to do with Swift Current,” Blue Twilight said. “Really? I assumed your character was secretly displaced from the series, and you were being really sneaky about it.” “No, it definitely wasn’t. I was never a fan of the series,” Blue Twilight said. “But now I’m wondering why you made that assumption.” “It was in the seventh book of the first series. It starts with Swift Current and his father watching a water skiing show, performed by a group called the Rainbow Troupe. The book mentions that there are seven members of the troop, all wearing swimsuits with a different color of the rainbow. So I assumed you mentioning a seventh color of the rainbow was a call-out to that scene,” Tall Tree said. “Did the book call the seventh color indigo?” “I don’t think so. The books are focused on the humans and their magicless technology, so those are always detailed, but the other world-building is more subtle. All these little differences between their world and ours are what make the series interesting to me.” “Spoken like a fanatic,” Blue Twilight said. “Guilty as charged. But I’m not the only one. And with the new television series starting soon, there will be even more of us.” “Aren’t all reboots bad?” “You’re right, there’s a really good chance it will be worse than the books,” Tall Tree said. “Oh, you’re still welcome to come to the meeting, you know. It’s tomorrow, at seven.” “But my story wasn’t related to Swift Current.” “Won’t matter for the conspiracy theorist crowd. They’ll just cite that as more evidence that humans are real.” Having been reminded of his old story, Blue Twilight thought back to its writing. Shortly after submitting it, he experienced a few feelings similar to the indigo revelation. Some things just seemed off when he looked at them, like the design of a snow shovel or a doorknob. The strongest feeling, though, happened during his foalhood, an incident he heard again when he went home for the Hearth’s Warming holiday break. During the big family gathering, his parents related to his gathered relatives an embarrassing story from his foalhood. It was the year when Seaddle was scheduled to supply the water for Cloudsdale, and as normal the town’s pegasi volunteered to form the tornado, while the rest of the town came out to watch. Blue Twilight was young, maybe four years old at the time, and really didn’t understand what was going on. But when he saw the tornado begin to form above the reservoir, he freaked out. He ran away, towards the nearest house, and was rescued by his father while he was trying to open the door to its cellar. They laughed about it now, attributing his reaction to not being from a pegasus family, but he recalled them trying to explain it afterwards. No matter how his parents tried to explain the weather system to him, Blue Twilight still felt a primal fear from seeing a tornado. It haunted his nightmares for months. And he never watched another tornado. The Swift Current book that Tall Tree mentioned also lingered in his mind. His curiosity piqued, he decided to look for it. He was not that surprised to find somepony had made a fan page for the Swift Current series on the Internet; in fact, there were several. He found a listing of the books in the series, and the name of the seventh volume of the first series wasn’t hard to find: Swift Current and his Motorized Speedboat. Blue Twilight logged into the campus library system and looked up the title. Surprisingly, the senior library had a copy of the book. He wrote down the location and set off. The senior library was a familiar place. Blue Twilight often spent time in the stacks on the eighth floor, where the library held archives of magazines. He liked to read the old technology magazines, drawing inspiration and a few laughs from what was then the technological cutting edge. This time, he was headed to the second floor. “Whoa,” Blue Twilight whispered to himself. He knew there were a lot of Swift Current books, but seeing them all in one place was overwhelming. After some searching, he found the book he wanted. It was an ancient book, with an old-fashioned cloth binding and yellowed pages. The cover illustration showed Swift Current and a speedboat. Blue Twilight took the book to a reading room and started reading it. The story started with Swift Current and his father, Far Horizon, on vacation to a town on a lake. They toured the boatyard, and Far Horizon introduced Swift Current to one of his old friends, who owned a speedboat. That provided the cue for the book to segue into describing the motorboat and its technology. He flipped to the front of the book and looked up the copyright date: 1482, or around ten years after the return of Princess Luna. Thinking back to his schooling, Blue Twilight recalled the kinds of engines that existed then. They were either huge, like those used in trains, or small and unreliable, normally used only in things like parade floats. Certainly, the motorboat described in the book was a reasonable extrapolation of the then-existing technology, made smaller and more efficient, with changes like using an electric starter rather than a magical charger to account for the magic-free world. And the casual mention of aluminum being used in its construction? It was an interesting prediction for the time that bauxite would one day be smelted in a way to make aluminum a reasonable metal to build with. The technology was interesting, but Blue Twilight was more interested in the rainbow mystery. Sure enough, he found the scene Tall Tree had mentioned in the next chapter. Swift Current and his father went to watch the Rainbow Troupe perform their stunt water skiing show. They were described as a group of seven humans, dressed in all the colors of the rainbow, and the seven number was emphasized again when their skiing formations were discussed; their signature stunt formation was three-one-three. Unfortunately, Tall Tree’s memories were accurate, and the seven colors of the rainbow were not identified. The next chapter showed the Rainbow Troupe unable to perform, due to problems with their speedboat. From there, the book became a mystery, with Far Horizon involved with the main investigation, while Swift Current worked on his own. He was joined by his friends, an athletic boy named Strong Arm and a feisty girl named River Wind, as they tracked down the group of criminals seeking to sabotage the water skiing show. There were more scenes with the humans being clever with technology, one where the trio used a balloon and a camera to take pictures from the air, and another where Swift Current rigged the motor on a rubber raft to make it quieter. But all in all, it was a lot like any other book for foals. It showed ponies, or in this case humans, a bit older than the readers, going on adventures and acting independently. Swift Current, Strong Arm, and River Wind fit the unicorn/earth pony/pegasus trio that was the archetype of most literature for foals. Reading the book confirmed the few details Blue Twilight knew about the Swift Current series—it involved humans, it involved technology, it involved adventure, and the writer seriously overused adverbs. (He enjoyed the “Swifty” jokes he saw forwarded over e-mail, even having never read the books.) However, he didn’t learn anything more about rainbows, or other things that felt out of place. It felt like the entire book could have been set in the real world. With no questions answered, and no pressing schoolwork, Blue Twilight decided he’d go to Tall Tree’s meeting tomorrow. “I thought you weren’t going to come,” Tall Tree said to Blue Twilight. “If I didn’t come, I’d be spending the evening studying,” he replied. “A wise choice, then.” “I did read that seventh book,” Blue Twilight said. “And it made me even more sure that my story had nothing to do with it.” “I know at least two ponies in the club for whom that won’t matter,” Tall Tree said. The meeting of the Running Swiftly club, like pretty much every club, was held in one of the classrooms on campus. And like every club, ponies treated the scheduled start time as a suggestion. The club members chatted as they waited for everypony to gather. Blue Twilight noted the club’s membership was mostly stallions, not surprising for a series targeted to colts. Around 7:15, the meeting finally got underway. “Welcome to this week’s meeting of the Running Swiftly club,” said a pegasus stallion, one Blue Twilight didn’t know. “Is there any new business?” Nopony responded, so the stallion continued. “In that case, I’ll turn it over to Tall Tree and the Creative special interest group. Tall Tree got up and headed to the front of the classroom. He motioned for Blue Twilight to follow. The two ponies sat down behind a table. “Last month, I shared with you my fanfiction about a pony who felt oddly out of place, because that pony was really a human! This meeting is primarily about exploring that theme, but feel free to share your stories and artwork. I also invited my friend Blue Twilight, who wrote the story, Indigo, which inspired mine.” “I wrote the story, but any connections between it and the Swift Current series are entirely coincidental,” Blue Twilight said. “That’s what they want you to believe!” somepony shouted from the audience. “Told you so,” Tall Tree whispered to Blue Twilight. “Blue Twilight, what was your story about?” one of the club members asked. “It was a creative writing assignment, with the theme ‘out of place’, and the encouragement to write using a subtle difference. I came up with a story about a pegasus working at the weather factory making rainbows, and being the only pony who thought rainbows should have seven colors. Now, I never read Swift Current as a colt, so I could not have been inspired by the book with the speedboat.” “Why did you choose indigo as the seventh color?” another asked. “I saw the color name, and it just felt right.” “There’s a reason for that,” another pony said, perhaps the other conspiracy theorist. “Nopony could prove that,” somepony countered. “The story I wrote is all about uncovering the secret pony society that steals human technology.” Tall Tree interrupted them. “Drizzle, since this meeting is all about fanfiction and fan art, why don’t you start with sharing your story?” “I can’t believe that many ponies wrote stories about a century-old series of books for colts,” Blue Twilight said to Tall Tree as they walked back to the dorms. “What can I say? Fans of the Swift Current series are passionate. You should see it online!” “Online? Where?” “Usenet. There’s an active community posting stories and art to rec.literature.foal.swiftcurrent.creative. But I’m hoping soon, something else will supplant it.” “What do you mean?” Blue Twilight asked. “Just a little something I’m working on in my spare time,” Tall Tree said. “I’m building a Web site devoted to Swift Current fan works. It’s going to have moderation for stories, folders to organize stories, discussion forums, and private messaging.” “Sounds cool, if you’re into that sort of thing.” Tall Tree slapped Blue Twilight on the withers. “I’ll make sure to enshrine your Indigo story.” “Great,” Blue Twilight muttered.