//------------------------------// // Hasty Reunion // Story: The Olden World // by Czar_Yoshi //------------------------------// "Right over that hill, my fearless companions," Howe noisily rambled, eschewing the winding roadways of Gnarlbough in favor of a direct route, "our destination awaits! I can feel it in my very bones!" "Oh, good," Maple griped, the only one of the group who was groundbound. "Only another hill. Thanks for reminding..." She bit her tongue, checking herself as she hauled her way up a sun-streaked slope, still fruitlessly trying to wipe the sweaty dirt from her coat. "Sorry. Don't mean to be a downer... It's just hot and I really wish I had wings too..." Starlight frowned down from atop Gerardo's back, her own coat growing damp from the humid air and unforgiving heat. "It really isn't fair that you get to cross this so much more easily than her, you know. Why couldn't we have followed the roads instead?" "Because my pegasus intellect does not work that way," Howe proudly informed them. "Roads like these amble courselessly through the infinite hills and valleys of the world, but on-" Gerardo silenced him with a cough. "I realize it's hardly my place to say this, but do you mind being slightly less verbose? It's growing difficult to understand you." "Errr..." Howe winced. "Because I remember things in terms of straight lines? If you saw what this place looked like from up here, you'd have nightmares about memorizing the roads, too!" He bit his goatee'd lip. "But I am serious. Our goal is right there." "Good." Maple dragged herself to the top of the final hill, collapsing and panting in the sunlight. "This... is hard work... arrrrgh..." "For what it is worth, I can feel the heat up here, as well..." Gerardo hovered limply. "Well, though? Is that door your destination?" "Yes," Maple panted. "Just... give me a minute..." Howe winked. "I presume you want the Howenator to stand vigilant guard, exactly like the time before?" "Yes," Maple repeated, swallowing. "And, Gerardo, I don't... know if you're good with kids..." "Better than some and worse than others." Landing, Gerardo shrugged, prompting Starlight to hop off his back and run to Maple. "This is your quest, I remind you. I am merely here to assist in whatever ways I can." Maple struggled to her hooves, sliding down the hill to the road beneath. "Thank you," she managed, futilely attempting to brush herself off one last time and, when that failed, straightening her mane. "Starlight? Are you coming in or sitting out here? I know with last time..." "With Howe?" Starlight made a face. "Ew, no. What are we even doing in there though?" "Hey! I hardly feel I deserved that..." Howe wilted. "We're keeping our promise to come back," Maple said, drawing strength from the closeness of her goal and straightening her posture. "I imagine we'll talk about whatever she wants to talk about, and if she needs it, we can go with her during the evacuation and help with her foals." She looked up at Gerardo. "I don't remember if I mentioned it earlier, but she's a single mother with eleven foals." If Gerardo hadn't been grounded, he would have fallen out of the sky. Howe merely looked aroused. "She's Faron's old wife," Maple continued. "And she's... lonely. You'll understand why I want to help her." Walking up the path, she lifted a hoof and tapped on White Chocolate's door. Thud! Within three seconds of knocking, the face of a filly was plastered against the door's window, a tiny pane of glass set too high up to be useful to anyone but a giraffe. Her cheek smushed against the glass at an awkward angle as her one visible eye scanned the crowd outside, as if she was either balanced atop a very precarious perch that required hugging the door not to fall, or had been flung against it by a catapult and had not yet peeled herself free. "Mooomm!" the filly hollered, dropping off and hitting the ground with a thump. "Those ponies from yesterday are back, and they brought a giant griffon!" From somewhere in the house came a muted, unintelligible response. "Can I let them in!?" Another distant response, sounding vaguely like "Wait for me!" Predictably, the door instantly opened, a little yellow filly with an enormous mane lurking in wait behind. "Hi, I'm Jamjars," she greeted with a perfect smile, "and welcome to our..." She gasped, eyes widening, pointing a hoof in recognition at Starlight as if she had just then noticed her. "I remember you!" she proclaimed, a sharkish grin taking form. "Do you remember me?" Starlight frowned. "I could hear you through the door." "...Yeah? So?" Jamjars furrowed her brows. "Are these your friends?" "I will end you," Starlight threatened, a stray spark flickering from her horn. Maple took a step forward, wanting to intervene or ask where White Chocolate was... but every time Jamjars spoke, she was distracted by Howe, standing out of the filly's sight on the roof of the doorway, trying his best to do an exaggerated lip sync. Before Jamjars could do anything she would regret, White Chocolate puffed and bustled her way into the room beyond, stepping over a trio of foals trying fruitlessly to build something useful out of a stack of oddly-shaped wooden blocks. "Maple?" Her visible eye widened eagerly, her manestyle back to covering the other but nothing work to cover her flanks or fading cutie mark. "You came back!" "Hoping we would?" Maple smiled crookedly. "Can we come in? It's kind of nasty outside..." "Please, of course!" White Chocolate scooped up Jamjars by the tail, hauling the massive-maned filly out of the entrance. "It's a little toasty in here, but hopefully not as bad as outside..." "Ow, Mom!" Jamjars flailed. "You're ruining my professional appearance!" "Too bad," White Chocolate muttered around a mouthful of tail fluff as she carried the filly off. Maple led the way down the short, curved staircase to the first room, Starlight close at her back and Gerardo bringing up the rear. The griffon flicked the door closed behind them, bowing his head and surveying the foyer with interest. "Hmm. This is quite the architectural style you have here, Miss...?" "White Chocolate," White Chocolate replied, dumping Jamjars and turning back to her guests. "It's how all of Gnarlbough looks. Are you a friend of Maple's?" She shot Maple an appreciative look. "I am, indeed." Gerardo bowed deeply. "Gerardo Guillaume, griffon adventurer extraordinaire, lest you forget it. But really, I'm just here on behalf of Maple. It is she who has business with you..." His eyebrow raised at her appearance, clearly deducing which Riverfall mare she looked almost exactly like. "And I think I'm beginning to understand why. Regardless, don't mind me! Maple, do what you came to!" "We're here because I promised I'd be back." Maple smiled, her mud-infused tail dragging like a log across the ground. "I don't remember if we made any other promises or agreements last night. It's been... Well, I've had a lot over the past few hours to remember." "You remembered me, though," White Chocolate hummed, stepping forward suddenly to embrace Maple... but when she tried to wrap a hoof around the mare's neck in a hug, she stepped back in shock. "Oh my! You're filthy..." Maple grimaced. "Sorry about that. I... fell in a mud puddle on the way back here." White Chocolate's face softened. "And you still came? Hmmm..." Her ears drooped. "I don't know that I had anything to talk about, really. I probably should have prepared, but when I woke up this morning and the foals needed to be fed and the house cleaned and everything kept in order, it just didn't seem like... I didn't think hoping you would be back was the most important thing I could do..." She looked away. "I have some leftovers from breakfast, if you like, and was going to get started on lunch in an hour but can do it earlier. And you can borrow my bath, too. Please!" "Really?" Maple perked up. "This mud is uncomfortable, but..." She glanced at Starlight and Gerardo. "This is my errand, and I'd feel bad to bring you all the way here with me and then force you to sit around while I get cleaned up..." "Worry not," Gerardo reassured. "You'd have to find time to do so sooner or later, and somehow, I doubt your point of residence last night has working plumbing. Better to do so here under open invitation than to put it off, no?" He winked. "And I doubt it will be that much of an inconvenience in the first place. White Chocolate here looks like a pony very much worth talking to." White Chocolate's ears folded beneath a soft smile. "You're not saying that just because she asked you to, are you?" "Hmm?" Gerardo frowned. "No, not at all. Why do you ask?" "If you're really fine with this..." Maple interrupted, standing near a tunnel. "Where's the bath?" White Chocolate pleasantly pointed out a direction. "Thank you!" Maple vanished in a puff of dust. "Well, then..." Straightening her shoulders, White Chocolate looked up at Gerardo, who safely beat her in height even though she was bigger than most ponies. "Would you two care to follow me to the kitchen, so I can get something started?" "We just ate, actually," Gerardo remarked, bobbing his head. "Though I could always find room to pack away a little more." White Chocolate's kitchen was a mess of pots and pans, in large part due to the chubby colt on the floor who had spent the last who-knew-how-long acquiring every single metal dish in the room and forming them into a loot heap to bang on. "Sorry, Board Biter," she hummed, taking one of the colt's pans in her mouth and risking collapsing the entire pile to free it. "Mommy needs this for lunch. But think of how much tastier something will be to chew on when it's something you can actually eat!" Board Biter hammered his pans in cacophonous protest. Granted, it could also have been acceptance. Starlight wasn't sure she could tell the difference. Gerardo stood nearby, Starlight lurking by his legs in a watchful vigil for Jamjars or any other foal who felt like messing with her. The griffon had a huge, imposing sheath for his sword strapped to his uniform, and in light of its non-lethality, she entertained more than one fantasy of whipping it out with telekinesis and using it to incapacitate any who tried to stage a repeat of the previous night's debacle. "So," White Chocolate began, attempting to breach conversation. "You're a friend of Maple's? How did you meet? We talked a lot last night, but I think it was mostly about myself..." "Through..." Gerardo hesitated. "Let's call it an incident. One involving a very pompous stallion, an improperly-maintained machine, and a rather selfless pony who made my recovery from said incident a lot swifter than it could have been." Starlight shrank against the wall. Her memories of the event were blurred by contact with Arambai's machine, but she knew exactly what he was talking about: Hemlock's boat lift, and her extremely-visible attempt to save the boat with telekinesis. "Oh!" White Chocolate gasped and turned to him, forgetting the pan on the counter. "You weren't injured, were you? I remember Faron once talking about a piece of equipment with these tremendous gears, and..." She trailed off. "Oh, nothing like that, I assure you," Gerardo chuckled. "Merely property damage and wasted time. Faron, though." He pointed a talon. "I see Maple was telling the truth about your familiarity with the stallion. He was your husband, I have been lead to believe?" "...Yes. He was." White Chocolate shifted uncomfortably, trying to hide her pregnant belly with her tail as she scrubbed at the pan under a stream of running water. "I see." Gerardo seated himself against the wall. "I don't suppose Maple told you much about where she is from, then?" White Chocolate shook her head. "Only that she knew him, and... that it sounds like he misses me. Or maybe she didn't, and I'm just remembering what I wanted to hear. I don't know..." Gerardo pressed further, inquiring into Faron's disappearance and life with White Chocolate over the past few years, but Starlight had stopped listening. She already knew everything that would come out: the stallion had grown depressed from the loss of his job, taken to long walks around the Earth District, and ultimately stumbled across the warehouse in the graveyard. Whether deliberately or accidentally, he had been ferried to Riverfall and started a new life with a mare who looked as much like his old wife as possible... leaving White Chocolate alone to care for their family, living in constant feelings of inadequacy and ultimately having an affair that would leave her another unborn foal and a fake cutie mark that just wouldn't stay. She hung her head, stewing. It wasn't fair. It was less fair to Maple, because she had personally dealt with abandonment, and Starlight's own history with the subject... It probably wasn't even a single pony's fault, so much as that of general apathy. And Sunburst had been her friend, not her husband. Every once in a while, foals peered out of the tunnels connecting the kitchen to the other rooms in the underground house. What about them? As horrible as White Chocolate's situation might have been, were they the victims of unfairness, too? Starlight still felt a flash of anger as she remembered Jamjars' constant pestering of her the night before, and Snow had irked her as well... but when they had lacked a father for the past two years, and Faron very well might have had nothing to do with raising them for some time before that, could she blame them? What was a pony responsible for if they didn't even know better? And if blame could be shifted upwards... who or what was really responsible for everything that had happened to Ironridge? Shinespark and Arambai, and their program to let stallions run away? That was merely in response to another problem. Herman and Yakyakistan, coming to Ironridge and changing it with their airships? It wasn't like she could ask other countries to stay their technological progress while Ironridge did whatever it had been doing... and from talking to Elise in Blueleaf, Ironridge hadn't been a happy place to live before that, either. In fact, the last time Ironridge had been truly happy, if everyone was to be believed, was in the days of Project Aslan... and that had been ended by a simple airship crash. Could everything bad that had ever happened in Ironridge boil down to bad luck? And if it did, what could a broken-horned filly like her ever hope to do about it? Her musing was interrupted by a sharp rapping from the direction of the cave-house's door, and a stampede of hooves as countless foals competed to be the first to reach it. White Chocolate's ears folded, and she put down her pan, pausing narration. "Somepony else?" she asked, confused. "But Maple was the only one I was expecting today... Kids, hold on, let me get it!" She stumped off towards the door, the pan still in the middle of being cleaned. A filly held a slip paper upside-down, squinting at it with her tongue stuck out as an uncertain stallion stood at the doorway, a thick saddlebag of identical papers at his side. "Evv... Evackshun..." She stumbled over herself, trying to read. "Eviction!?" White Chocolate skidded into the foyer, face paling more than usual, holding a hoof to her womb. "Give it here, dumb-dumb!" Jamjars seized the paper from her sibling, reading it properly. "It's an evacuation notice. Says we're supposed to go to grand Acorn." She frowned at the delivery stallion. "Why are we supposed to go there, huh? It's hot outside and will ruin my mane!" "H-Hey, don't look at me," the stallion protested, evidently expecting that type of treatment. "I'm just the messenger, and I have a lot more of these to hoof out, so bye!" His telekinetic aura slammed the door in Jamjars' face. "Wow, rude," Jamjars huffed. "Evacuation..." White Chocolate looked even paler. "What's going on?" "Ah, yes..." Gerardo swallowed, lifting a talon. "Perhaps it would have been prudent for us to mention that earlier..."