//------------------------------//
// Conversations Among Academics Wishing to Retain Anonymity 
// Story: Vacation to a Pleasant Country Retreat 
// by Sixes_And_Sevens 
//------------------------------//

Meanwhile, on a train bound from Trottingham: The conductor slammed the door, leaning her body weight against it. She pointed sharp green eyes accusingly at the head engineer, who merely shook her head, fighting back a smile. “I did try to warn you,” she said mildly.
“You did no such thing!” the conductor snapped. “All you said was that there was a ‘troublesome passenger’ in carriage three that needed dealt with! At no point did you mention that she would force me to polish my buttons before we could hold a conversation!”
“Is that all she made you do?” the engineer snorted. “She insisted that I clean off all the windows.”
The conductor blinked, nonplussed. “While… the train was moving?” she asked.
“Oh, no,” the engineer snorted. “That would be silly. No, we’d just have to stop the train until all the tidying was done. When I tried to explain the importance of the timetables, the absolute importance of keeping to a schedule—”
“Yes, yes, Whistle Stop,” the conductor interrupted. She had heard her coworker lecture on the importance of punctuality far too many times. “What did she say?”
The engineer’s normally brown face, grey with soot, had begun to turn red. Through clenched teeth, the mare ground out, “She said that perhaps that ‘for a destination so lower-middle class, we could consider tardiness a blessing.’ A blessing! I ask you, Spotter, have you ever heard such nonsense?”
Train Spotter bit her tongue. Whistle appeared not to have noticed. “I mean, perhaps Ponyville isn’t Canterlot, but they’ve got a bloody princess! What more do they need? Besides, if we only went to the interesting places, we certainly wouldn’t stop in Trottingham.”
“Oh yes,” Spotter said drily. “I’d somehow forgotten you were a West Egg supporter. Perhaps you should mention it more. Like, I don’t know, every time the subject comes up? And every day? Twice?”
Whistle puffed up slightly. “Best hoofball team there is.”
“I’m sure. How long until we arrive in Ponyville, anyway?”
Whistle paused and pulled out a watch. “Another… fifteen minutes,” she said with a nod.
Spotter breathed out. “Well, that’s not so bad. I can handle another fifteen minutes. There’s only so much even she can do in—”
She broke off suddenly, a horrified expression creeping over her face. Whistle frowned. “What?”
“Ssh,” Spotter hissed. “Listen.”
Whistle fell silent. The two mares listened. Mixed in with the clatter of hooves and wheels along the tracks, the rattle of the cars and the other mechanical noises, there was a new sound. A warbling sound. “She isn’t,” Whistle began.
“Oh, she is,” Spotter said grimly. The two listened with growing horror as the noise rose and rose— the dreadful sound of Hyacinth Bouquet butchering the opening lines of the Lunar Aria.
The two locked eyes. In perfect synchronisation, they stated, “You deal with it.”




It was a peaceful day in the house on Magnolia Street. To look at it, you could hardly imagine any other sort of day there. Flowers bloomed and grew from every available plot. Roses arched over the door. Flowering ivy climbed the walls. The thatched roof seemed to have been woven from daisy chains. In the center of the garden, a circular plot was carefully bricked into five portions. Daisies grew in one bed, lilies in another. Roses and violets filled the next two. They were all well kempt and free of weeds. The fifth plot contained hyacinths. They grew up straight and tall as arrows. The soil was tilled regularly. That bed was the only one in the entire garden that contained pesticides. It was beautiful, as beautiful as rest of the garden, but in a different way. Where the rest of the flowers grew around and intertwined with each other, the hyacinths grew apart, both from their fellows and the other plants. 
Among the flowers, a bubblegum-pink mare with a blonde mane carefully, painstakingly held a pair of hedge clippers at just the right angle to deadhead the lilies. An unpleasant job, to be sure, but one which must be done, and done well. She breathed in slowly, adjusting the clippers by micrometers. There— perfect. She listened to the beating off her heart. Ba-bum. Ba-bum. Ba-bum. In between one beat and the next, she made to snap the shears shut—
“Lily!”
The pink mare shrieked, the hedge clippers falling from their position and snipping much farther down than she had intended. Her heart pounded like a rabbit beating a foot against the ground. “R—Rose,” she murmured. “D—don’t sneak up on me like that!”
“No time. Where are Daisy and Carrot?”
Lily blinked. Her sister’s coat was dewed with sweat, and her eyes flickered like livid lightning. “Uh—um, in the parlor, I think?”
Rose grabbed her sister’s pink hoof. “Emergency meeting. Now,” she gasped, bodily heaving the flustered mare along behind her.




Carrot Top exhaled sharply through her nose. “Daze, how much longer do I have to sit like this?”
“Patience,” the green-maned mare replied mildly. “You can’t rush good art.” She swirled her paintbrush on the palette to pick up some more orange.
“Daze. You’re doing a paint by numbers kit.”
“Which I am not painting by the numbers, Topsy!” Daisy looked completely serious. “I don’t want to paint some random hussy lying on a chaise longue. I want to paint my hussy lying on a chaise longue.”
“No, stop. Please. You’re making me blush,” Carrot deadpanned.
“This from the mare who compared her wife to a potato?”
“Potatoes are the second-best vegetable there is! Don’t even tell me I’m wrong, I’ve seen you around potato chips.”
“That doesn’t mean I want to be called one, Carrot.”
Just as the yellow mare was preparing a retort, the door swung open. Daisy shrieked, and the palette went flying. Carrot Top blinked, suddenly finding herself miraculously transformed into a work by Jackson Paddock.
Rose either failed to notice this artistic alteration, or simply didn’t care. She waved toward the couch. “Sit down. Down! House meeting!”
Carrot Top sighed. “Can this wait until I’ve had a shower?”
“No! I need you to sit in the middle, just for a minute. Make sure nopony bashes their heads on anything when they faint.’
The yellow mare sighed, but grudgingly did as directed. “Now, what’s this all about?”
“I got a letter in the mail from Hyacinth.” There was a gasp and a thud as Lily fainted dead away.
“She’s coming over—” Another muffled shriek and a gentle thump as Daisy too entered the realm of the blissfully unaware.
“Today.” The cream mare took a deep breath and let it out. Then she too let out a sigh as her eyes rolled back in her head, and she passed out.
Carrot blinked. “Right. Better have that shower then, and clean the paint off the couch before Hyacinth gets here… Best fetch out the smelling salts.”




Back at the flower shop, Mac and Ditzy were waged in a staring contest against the robotic crab. “Mebbe,” Mac whispered, “If we stand still, it won’t see us.”
“Good idea,” Ditzy murmured back. “But how do we get rid of it if we can’t move?”
Mac hesitated. “Hope it falls asleep?”
“Wait. It’s moving,” the pegasus hissed.
The crablike robot was indeed scuttling away from them, down the counter. The duo relaxed slightly, watching the machine scurry off. “C’mon,” Ditzy whispered. “After it!”
Mac stalled. “Uh… ya sure that’s a good idea, Miss Ditzy?”
“Not really,” the pegasus confessed. “But I’m curious, aren’t you?”
After a moment’s hesitation, the big red stallion nodded his assent. “But slowly. We still dunno what that thing does…”
Ditzy gave a brief bob of the head, and set off at a slow tippy-hoof over the floor. Mac sighed the deep, sorrowful sigh of one who simply knows they will regret this, and did his best to mimic her with his much larger frame. The crab appeared not to notice, nor care. Quickly, however, it arrived at a mousehole and, with a fair bit of compression and a few hacks at the wall, it slipped through. Ditzy gawked. Mac sighed, settling back down with no small amount of relief. These hooves, Mac considered, were really not meant for travelling en pointe.
“What do you think it was?” Ditzy asked, peering into the mousehole.
Mac shrugged.
“What did it want?”
Again, the large red pony did not know.
“Do you think there were more?”
Mac made to shrug again, then stopped. “Huh. Good point. This might be a problem, after all. Mebbe we oughta tell somepony.”
Ditzy raised a brow. “Like who?”
That was a stumper. “Th’ mayor?”
The postmare shook her head. “The mayor might be really good at legalese and stuff, but I don’t think she’d know a, a, an exhaust pipe from a coolant delivery system, and she’s probably never even met an alien.”
“Outside yer family, how many have you met?”
“I— more than anypony else in town. Who isn’t in school today.” Ditzy flushed. “And I have a degree in engineering, minoring in astrophysics.”
Mac raised a brow. “What’s a physicist doin’ deliverin’ folks’ mail?”
“Same thing a mathematician’s doing on his family farm,” the pegasus said without flinching.
Mac fell quiet. “Who—”
“Pocket. He was very impressed with your grasp of logic and theory that time with—”
“Ah know, Ah know,” Mac sighed.”Ah’d ‘preciate it iffin ya didn’t go ‘round tellin’ folk that.”
Ditzy frowned. “Why not?”
Mac considered. “Ah’m happy. Happy with who Ah am as a pony, happy with where Ah am, what Ah do… Ah don’ wanter change. Ya know what it’s like there, up in Canterlot, all them snooty schools an’ such.”
Ditzy imagined the glistening ivory towers and academic rivalries of scholastic pursuit. She tried to picture Mac there, in tweed and a button-down shirt, seeking publication, and she slowly nodded. “Yeees,” she agreed. “But there’s no harm in other ponies knowing you’re gifted, is there? Nopony’s going to force you to write a book or anything.”
Mac shook his head firmly. “Nope.”
The pegasus opened her mouth once more, when a scream echoed down the street. Without a single word, the two broke into a gallop out of the shop.