//------------------------------// // Preface // Story: An Eternity of Rocks // by McPoodle //------------------------------// An Eternity of Rocks A My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic By McPoodle Preface “Have you tried looking under your bed?” Starlight Glimmer asked Maud. “Every time I lose something, it ends up under mine.” Maud gave Starlight a blank expression for a moment, which Starlight interpreted as “I hadn’t thought of that! You’re a genius, Starlight!” Then she actually spoke. “I’ll take a look.” Starlight followed Maud into her bed…room? Bed-cave? Whatever. She looked away politely as the gray pony shuffled the various items under the bed around, exposing her cutie mark—Starlight wasn’t exactly an expert on the unusual belief system practiced by most of the Pie family, but she suspected that wearing clothes, and then exposing one’s mark, was on the Shunning list. Her eyes were drawn instead to the nightstand beside the bed, and two bizarrely familiar items located atop it. “Found it,” Maud said, emerging from under the bed with her seismometer. “Maud, where did you get this?” Starlight was using her magic to hold up a black rectangular object, with a second semicircular piece cradled atop it. The main piece featured ten circular push-buttons, arranged in rows of three, four and three. The top two rows and the middle button of the bottom row had digits painted on them, while the remaining two buttons each had a different symbol. All of the numeric buttons except the “1” button also had letters of the Equish alphabet on them: three letters on most buttons, and the two rarest letters on the “0” button. A curly black wire connected the semicircular piece to the rectangular piece, and a straight black wire led down from the back of the rectangular piece. Maud said nearly nothing for nearly a minute before finally answering. “It’s a phone.” “Well, yes it looks like one, but not an Equestrian telephone. An Equestrian phone should be a big wooden box with a couple of horns sticking out of it for speaking and listening, a couple of bells on top to tell you that you have a call and a handle you turn to get the operator. Also, Ponyville only has one telephone, and it’s in a little building attached to the train station. Oh, and did I mention that this is a solid piece of granite covered with about a dozen coats of black paint, and the buttons don’t work?” “It’s not granite,” corrected Maud. “It’s monzonite. An easy mistake, as even experts frequently misidentify that particular rock.” “I don’t get it. Why would you put a fake phone in your room, and not just any fake phone, but a fake hu—?” It suddenly occurred to Starlight that she had never asked Twilight to clarify if the true nature of the magic mirror in her castle was supposed to be a state secret or not. And considering how few ponies seemed to know anything about humans… “—Not pony phone?” “I already told you,” Maud answered patiently. “Anyone looking at this room is supposed to take it for granite.” Starlight laughed. “Okay, that one was pretty good.” “And if you’re taking the phone for granted, then you won’t even think to look inside the phone book. …I probably shouldn’t have said that last part out loud.” Starlight looked over at the thin hand-bound volume with the words “PHONE BOOK” on the cover. “And what’s in there?” Maud looked away. “I’d rather not say.” Starlight continued to look at the “phone book”. “Can we please change the subject?” Starlight turned to look at Maud. Was that a hint of desperation that she saw? “Alright,” she said slowly. “Let’s go check out your earthquake readings.” Time passed. On several occasions, Starlight found herself in Maud’s cave home, and she always found her eyes drawn to the open entrance of the bedroom, and to the surface of the nightstand that was visible within. And Maud would see that look, and find some excuse to get the pair of them out of her home as soon as possible. After going through this routine for more than three months, Maud uttered a nearly inaudible sigh and said, “Do you really want to know what is in that book?” in a lower than usual voice. “Yes!” exclaimed Starlight, much louder than she meant to. “I mean,” she immediately back-tracked, “I’d like to know, if that’s alright with you. Is it more of your poetry? I promise not to be judgmental.” She settled herself on a reading rug. “It’s actually prose,” Maud said, retrieving the false telephone directory from her bedroom and hoofing it over to Starlight. “And not really dominated by rock imagery, at least on the level of plot.” Starlight held the book on her forehooves, not daring to open it. “Is that all that’s wrong with it?” she asked. “Well…it falls under the category of ‘Palomino manuscripts’.” Starlight tossed the book into the air like it was a hot potato. “A Palomino manuscript?! Did…did you illustrate it yourself, or hire somepony to—” Maud put a hoof over Starlight’s muzzle, catching the book on her back without even looking. “It’s not that kind of Palomino manuscript.” “What other kinds are there?” Starlight asked once her mouth was freed. “A Palomino manuscript is any self-published work that fictionalizes the life of a real pony. I will admit that the…erotic comics are the best known subtype.” “So, it’s like fanfiction, only about Princess Celestia instead of Fili-Second?” “Yes. I had never heard of the genre until the day before I first met Pinkie’s friends.” With an internal sigh, Starlight got herself comfortable to hear the story. It was obvious that Maud was only telling it to put off for as long as possible the moment when she’d actually let her read the book, but on reflection, it was a miracle that it had taken only three months, as opposed to three years, for the reclusive pony to finally open up to her about something that she was clearly ashamed of. And to be honest, if Starlight had written a fanfic about Princess Celestia or worse, Princess Twilight, she’d do anything to keep anypony knowing about it as well, even if it wasn’t one of those kinds of manuscripts. “I deliberately took the long way to Ponyville,” Maud began, “going through Manehattan and Canterlot. I went to the public libraries in both cities, in order to do research on Twilight and the Bearers of the Elements of Harmony.” “Research?” asked Starlight. “I didn’t want to make any mistakes when I talked to them. I have a habit of saying dumb things when I talk to ponies. I treat them like I treat my rocks, and that always gets me in trouble. I had to meet Pinkie’s friends because she made me promise—and she said she’d cry if I didn’t. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t prepare myself. “To skip ahead, I did wind up saying the wrong thing to every one of them, but they told me they didn’t notice.” Starlight interpreted the look on Maud’s face to mean that she knew full well that they were lying, but friendship apparently involved lying through one’s teeth, so she’d just have to accept their non-indignation in silence. “I was waiting for the train from Canterlot to Ponyville when I noticed that one of the sidewalks had an interesting sandstone composition—which is supposed to be rare for that part of the country. I followed the sidewalk for quite some time, until I found myself in a particularly dark neighborhood of Lower Canterlot. “And there I found a merchant selling Palomino manuscripts. Most of them were the illustrated kind featuring Princess Celestia, or if not her than some mare or stallion I had seen on the cover of a fashion magazine. But there were also regular stories, about all kinds of ponies, including the Bearers. “I had some spare bits on me, and I still felt I didn’t know enough about Pinkie’s friends to avoid saying something unforgivable the moment I opened my mouth, so I bought a few of them to read on the train.” Maud looked up in the air as she thought back. “The first one was about Twilight, only she never left Canterlot and instead defeated Nightmare Moon with the help of prominent members of the nobility. The second story, written with much less flowery language than the first, was about Rarity marrying into nobility, but only as a ruse to lure all of them into a graphically self-destructive rebellion against the crown with her end goal being ‘to free Equestria from aristocratic tyranny forever’. I won’t comment on the Pinkie story I purchased as a comparison to see how good any of these stories were at getting the target’s character right, other than to note that they almost completely inverted her personality. The general impression I got was that the purpose of a Palomino manuscript was to act as wish-fulfilment, to re-write history into the story you wanted to hear. “When Pinkie Pie wrote me the details of your reformation, it wasn’t hard for me to convert her story into the tale of what really happened. It was a story that caught my interest—I remembered the dangerous gleam in your eye the first time we met. Not to mention the fact that her story of how she and her friends…ran into you the first time was quite memorable, what with the smiles and all.” Starlight had to shake her head to recover from the lightning-fast change in topic. “Yes,” she said slowly, “Pinkie has told me her opinion of those particular smiles after my reformation…many, many, many times.” “I talked myself into thinking that I’d never meet you again. That you’d be Twilight’s pupil for a few months, and then I could graduate and move to Ponyville and never run into you. And that would leave me free to write my version of how that particular confrontation should have gone.” Starlight picked up the “phone book” with her magic. “So this story…is about me?” “Eventually,” Maud admitted. “I stuck myself in there as the main character, mostly so that my running commentary on what was going on would seem less annoying than it would be if it was coming from the narrator all the time. And I had so much fun with that that I delayed introducing you until halfway through. “So a fix-fic and a self-insert?” Starlight asked. (Thanks to being roped into the job of being Rainbow Dash’s pre-reader, she had a thorough understanding of the darker side of Daring Do fanfiction.) “You know, maybe I don’t need to read it.” “Oh. Good.” And Maud picked up the book and put it back next to the stone phone. The next day Starlight came by to pick up Maud for kite flying and stared even more intently at the nightstand. Without a word, Maud walked into the bedroom and back, dropping the book at Starlight’s hooves. “Just read it,” she said. “I’ll sit…over…here, and answer any questions you have.” Starlight noticed that Maud picked a sitting spot that was as far from Starlight as possible, as well as being the closest to the exit. Starlight settled onto the reading rug and flipped open the book, to see its true title: An Eternity of Rocks. She read it aloud, and then gave a questioning look over to the author. “I suppose I should explain. At one point in your battle with Twilight, Pinkie tells me that Twilight confronted you with the possibility that you could be looping through time for all eternity, and you had no objection to this. Well to get everything done in my story that I wanted, I needed you two to go through a lot more than the eight trips that you actually made, so in this version you actually go through a lot more loops, like a hundred or more. “Again, I never would have written that story if I ever suspected that you’d end up reading it.” “I’ll…keep that in mind,” Starlight said. She turned the page, and began reading aloud. “‘Equestria is a wonderful place to live…’”