//------------------------------// // Prolonged Prologue: Stuff you don't need to know. // Story: Airship Mauled // by Darkonshadows //------------------------------// It all started when… well… it started when I was born I guess. I am a reincarnated being, meaning I have memories of a past life. Other reincarnated beings might get some small samplings of their past lives, some might not at all and then there were the outliers. I on the other hand… I remembered every single detail of my past life from birth to friendless, lonely and exceedingly painful death by starvation. I cried a lot as a baby because of how all the information hurt being squeezed into my tiny little baby skull, said information never went away and it got easier to cope with given time. I managed to hide how intelligent I was well enough, up until my vocal chords developed anyway. I was born into this world an outlier in every way imaginable, I wasn’t normal for my species and I knew exactly what world I had been born into. All things imagined for entertainment was just a gateway to another world, another time and place where the laws of reality as we know them don’t work the same way we imagine them to. Anything you have ever dreamed of has likely happened in another dimension, even a dimension where spelling errors are actually how you spell a word sometimes. I was reborn into the world of My Little Pony, on the very planet of Equus the show was aired and the time I was born was approximately eighteen years before the show really got started with the Nightmare Moon event. Many people would imagine being born as a Pony, usually a Unicorn, a Pegasus or the rare seldom used Earth Pony. If they were used, said Earth Ponies can control their hair, had resilience to sicknesses and were physically stronger than their bodies should allow for. The even rarer chance would be an Earth Pony might have a talent for psychic or reality bending abilities. I was not any of these, nor was I a Dragon with its mighty halitosis and tough hide, a Yak with dwarf like tendencies which are just less magical versions of Earth Ponies or even a Griffon with their eagle eyes. No, I wasn’t a Changeling either, though that might have been fun. I wasn’t a Nightmare, one of the storm kings army, a Minotaur, a Centaur, a Hippogriff, a Mer-pony or even a Zebra. Also just for the sake of clarification, I certainly wasn’t a Sea Pony even though I will jokingly say shoo-bee-doo shoo-shoo-bee-doo. Breathing underwater did later become a permanent talent of mine thanks to the shenanigans of my very existence, you’ll learn about that soon enough. I was an Abyssinian, a humanoid cat person and an exceptionally unusual one at that. The first twelve years of my new life were spent in a relatively quiet location known as the town of Palicoast, a coastal fishing town part of the trade nation of Abyssinia. As any… would I really call myself a protagonist? I’m more of a do what feels right person. Where was I? Anyway, I was born into the town of Palicoast as one of the most interesting sights the sleepy fishing town had seen in years. I was an Abyssinian that actually could grow long hair, I’d eventually have long bushy bright green hair down my back around the time I hit thirteen. Surprisingly I wasn’t called a freak for it, but there were implications that my mother had slept with a pony and aside from that most Abyssinians treated me like just another Abyssinian despite me being slightly unique in appearance. Aside from the hair, my body was covered completely in beige colored fur, my eyes were green and there was a tail of moderate length popping out my feminine backside. I looked nothing like my strange mother. I was the basic plot for any starting RPG hero. Except I don’t think running into people’s houses and stealing everything, including the stuff that is also nailed down, would be welcome and would generally aggravate a lot of people. General RPG protagonists started out a plot as such, they grew up in a sleepy or peaceful place with one notable parent and no other family around in their existence with a simple life style with various minor oddities. Eventually said RPG character would set out on an adventure or stick around in one place long enough to watch their home town get burnt down to the ground by a bunch of assholes that they’ll swear revenge upon and then take years adventuring to culminate their revenge slash justice plot. At least the town getting burned down never happened, though it might have burned down after me and my 'wonderful' mother left it when I was thirteen. Why am I comparing my life to a role playing game? Well apparently some things in RPGs work in this reality, such as Celestia or the sun being my patron goddess giving me a single really broken and rather ridiculous ability for starters. One of the other things that worked other than my unique goddess given ability was magical alchemy, something of which my mother is slowly becoming far more proficient in to a scary degree despite having no one to teach her how to do it. The Abyssinian that gave birth to me in this world was Kurilian La Perm, or Kuril as she’s more commonly known. She had beautiful silver and white fur and truly cared for me, even if I was a reincarnated with perfect recall of a past life. Ever since the age of six when I told her of my past life and my reincarnation, one would expect she was highly skeptical of me. She wasn’t skeptical at all given I was finally talking and with far more intelligence then a kitten my age should be, she actually thought it was interesting and told me to help do the dishes afterwards because I was more intelligent than a child my age should be. If I was going to have an adult mind, which as she pointed out I was still capable of being emotionally fragile despite my intelligence, then she would treat me like an adult with emotional problems. Kuril, my mother, was the proprietor of Kuril’s Curing Canteen of Port Palicoast, again up until I turned thirteen. She never married though she did take some passing interest in some of our customers. We had a pleasant life even if I didn’t know who my father or possibly other mother was, I wouldn’t put it past the abilities of magic to do anything in this world. My mom was paid in both money and leftovers of whatever she cooked that was brought to her. People brought the food in and paid a small sum for cooking it expertly. They’d leave with happy bellies and we’d have more fish jerky than you can shake your claws at. My mother was a talented lady, she knew how to make fish eye soup my second favorite meal behind potato stew. Mom made a heavenly tasting potato stew and darn it she only let me have it once a month because she actually cared about my health and the fact that I was continuing my trend of being completely friendless and a bum like I was in my last life. From the age of seven I and mom started playing Ogres and Oubliettes while discussing the future of what happens in Abyssinia and the world at large, more importantly what would happen in Equestria and the ponies I wanted to meet before they became a tightly knitted group. Kuril wanted me to have friends and I could think of none better than those to attempt to be friends with. Our various talks over the game of O and O led mom to confiding in me that she always wanted to be a witch. When I had asked why she couldn’t be one, she told me she didn’t have the first idea about how to do magic even if she did magic all the time with various foods. Mom didn’t think cooking magic was quite the same, only we later found out that cooking magic actually existed and was a thing. Kuril’s food was in fact magically enhanced to make eaters healthier than they would be otherwise. A bit of information that made my mother happy to hear, but we didn’t discover that until after we ended up in Equestria and what we discovered before we went there was more important. It was mom’s wish to be a practicing heroic witch that led to me telling her about a video game based alchemy system of magic. I didn’t quite explain intrinsically that it was from a work of fiction in my previous life and just told her that it used ingredients to do various things. Even things that weren’t very magical at all, when given enough magic, would actually change to be a mystically active thing for use in magical alchemy. The first bit of magical alchemy Kuril did was with fish bones, we had a ton of bones just sitting around doing nothing until that point. At first she just made them glow in various colors and used them to light up the room when I was eight, as far as decorative magically powered overhead lights went they were well received all Abyssinians and the aroma of fish attracted customers. My mother was on the way to becoming the good witch she’s always wanted to be and it was all thanks to me, what she discovered led to a discovery of my own. I, jokingly enough, praised the goddess Celestia and the sun a lot, thanks to that I gained the intrinsic knowledge to use a very unique magical ability from my constant worship of either Celestia or the sun. I’m banking on it being the sun that gave me this ability, as it was a ridiculously broken ability and it seemed harmless from an outsider’s point of view. That is, if they didn’t know what the ability actually did like I do and just how much it broke so many laws of physics, especially that of thermodynamics. I could use the ability anywhere and almost at any time, there was some kind of cooldown factor of about two minutes before I could use it again, but I could only have all the permanent results of said ability in one spot at any given time. It was from that point that I first used the ability for the first time that I knew I could break this world in silly ways that nobody would have ever accounted for, praise the sun for it will give you one uniquely broken magical ability. It made me wonder what would happen if I praised the moon after Luna returned when Nightmare was no longer an issue. I was living in a fantasy world where the laws of logic from a previous existence ceased to exist and knowing that... I started working towards my chosen class as if I were a literal O and O character. My mother and I kept up to date character sheets of ourselves and our capabilities, my mother would not have her class be anything other than purely witch and I was dual classing as a priest and a rogue. I also did dabbled in some magical alchemy, but my mother was more fervent about using it than I was and was the leading world expert on it. When I got to the age of thirteen Kuril shut down her canteen, much to the sadness of our many beloved patrons, we then set out for Equestria on an airship. Knowing what I did about this world, I told mom to be prepared for an imminent disaster as soon as we arrive in Equestria. The name of the airship was The Predestined Paradox after all and with a name like that... we were definitely screwed from the outset. One rainbow colored sonic boom to our the uniquely named airship and all the passengers fell overboard into the sea near some incredibly jagged and rocky shoals in a matter of seconds, with the exception of me and my mother thanks to our claws. This was where the legend started. I smugly told my mother I called it while clinging to the completely vertical deck and the remaining working balloon that kept us barely in the air until we were over land. Not that being over land was exactly safer, we were quickly falling towards the ground at an increasingly worsening rate with only one working balloon to hold the whole ship aloft. I wonder if Rainbow Dash had ever realized or was told just how many people she might have just accidentally grievously injured performing that so called ‘cool’ stunt of hers. Mom would certainly hate her guts and would be having some words with Windy Whistles about it later. The legend beginning here was about a place called Airship Mauled.