//------------------------------// // In Which Frederick and Amethyst Get Accustomed To Living Together And Frederick Says Too Much At A Bar // Story: Derpy Accidentally a Portal Gun VI: My Little Amethyst // by Admiral Biscuit //------------------------------// My Little Amethyst Admiral Biscuit It didn't take too long for things to get into a routine. She took over one of the bedrooms upstairs that I hadn't been using. Since I didn't have a spare bed for her, I offered her my Yu Ayasaki dakimakura, which she seemed to like. She didn't bother to close the bathroom door when she showered, which was just awkward for me, despite the fact that she was naked all the time. And she wouldn't go near peanut butter if she could avoid it. On the weekend, we got blitzed together. That hadn't really been planned; I'd bought what should have been a month's supply of beer. Friday after classes, I'd gotten home and she was down in the basement putting together some mechanical abomination that looked like it had been rejected from a steampunk movie. I'd seen enough movies with mad scientists to know that this was only going to end badly, and that was before I got a good look at some of the parts she'd been using. The planchette out of my ouija board wasn't even the oddest component in her device. Truth be told, it kind of hurt my eyes to look at it. I didn't stop her, though. Maybe it was stupidity on my part, or maybe it was just a sense that she was tolerating the rules of the human world and in turn I ought to respect whatever it is she did. Something that high fantasy novels never seem to deal with is what all the magic creatures do when they're not interacting with the protagonist. How many adventurers came by Shelob's lair, anyways? Maybe when she was bored and waiting for fresh meat, she knitted spider silk rugs or something. Maybe I was just overthinking things. I wouldn't say that we were buddy-buddy. I'd lived with roommates before, and when we'd gotten along it had been alright. But the fact that I was paying a little bit more so that I could have my own crapshack a bit off the beaten path showed my true colors when it came to housemates. We got along, but we weren't inseparable, nor were we BFFs. What I mean to say is that we got along when we had to, and the rest of the time we did our own thing. I was in the kitchen scraping the last of a jar of peanut butter out of the jar and I don't know what possessed me to do it, but I dropped the empty jar over her horn. I didn't really mean anything by it, but you'd've thought I'd stabbed her in the heart. She dropped to her rump and grabbed at it with her front hooves. It was weird; you'd think that watching her do magic was the most amazing thing in the world, but after a while that got kind of routine. Seeing what she could do with her hooves, on the other hand, that was constantly mind-blowing. “Get it off! Get it off!” There was a little tinge of panic in her voice as she finally got her hooves clasped on the slippery jar and tossed it off her horn. Then it lit, just for an instant, and a few little sparks came off the tip. She took off at a gallop for the bathroom, and a moment later I heard the water running. A few minutes later, she came back downstairs and I was still trying to process what had just happened. Said processing ended abruptly when she smacked me with a hoof. Ponies aren't very tall. The tallest point on her was her horn, and when she was standing on all fours, it came up to about my breastbone. What I'm saying is that her hoof-strike came close to ending my prospects as a father. As it was, she got me right in the muscle in the thigh and cramped it up instantly. If I hadn't caught myself on the kitchen counter, I think I would have dropped. “What the hell?” “What's wrong with you?” The two of us glared at each other for a moment, each waiting for the other to make another move. And I think if I had, it would not have ended well for me. Luckily, I wasn't much of a fighter when it really came down to it, and I was still processing the fact that my leg suddenly didn't work like it was supposed to. That gave her time to calm down. It also gave me time to observe that there were soap bubbles clinging to her horn, her mane was soaking wet, and there was literal steam coming from her head even though there was no way she'd gotten hot water out of the shower that fast. It's weird to come to the sudden realization that you're potentially only a moment away from death, and even weirder when you can't fully process how it might happen. Anything I'd ever seen in a horror movie was a possibility—for example, I didn't know if she could turn me inside out with her magic, but I didn't know that she couldn't. “I'm sorry,” I finally managed to squeak out. I didn't really know what I was sorry for, but at the moment it didn't matter. I was nonspecifically sorry for every life choice that had brought me to this particular moment. And those words . . . they were like magic. I could see the tenseness leave her body, not only in the way that her shoulders (or is it shoulders and hips?) settled, but also the fact that the steam was no longer coming from her head. Also the faint glow of her horn ceased and it was probably my imagination but I swear I heard some kind of angry music that also cut off. “You couldn't have known,” she said, and then I can only attribute the next part to the fact that we'd been drinking. “Peanut butter blocks my magic.” It turned out that all unicorns had their kryptonite. Some substance—mundane or otherwise—blocked their magic fields completely, and for her it was peanut butter. That was a useful bit of knowledge, and the more sober me might have thought of it as a trope, something as dumb yet pervasive as a self-destruct button on a spaceship or an evil lair. And more sober me might have also come to the conclusion that she was yanking my chain. But there was no denying the slight panic as she'd galloped off to the bathroom, nor the fact that she'd always given peanut butter a sideways look. Back in the day, there was a famous poster that said Loose Lips Sink Ships, and while that had been in no way my intention, when I was at the bar, I’d somehow managed to slip that there was a unicorn in my house, that she had access to seemingly unlimited supplies of gold, and that she was vulnerable to peanut butter. Had I known what would wind up happening, I would have kept my stupid mouth shut. And that ought to be the background message on my cell phone. Not that I gave out all that information at once, mind. Nor do I remember saying it at all, but then there are a lot of things that have probably happened when I was drunk that I don't remember. Not that that's an excuse.