Getting anything done with Pinkie Pie around was downright impossible. Sumac knew that the enormous cluster of balloons was a terrible mistake, but here he was, here she was, and he was committed. This prototype wasn’t going to build itself and he had to find out if his idea worked. But Pinkie Pie was attracted to big colourful balloons in the same way that Pebble was attracted to piles of her grandmother Cloudy’s rock hard fudge.
“Whatcha doing?” Pinkie Pie asked in the annoying manner of Pinkie Pies everywhere.
Wrapping copper wire around a stiff, sturdy frame, Sumac continued to rebuild his dynamo, determined to make a better one than the previous attempt. “Working,” he replied while he kept his eyes on his work and not on Pinkie Pie, who was pronking in circles around his balloons.
“But you could be playing!” Pinkie Pie paused, mid-pronk, and while suspended in the air she let out a gleeful giggle-snort. “You have the balloons, so you’re halfway to a party! It’s summer, Sumac. You should be playing!” Pinkie landed in the grass, giggle-snorted again, then again, and overcome with party pony glee, she began pronking once more.
Four hundred wire wraps seemed like a good round number, with two hundred, he had managed to get a small light bulb to flicker, right before everything had gone up in smoke—literal smoke, with fire and everything, all because friction had to have the last laugh. At the moment, he was approaching three hundred wire wraps, and he had a ways to go. Good thing he had plenty of copper wire.
“Sumac… you have a funny way of playing. You built a kite flying machine and it caught on fire. Why not just fly a kite yourself? Why build a machine to fly a kite for you? Doesn’t that take the fun out of it? You know, if you’d stop working and spend some time playing, you’d have more time to fly kites and you wouldn’t need to build a machine to fly a kite for you.”
“Pinkie, it wasn’t a kite flying machine—”
“Yes it was!” Pinkie’s voice was shrill from her over excited enthusiasm. “Yes it was! I saw it! You made a machine and that machine flew a kite! So it was a kite flying machine by definition!”
At this, Sumac sighed and did his best to keep count of how many times he had wrapped the thin copper wire around the frame for his dynamo. There was no point in arguing with her—no way to win, so to speak—but Sumac was now annoyed because Pinkie was just plain wrong, and wrong things had to be sorted out, lest his head explode.
“Starlight Glimmer likes kites, you know.”
“I got my idea from Starlight Glimmer—”
“To make a kite flying machine to fly your kites for you?”
The sigh that escaped from Sumac was one of exasperation and resignation, the sort of sound one made right before their head might explode from encountering wrong in the world. How did Applejack deal with it? Sumac wanted to know how anything got done at Sweet Apple Acres when Pinkie Pie showed up for a surprise visit. A new appreciation for Applejack took root and Sumac kept wrapping wire—performing the same task—while trying to keep his cool in the summer sun.
“Are you going to make a machine to play with your balloons for you?”
Cringing, Sumac almost dropped his partially-completed dynamo and he felt something in his spine kink while his left eye began twitching. Before he could say anything, before he could respond, Pinkie Pie swept him up in a hug and crushed the wind out of him. This was super-awkward, like, awkward squared even, and Pinkie was giving him a full-body snuggle hug that was truly terrible to endure in the summer heat.
“Play with me!” Pinkie hollered while whirling the colt about, flinging him him to and fro.
His precious dynamo!
Sumac fought to keep tension on the copper coils while the horizon bobbed around him and he wiggled in a vain attempt to get free. Of all the worst possible things—why this was even worse than the time when he was foalnapped by Ahuizotl and his army of trained cipactli crocodile-toads. He was just trying to get some work done on a machine that almost certainly wouldn’t destroy Ponyville and Pinkie Pie was being a pest.
Almost like a coiled spring, the coiled copper wire sprung free, all three hundred and something wraps of it, and once in motion it was impossible to stop. Wide-eyed, Sumac watched all of his hard work come undone and he went limp in Pinkie’s over-enthusiastic embrace.
“You made a boing!” she cried while Sumac’s dynamo flew apart and the pieces scattered in the grass of the backyard.
Now completely limp, Sumac quailed at having to start over. The frame would have to be held again, the magnets, the copper wire, and at least four hundred wraps, all done with exquisite tightness while holding everything just so, until he could secure everything by slipping the housing around it. So dejected was he that his temper couldn’t even ignite.
“You okay, Sumac? Is something wrong? Are you getting motion sickness?” Standing on her hind legs, Pinkie pulled the colt close and held him snoot to snoot. “It’s like all the fun just got sucked right out of you. You know what you need? Some fun! Come play with me! We’ll go find Pebble and your friends and everything will be hunky-dory!”
“I can’t go play, Pinkie… I have to clean this up.” Sumac made another attempt to be angry, but nothing kindled, nothing happened, and he looked the bubbly mare holding him right in the eye. “I’ll get in trouble if I leave dangerous things in the yard where ponies might step on them.”
For the first time, Pinkie’s cheerfulness faltered. “Oh.” Blinking a few times, she looked around, her eyes darting about, and then her gaze returned to Sumac. “Oh. Do you need some help?”
“No, Pinkie… I just need to start over.”
Now, it seemed to sink in that something was wrong and with a huge frown that contorted her whole face, Pinkie Pie set Sumac down upon the grass. She dropped down to all fours, backed away, and appeared to deflate. A few bouncy curls in her mane went limp and her blue eyes now held a genuine sadness. “I guess I should go—”
“Yes, Pinkie, I’m never going to get anything done otherwise.” Even as he said the words, Sumac wished he hadn’t because he saw Pinkie Pie flinch. Now, he felt awful and ashamed of himself—so much so that he really wanted to be alone so that he could sort his feelings out before they got worse.
“Sorry, Sumac… I guess I got carried away. I’ll go, I guess. I didn’t mean for things to go wrong. It’s just… I’ve been real worried about you because since school was let out, you’ve been working harder than most adults I know and I thought maybe you could use a little fun.”
To avoid making things any worse, Sumac kept silent and said nothing.
“I guess I’ll be going…” And with that, Pinkie left.
Try as he might, Sumac couldn’t put the heavy gage copper wire back on the frame of the dynamo. His magic kept sputtering, he was overcome with guilt, and he couldn’t stop thinking about Pinkie Pie. If only she had shown up for a visit while he wasn’t wrapping copper wire—it wasn’t a task that he could just stop in the middle of and put down. Now he was stuck thinking about all of the things that could’ve happened, all of the things he could have done to get a different outcome, and it seemed that his concentration was beyond repair.
Magic needed concentration.
The workshop smelled of machine oil, warm wood, electricity, and the sweet, cotton candy-esque smell of Cadance~Cola. He sat on a wooden stool, sweating, the shed he called his workshop was a bit hot now that the sun neared its noontime position. All around him were his many experiments, some successes, some failures, every last one of them something he had poured his heart and soul into.
An old Wonderbolts juniour flight camp suit hung on a hook and he had undetermined plans for that. He had plans period, including a really good one where he would shoot himself out of a cannon and fly like a bird—or in this case, a pygmy tree dragon. Getting shot out of a cannon would allow him to get enough speed that he could glide, if only he could somehow replicate the membranes that Boomer had stretching from her hind legs to her front legs.
Taking a sip of his soda, Sumac wished Boomer was here, but she was off with Megara.
What might he have done differently with Pinkie?
Outside, there was the fluttering of wings and the clank of metal. Sumac tensed, wondering if he was about to be foalnapped again, because everypony wanted their very own sorcerer and he was just so tempting. Things were about to get interesting and Sumac chugged down his soda so that it wouldn’t go to waste.
When the door opened, Sumac was so startled by what he saw that he belched—no sissy belch either—but something that he liked to believe would make a dragon swoon. All of his lessons with Twinkleshine paid off at the moment and he poured his heart into his thunderous brap that made everything on his workbench rattle.
“Well, that is certainly one way to greet a princess,” Princess Celestia said while she stood in the doorway. “Your technique and form need work though, I find your effort a bit lacking. That would not be a passing grade, Sumac Apple.”
A tiny, disappointed after-burp rattled free and Sumac slumped down on his stool, crushed, destroyed, his frog-song graded by the most important schoolmarm he knew. “Hiya, Princess… what brings you here?”
“Funny you should ask,” was the princess’ reply. “I was visiting with Twilight and we were discussing an important issue about global trade policies. Things were just getting boring when all of a sudden, a crying, distraught pink pony came bursting through the door and crashed Twilight’s trade lecture just as I was about to get my well deserved nap. Suddenly, pink pony. Right out of nowhere. Would you happen to know anything about that?”
Before Sumac could respond, Princess Celestia came into his workshop proper and began to inspect him. She was close and huge and terrifying in the way that only the giant alabaster behemoth could be. When her magic wrapped around him, it tickled, and he was lifted from his stool in a bubble of tickly, fizzy feeling magic. He was lifted up to eye level, turned, and the princess folded over his ear to have a better look at a now mostly-healed injury. Then he was turned around the other way and Princess Celestia examined the left side of his neck, no doubt checking out the half-healed scratch that looked much worse than it had actually been.
“You’ve healed,” Princess Celestia said to Sumac. “You’re rather tough for being a… how is it that Pebble puts it again? A scrawny stringbean. That unexpected and unannounced trip with Ahuizotl to Las Pegasus… tell me, how are you recovering?”
“I’m fine.” Sumac was turned once more and he found himself eye to eye with the larger than life alicorn. “It was exciting… and even a little fun!”
“Sumac”—Princess Celestia sighed his name while rolling her eyes—“being foalnapped shouldn’t ever be exciting, or fun for that matter. Though I must say, having Mister Teapot, Daring Do, Rainbow Dash, and Vinyl Scratch show up to rescue you was probably a relief. A pity about that piano factory, but Mister Teapot is an excitable fellow when he’s angry, isn’t he?”
When Sumac recalled the memory of Tarnished Teapot rampaging through the piano factory, he winced and felt stabbing sympathetic pains. Pianos were hard, brutal unforgiving things, heavy, and they made a terrific sound when they fell. When a whole bunch of them fell in succession, it was almost musical, in the most horrendous way one could imagine, and Ahuizotl had been concerted upon by Mister Teapot while Vinyl had conducted the orchestration of justice.
The sound was still very real in Sumac’s ears.
“You know, Sumac… something tells me that you’re not as okay as you let on—”
“What makes you say that?” Sumac asked, interrupting.
“Well, Sumac…” Princess Celestia appeared thoughtful and her bright eyes glittered with a keen sense of wisdom. “You’ve been avoiding your friends, for one. You’ve been working almost nonstop for a while now. These are worrisome signs, Sumac. Sometimes, when things go wrong or we get hurt, some of us bury ourselves in our work, Sumac. I do it, Gosling does it, Luna most certainly does it, and from the looks of things, you’ve joined our little club. Pinkie Pie says you’ve stopped being fun and she is very, very worried that there is something wrong with you.”
Sucking in a deep breath, Sumac wanted to respond, but he wasn’t sure how. He had been trying to perform a task that couldn’t be interrupted, couldn’t be stopped, and Pinkie had come at the most inopportune time. Just like she had come at a bad time the day before, and the day before that… and… whatever words he might have said in his own defense died in his throat. How many days had it been? Honestly, he had lost track and had gone on a spree of invention.
“What are you working on, exactly?” Princess Celestia asked, her voice soft and reassuring in the most pleasant way. “Pinkie Pie kept babbling that you built a kite flying machine in between all of the things she said about you—”
“It’s not a kite flying machine!” Sumac blurted out and then he felt a powerful shudder of frustration that made him feel like crying. Or maybe it wasn’t frustration, maybe it was something else. Everything else. “I watched Starlight flying kites and I had this idea… I thought that maybe since the wind keeps blowing it could be harnessed to make mechanical force. Now I know about windmills but I thought I could do something different and I hooked a kite up to a dynamo and it powered a lightbulb and everything seemed to be working until something went wrong and the dynamo caught on fire.”
“You used a kite to produce electricity?” Princess Celestia’s eyes widened, her ears pivoted around to face forward, and stood up straight. “You harnessed the pull of the wind to make electricity?”
“Yeah.” Sumac’s own ears drooped and he hung limp in the air, suspended by the princess’ magic.
“So what is with the balloons?”
“Well, I thought that the balloons would lift and constantly pull and I wondered if I could harness that to make electricity.”
Something in Princess Celestia’s eyes twinkled and a faint smile could be seen on her muzzle. “Silly colt… those balloons don’t produce nearly enough lift. Why, you couldn’t even lift a brick with those, much less find some way to produce enough force to power a dynamo.”
“Oh.” Dejected, Sumac sighed and realised that Princess Celestia was right. What had he been thinking? It seemed so obvious now. He was going to need much bigger balloons to pull this off. He was so caught up in his own work that he had failed to notice the obvious. Now, he just felt stupid, and rightfully so.
“I want you to continue this project,” Princess Celestia said to Sumac. “But not alone. Don’t even think about arguing, Sumac. If you want to work, that’s fine. It’s good to be productive rather than to feel despair. But don’t be alone. Find a companion or a helpmate.”
“Is this why Princess Luna and Prince Gosling are almost always seen together?” Sumac asked and after a moment, he clarified, “So that Princess Luna doesn’t feel so alone?” His words caused Celestia’s ears to twitch and then lean forwards. She was thinking and Sumac knew he was on to something.
After many long seconds, there was a reply. “Yes, Sumac. Gosling helps Luna far more than he helps me, but she needs it more than I do. I have Raven, Kibitz, and others. This is very private, so I know I can trust you not to talk about it. Luna finally has somepony that meshes well with her… quirks. Gosling is her constant friend and he stays with her, even during the worst of her moods, because that is what good friends do, Sumac. Gosling is the best of friends and his patience only grows greater as he ages.”
“And Pinkie Pie was just trying to stick with me during my bad mood.”
“Yes, Sumac, that is true.”
Sumac sighed, squirmed, and thought about being alone, but being alone was the problem. He had pushed everypony away; his mothers, Boomer, his friends, everypony—but Pinkie Pie had held out the longest. She had pestered and persisted. Upon realising this, Sumac was crushed and he wanted to make things better, but how?
“Come with me, Sumac, and let us take a little stroll to Mister Teapot’s house. Perhaps we might find your master there, and maybe a few friends. I know they’ll be waiting and happy to see you.”
“Alright.” With a nod, the colt accepted his fate.