//------------------------------// // Common Ground // Story: A Dream // by totallynotabrony //------------------------------// “I’m going to make you talk about your feelings.” “Goddamnit, Twilight.” I got up. “No.” Her horn lit up. “It’s not good for you to keep things bottled up. And, in your case, I get the feeling it’s not good for anypony else, either.” She tugged at me, holding me in place with magic. “Let me go. Or else.” “Or else what?” I stared at her. “I know that the you from this universe hasn’t known me for very long, so you don’t have the depth of experience about what I’m capable of. But from what you’ve seen so far - I threatened Discord of all people with death, I beat King Sombra into submission, I almost had sex with your brother - use your imagination.” Twilight let me go. I left. I wasn’t sure where I was going. Dramatic exits are better when you have a destination in mind. Rarity would know something about that. I ran into her as I made my way down the street. “Valiant, there you are. You speak French, right?” I struggled to remember how she knew that. I was probably drunk at the time. “Yes.” “Could you translate this for me? I’ve just picked up this lovely cloth from the Bretons of Brittany.” I had no idea who they were, but it was probably the usual horse pun on something from my own world. I glanced at the tag. “It says it’s from the Bretons of Brittany.” “Oh, yes, that does make sense.” She sighed. “Though I do wonder why they would need to be so obvious about it. A bit full of themselves, and that’s coming from me.” I shrugged. “It’s Brittany, bitch.” I headed off down the street again, but pulled up short as I caught sight of Starlight. She gave me an odd look. “Why are you vibrating?” “Twitching too much.” “You want to kill me, right?” “It crossed my mind.” She looked uncomfortable. “Maybe I should have asked Trixie to meet me somewhere else.” “Wait, Trixie’s going to be here? I need to talk to her.” Starlight was suddenly on the defensive. “Are you going to threaten her too?” “No. She’s my daughter.” Now it was Starlight’s turn to twitch. She was still trying to wrap her head around that when Trixie appeared. She wore her usual hat and cape. I thought maybe I should have gotten her flowers or something. I’ve never really been good at this. She glanced at me as she walked up. She apparently noticed my intent look, because she said, “Does Trixie know you?” Knife to the heart. “I, uh…” I put a hoof to the back of my head. “In a different universe, you’re my adopted daughter.” She stared at me for several seconds. “But not this universe?” “Well, no, but-” I fumbled “-as well as I know you, I just wanted to let you know. It’s awkward, I understand, but...here I am.” Trixie looked at Starlight. “He, uh...is from a different universe, I guess. Twilight believes it. I don’t know about the veracity of anything else he says.” Trixie looked back at me. She shifted her hooves. “Well mister…” “Valiant.” “This is quite a story that we should discuss at a later date, which, if we’re being perfectly honest here, will probably be never because I have enough daddy issues without having another one from a different dimension.” She grabbed Starlight and skedaddled. I sighed. I mean, Trixie was right. It was weird. I’d even had the parent-showing-up-out-of-nowhere thing pulled on me too so I could see where she was coming from. Though, the more I thought about it, the more the creeping sense that she was better off seemed to take hold. My Trixie had been a radioactive mutant. Tracing the causality of that...it probably wouldn’t have been that way had I never come to that world and built the nuclear stuff in the first place. Shit. I looked after the departing Starlight and Trixie. If that was true, then...maybe Trixie was better off without me. That was good, and I was happy for her, because I sure as hell wasn’t better off without her. “HeyValiantweneedaridetoAppleoosabecausetheBuckballHallofFameisopeningandwe’rethefirstponiestobeacceptedsoitwouldbesupercoolifyoucouldflyustherelikerightaway!” I blinked, taking entire seconds to be pulled out of my introspection. “What?” Pinkie opened her mouth again, but Fluttershy cut in. “Our buckball team was invited to Appleoosa.” “And it would be totally cool if we arrived in style,” said Pinkie, speaking slower this time. “So how about it, could we get a ride in your airship? We’ll get you free tickets to the exhibition game.” “Um.” I shook my head to clear it. Boy did I need that. “Yes. I could use the distraction.” Pinkie, Fluttershy, and Snails loaded up aboard ATHSS and we went to Appleoosa. Also, Rainbow was there, for some reason. To be fair, I had no idea what the others were doing either. Appleoosa looked a lot different than I remembered. It wasn’t tromped flat by buffalo, for one. Also, there was a huge stadium at the edge of town. Fluttershy voiced what I was thinking. “I can’t believe the ponies of Appleloosa built this place.” Pinkie said, “Yeah, especially after their team lost to us. They must really love buckball.” “I’m so proud they decided to honor us,” said Fluttershy. “I never thought I’d get to be in anything like a Hall of Fame.” “Me neither!” Pinkie agreed. “Unless you count a Royal Order of Party Planners Memorial Library, which I don’t, because every party planner gets one of those eventually.” “That’s cool, I guess. I’ve only got the Plymouth Valiant memorial couch.” Pinkie looked at me. “How did you even move in without Twilight noticing?” “You just have to believe in yourself and ignore everything she says.” “I hope Snails finishes signing autographs soon; we can't play without him,” said Fluttershy, glancing around for Snails. “And if we lose or forfeit one game, we’ll be out of the tournament.” “Well, he better get his flank over here then!” said Rainbow. “You have to win the first few games without me cheering you on. Applejack was too busy to come, so she made me promise to go to all the museum exhibits and tell her about them. I’m gonna try to get in first and beat the crowd so I can get back to the tournament faster.” I took a leap of logic. “Doesn’t her cousin Braeburn live in Appleoosa?” Rainbow blinked. “Hey, yeah he does. She should have gotten him to do it.” “In this universe, is Braeburn...normal?” “I guess?” Rainbow gave me a strange look. I couldn’t figure out how I might have been responsible for buffalo trampling Appleoosa, but apparently without me around it hadn’t happened. With Braeburn not being a cripple, there was no need for me to fix him up with cyborg parts, either. “You’d better hurry for the museum,” Pinkie said to Rainbow. “Looks like there’s already a line.” “What?!” said Rainbow, spotting a tent beside the museum’s front door. “The doors aren’t even open yet! What kind of sports fan camps out for a museum?” A familiar face came out of the tent. It belonged to a guy named Quibble Pants. He smirked. “The real question is: what kind of sports fan doesn’t?” Pinkie noticed the look on my face. “One of those difference in universe things?” “Yeah,” I said. “He was an asshole so I long-term gaslighted him until I’d manipulated him to the point that my robot daughter killed him in quote-unquote self defense.” In other words, I wasn’t really worried about him. Starlight had had an agenda and was powerful enough to back it up. Quibble Pants was just an asshole. Case in point, he kept talking to Rainbow. “Of course I’m into sports. You can’t keep me away from that buckball rink. I’m the biggest fan there is.” Rainbow said, “Buckball field. And you are?” “Oh sure. What with all the bucking and the balling, uh, on the buckball field, which is where they play buckball. I wanted to be first inside the museum to experience the grand history of the sport.” The guy was hopeless. Or at least I thought he was, until the next sentence out of his mouth was introducing Rainbow to his girlfriend. And to my complete surprise, she was reasonably attractive, normal, and had a kid. Well shit. That was better than I was doing. Strangely enough, he’d gone about it in roughly the same way. Quibble, an earth pony, had gotten with a unicorn mare who had a pegasus filly. I thought of Cordoba. I tried not to. Clear Sky - which was a weird name for a unicorn - and her daughter Wind Sprint had varying levels of enthusiasm for Quibble. I guess I could understand that - Quibble was clearly not the kid’s real father. “Quibble is clearly not the kid’s real father,” Pinkie observed. “I wonder what might have happened to him,” said Fluttershy. “Well, don’t look at me.” I paused. “Probably.” Quibble had bought a buckball almanac with lots of stats about the sport, but instead Rainbow went off on some quest to make him more sporty because he was concerned that his sporty new daughter wouldn’t like him. I mean, I didn’t think that was the core issue, but I could see he had room to grow his sportiness. I also had to reluctantly admit maybe Rainbow was just the person to teach that. I overheard her claiming that everypony had a sporty side. Shit, apparently even Fluttershy has a sporty side, so I was willing to believe it. Speaking of that, I went to watch the tournament because there was nothing else to do. Spoiler alert: Team Ponyville won again. I was sitting there in the stands when I noticed a familiar face. It was Timmy Times from the Canterlot Canter newspaper. He noticed me, too. “You’re Valiant, right?” he said. Apparently he only knew me by reputation in this universe. “I was hoping I could ask you a few questions about your battle with King Sombra. Just how did you defeat him with a bell of all things?” “Heck, I even shouted ‘you got donged’ as I did it.” We talked for a few minutes. He didn’t seem to have changed much, which I appreciated. I promised to look for the article when it came out. Late in the tournament, Quibble came back in the stadium and sat with Clear Sky and Wind Sprint. I noticed that they’d started to bond over the book he’d bought. So basically Rainbow didn’t do anything at all and Quibble was right all along. What a strange, messed up place this universe was. To be fair, the way I understood the friendship table, it only called a couple of the Elements when there was a friendship problem. Apparently there hadn’t been one here. Or maybe didn’t think family relationships were in its lane because they weren’t the same as platonic friendship. I guess. Or maybe I’d just broken the table so it wasn’t calling anyone for anything. Speaking of breaking stuff, Appleoosa clearly hadn’t learned anything about security. I remembered security screening checkpoints for the Equestria games, but there was nothing like that here. Granted, not that a metal detector would have detected my obsidian knife. And let me tell you, when you had a knife that could cut through anything, building a sheath was pretty difficult. The tournament was not really my thing, but the lack of security also meant that I could BYOB. Well, bring my own tequila. Good thing there was nothing to hit in the air as I flew the airship back to Ponyville with the team and their newest trophy. Back at the library, though, Twilight caught me again and I had nowhere to go. “We’re going to talk about your feelings!” I put my hooves to my face. “Not the feely feels that make me feel feely!” I was hoping that would throw her off - and it did - but not enough. She made me lay on the couch and got her notebook. “Now...how do you feel?”