Tales from the Staff Canteen

by Midnightshadow


In Which Paper Mâché and the Moon - HiddenBrony

        “You said you found this,” Hyde muttered under his breath, his eyes unmoving from the large monstrosity before him.

        Midnight Shadow nodded emphatically, his grin plastered on his face with no signs of leaving anytime soon. This had disturbed Hyde somewhat, as that sort of smile should have been nowhere near the revealing maid outfit Midnight wore. “Sure did,” Middy brought up a hoof and tapped it against his chin, reliving the day he found the object. “Well, more or less it found me about five feet from where I was standing.”

        “You mean it almost fell on you?” Nines muttered, his midnight blue coat matching tone for tone against Middy’s. “You must of shat bricks.”

        “Let’s just say I’m lucky I’m surrounded by proverbial toilet paper,” was the midnight unicorn’s only response as Hyde stumbled forward to the giant mechanism.

        Upon the moon, many things dusted its surface, and upon recent years those things tended to be the flagrant wailings of the masses who wished that their writing be the next big thing in Equestria put on paper. Fanfiction was a veritable carpet of crumpled paper on the surface of the moon, but every so often a pony who had the misfortune of being banished here would stumble upon the occasional piece of trash, or empty donut box, or what have you.

        What Midnight and the others hadn’t quite expected was to find a giant cannon aimed up toward Equestria. “You mean to tell me we shot a cannon to the moon?”

        Hyde’s face jumbled up in confusion. “Wait, so we actually fired a cannon capable of shooting things to the moon, from a cannon capable of shooting things to the moon.”

        “That’s like, cannonception.” Nines cooed, rubbing his face against the giant phallic object. Hyde decided to ignore the blond-maned pony as he started to pet the cannon and whisper affectionately towards it.

        “It’s a little smaller than the one on Equestria Daily’s roof these days,” Midnight began, his mind reflecting to the few times his hooves hit terrestrial dirt. “I guess we needed a new one to shoot fanfiction to Mars and the Sun, if need be.” Flicking his tail over some rotten fics, Midnight swept away their offending words until he found some soft lunar dust to rest on.

        “I should review fics more often if I get to fire this magnificent beast.” Nines stroked the cannon’s underbelly with his tail, his words becoming all the more muted and nasty as he started to come up with petnames for the ‘magnificent beast.’

        Hyde turned away from the sight, it lacking too little curtains for his taste, and focused his attention on Midnight and Equestria above. “So, what, you saying we can hop into the cannon and fire ourselves to Equestria?”

        Midnight snorted. Shaking his head, the unicorn shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t think so. Cannonballs are made to take up every nook and cranny of the space in a cannon, otherwise the explosion will escape around it and the stuff inside will just kind of... flitter about uselessly.”

        Hyde stared at Midnight, his eyes crossing ever so slightly as he took in the mechanics of firing cannons. “This is the last place I expected to learn about physics.”

        “On the moon?”

        “On fanfiction.” Hyde muttered, his horn absentmindedly paper mâchéing a lampshade out of the discarded fics. “So I guess we’re at square one. Unless we have any cannon ball shaped moon rocks?”

        “‘Fraid not,” Midnight sighed.

        “I have the most powerful force in Equestria between my legs!” cried Nines. The pegasus had flown up and sat on the cannon without notice from either unicorn ponies below. A folded piece of fanfiction served as a cowboy hat for the insufferable pony as he ‘rode’ the monstrosity.

        Hyde raised an eyebrow before raising his voice. “Nines! Get off the cannon!

        “No!”

        Grunting, Hyde stood up on two limbs, pointing his hoof dangerously at the pegasus. “Nines, get off the cannon!”

        No!”

        As Nines stuck his tongue out at Hyde, he face was quickly filled by the paper mâché lampshade, magically propelled into him. Knocked from his high horse, Nines fell to the ground in an light thud, the low gravity of the moon robbing Hyde of a satisfying pratfall.

        Midnight looked up, his expression unchanged. Putting a hoof on his forehead, the veteran pre-reader sighed. “Foals.”

        -----

        Hyde looked upon his work with a flickering moment of pride. All around the giant, steely blue cannon were an assortment of trinkets. Scattered about the lunar expanse were various pony angels made from the absence of fics, which Nines had been quick to call ‘ficangels.’ Dotting the landscape, paper mâché snowmen – deemed ‘ficmen’ by Nines – were offset by a large quantity of small, bipedal and horribly deformed creatures made, again, by paper mâché. Unfortunately, Nines also had taken it upon himself to name those, as well.

        “They’re fikmen!” he announced, poking one of the unstable creations with a stray hoof, knocking it over. “With a ‘k’!”

        Hyde raised his forehooves in incomprehension, shaking his head vigorously. “Why must everything begin with ‘fic?’ How does that even begin to make sense!?”

        “When you started making little fikmen,” Nines said simply, justified with his answer.

        Hyde opened his mouth as if to retaliate, but no words managed to get out. Taking up a large ball of crumpled fanfiction, Hyde’s horn glowed, melding together the entirety of the paper in a sticky mess. He chucked it at Nines, the pegasus pony raising a wing to defend himself from the slop of wet paper as it bounced harmlessly off him.

        “Hey! That’s not fair! I can’t throw as well as you can!” Grabbing the secondhand projectile off the ground, Nines made as if to toss it back at Hyde, only for the offending material to get caught up in unicorn telekinesis and float away from his hooves, a look of utter horror masking the pegasus’ face. “W-wait! How about we call ‘em, fanmen?”

        Hyde was too busy fashioning up a second ball of fics to listen. Nines flared his wings out and started to take off, Hyde chucking pieces of fanfiction at him as the two ponies chased each other around, much to the mild amusement of Midnight.

        “I can’t believe I thought it was a bad thing to be lonely here on the moon,” he exhaled.

        “Middy! Middy, please make him stop! Unicorns don’t fight fair!” Nines shouted, paper mâché snowballs whizzing past his ears as Hyde ran just meters behind him, taking great pleasure in leaping tens of feet into the air after the pegasus.

        Hyde galloped as he hit the ground, taking up another mess of paper and turning it into ammunition. “Tell him to keep his big fat gob shut for a change!”

        “I’m clever and I have to make sure ponies know that! Fikmin is genius!”

        “It’s not! It’s stupid! Stop being stupid!”

        “No! You’re stupid!”

        Midnight groaned “Will you two just shaddup –” In the next moment, Midnight’s face was covered in wet, sopping paper. Screeching to a halt, as best one can screech to a halt on the moon, both Nines and Hyde stopped dead as they realized the collateral damage to their bickering. Ears folding to the side of their heads, Nines returned to the ground next to Hyde, both ponies wearing shameful expressions.

        Horn sparking to life, Midnight took the soaked mess of paper mâché off his face in one slow, disgusted movement, his magic holding the offending piece mere inches from his face. “Hyde...”

        “I, um. Well Middy, you see. I was just.” Hyde’s voice quietly died in his throat. “Sorry?”

        Midnight was about to do a number of things. Sure, murder was illegal in Equestria, but they were on the moon. The moon didn’t have laws. The moon was wild lands. Where paper mâché snowponies dotted the landscape. But then, his eyes saw something new. Something glorious. In his vision, Midnight could see the lunar cannon, but what else he saw, was a giant floating ball of paper mâché in perspective. What could be the beginnings of a giant floating cannonball. “You’re a genius!”

        Immediately perking up, Hyde bonked Nines on the nose, coupled with a self-righteous, “HA!”

        Nines had absolutely no qualms with bucking Hyde halfway across the moon.

        -----

        It took the better part of the week, but Hyde and Midnight had used their unicorn magic to amass a large collection of fanfiction near the cannon, the two ponies setting Nines to work on making sure the cannon was operational. Somewhere during the second day, Midnight’s maid outfit had disappeared, much to the delight of Hyde. “But now I’m more naked!” Midnight huffed.

        “I don’t care, it’s gone, and you can’t steal that from me!” Hyde retaliated, glad to have been done with the offending garments. With that, the two ponies rolled up their fanfictions and headed back to camp.

This generally meant coming back to find the pegasus sleeping on the weapon with a terrifying smile on his face. The unicorns made a silent pact to let Nines continue his ecstasy without interruption if it meant not touching the cannon anywhere.

        Wearing grizzled beards and smelling of manly ponies, both Hyde and Midnight set to the task of creating a giant cannonball that would actually work with the physics provided on the moon. At first the question of finding enough flammable material that had enough oomph to propel three ponies back to Equestria came up, but Midnight was quick to answer that.

        “The cannon back on Equestria doesn’t use any sort of normal fuel. Heck, most of Equestria Daily runs on the crushed hopes and dreams of the ponyfolk who send in their fanfiction.” Sweeping his hooves across the landscape, Midnight wore a sickening grin as he returned to face his compatriots. “And we’re standing on a veritable goldmine of pony tears.”

        “That’s sick,” Hyde said, his eyes hardening, “I like it.”

        And thus the ponies got to work actually putting the cannonball in the cannon, a task which Hyde and Midnight were more than happy to let Nines figure out on his own, the unicorns opting to simply feed some loose fanfics into the chamber to use as wadding and leave the pegasus on his own to deal with the wet ball of shame and failure.

        Slipping the ball into the hole, which required the help of the unicorns anyway, was done quickly. Nines had somehow ‘sprained a wing,’ and made up an elaborate song and dance involving moon ponies and grayscale princesses, to which went completely ignored by Hyde and Midnight. Instead the ponies went about aiming their giant cannon at Equestria, hoping to get the trajectory somewhere about where the EqD office was. “Eh, somewhere close to that.” Midnight muttered, leaving the coordinates up to chance.

        Packing themselves into the cannon, Hyde leaned against the metal walls, Equestria the only thing the ponies could see from inside. “So how do ponies get back from the moon normally?”

        Midnight stroked his totally manly beard in thought, the midnight blue unicorn shrugging his shoulders. “Usually whenever the Princesses decide to let us come back. They tend to forget, though. Forget for months, sometimes.”

        Nines smiled in the darkness, his nigh luminous blond hair one of the few things visible. “Well now we got a way back, right? No more waiting!”

        “So, wait, I’ve been meaning to ask...” Hyde trailed, Midnight taking the moment to light the cannon’s fuse. Watching the line spark, there was a light fizzing sound as the fuse sputtered up, Hyde’s eyes trailing with it as it fed outside the cannon and back in near the bottom. “If we’re using the fanfics as explosive accelerates, and our cannonball is just one, big, condensed ball of fanfics... doesn’t that make what we’re sitting on a proverbial bomb?”

        Midnight opened his mouth to calm the fears of his fellow pre-reader, but soon closed it as he thought about the implications. “Well, ah.” Bringing a hoof to his chin, he dwelt on it another moment as the fuse disappeared from view, the sound of burning starting to fade with it. “Actually you have a point.”

        “Oh good, I thought it was just me – wait what do you mean I’m right!?”

        Nines looked between the unicorns as best he could in the darkness, his eyes widening in fear. “Wait, why didn’t you bring this up earlier?”

        “I don’t know, I thought you guys had already considered it!”

        “Hyde you idiot! We have to get out of here before –” the sound of the fuse stopped, bringing with it an eerie silence.

        “Was –” Nines gulped, his eyes looking fearfully toward Midnight. “Was it a dud?”

        Before anypony could answer, the sound could be heard again below them, the fuse reentering the cannon from the side with all the wadding. Midnight looked at the ball of paper mâché fics below them as it started to ignite. “Oh, son of a –”

        “BEEEEEEEYEEEEETTTTTTTTTCCCCCCHHHHHH!”