-Ponyville Hospital, Dr. Bones-
“Any questions?” I asked of the combined chimera.
“Yes, why do my eyes change drastically when I separate from Mara or Maria?” Sending Marie a flat stare, I eventually rolled my eyes.
“You’re a bloody idiot.” She couldn’t be that dense could she?
“No I’m not, the Idiot clan hasn’t actually ever mixed or mingled with the Bloody clan all that much and we always have issues with the assumptions that we’re even related to them! Though we haven’t been home in a while, I’m still pretty sure that we have absolutely nothing to do with them.” What Marie said somehow made a little piece of me die on the inside, I slowly slapped my left paw to my face and groaned.
“No, I’m saying that you’re being stupid.” Knowing fair and well, as I do, that she was actually fairly intelligent and had a high IQ that saved Maries from experiencing complete and total memory loss. She was still busy receiving most of the missing memories of the time she almost acted like a normal snake and was obviously fairly embarrassed about the whole thing. “When connected to Mara or Maria you become warm blooded, alone you’re cold blooded!”
“No I’m not, I don’t think I could harm a regular animal in cold blood these days!” Marie looked thoughtful for a moment. “Aside from fish or rats I mean, those are tasty. Give them a nice lemon glaze and I could sing praises of that kind of fine cooking for days.”
“Would one of you two smack Marie for me?” Understanding the stupidity going on here and what I was requesting, Mara rolled onto her back and swatted her sister lightly on the nose.
“Ow, okay, okay, I’ll stop acting dumb!” Ah, she admitted to it, it was too late to say otherwise now. “I swear, a warm blooded reptile mammal just can’t have any fun these days.”
“Just for the sake of curiosity, does the Idiot clan she spoke of actually exist?” I felt like an Abyssinian with my curiosity, I would probably receive a laugh or be tormented by the following conversation.
“Yeah, they exist, a pony once wrote a book on wilderness survival and based an entire book of what not to do on them.” It was a little hard to believe Maria. “I mean that literally, go to wherever the library is around here and look up ‘Camping with Idiots’. Also, no, I don’t mean ‘Camping for Idiots’, that’s a different book entirely. We did our research for nature walks with Fizzle, very informative and would have saved our gatherers a lot of effort back in the chimera clans. If they would ever bother with learning how to read that is.”
“Oh that was a good one! It’s both funny and informative about how to safely camp.” Princess Twilight said as she passed by the doorway. “Though I do kind of feel sorry for all the chimera harmed in the making of that book.”
I’m going with tormented if I ask any more about them, why I might even visit those chimera myself to beat some common sense into them if what I hear is bad enough.
“Ugh, tell me more.” I can’t believe I was this curious about it.
-Edge of Ponyville, Grubber-
I am Grubber the magnificent, a hedgehog of peerless might… even if I was a little short in stature than everyone on this ship. I had to be mighty while leading the Storm Creatures while Tempest or as she is known now, Fizzle, is gallivanting all over the place righting wrongs.
I honestly had no idea Tempest’s mother was an Abyssinian, I think she joined the Storm King to put a stop to him. Still don’t know what that guy’s actual name was, but the Storm Creatures didn’t mind that he was gone. They were much happier nowadays and running around in less threatening looking armor, they certainly couldn’t ditch the Storm King’s motif fast enough.
I’ve been spreading the word as well over these last few months, Storm King shattered and Storm Creatures open to negotiations and had already made a lot of reparations to Abyssinia. Friendship isn’t half bad and Pinkie has half the army of Storm Creatures as friends, she even has access to messaging spells to take orders for pickup.
How does Pinkie still make swift deliveries halfway across the planet? Well, we’ll never begin to understand or know how she does it.
“Do you think the boss lady is going to tell us what she used the emergency call for?” I asked the Storm Creature next to me, I think her name was Gretel. Hard to tell any of them apart aside from Pique and Niche. I received a short garbled response. “Yeah, she did need to get here really fast and we needed to take the Princess of Love with us… do you think the boss might have a colt friend? I mean we heard that she was here because a close friend of hers was in the hospital. So maybe it’s a special pony friend, huh, huh, do you think we’ll be seeing cute little Storm Queens in the future?”
-Twilight’s School of Friendship, Main Hall, Silver Stream-
Breathe in and out, in and out… into a brown paper bag, because that might help with my hyperventilating!
The intention of the paper bag would be me huffing my own carbon dioxide to get it back into my blood stream, but in general it doesn’t seem to work very well or very quickly at all. While doing this does reduce hyperventilating somewhat and could possibly cure hiccups, there might be something akin to a placebo effect involved with this. Also there is the danger involved in rapidly breathing into a paper sack if you have asthma or happen to be having a heart attack, thus it can turn out to be deadly to be doing what I’m currently doing right now.
Hopefully I am not having a heart attack, because that would be bad and I know that I don’t have asthma. Unless I count the times I sleep as a sea pony and forget to wet myself before snoozing away in the tub. Wow, my minds phrasing could use a little work… um… water myself, I need to water myself if I’m going to sleep as a sea pony. There, got it in one try!
I might want to be a school nurse when I grow up or working at this school in general, I liked being on land and the people that live here. Also there’s stairs and lots of them, to think all of them so very huggable!
“Is something the matter Stream?” My eyes darted to the blue feathers of a griffon who was one of my best friends in the whole world, Gallus. He was someone I could tell about this and he looked worried about me! “You seem a little panicked, did you forget a playdate with Ocellus or something?”
“Yes, I was flying around… and then… there was… the ship and… I… so many…” I inhaled and curled up into a ball on the floor whimpering. Storm Creatures were here in Ponyville! I wanted to scream that at the top of my lungs, but I couldn’t get the words out. “So scary… can hardly talk about it.”
“Hey, calm down, you look like you’re having a panic attack over nothing.” He came over to me and pulled me into a hug and started to rub his talons along my back. This did actually feel rather nice and I was started to feel better and calmer already. “Now if it’ll make you feel safer, I’ll call one of our friends over and we can listen to what you have to say. Ignoring a friends problem is what caused the ‘want-it, need-it’ incident our teachers talked about and I’m not looking to repeat that lesson in person. I’m sure if it’s a school problems, the teachers will be cool about whatever is wrong. They tend to destroy more of the school than we or even Yona does on a biweekly basis.”
“That and Ponyville’s emergency repair funds take up the largest portion of the town’s budget every year, most of said emergencies are not even caused by creatures coming out of the Ever Free Forest. It’s a really fascinating read.” Looking over to the friendly face and large adorable solid eyes of Ocellus as she came over to us, I started to calm down. Changelings were colorful and literal minded creatures, they were so much like ponies and sometimes they weren’t. Smolder wasn’t the only one that thought she was cute, her calming shades of blue was nice to look at like Gallus’s blue was. I liked the color blue, like my plumage or was it a mane… a combination of the two? “What seems to be the problem Gallus?”
“Wish I knew, Stream saw something that has her completely freaked out and here I am trying to calm her down.” Gallus looked to the ceiling for a moment and then turned his attention to Ocellus. “You wouldn’t happen to know how to stop a panic attack would you?”
“Oh, I know that! Take a breath deep, focus on an object you love and focus on a place that makes you happy!” Ocellus closed her eyes and did as she said and smiled, her sweetness made me smile and close my eyes. “What makes me happy is hearing what my Uncle Clypeus is welcome back to the hive, he started a mariachi band after getting kicked out of the hive with several of his friends by Chrysalis. Come to think of it, they are some of the first colorful changelings I’ve ever heard of. I remember how Big Mclarge Huge went away with him, he was always very nice and friendly despite his size… it was little wonder that he left with my uncle.”
“Wait, there’s a changeling actually named Big Mclarge Huge?” That’s not important right now Gallus, what’s important is what I saw! Though it was pretty funny and you’re laughter is rather contagious… I started giggling about that changeling’s name. “Are there changelings simply named things like Small O’tiny Miniscule?”
“Oh Mini is one of my cousins, she’s a quarter the size of a pony. I swear, he could do a good imitation of a Breezy pretty well if she wasn’t so great at imitating foals and fillies!” Ocellus seemed cheerful and plucky as ever. It was actually beginning to make me forget… no, wait... I shouldn’t forget what I was panicking about! Even if and when my friends were so nice and comforting. “Wait, how did you know her name when you’ve never met? Oh dear, I hope Mini didn’t do anything to annoy you in Griffonstone in the past, changelings were never meant to go that far abroad at the time! You see, she has this habit of getting around like you wouldn’t believe and…”
“Not important, Storm King, Storm Creatures, Ponyville, here, now!” I hope my wild gesticulating could be understood, I mean who doesn’t like to read books about how to do rapid fire semaphore? I would do it slower for them to understand the severity of the situation, but I was still kind of panicking.
“Didn’t Yona hear that Storm King was turned to black stone and then he got shattered by a brave and strong pony that smashed him like Yak?” Yona came thundering up to us, oh goodness I was panicking hard enough to attract our yak friend’s attention! “Also you are being very good at rapid fire semaphore, but yak is still best at learning esoteric things and I am wanting to get into cheerleading!”
“Wait… what semaphore?” Gallus asked while rubbing at the side of his head. “It just looked like a lot of wild flailing to me.”
“Not important, Storm Creatures, Airship, in Ponyville!” Clutching at my head in distress as I went back to hyperventilating, at least I’m fairly sure now that I wasn’t having a heart attack and as such the paper sack should be safe to use. I took it up and went back to breathing into it.
“Huh, neat, do you think there will be fighting?” Smolder, the adorable orange dragon that she was, flew in and landed among us while being all really cool and stuff.
She could have taken my wild panicking a little more seriously!
“Did someone say fighting?” That was sandbar our earth pony friend, his sea green fur always looked so nice with that teal hair and green eyes. I think he has a really big crush on Yona, but I’m not sure about that yet. He was a really nice guy, the steadiest and most easy going of our group. He liked turtles a lot, especially when it came to hearing legends surrounding turtle doves. “Whatever you’re all fighting about, I’m sure we can solve the problem by simply talking it all out.”
“We’re not fighting, it was just Stream was panicking over something about Storm Creatures on an Airship?” Looking a little lost in the conversation, Smolder poked a claw at her chin and turned to me with a shrug.
“Look, just follow me!” I spread my wings and flew in the direction of the airship.
-Ponyville outskirts, Grubber-
“So I’m going to be in Ponyville a while until my… friend… is allowed to leave the hospital.” That confirms it, Tempest was in love with someone here. I knew her fairly well and she would be hard pressed to hide something from me, I wondered what his name was and when Fizzle met him?
“No problems boss, we can stick around for as long as you need and I’m getting an order delivered by Pinkie anyway… I’m not moving until I get my triple deluxe cheesecake with extra strawberry syrup.” I leaned closer to Tempest and spoke quietly. “I don’t know about you, but I think she might have a party planned for us… with a lot of delicious stuff being made just for me…”
“Gee, I wonder what ever gave you that idea.” Tempest turned to look at the pony sky writing the information for everyone to read about the time and place the party was being held, not only that but there were several ponies delivering cards to those who were invited to the party. I felt some heat rushing to my cheeks. “Oh wait, Pinkie holds a party for every new visitor to Ponyville and is the only pony that the welcoming committee needs. All you have to do is step one hoof in the town and she sixth senses you from miles away.”
“See, I told you there were Storm Creatures!” Oh great, a panicking hippogriff, how was I going to diffuse this situation? Maybe Fizzle could do it for us? Hippogriffs still got rather angry at the sight of us.
“Please don’t let it become a Ponyville thing… I’d rather take an attacking pack of Puks.” An attacking pack of what? What was Tempest talking about?
“Uh, boss…” I started slowly.
“Don’t worry Grubber, I’ll stop things before they get too bad.” Oh thank goodness, I thought I would have to… “You’re doing all the talking though, because I think you need more leadership skills.”
Boss, I love you, but you are horribly cruel. Still far nicer than the other guy and, yeah, I can see where it would be my problem to diffuse things.