“Mjolna, why do you look at me this way?” Solveig asked with a hard stare. “We are your family! We have come a long way, despite your abandoning our ancestral home! What else could you possibly be doing right now that would be better?”
Crapping swords, Mjolna thought. I would rather be crapping swords in a maid’s outfit and fighting an army of tentacle monsters with a singing teddy bear wand. That would be much better.
She resented how Silver’s neighponese manga managed to infiltrate even her sarcasm these days.
“Of course I am happy you are here, Mama,” Mjolna said instead. “I am only tired.”
“Oh, so your poor pregnant mother tires you, eh?” Solveig’s lip trembled and she turned her head. “Perhaps you’ll show greater care to my grave!”
Mjolna groaned. “Mama do not mistake me! I only meant I was tired from training. Entering the Royal Guard is a great challenge!”
“Pah! Royal Guard!” Her father snorted. Knut looked at his daughter with nostrils flared. “You are a craftspony! You come from a long line of craftsponies! Be proud of the good work you already do.” He stomped a hoof long after speaking. Knut was never very good with the rhythm of emphasis.
“Yes, Papa,” she droned. “I already am.”
They were just wrapping up a walk through the lower districts of Canterlot. Solveig, for all her haughty northern air, had stuffed her pregnant blonde body into a white tee that read: Unicorn - (n.) A single piece of corn. Knut, on the other hand, passed on a novelty shirt, and instead sported a jean-styled bucket hat that would have been in style over thirty years ago—which was probably how long the hat had been hanging on the vendor’s hook, considering how unevenly faded the stitched in Celestia’s #1 Fan read on the front of it. And Mjolna’s siblings…?
They were everywhere. Ev-ery-where! She sincerely hoped they had purchased the toys they were terrorizing passersby with. Her ears pinned as she whacked her youngest brother on the back of the head. “Put it back, Arne.”
The little brown colt pouted and turned to replace an ashtray on a knick-knack vendor cart they were passing.
“What were you going to do with that anyway?” she muttered with a suspicious squint.
Crash.
Mjolna stopped and closed her eyes with suffering. She honestly didn’t want to look. Her family was simply too much. She was just one mare, after all… How could she be expected to keep them in line, and show them a good time?
“Revna, you had better not be reflecting sunlight into cart drivers eyes again—!” Mjolna turned her head. Her jaw dropped. “S-Silver Spanner?”
Silver waved at her jovially from the driver’s seat of her motorized cart—an invention Mjolna thought her roommate had disposed of after the last time it had crashed. It was large, the wooden frame ladened with a complex series of mechanisms. Smoke trailed from its rear-engine, where coal burned. An early prototype for Silver’s self-driving tractor. Its successor hadn’t just crashed, it exploded, though the unicorn had clearly held onto the hope that she could finish the project given the prototype’s continued existence. Heaven only knew where she’d stored the damn thing.
The cart had crashed into a street sign further down the road, bending it severely. Silver pulled on a lever, and with an aching creak, the vehicle moved in reverse. Stepping on a hoof break, she shifted the lever again and the cart moved forward, turning up the road… toward them.
Mjolna gawked as the big contraption ventured closer, chugging loudly like a train. Other ponies stared as it went.
Windigo’s teeth, is she serious?
“Mjolna! Hey! Fancy seeing you here!” Silver shouted over the racket her cart was making. The unicorn had on a pair of goggles over her eyes.
“What are you doing?!” Mjolna shouted back.
“Oh, you know! I was just in the neighborhood!”
“‘Just in the—’??” Mjolna’s hoof struck her forehead. “Silver, you dumbom! I’m busy!”
Knut turned a narrowed gaze on his eldest daughter. “Is this your ‘crazy’ roommate we’ve heard so much about?” he asked in a growl.
Mjolna gazed at him sidelong and could feel the sweat forming. “Er… yes?”
“You did not mention she makes such…” He gestured with a curl of his lip. “Things.”
Mjolna’s ears drooped and her spine curved. “W-well her contraptions aren’t normally so obnoxious—!”
“It is genius.”
“—They’re usually… uh…” she squinted one eye at her father. “What?”
Knut nodded his head in approval just as Silver pulled to a squealing stop in front of them and turned off the engine. “The ingenuity! The craftsmanship! This is a rapturous invention!”
Solveig nodded her head with a small smile. “Yes! Quite.”
Mjolna glared at her mother. She knew about as much about craftsmanship as she did the dirty end of a chimera.
Silver pulled her goggles from her face and grinned down at them. “Hiya! My name’s Silver Spanner! It’s nice to meet you, Mjolna’s parents!”
Mjolna said through a tight smile. “Mama, Papa, this is my roommate.”
Knut made a face. “Why are you telling us this again? Honestly, it’s as though you have the memory of a goldfish!”
“I’m sure she forgot her promise to take us to the royal castle as well,” Solveig sniffed.
“I did not forget!” Mjolna snapped. She ground her teeth at her mother’s frigid look. Returning her attention to Silver, she gestured stiffly between her parents. “This is my Mama and Papa, Knut and Solveig.”
Silver hopped down from the driver seat and beamed. She looked around them with an air of expectation. “Aaaaand...your siblings?”
Mjolna gazed at her grumpily. “What about them?”
Silver tilted her head to the side, one ear drooping. “Uh… It doesn’t look like they’re here?”
Mjolna’s eyes popped wide. Her head whipped around one way, then the other. She snarled and pulled at her face with her hooves.
Solveig’s mouth screwed to the side. “Tsk! As if she never vanished on us before…”
Knut nodded. “Royal Guard… Hmph!”