//------------------------------// // Deviant // Story: Daily Equestria Life With Monster Girl // by Estee //------------------------------// So much of it seemed to be about weight. The Sergeant had decided he needed to know exactly how strong she was, and so the training area was now populated with raw mass. Most of that came in the form of stone: ones which were irregular enough for her hands to find a grip, smoother specimens that required her to forcibly press inwards just to get any degree of leverage, and shapes so awkward as to have limbs trying to pull them in while her own breathing attempted to push everything back out. There were also ropes tied around the loops of piton-like spikes which had been driven into larger boulders: the hemp trails eventually ended at a harness which was probably just about ideal for placing around a pony's neck and so could be used to test hauling limits. But when it came to Cerea... There was but one rather dubious comfort in the attempts to shift her own anatomy past the part of the harness which came down over her shoulders: she was the only one who knew to be embarrassed. It was still enough to trigger the blush, and... the Sergeant hadn't really said anything about that. He'd watched the entire process, but that observation had been strictly clinical: he was trying to find the limits of her physical strength, and so had no interest in a capacity for personal humiliation which seemed to approach the infinite. The most he'd gruffly said was that some of the equipment was still being improvised. Cerea, after having spent the prior day in the smithy, should have been used to that, if only on principle. And she lifted, hauled, kicked on command, briefly considered whether it was worth trying to summon the Second Breath -- -- but he wanted to know about her normal limits. He was memorizing every physical capacity she possessed, and... there was a strange, unwelcome intimacy to that. The training seemed to be systematically exposing every secret she'd kept from the household: the true range of her flexibility, her typical top speed, the fact that she'd had blacksmith training, and some part of her was waiting for the Sergeant to order her onto a public scale. She told herself that she wasn't keeping it from him as a tactical move. That she wasn't hiding one final aspect of herself away because there might come a time when the ponies would think they knew everything about her -- followed by using all of that knowledge against her. When it came to standing against a full herd's worth of pony magic, the Second Breath wouldn't mean much more than potentially staying conscious long enough to count the exact number of field hues squeezing her body. She... just wanted to keep some part of herself to herself, for a little while longer. Especially when it seemed as if the only thing she truly had any chance to retain was the relative privacy of her thoughts, and blushing still exposed most of their nature. So she moved the weights, doing so without the Second Breath. Lifted, pushed, and hauled until the stallion felt he knew where her limits were, or at least the limits which existed after the previous day had seen her pounding metal for hours. She had tried to let sleep restore her, but... ...she hadn't been sleeping well: something which had been true for just about every one of her nights in Equestria. Part of that came from dreams, and there were times when those nocturnal travels brought her home: most of that ache set in when she woke up and wondered if dreams were as close as she would ever come. But there were other kinds of dreams... (She didn't know that the dark Princess had been observing her dreams.) (She would learn.) Centaur steel. She was allowed to set the weights down. The harness eventually came off, and did so even more awkwardly than it had gone on. But the mass of the most recent nightmare had taken up residence within her skull, and nothing she did seemed to shift it. The sergeant tilted his head to the left: about ten degrees of incline, just enough to indicate the cottonwood tree. "In the grass," he ordered, and she slowly trotted in that direction, shaking her legs in turn to help the sweat slide across saturated fur. Some of the drops hit green blades and when she glanced back to see how closely he was following, she saw them glistening oddly in the shield-distorted light. Cerea carefully lowered her body into the relative coolness of the greenery, picked up a canteen which had been resting against the trunk and forced herself to take slow sips. She needed to stay hydrated, and she also needed to take in water at a rate which ensured it wouldn't all come up again. Emery Board silently watched her, brown eyes sent into something closer to black by the shade of the hat's brim. "Thought there was going to be more of an imbalance," he eventually said. "There's some, but that's because you've got more mass in your lower half. It's where the majority of your muscles are, so that's where more of your power is. But it's the same kind of muscle all the way up. Compact. You were flexing there: no way around it, dealing with some of those weights. Saw some extra definition under the sweater, but not as much as a lot of species would show. Work out enough and you could probably add a lot of power without worrying about hurting your flexibility." She nodded to that. When it came to muscular development, centaur mares would readily gain in strength -- but had a hard time manifesting true bulk. Stallions, at least for their upper torso, went the other way: they could happily bellow about the sheer number of centimeters it took for tape to wrap a single bicep -- and in Cerea's experience, all of that supposed power was mostly good for two things: lifting mugs of alcohol to their mouths and wrestling each other. (The first could potentially lead to the second, but the second generally didn't need that much of an excuse.) There were times when she'd felt as if the mares and stallions of the French herd were two separate species which had the capacity to interbreed. And as it had turned out -- -- don't. But the thought wasn't so easily dismissed. "Drink more," the earth pony told her. "Your head just went down. Took too much time in the forge yesterday." He snorted. "Not that you can really rush it. Barding was telling everypony in the Lunar kitchens about all the experiments he had to run." Again. "Real story there is that he got as far as a kitchen. Wasn't sure he knew where those were. And the talking part is new." She forced herself through a few more sips. "He was talking yesterday." Even after she'd put all of her unanswered prayers into wishing the blacksmith would stop. "He's better at cursing," the Sergeant stated. "Doesn't see ponies who can't work metal as something worth talking to. But he must have felt like he had to tell somepony and to keep the secret, he found some ponies who wouldn't understand any of it." The near-microscopic ripple of fur along his shoulders suggested a shrug. "Stopped by this morning, before I came out here. Looked at your sample." She waited. "Could have used that before now," the old stallion said. "Over and over. Might have led to a few less statues." Don't let him see, don't let him know I smelled it again... "You're studying Blitzschritt?" he sharply asked. "I'm trying," was the best answer she could give. "There's something called -- the Canterlot Archives?" Which she understood to be like the Bibliothèque nationale de France, only occupying considerably more space and with a slightly less stringent loan policy. "I put a request in for the books. But it takes a little while to send them over, and then I still need help to read them..." "But you took the walk." Cerea nodded. She'd been expecting this -- or rather, she'd been expecting it on the day they'd talked about fighting pegasi. But you couldn't completely predict the Sergeant, and given extra time to think about all of it... There had been a lot of dreams. "Saw her statue?" "Yes." And while bracing herself herself for any triggered shout, "1127 -- that was the year when she died? And it's 1275 now?" She had thought he might respond to it with a spike in volume and temper: a demand to know why she was wasting training time on something so basic, because the best way to make him yell was to ask a truly stupid question. But he just... looked at her. "Hadn't thought about that," the old stallion said as his tail failed to shift. "Someone not even knowing what the year is. There's foal questions, and then there's things which foals never had to ask." She wondered if he'd ever had children. If the only living legacy he knew were those he'd trained and sent out to die over and over and -- "1275," he told her. "That's the current year. So you're right: Blitzschritt made her choice in 1127. What did you think of the honor statues?" "There's... a lot of them." She hadn't meant for the words to be that soft. "It all adds up," the Sergeant said. "Twelve hundred and seventy-five years. Wars. Assassination attempts. Accidents. The kind of stupid coincidences which can kill. Take enough time, enough chances, just exist long enough and there's going to be statues. The Generals could tell you every name. They need to remember. There's those who say that as long as there's somepony who knows what your name was, you're not completely gone..." It was just enough of a head shake to register as one. "So I remember mine," Emery Board told her. "You saw her statue. You saw some of the others." And with no change in volume at all, "And you're still showing up. Based on what you saw in the statue, how do you think an ibex fights?" "Without factoring in their magic?" He nodded, and Cerea hesitated. "What is their magic? Does... everyone have some kind of magic?" "If you're alive and you can think," the sergeant calmly stated, "you've got magic. Applies to everyone in the world." Everyone except me. "But it takes different forms," he added. "For an ibex... it starts with stability. All kinds. It's just about impossible to knock them off their hooves. Their minds can dig in pretty well. It's not always a good thing. There's ponies who say donkeys are the most stubborn species, and they're wrong. Donkeys just endure. They push forward because they think that's the way out of everything. But at least they move. An ibex is going to stand in one place because that's where an ibex has been standing for centuries, and there's no reason for anything to change now. You'll probably never fight an ibex: you might never see a living one. But keep that in mind, before we get to the other species for real. They're about stability. Hard to change, hard to fool -- unless you can get them to trick themselves." And before she could ask about that, "How do you see them fighting?" "Mostly with charges." The horns had looked dense enough to do some damage. "Try to get some speed together over level ground --" The stallion snorted. "Stability," emerged as a correction. "They live in the mountains. They walk all over the slopes, when gravity says they shouldn't. An ibex can charge you going uphill, and anything which isn't a sheer cliff is uphill. They're a terror in their own territory, especially if you don't hear them coming in time." Oh. It took a moment before she could banish the image of an ibex charging up a seventy-degree slope. "But that's their basic tactic," he confirmed. "Close in at speed, hit hard and fast. Ideally, once. Tell me how that differs from earth ponies." And they were finally there. She'd been waiting for this... "Physically, earth ponies are the strongest. They usually have the most endurance, too. But that's as a species: any earth pony will be stronger than somepony with the same build from one of the other races, but that means there's still some who are weaker than others. They're just always stronger than they look." Which won her another nod, and she used that time for an extra sip. "So for physical combat, an earth pony wants to close in. Pegasi can be impossible to reach. But if they can reach the point where they're right on top of a unicorn, they can kick hard enough to take out their opponent as long as they watch for the horn: backlash any attempt to cast a spell, or dodge if the unicorn tries to gore. But without the horns of an ibex, all they have for natural weapons is their hooves, limbs, and teeth." "Or the full body, if we get up speed," the Sergeant instructed. "There's a little extra density to our bones, and everything else. We're not just stronger than we look: we're heavier. It's not that much of a difference, but it gives us a few more options in a charge." His right foreleg came up, and the hoof rapped against his rib cage before he lowered the limb again. "Head to head against a pegasus, the pegasus probably drops. Unicorn, we're in trouble if we hit the horn while it isn't lit. But the skull around the base can't take as much of an impact." A minor incline granted her permission to continue. "But unless they're a lot stronger or hit in just the right place," the recruit went on, "the earth pony probably has to kick their opponent a few times. Because it's hard to knock somepony out with one impact, or put them in so much pain that they can't keep fighting." He nodded. "There's powerhouses out there. And some of them are a lot stronger than they look -- even for the ones who look like they can haul half of the Lunar Wing. But being strong enough to break bone with one kick doesn't mean they're going to land the kick that does it. And with ponies, taking out a leg only ends the fight with another earth pony: a pegasus can still get airborne, and any unicorn is dangerous as long as they're conscious and unrestrained." She listened. "Wanted to find out how strong you were today," the Sergeant told her. "Got the answer I was expecting: you're closer to an earth pony than anything else. The main difference is that when I put you against most of them, you're stronger. There's still some ponies out there who can outhaul you, but they're the outliers. And they aren't working with arms. But you don't have that extra density. You're resilient -- but you can't take a hit on their level. So against earth ponies, you dodge as much as possible. Once the armor's ready, you try to let the metal absorb their worst. And then you come at them from the angle they can't do much about: overhead. Based on the reports I got from the ponies who tried to move it, touching that sword makes an earth pony lose some of their strength. Even with a second of contact, it'll disorient them. And once they're shaken, they can be dropped. You just have to watch for the one pony who can cave in your sternum. Either one, because that strength increase is consistent for their whole body. It's not just kicking: they jump higher. You won't see an earth pony try to go airborne too often, because it always ends the same way. But if a pegasus gets a little too low, thinks a basic hover has them out of range -- they usually wind up getting a little surprise." The fur around his snout seemed to twitch. "And with you, that means they might try going for the head." The girl had taken it all in. Everything he told her was information which could save a life: there was no excuse for ignoring any of it. But his words led her to what she saw as a perfectly natural question, and she had learned that he only objected to queries under two circumstances: they interrupted him, or they were stupid. She was sure this question didn't qualify for the latter. So she asked it. A question which, in all the world, only she could have asked. "What about their magic?" And he looked at her. (It would be a long time before she fully understood the nature of that look. Mere hours before she recognized the aspect which had never manifested in his features prior to her words: the sudden tension...) "What about it?" Carefully, "Manipulating rock and soil? Controlling plants, especially the dangerous ones, so that they'll attack? Maybe making things grow so fast that they create instant cover? And --" relocating the energy of heat itself was for pegasi, but "-- bringing up lava flows from underground, or rivers, and..." With genuine curiosity, "...can you transmute elements, as long as they're rock or metal on both sides of the change? Is that why there's so much marble?" His right forehoof shifted. A quarter-circle, twisting into the dirt. "Why?" It had been a single syllable. A word which stretched across the world like taut wire, pulled to the point of breaking. And the girl didn't understand. "Sergeant?" "Why do you think we can do any of that?" She blinked. Looked into motionless, shadowed eyes, registered the way his nostrils were flaring... "It's... the name," Cerea softly replied. "Earth pony. The pegasi are connected to the sky. Nightwatch told me about the crops, and what wasteland does. With that, added to the name, I just thought... you would have the same level of link to the land." The girl blinked again. The stallion didn't. He just stood there, exactly like a living statue. A statue which was barely breathing, and so she instinctively slipped into the final defense of formality. "I -- did not meant to offend, sir --" "-- you don't call me sir," the stallion quietly stated. "You call me Sergeant." There seemed to be no response for that. And then the translator's wire hissed. It wasn't searching for a term she would know. There was no attempt to render an unfamiliar concept into something a centaur might understand. It was simply straining to pick up on words which barely shifted his lips, emerging into the world as something so much less than a whisper. "Questions foals don't even ask..." "...Sergeant?" He inhaled. "Wasteland isn't much good in combat," the stallion told her. "You're not a plant. It's possible to force growth in a hurry, but it usually takes teams and it still doesn't operate at the kind of speed you're thinking of, plus a clumsy normal push can hurt the plant long-term. The rest of it..." There was a moment when the old stallion gave her something which, when regarded across the chasm of time, came close to the supreme compliment of her life. He hesitated. "...no. You let your imagination tell you things, because you didn't know not to. It's strength, endurance, and a few tricks with the local flora. That's it." She didn't understand why she felt so sad. She had no way of knowing why his scent was so strange -- "But," the Sergeant continued. The girl pulled herself out of the miasma of his sorrow, forced herself into focus as his head came up a little. Just enough to let sunlight restore brown eyes to their proper shade. "You've got an interesting imagination there," the earth pony told her. "Been putting you through enough physical exercise. So let's do a thought one, while your body's resting up for the next round. Let's say, just for the sake of imagination... that there's wild talents out there. Pegasi come up with new techniques every so often, something nopony else in the flock had the chance to learn yet. Unicorns finish their manifest with a unique trick. So if there was an earth pony who could do something like what you just proposed, a wild talent out of nowhere, somepony who was desperate enough in a fight to use that kind of magic against you -- how would you counter it? I want to hear how you think on your hooves, when you're facing something nopony was expecting. And start with shifting the soil, because a pony who can change the terrain is going to be a thousand kinds of trouble." It kept her under the tree for hours. They never got around to any other level of physical exercise on that day, because the girl had come from a world which had created videogames, elaborate systems of probability judged by a combination of dice and prayer, and so knew that the tactics of fantasy was a subject which could go on forever. She thought he wanted to see how she would improvise in that sort of impossible situation. Just to find out how quickly she could think. She didn't know. She had no way to know. And when she finally looked back... The mare was in no way approaching the home of a pegasus. She was almost at an apartment, and was thankful not to have been stopped at any point during her Moon-lit route: she knew it would have been almost impossible to explain some of the items in her saddlebags. But to the mare, there was a simple fact in play: a pegasus did not occupy that residence, and that made her planned activity into something which those of intelligence and insight would recognize as necessary. The mare never would have moved against a pegasus. It was true that the feather-dusters were inherently inferior, but you could say the same about anything which wasn't a unicorn and besides, the pegasi as a species had one major point in their favor. They possessed the capacity to go away. Let them go back to the vapor, as isolated as they had been in the beginning: trade would substitute for raids, and then they could just -- stay there. Leave Canterlot to the unicorns, the way it should be. But until that day arrived, the mare regarded pegasi as something of a contradiction: a necessary inconvenience. Weather manipulation... well, once they were gone (and she wasn't sure exactly how that was supposed to happen, but CUNET's leaders insisted it was just a matter of Creating Policy), there would be nothing to keep unicorns from inventing spells which did the same thing, correct? In fact, according to the near-facts which CUNET passed around to the core of its membership, facts which the Diarchy had suppressed and which qualified as 'near' because when you put all the words together in a dictionary, every term had some degree of adjacency -- unicorns had been making breakthroughs for centuries. Those casters were just targeted by the fliers, and their workings had been forced into obscurity. Pegasi could do things like that, and it was amazing how they kept managing to get one over on their superiors. It was one of the many reasons CUNET used to explain how historically, Canterlot's unicorns had found themselves in the eternal position of persecuted majority. (If you believed the stories, there had even been a breakthrough something over a year ago, in Ponyville of all places. It was just that nopony seemed to be capable of identifying the caster. The flock's control was just that subtle, and of course when you figured in the corruption inherent to an alicorn's mere existence...) You couldn't be friends with a pegasus: it would be like saying you were friends with a cat, because cats were only in it for themselves and in this case, a flying cat would be all too happy to target its owner with hairballs from above. But you could live with its presence, until the day you figured out how to get rid of it without attracting the attention of an animal rights activist. And you didn't attack pegasi in any ways beyond the social and ideally, those couldn't be proven in court. Because unicorn magic could do a lot and thanks to all of the discoveries which had been quashed, none of those categories seemed to apply with lightning. She was doing something which Mrs. Panderaghast wouldn't want to be associated with, and so the mare had very carefully not told anypony about what she was planning: true plausible deniability needed that kind of helpful push. And she wouldn't have done it to any pegasus, no matter how inferior they were -- but... There was a monster in the palace. She'd seen the pictures. The monster on the dais. The feathered presence hovering close by. In times of stress, closer still. Too close. She had struck out under Moon, because that meant less ponies on (and above) the streets. Less of a chance to be seen. It had gotten her into the proper building, up the ramps, all the way to the door, and now she was ready to proceed. The mare had told herself that she never would have hurt anypony, or even those whose pony status was somewhat lesser. She still felt this was true. But Moon had been raised, and so the Guard had gone to her shift. (She didn't consider the possibility of days off.) There was nopony present to be hurt. The message would be received at the moment they learned of the smoke, and that news would need some time to reach the palace. (She didn't understand how fire moved.) (She would eventually tell somepony that she had meant to light it. She just hadn't meant for it to spread. And if she hadn't intended that, then having it happen was in no way her fault.) (It was supposed to be a warning.) (She was innocent...) And even if the apartment had been occupied... there was still nopony there. A pegasus who would move to protect a monster wasn't a pony at all.